BEES AND POLLINATIONS

Today I went through my hives in my backyard.  My friend Julie’s husband, Seth, who used to keep bees in 1989 and wants to get back to it, came over and went through the hives with me.

We’ve had rain and cooler weather over the last ten days or so.  And the nectar flow has about stopped.  So I didn’t expect much.

We found roly-polys under one hive!  There were also earwigs, I saw one roach, and I smashed three large wax moth worms.

It’s the scheduled week for powdered sugar every four days, so I started today.  The bees were not pleased with my effort to keep them healthy!

I only added a new box to one hive (below).  I did shift around some of the top boxes to encourage the bees to build a little more.  I also, to account for drift, add some identifying markings to all the hives.

Below is another hive that I shifted the box positions.

I don’t have photos of the bad part of the day.  We went up to the nuc housing the Little Kitten swarm.  I know not to open or go through it for three weeks after installing the new queen (the Zia queen) but I hadn’t pulled the queen cage and wanted to get it out.

We opened the top of the nuc.  The bees are quiet and calm – there are lots of them thanks to the nuc I created a week ago.  There between the frames was the queen cage, with the queen still inside.  The bees weren’t attacking the cage or biting it.  The queen was not released but was alive and seemed vigorous.

That’s when I did the stupid thing.  I thought, „At this point I should direct release her.”  So I opened the cage and she walked down into the rest of the bees.

THEN I thought, „Wonder why they hadn’t released her…..could there already be a queen in this hive?”

Too late to retrieve her majesty.  I guess I just cross my fingers that they accept her and life is good rather than my other thought which is that there is a competing queen who will kill Zia on sight.

And how will I know later what queen is in the hive, if there is another queen already present?  I can’t say, „Will the real Zia step up.”  I have no idea what she looks like compared to any other.  I guess I can add this to the growing long list of my bee mistakes………….

(więcej…)

I talked about Varroa Mites yesterday, and I wanted to point out that solitary bees also have parasites that can be deadly.  Osmia, or Mason bees, occur in all shapes and sizes, but nearly all 300 species are fuzzy, mild-mannered, and adorable.  They’re called mason bees because they create nest chambers out of mud.  Each individual female does all the work herself, unlike social bumble bees and honey bees.

Sadly, just as lots of things like to kill honey bees, there is also an extensive list of predators, parasitoids, and parasites that specialize on just this one type of bee.

Solitary bees pose a unique challenge for a parasite. How are you supposed to build up a population when your host doesn’t live in a group or a herd?  Somehow you have to spread and move between both individuals and generations.

One time when even solitary animals have to hook up is…. when they hook up.  Parasitic mites on bees hop off one host and onto another just like changing taxis. The bees are too otherwise occupied with gettin’ it on to notice.

I posted some footage of varroa mites on honeybees yesterday, but that pales in comparison to the horror I’m about to show you.   Indeed, I hope it will shock you, make you quite itchy, and put you off sex for a while.  (I’m not getting any, so might as well make it a universal condition.)

From the video author:

“These Red Mason Bees are heavily (probably fatally) infested with mites. Mites will often move from the male bee (who picks them up whilst visiting flowers), to the female during copulation. The female will then carry them to her nest where they will feed on the provisions and breed. Mites often will suck the blood of bees, sometimes leading to death. Heavily infested bees are unable to fly.”

The mites are probably Chaetodactylus osmiae, but that’s a guess.

Citation:
Miloje KRUNIĆ, Ljubiša STANISAVLJEVIĆ, Mauro PINZAUTI, & Antonio FELICIOLI (2005). The accompanying fauna of Osmia cornuta and Osmia rufa
and effective measures of protection Bulletin of Insectology, 58 (2), 141-152

Filed under: Bees, Entomology, Insects, Science Tagged: Bees, death, osmia, parasites, sex, solitary bees
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[The second in my guest post gig over at Scientopia]

I spent my first post lamenting confusion over CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder), honey bees, and native bee species. One key problem is that CCD as described by entomologists is not the same as “disappearing bees” as described by media or Hollywood. (Although, to be fair, “vanishing bees” is a pretty cool idea, suggesting that perhaps aliens have decided to abduct bees rather than rednecks in pickup trucks, just to mix things up a little.)

