BEES AND POLLINATIONS

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One of the many cool things that came out of ScienceOnline2012 was a meme-thingy called “IamScience”.  From Mindy, who created the video below:

“On January 27, 2012, science writer and marine biologist Kevin Zelnio started the Twitter hashtag #IamScience, encouraging scientists to share their individual stories about their traditional or unconventional paths that brought them to where they were today. The response was overwhelming, with hundreds of tweets pouring in over just a few days. 

I’ve collected and excerpted just a handful of them, and set them to Reckless Kelly’s “Wicked Twisted Road”, a song that Kevin mentioned in his original post as holding particular significance for his own path toward science.

You can see a storify of most of the tweets for #IamScience; or you can watch this video. Get Kleenex.

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet. One of these magical things is learning how personal experience shapes people’s lives. Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”  –Kevin Zelnio

Want to make the project bigger? Kevin has offered to put things together in an e-book:

I would like to curate a free e-book of submissions from people about their experiences – good and bad, whatever you are willing to share. Put your name on it or keep it anonymous, doesn’t matter, but people need to hear how your experiences in the past shaped who you are today and what you do.

If you are interested in participating in this project, I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at kzelnio at gmail dot com. Submissions are whatever is necessary for you to tell your story, up to 5000 words. Include drawing, sketchpads, poetry, whatever you need to tell your story.

You ROCK, Kevin.

Filed under: Science Tagged: #iamscience, personal stories, pipeline, scio12
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–Richard

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I get asked that a lot.  Last Saturday the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers taught a short course and I’m sure I was asked that question at least three times.  On Thursday night I gave a talk on Keeping Bees the Simple Way at the Forsyth County beekeepers meeting, and I started the talk by telling my usual answer to that question:

I keep bees because I wanted to keep chickens.  I read up on what one must do in Atlanta to keep  chickens – how they had to be housed a certain distance from your neighbor’s house, what you needed to do to leave them for a while to go out of town, what to do with the waste they create.  But my children who live here said they would not be chicken-sitters when I went out of town; I couldn’t quite meet the regs when it came to distance from my neighbors, and I didn’t want to deal with chicken ****.

I was driving one Saturday morning, listening to the Walter Reeves show on the radio and he had a beekeeper for a guest.  She was talking about the joys of beekeeping and announced that there were three upcoming short courses in the Atlanta area.  My ears perked up and I listened to her every word!  The first course was on a weekend I couldn’t go and in a place way south of Atlanta.  The second course was on another weekend when I already had commitments and was also in a location pretty far away.  The third course was offered by the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers at the Chattahoochee Nature Center on the only Saturday I was available.

I pulled over to the side of the road, called the number she had given for registration, and signed up.  Bees are legal all over the state of Georgia; they don’t need bee-sitters when you go out of town; and bees take care of their own tiny, tiny bodily waste products.

I went to the course; fell in love; came home and ordered bees and equipment.  And that’s the story.

That’s why I started keeping bees but not why I keep bees.

I think I need to change the answer to that frequently asked question.

I keep bees because bees are fascinating in so many ways.  Among them:

• Bees live in a society that runs democratically and well.  With the help of a thoughtful, careful beekeeper, they can thrive in a man made hive box.  
• Working the bees requires moving slowly, something I rarely do in the rest of my life, and feels zen-like in the slow motion of inspecting the hive – the bees bring me serenity and peace
• Working the bees requires respect for the bees and the hive to work the bees well
• I love the miracle of the reproduction of the hive - 

• they can make a new queen if they need to; 
• they create males if they need them (and get rid of them in the fall when they don’t need them!); 
• the hive itself reproduces the community as a whole in the process of swarming

• they create wax for the honey comb from their thorax; 
• they pass nectar from bee to bee with their proboscis, 
• they use their wings (among other things) for 

• hive ventilation, 
• drying the nectar to create honey, 
• flying to flowers and back to the hive, 

Richard Taylor has written about how the bee yard is a place of quiet reflection and I resonnate with his thoughts about that every time I open a bee hive and spend time with the bees.

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There’s good news and there’s bad news. Both of these hives were small and not too great going into the winter. The dark green hive had been covered by kudzu at the end of the summer – the gardeners who maintain the area around the garden didn’t realize I had two hives and let the kudzu win. I would take garden shears with me every time I went and cut back the area around the entrance but the kudzu definitely won.

I anticipated that these hives would not make it through the winter. I’ve already ordered packages of bees to replace them, assuming they would die.

Today on my visit to the garden, I found out that the dark green hive at the Community garden in Rabun County is bee-less. I’m sad, but not surprised that they are gone. At first without investigating, I put some food on the hive, assuming there might be bees, but when a hive is dead there is an eerie silent feel and I realized that there was no life there.

But then I went to the second hive and lo and behold there were bees flying in and out. They were really there and I was astounded. The hive felt alive when I opened it, even though I didn’t see bees anywhere except at the front entrance. What a relief!

I saw as many as six bees at the same time, but couldn’t snap a picture fast enough – are digital cameras irritating that way?

Anyway, I took the feeder off of the green hive and poured the contents into the feeder for the living, breathing hive – HOORAY! Hope for the future at the Community Garden.

