September 2022
Professor Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University, London, has published a new book, The Mind of a Bee. In it, he draws from his 30 years of studying bees, showing that bees are highly intelligent, can count, recognise individual human faces, use simple tools and may be sentient beings. Since sentience is all about feelings, I think most of us have experienced happy bees when everything is going well, and not so happy bees when we take the honey, so it seems likely there’s something in this. In any case, this has been added to my to-read list. If you’re not the reading kind, you can find his talk on YouTube in a number of versions.
Speer’s Lane in Letterkenny is the location of a beautiful new mural depicting a honeybee foraging on an ox-eye daisy. Unlike many of the bee drawings that have appeared over the past couple of years, this bee does not play for Kilkenny with yellow and black stripes, but realistically looks like our native black bee, and she even has pollen on her hind leg. The mural was painted in conjunction with an update to the Quiet Moment coffee shop and was painted by street artist Ciaran Dunlevy.
Even though we definitely don’t want to hear any more bad news, a new threat to bees was reported in Eurasia Review. It appears that the apparently innocuous fungicide fenbuconazole, commonly used to fight fungal infections of crops, impacts a drone’s ability to mate. The research was done on mason bees but there’s no reason to believe that honeybees would have a different reaction. It seems that the female bees find drones rather unattractive when they have been exposed to the fungicide and prefer to get together with a different drone that does not smell of the chemical. “Our study shows that the early stages of bee reproduction must be included in the risk assessment of pesticides,” says Professor Thomas Schmitt. So that’s yet another aspect of pesticides that needs to be investigated!
While I accept many people find that the details of honeybee genetics are difficult to understand, Randy Oliver has an eye-opening article (probably eye-watering for many) on the genetics of breeding Varroa-resistant bees, in this month’s American Bee Journal. Unsurprisingly he has a large number of colonies from which to select his drones and queens but, as he says himself, “it’s difficult to imagine that any hobby beekeeper (unless they live on an isolated island) could be expected to significantly affect the breeding population surrounding their apiaries.”, but he suggests that instead a good solution is to use locally adapted bees who may well have already adapted to coexist with varroa, rather than bringing in new genetics. I suspect that a local association could well help ensure good quality bees in their area by helping members to focus on the queens they are rearing, although that’s probably a lot of work requiring a lot of free time from people who are already busy.
New research confirms that Donegal’s Boomtree Bees are on the right track. An article in American Bee Journal by Tom Seeley and Robin Radcliffe compared the temperature dynamics of a tree cavity, a wooden hive and an insulated wooden hive. The clear winner was the tree cavity where the temperature remained constant, despite the fluctuations outside. The other hives provided a little protection to the bees, but they basically followed the fluctuations of the outside temperature. They concluded that the plain wooden hive wasn’t much of a substitute for the natural tree cavity, although insulation did help. It would be interesting to see the same experiment repeated with various poly hives. Perhaps their claims that they more closely mimic natural conditions are true but, in the meantime, it appears that trees are best.
Every year we see innovations from beekeepers and this year is no different. A new protection against wasps called HiveGate has arrived on the market. This is brought to you by Vita Bee Health, the same folk who produce Apiguard, Apistan, and more. The HiveGate is essentially a long flat tunnel that leads from the hive entrance to where all the bees are, making it pretty much impossible for wasps to do damage. As someone who has a 3D printer, I have to say that I have produced something similar to this last year, although not quite as long, and it definitely helps keep the bees safe, so this is probably a useful addition to the already long list of items on the shelves in 0your bee shed.
Over the past few years, there has been much talk about cryptocurrencies and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), with the current precipitous drop in value of Bitcoin being one of the most recent talking points. From the beekeeper’s perspective, this has been largely irrelevant, but it appears that the time of the bee-based NFT has arrived. A couple of weeks ago I was alerted to someone trying to sell an NFT per bee in his summer hive (some 50000 bees) at $1 each, not a bad return although there was no mention of what happened when winter arrives. However, since then, I see that there are literally dozens of people trying to sell ideas such as CryptoBees. I thought we were only exposed to get-rich-quick artists who added sugar syrup to the honey, but it appears that we are now the target of financial scams too. Given how careful Irish beekeepers are with money, I suspect they’ll earn very little from us.
While I accept many people find that the details of honeybee genetics are difficult to understand, Randy Oliver has an eye-opening article (probably eye-watering for many) on the genetics of breeding Varroa-resistant bees, in this month’s American Bee Journal. Unsurprisingly he has a large number of colonies from which to select his drones and queens but, as he says himself, “it’s difficult to imagine that any hobby beekeeper (unless they live on an isolated island) could be expected to significantly affect the breeding population surrounding their apiaries.”, but he suggests that instead a good solution is to use locally adapted bees who may well have already adapted to coexist with varroa, rather than bringing in new genetics. I suspect that a local association could well help ensure good quality bees in their area by helping members to focus on the queens they are rearing, although that’s probably a lot of work requiring a lot of free time from people who are already busy.
New research confirms that Donegal’s Boomtree Bees are on the right track. An article in American Bee Journal by Tom Seeley and Robin Radcliffe compared the temperature dynamics of a tree cavity, a wooden hive and an insulated wooden hive. The clear winner was the tree cavity where the temperature remained constant, despite the fluctuations outside. The other hives provided a little protection to the bees, but they basically followed the fluctuations of the outside temperature. They concluded that the plain wooden hive wasn’t much of a substitute for the natural tree cavity, although insulation did help. It would be interesting to see the same experiment repeated with various poly hives. Perhaps their claims that they more closely mimic natural conditions are true but, in the meantime, it appears that trees are best.
Every year we see innovations from beekeepers and this year is no different. A new protection against wasps called HiveGate has arrived on the market. This is brought to you by Vita Bee Health, the same folk who produce Apiguard, Apistan, and more. The HiveGate is essentially a long flat tunnel that leads from the hive entrance to where all the bees are, making it pretty much impossible for wasps to do damage. As someone who has a 3D printer, I have to say that I have produced something similar to this last year, although not quite as long, and it definitely helps keep the bees safe, so this is probably a useful addition to the already long list of items on the shelves in 0your bee shed.
Over the past few years, there has been much talk about cryptocurrencies and NFTs (non-fungible tokens), with the current precipitous drop in value of Bitcoin being one of the most recent talking points. From the beekeeper’s perspective, this has been largely irrelevant, but it appears that the time of the bee-based NFT has arrived. A couple of weeks ago I was alerted to someone trying to sell an NFT per bee in his summer hive (some 50000 bees) at $1 each, not a bad return although there was no mention of what happened when winter arrives. However, since then, I see that there are literally dozens of people trying to sell ideas such as CryptoBees. I thought we were only exposed to get-rich-quick artists who added sugar syrup to the honey, but it appears that we are now the target of financial scams too. Given how careful Irish beekeepers are with money, I suspect they’ll earn very little from us.