CCD is a syndrome. By definition, a syndrome is a collection of signs and symptoms known to appear together but that have no known cause.  Unfortunately, we can’t use Koch’s postulates to clearly link a causal pathogen to a disease.

The CCD Working Group issued this definition in 2009 for a diagnosis of CCD:

1. “the apparent rapid loss of adult worker bees from affected colonies as evidenced by weak or dead colonies with excess brood populations relative to adult bee populations;
2. the noticeable lack of dead worker bees both within and surrounding the hive; and
3. the delayed invasion of hive pests (e.g., small hive beetles and wax moths) and kleptoparasitism [honey stealing] from neighboring honey bee colonies.”

To diagnose a hive that is in the process of failing:

“In those CCD colonies where some adult bees remained, there were insufficient numbers of bees to cover the brood [brood = baby bees], the remaining worker bees appeared young (i.e., adult bees that are unable to fly), and the queen was present.

Notably, both dead and weak colonies in CCD apiaries were neither being robbed by bees (despite the lack of available forage in the area as evidenced by the lack of nectar in the comb of strong colonies in the area and by conversations with managing beekeepers) nor were they being attacked by secondary pests (despite the presence of ample honey and beebread in the vacated equipment).”

“Bees gone” is not sufficient for a diagnosis of Death by CCD, if you are a CSI Apiarist.  The status of the brood is important. A lot of hive health is assessed by how well the queen and her minions are producing and caring for the young.

Another major complication is that beekeeping is an endeavor with an incredibly high rate of failure.  It boggles my mind that 15% hive loss yearly is NORMAL.  I don’t mean hive losses from CCD–that’s the rate of hive failure before CCD arrived on the scene. It’s just the cost of doing business–a lot of hives don’t make it through the winter.

In the last decade, that loss rate has crept up to 30%, on average, for the US.  This increase in bee deaths has been primarily driven by two bee parasites–Varroa Mites and Tracheal Mites.  Varroa mites are pretty big, compared to a bee. It’s probably like having a tiny vampiric chihuahua stuck to your body.  Here, have a look:

(Also, I just SERIOUSLY creeped myself out imagining vampire chihuahuas.)

Tracheal mites live in the breathing tubes of insects, and as you might expect, severely inhibit the ability of bees to thrive.  And I’m just getting started on things that kill bees independently of CCD.  I can think of at least 20 different fungal infections, viruses, and additional parasites.  Foulbrood. Nosema.  Chronic Paralysis Virus.  I’ll spare you the full list, but a LOT of things like to kill bees.

This is part of what makes teasing out the cause of CCD so difficult. It’s not that there are no smoking guns; there are hundreds of smoking guns, all of which plausibly contribute to the decline of bees.  Here is the short list of contributors to CCD, ordered roughly in order of importance, based on the most recent literature:

• increased losses due to varroa mite;
• diseases such as Israeli Acute Paralysis virus and the gut parasite Nosema;
• pesticide poisoning through exposure to pesticides for in-hive insect or mite control
• habitat loss for foraging; inadequate forage/poor nutrition;
• Exposure to pesticides in the environment (including neonicotinoids)
• poor nutrition and migratory stress brought about by the increased need to move bee colonies long distances to provide pollination services.

Note that the pesticides on this list that are of most concern, and mostcommon in hives, are the ones that we apply to the bees on purpose.  Miticides and fungicides to control parasites and diseases of bees are the ones of most concern for sub-lethal effects on the bees we are trying to protect.

Bees encounter pesticides in their environment as they look for nectar and pollen, and those get all the press.  That story fits a narrative for humans–we fear pesticides in our environment too–and gets privileged over other factors in news coverage.

What pesticides really seem to do is make everything else worse for bees. For example, three different studies this year found that exposure to pesticides increased  Nosema infections.  It’s these synergistic effects that make pesticides of concern, not their ability to kill a bee outright.

One other factor that entomologists know is that a Beepocalypse is actually not new, if you look at the history of beekeeping.