Interestingly there were spiders nesting in the corners of the top cover of both hives. I like them better than roaches!

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You may have heard that I told a slightly rude story at the ScienceOnline2012 conference.  If you missed it, here you go!

Listen to the (Slightly NSFW) Story  via The Monti

Everything I said is true; there are even photos. (Think carefully before you click this link. You’ve been warned.)

There are still pubic lice out there, even in a world of Brazilian waxing.  Here’s a recent paper from the New England Journal of Medicine. Can you spot the crabs?

Ben Lillie’s story is right after mine, and is very different, and incredibly powerful. I got a little verklempt.  Ben now runs The StoryCollider, which is an amazing project to collect science stories.

I had been mentally drafting something about storytelling and science, but then Emily at This View of Life wrote something so spot on in summary of ScienceOnline I defer to her:

“I think that this tendency to focus on the sexy or the gross, the morbid or the taboo, is not just a symptom of our four days of very little sleep, more than a little alcohol in some cases and a deep sense of intellectual and cultural overstimulation.

No, this is an integral part of who we are as a group. We focus on duck penises because we almost have to.

We are all story tellers, whether scientists, journalists or educators.  We take data and create hypotheses. We take facts and construct narratives. We take a curriculum and transform it into inspiration.

What she said.  Go read the rest.

I’ll try to put together a more meaningful summary of the Science Online conference later this week, but for the moment I’m enjoying the accomplishment of briefly trending on Twitter.  Even if it is for telling a story about Seamonkeys in your Pants.

Filed under: Insects, WTF Tagged: crabs, lice, monti, podcast
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Elementary beekeeping. For reasons beyond me, this book is listed on Amazon at £470.36.

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The bees in the nuc at Blue Heron are ALIVE! I really can’t believe it. These are the vandalized bees that are now housed in a nuc and locked with a bicycle lock against further intrusion. I did not believe they would still be OK and we are not out of the winter death possibilities until March. At least for now they are flying.

I couldn’t believe it so I took four pictures to prove to myself that they actually are coming and going. You can watch a hive and tell if the bees entering and leaving it live there or are robbers from another hive. The residents enter confidently and in one fell swoop into the entry. Robber bees are unsure and tend to hover around the entrance before going into the hive.

These bees own this hive.

At my old house where Jeff and Valerie now live we have two hives we are concerned about – now three. Colony Square is doing great with bees all at the entrance. Lenox Pointe has bees but also evidence of nosema, possibly, in that there are streaks of bee poop on the hive box at the entry way.

The hive we call „Five” is still alive. It was tiny going into winter and we had talked about putting it into a nuc, but never did. It is housed in two medium boxes. Jeff hasn’t seen any bees flying in or out, so we opened the top to take a peek. The rapid feeder was still on the hive and there were bees walking up and down the sides of the cone. We both whooped out loud to see actual bees alive in the hive.

Our fourth hive over there is the swarm we caught in June. Although small, it too is alive and had bees in the feeder cone of the rapid feeder.

Don’t be disturbed by the mold in the rapid feeder or the „weeds.” The weeds are actually sprigs of thyme and we’ll clean out the mold on our next opportunity to open the hive.

Today it was still quite cold and we didn’t want to remove the rapid feeder to clean it because it covers the hole in the inner cover and the bees are likely to have propolized any air space to maintain warmth. I’ll take warmth over cleanliness if they can make it through the winter.

Jeff and I are following Jennifer Berry and Keith Delaplane’s system for powdered sugar treatment for varroa mites.  We are dusting the bees with the Dustructor – which means dusting without opening the hive – four times this month (three days apart) and then will repeat this in March.

Today was my third treatment and I dusted the bees at my house and at the Stonehurst Place Inn.  Jeff will do the bees at my old house tomorrow.  It’s out of schedule but I dusted the bees at Blue Heron when I stopped there – they are actually part of Jeff’s schedule, due to be dusted tomorrow.

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Today I removed all the frames in each box of the dead hive in my yard. As I thought the hive died out from being queenless and through beekeeper error (I didn’t realize they were queenless and didn’t combine them with another hive, for example).

There were scattered dead bees throughout the hive. What looked like perhaps the last part of the living bees had died together (about eight of them) in box two on the tops of the frames. I looked through the bodies on the slatted rack and the screened bottom board. I saw no deformed wings, no varroa mites, no dead queen – just worker bees. All told there were about 30 or so dead bees in the hive.

In the picture below you can see numerous small hive beetles dead with the bees.

Because I had fed them bee tea, there was a lot of stored nectar. Here’s one frame with every cell filled with nectar.  There was only one frame of capped honey.  Bees that are queenless can die out with honey in the hive because they simply come to the end of their life span and with no queen, there are not younger bees to replace them.

On the frame below, you can see some evidence of their attempts to make a queen. There was absolutely no capped brood or any brood of any kind.

This is clearly a hive that died out from lack of a queen. I should have paid better attention to it going into winter. It’s also possible that their queen died fairly early in the winter and they didn’t have resources to replace her.

I’m sad that they are gone, but satisfied that I know the cause and that gives me some peace.

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