2022-08

August 2022

I’ve been away for a good part of last month, so I didn’t have as much time to find interesting items, but here’s this month’s selection anyway.

Over the years I’ve heard some people claim that swarm cells are no good for queens and others say that they are the bee’s knees (for want of a better expression) - I remember one past president of FIBKA who swore by their superlative quality. Well now the scientists have had their say: a recent paper in the journal Insects entitled “High-Quality Queens Produce High-Quality Offspring Queens” compared queens raised from swarm cells, from worker eggs and from 2-day old worker larvae. The results showed that the queen from the swarm cell was of a far better quality than the others. Even the egg laid in the swarm cell was slightly larger than a worker egg. There’s lots more in the article, but these details alone indicate that whatever queen-rearing system you’re using should probably focus on triggering the swarm impulse rather than the building of emergency cells.

In the July issue of American Bee Journal, Prof. Scott McArt from Cornell University describes the work he’s doing, looking at the various pesticides that impact bees. He took a large number of samples from blueberry fields and analysed these for all pesticides that might be present. Worryingly he found that the samples contained chemicals that had not been used on the blueberries, indicating that the bees had picked them up from further afield. This tells us that we should not be complacent about our bees when someone sprays a field 5 miles away – it can still be a threat to their welfare despite the distance.
This month there’s a flurry of articles on Varroa in multiple magazines, focusing on the idea of the bees being able to handle the mites without help from the beekeeper:

In this month’s Bee Craft, Prof. Stephen Martin from Salford University and his PhD student Isobel Grindrod write on how around 25% of UK beekeepers don’t treat for Varroa, relying instead on the bees’ ability to keep the mite population under control. Interestingly they mention that while in Europe we focused on treatments, South Africa and South America took the approach that they would allow their bees develop the ability to coexist with the mites. The result is that the bees in the Southern Hemisphere are thriving without treatments while we’re still treating ours.
In the American Bee Journal, Randy Oliver writes about his goal of mite resistance rather than tolerance. He wants his bees to disrupt the breeding phase of the Varroa lifecycle so that their population dwindles to a low level or even to zero. He goes into detail about the genetics of this whole process and emphasises how difficult it is to make this happen.
Another article in the American Bee Journal is by Mary & Bill Weaver, and focuses on the Indiana mite-biters which, as can be guessed by the name, attack the mites, biting their legs and bodies and potentially killing them. Once again, the genetics of this project make it very difficult to ensure that the trait is passed on.

All three of these articles are fascinating, each taking a different approach and all three indicating that they are having success. Perhaps with their combined experience we’ll eventually get to the point where our own bees treat Varroa with the contempt they deserve, completely unaided by treatments.

Sticking with multiple articles on a subject, this month there are a couple of articles on the use of beeswax in encaustic art. I must admit that I’ve only ever encountered this at the FIBKA Summer School, so it was interesting to see not one but two articles on the subject:

In the American Bee Journal, M.E.A. McNeill writes about the encaustic art of George Hansen, a beekeeper with some 7000 hives who paints in his spare time. The article describes his work and explains the history and background of this art form, including the funerary pictures painted in Roman Egypt in the second century (see the Portrait of the Boy Eutyches on the right).
In the Welsh Beekeeper, Summer magazine, freely downloadable from https://wbka.org, Irene Gardiner writes about her own encaustic art which is quite striking and focuses on the issues affecting nature and the planet.

Perhaps this is something we should be doing with all the wax we have. Rather than fussing over candles or swapping the blocks of wax for foundation, perhaps we should be keeping a little back and using it for a bit of experimentation with the arts – maybe associations should be encouraged to add encaustic art to the list of classes in honey shows.

To add to their already impressive library of downloads, the Welsh Beekeepers have added a new booklet, “The Beekeeping Year” by Lynfa Davies. This goes through the year month by month, listing the beekeeping tasks for each month. While this is targeting beginners, it’s definitely worth reading no matter how much experience you have. It’s also the perfect price – it’s free – so you have no excuse for not reading it.

This year we’ve had lots of wind and, if summer ever turns up, what could be better than taking advantage of it with a kite, a bee kite, no less, which is available from Amazon. It might frighten your bees or annoy your neighbours, but any children around will love it.