Many of these historic collapses pre-date the introduction of pesticides or other modern bee culture practices that are being blamed for bee losses today.  The extent of some of those historic losses are staggering–up to 90% colony collapse in some cases.

Hopefully, this gives you a sense of just how difficult and tangled the problem of CCD is, and how very far we are from a simple linear cause –> effect relationship for this problem.  It IS hard out there for a bee.  And it’s frustrating that when researchers find a new potential contributor, it’s reported as “the cause” of CCD, even when the scientists involve explicitly say it isn’t a cause.

We aren’t kidding. It is complicated.

Next up: a brand new literature review published this month that tries to untangle the issue of pesticides and bees.

Filed under: Bees, Entomology, Gardening, Science Tagged: CCD, colony collapse disorder
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At Sebastian’s and Christina’s house, the bees were doing well.  Interestingly the blue hive which is a 10 frame set up is growing faster than the yellow hive which is an 8 frame set up.

In the blue hive there were only six undrawn frames total in all the boxes.  I might not be back for about 10 days, so I put a new box on that hive.  However, now I am out of 10 frame medium boxes, so I put an 8 frame on the hive and covered the extra two frames below with a 2X4 (see the hive tool sitting on it?).

This year in every location I am finding earwigs on the hives.  Generally they are located like these are around the top edge of the hive often outside or on top of the inner cover.  Wonder what the appeal of the bee hive is for the ear wig?  They eat arthropods, plants and ripe fruit – none of which describes the honey bee, but they do like small tight spaces which does describe the bee hive.  Whatever the appeal, they are in all of my hives this year.

Then I went to Stonehurst Place.  It’s an interesting group of hives.  We’ve had rain and cooler weather for the last week, so the bees have not been able to forage and the tulip poplar is almost done so there isn’t much nectar to be had.  The two new nucs at Stonehurst this year are moving slower than my other nucs.

In the first hive I took this picture of new comb filled with nectar.  I love it that the bees immediately use wax as they draw it.  They will continue to fill this frame but are storing the nectar as the storage are is created.  Even more fun is to find comb that is a niblet hanging off of the top bar of the frame, but is already filled with eggs from the eager queen!

The second nuc at Stonehurst swarmed almost immediately after installation.  However, their new queen is laying and doing well.  If you click on the photo below, you can see an egg in almost every cell.  She is trying to catch up.  However, swarming is almost a guarantee in a new nuc that we will not get any honey from this hive this year.  They will need whatever they store to make it through the winter.

Talk about a bee yard that needs equalizing!  The overwintered hive is full of honey – the bees were unhappy with me because they are in such need of space.  I had no help with me today and no ladder so I simply added a box to the top of this hive.

In the hives at Morningside, I’m finding the same phenomenon that is occurring at Sebastian and Christina’s.  These hives at the community garden were started from packages on the same day.  The hive on the left is smaller and has fewer bees than the hive on the right.

Both have active laying queens and appear to be storing nectar, laying eggs, and generally going about their bee business.  Differences in hive size may be the result of the queen, but it also may be the result of drift (bees coming back to the wrong hive).  These hives are different colors and have different markings on the front, but to further address this potential problem, I added stick-on flower designs to both hives to increase their distinctiveness for the returning forager bees.

(więcej…)

[I am doing a guest gig at Scientopia this week, and will be re-publishing posts I write for them here as well]

Right now, even people who aren’t bug dorks like me are really interested in bees.  This is a mixed blessing for an entomologist.

The Good:

As the American population becomes more distant from their food production (only 1% of the population works on farms), a bee crisis reminds everyone that a significant part of their diet depends on these little Angels of Agriculture.  We rely on bees to serve as pollen couriers for fruits, vegetables, and animal food crops. The value of pollination services is estimated between 30 and 15 Billion dollars per year in the US.

It’s good to remind people that their food depends on these little animals, and to generate some positive buzz about bees and agriculture. People are interested in planting native plants, and creating habitat for bees and other pollinating insects. Win!

