December 2022
Here’s your December fix of beekeeping oddities.
We have heard in recent times that the trend of keeping bees in cities may not be an environmentally good thing to do, creating competition for resources for wild bees. However, in a research piece published in Scientific Reports entitled Urban ecosystem drives genetic diversity in feral honey bee, the authors say that urbanisation plays a large part in the genetic variability of feral bees, contributing to their fitness in the environment. The positive message from this research is that it appears that urbanisation does have positive aspects for honey bees. This will be good news to the new Dublin 8 Bee8 project run by the Digital Hub.
Another research article published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science talks about a new vaccine that can be used to protect bees from AFB. However, bees lack antibodies, so the solution is to vaccinate the queen, and her offspring are then primed against the Paenibacillus infection. For those of you who are creating a picture in your minds of a queen receiving a shot in her arm (or fore leg), I have to point out that this vaccine is administered orally.
For the youngster in us all, Cortney Cameron has written a book directed at children, to celebrate the variety of bees in the wild. While Look, a Bee! Is American and refers to American bees, there’s plenty of overlap with our own bee species, so it’s worth a look. You can find it online at https://www.crcameron.com/look-a-bee/.
Beekeepers are not fans of Galleria mellonella, the Greater Wax Moth, because of the damage it can do to stored comb. However, it turns out that their saliva can break down not only the precious comb, but also one of the most widespread plastics, polyethylene. With around 100 million tonnes of polyethylene waste created worldwide every year, this may be the magic bullet we’re looking for – perhaps we can at last get our plastic waste under control, and even use this to attract the moths away from our combs.
This month I read a couple of stories about weaponised bees. The first involved a woman in Springfield, Massachusetts in the USA who unleashed her bees to try to prevent an eviction. This resulted in several stings for the police executing the eviction, with the result that she has been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. In a similar situation in Neuwied in Germany, a beekeeper set his bees on council workers who were trying to demolish a building. This time it appears that the beekeeper came out worst with 50 stings and required hospitalisation. The authorities are currently considering charges.
Have you ever wondered what goes on in a swarm cluster? Well, the folks in the University of Colorado, Boulder, performed a CT scan of a number of swarms to try to identify what the bees are up to, publishing their results in Scientific Reports. It appears that they create a kind of upside-down layered pyramid, with more bees in the upper rows than in the shorter rows near the bottom. To understand how much each bee could carry, they calculated that this maximum was approximately 35 bees. However, in the swarm structure, the bees only have to support four others, so they are not overloaded, making the structure very stable. This scaffold structure then leaves other bees free to roam around the cluster or to scout for a new home. There’s lots of interesting reading in the article, such as ideas for bioinspired engineering solutions where this research could be applied to swarms of insect-sized robots that could be used to repair the exterior of buildings!