The Bad:

Most Americans, and lots of the media, don’t seem to realize that “The Bees” are actually thousands of different species, with very different habitat needs and life histories.  Honeybees are domesticated animals. Like cows and chickens, they came to America with Europeans as introduced species in the 1600’s. They rapidly displaced native bee species, and habitat loss due to agriculture and urbanization further weakened our native pollinators.

Honeybees live in artificial hives we build for them, and work to pollinate crops that grow in huge monocultures of single plant species. It is the honeybees that are dying from CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder.  Or, maybe not.  It’s complex.

There are also declines in native solitary bee populations, in wild bumble bees, and in bumble bees that are reared commercially like honeybees.  Confused yet?  The press certainly is. Sometimes they can’t even figure out what insects are actually bees, much less what is killing them.

Because the media is Beedazzled, bee stories are covered heavily.  This results in some not-good science getting a LOT of exposure that it would not otherwise. Papers that would have quietly been published in an obscure periodical, and perhaps used as a “don’t do this” example in Journal Club, are suddenly big news. Press releases about grant funding to study a bee issue are presented with the same weight as  finished research.  Mainstream media seems to need to create a false sense of urgency about the stories. OMG NOT THE BEEZ!!! (obligatory photo of Nicholas Cage inserted here).

A whole bunch of conspiracy theories about bees and what’s killing them have surfaced:
GMO Plants.
Cell phones.
Sun Spots.
Power lines and electromagnetic smog.
Rapture. (No, seriously. The bees are being raptured. Via a psychic they issued a “so long and thanks for all the pollen” statement, and revealed they were going to a higher astral plane.)

Claims of catastrophic consequences (“OMG All humans will die without bees!!1!”) and complex, murky science make space for some pretty wild claims.  A whole mythology of what Einstein might have said about bees has sprung up.   Monsanto bought a bee genomics company and it’s part of theirgrand plan to poison us all.  At this point, the only claim I haven’t seen yet is that very, very small black helicopters are abducting the bees.

 So what the F is up with the bees, anyway?

As you can see, there are a lot of different things going on with honeybee disappearance and loss of native species.  It doesn’t help that the honeybee problem is usually framed as a cause/effect relationship between bee declines and some toxic thing. Our modern news cycle isn’t really built to deal with nuance and complexity.

This “toxic thing” narrative results in some stories being given far more weight than others.  For some reason, a lot of people really want to believe cell phones and GMO crops kill bees, even when there is no evidence for it.  Some of the evidence that does exist is discounted, as is the “expert” status of a lot of entomologists.  The story has been shaped as much by what people already think about “those corporate bastards” than actual bees.

This has been a bit of an existential crisis for me, since while I know from my work in science education that just telling people facts won’t change their minds…I still do it. It’s the default position for an academic.

Commenter: Cell phones are killing bees!
Me: Well, actually, not so much [facts]
Commenter: Well what about this story?
Me: [more facts]
Commenter: You are a tool of the industrio-telecommunications complex.

I occasionally find myself in the problematic position of not wanting entomology to be covered widely as news because people aren’t listening or thinking carefully. (Which, frankly, could cover a lot of the daily news cycle, not just stories about insects.)

This is all a long way of saying that “The Bee Problem” is a really complex issue, involving many species, and the research isn’t finished.  It’s a biological system with thousands of moving and living parts.

When trying to explain this, I find myself returning to Carl Zimmer’s excellent New York Times summary of recent research on bees and pesticides:  Bees’ decline linked to pesticides.  Carl (I shook his hand once, so I can call him Carl, right?) does a great job of showing how the scientific community is still resolving how all this research adds up.  In a post on his blog providing supplimental information to the NYTimes story above, Carl discusses the difficulty of making sense of all this information:

“I found this story to be especially challenging to sum up in a single nut graph. To begin with, these experiments came after many years of previous experiments and surveys, which often provide conflicting pictures of what’s going on…. The experiments themselves were not–could not–be perfect replicas of reality, and so I needed to talk to other scientists about how narrow that margin was. As they should, the scientists probed deep, pointing out flaws and ambiguity–in many cases even as they praised the research.
At the same time, these two papers did not appear in a vacuum. Other scientists have recently published studies (or have papers in review at other journals) that offer clues of their own to other factors that may be at work. And, biology being the godawful mess that it is, it seems that these factors work together, rather than in isolation.”

Exactly! It’s a body of research, not hundreds of isolated individual papers.  If Carl Zimmer–an exceptional science journalist with access to the actual scientists that are doing the research–struggles trying to assemble a coherent picture of the information, I KNOW that the rest of us regular schmoes are too.

What I hope to do in my time at the Guest Blogge is cover some of the research that I think is important to understanding bees and the ecosystem services they provide, within the context of a field of rapidly evolving research.

Filed under: Bees, Entomology, Science
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**

• 0: the number of chemicals or pesticides I use in my hive.
• ⅜ of an inch: bee space.
• 1: the number of queens in most beehives
• 1: the number of times a worker bee can sting
• 2 days: the amount of time in which a larva can still become a queen if fed royal jelly
• 3 times a month: the number of times I inspect bee hives during bee season
• 3: the number of segments to a honey bee body.
• 4 minutes: the amount of time it takes for a honey bee to remove and manipulate a scale of wax exuded from the abdomen of a bee (4th to 7th abdominal segments if you are interested!)
• 4 – 5 pounds: the approximate weight of a full medium frame of honey
• 4.9 mm: the width of a natural-comb worker brood cell.
• 5 : number of eyes on a honey bee
• 7:  the number of hives I have in my Virginia Highlands backyard
• 8 feet:  the average height of a wild colony inside a tree
• 8: the number of frames I use in my hive bodies
• 9 ODA:  9-oxodecenoic acid or queen substance – queen pheromone
• 10 nails: the number required to build a frame properly
• 10 – 15 trips a day:  the number of times nectar and pollen gatherers fly out
• 12 – 25 days:  The age of most guard bees
• 16 days:  the number of days it takes for a queen to emerge
• 17: the number of states having the honey bee as the state insect
• 17 – 30: the number of drones needed for a well-mated queen
• 18.6% moisture: the maximum moisture content a honey can have and not ferment.
• 20 times its own weight: the amount of honey a comb can support
• 21: Current number of Master Beekeepers who have earned their certification from the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute
• 21 days: the number of days it takes for a worker to emerge
• 24 days:  the number of days it takes for a drone to emerge
• 24 km/h: average honey bee flight speed
• 25: the number of talks I’ve given to bee clubs and others since January 2011
• 36: the number of days from egg to sexual maturity for the drone
• 40 liters: the size of a hive cavity
• 56:  the number of workers a single worker touches with her antennae in 30 minutes
• 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit:  the temperature of the core of the brood nest in a hive
• 120 degrees: the angle between adjacent cell walls in honeycomb
• 600-800 meters: the average distance a swarm moves from its parent colony
• 800 km:  The distance a forager accumulates in foraging flights before her death

• 
• 1000:  The number of posts on this blog as of this very moment!
  
• Infinite: The amount of joy and pleasure I get from beekeeping and the amazing  people and experiences that it brings to my life…………

(więcej…)

–Richard

(więcej…)

My flower pot swarm trap caught a swarm that I called Little Kitten because it was so small.  I think it was a secondary swarm and was relieved to find that finally a mated queen was laying in the wax comb.

I had a Boardman feeder at the entrance of the nuc – and those of you who have used Boardmans know that they are not designed for a nuc.  To combat the instability I put a package container under the feeder with a small block to support it.  However, one night our evening raccoon or maybe my dog, Hannah, had bumped into the Boardman, turning over the feeder bottle.

By the time I discovered the mishap, there was a pool of sugar syrup all over the bottom board of the nuc and bees were having a terrible time negotiating entry to the hive.  It could have been like that for several days – I don’t always look at the hives every single day.  I put the hive on a new bottom board and cleaned up the old one.  Then I returned it to the hive and put it all back together.

Sadly, either the queen drowned that night – death by raccoon/Hannah/sugar syrup??? – or the bees, upset with the state of things, balled her.  The hive was queenless.

I put frames of brood and eggs into the nuc.  They didn’t really succeed at making a queen.  There was one small queen cell – obviously an inadequate job (1/2 inch long at best) – and the handful of bees now left could not have managed to take care of it.

My friend Jerry ordered 20 virgin queens from Zia and offered me the opportunity to buy one.  Zia Queen Bees is a family operation breeding survivor queens.  I believe this is the answer to the mite problem – not poison.  I snapped him up on it, got the queen on Wednesday night.  She was alone in the queen cage.  Jerry suggested that I feed her a drop of honey and a drop of water when I got home and that I install her the next day.

An amazing experience but with no pictures:  I put a drop of honey on the end of my finger and held it next to the openings in the plastic queen cage.  She stuck out her proboscis and sucked the honey off of my finger.  I will never forget the experience.  I knew the water wouldn’t stick to my finger, so I put it in a spoon and watched her drink, but I wished I could repeat the honey drop!

The next day, Thursday, I was scheduled to give a bee talk at 7 PM and from there to drive to Young Harris, so I had a packed day.  I luckily had a two hour break in my professional day (but only 2 hours) so I drove to Valerie and Jeff’s to get frames of bees to create population for the small Kitten.

Jeff has been busy adding boxes to these hives and this is how they looked:

All of these boxes are full of honey and I can’t lift the top box on these hives without a ladder and help, so I opened the hive I call Lenox Pointe (second from the left in the collage above).  I took two honey frames with bees from the top box, checking very carefully for the queen.  I did this because I could take honey frames out of the top box without having to lift it off of the hive.  I put these in a nuc I had waiting.  I took three frames – two of brood and bees and one of mostly pollen and honey from the Swarmy hive – the mostly yellow hive on the right in the collage.

I shook a few extra bees, but didn’t worry about that as much as I would normally since I am adding this „split” to Little Kitten where there are already some under employed bees.

Oh, and I put an end bar on the entry to give them an entrance reducer of sorts.

Returning from Young Harris, I found the bees happily flying in and out of the hive and seemingly happy. I’ll check tomorrow to see if the queen has been released and then leave them completely alone for three weeks.

(więcej…)

Home from Young Harris Beekeeping Institute today and I’m exhausted.  This, for me, is the end of seven weeks of over-commitment and now it’s setting in that I am TIRED.

Young Harris was great in so many ways.  I learned a lot and heard some good speakers:  Juliana Rangel from NC State and Gary Reuter from the University of Minnesota, in particular.  I also taught two workshops on Low Tech Beekeeping and tested the candidates for Certified Beekeeper on their practical exams.

Julia and Noah went also.  Noah earned his Journeyman certification – he’s only 15 and I imagine he’s one of the youngest, if not the youngest, person to get this certification in Georgia.  He is such a knowledgeable and excellent beekeeper, and I love being associated with him.

I couldn’t believe that I left my camera in Atlanta so I couldn’t take photos of Noah and Julia in their moments of reward, but I’ve put in pictures of them in inspections that we have done together.

Julia who earned her Journey(wo)man last year, this year went for her Master Beekeeper and she DID IT!  I have loved working with her over these years and was sure she would achieve this.  There’s an old saying that if you ask 10 beekeepers a question, you’ll get 10 different answers, but Julia, Noah and I generally think very similarly and agree in philosophy.  I feel lucky and really privileged to be friends with and to keep bees with both Julia and Noah.

I didn’t enter any honey in the honey contest – all of my cut comb has been opened and shared with others; my liquid honey is beginning to crystallize, and I never got around to making a wax block or creamed honey, so I didn’t have any honey to enter.

I did enter the „art” category of the honey show with the quilt I’ve made for my newest grandson:  Max who is now five months old.  Jeff, who is his father, keeps bees with me, and he and Valerie decorated Max’s room in bees.

I’ve worked on it for six months and was thrilled to win a blue ribbon.  I’ve made a number of quilts in my life, but this is the first quilt that I actually drew the design myself so it is totally original.  The six honey bee blocks are based on a traditional quilt block but I made the heads smaller like a real honey bee and put a floral block in the center.

So now I’m going to slow down for a month or two and take better care of myself…..but I will still be sharing my bee life with all of you.

(więcej…)