May 2023
It’s good to see An Beachaire back, so here we are again!
A rather worrying piece of research from Canada published in the Journal of Insect Science has revealed that some mosquitos have been found to be infected with Black Queen Cell Virus (BQCV). Since the mosquitos have no sign of Varroa nor of Nosema, they surmise it was picked up from flowers recently visited by infected bees. The researchers said that they didn’t believe that the mosquitos could pass on the virus, but there still is the remote possibility that humans could be infected by BQCV from a mosquito bite, not a pleasant idea.
A rather worrying piece of research from Canada published in the Journal of Insect Science has revealed that some mosquitos have been found to be infected with Black Queen Cell Virus (BQCV). Since the mosquitos have no sign of Varroa nor of Nosema, they surmise it was picked up from flowers recently visited by infected bees. The researchers said that they didn’t believe that the mosquitos could pass on the virus, but there still is the remote possibility that humans could be infected by BQCV from a mosquito bite, not a pleasant idea.
While I would normally warn Irish beekeepers off US beekeeping videos, the University of Arkansas’ Arkansas Division of Agriculture have posted a playlist on YouTube that is a full “Home Beekeeping Course” with 19 episodes, so it’s quite a thorough piece of work. The lecture on Small Hive Beetle is not really relevant for Irish beekeeping (at least yet, and hopefully never), but it has lectures on other aspects that many won’t have considered before, for example Integrated Pest Management (IPM) which gives an approach to tackling Varroa, from prevention to testing to treating. To view the videos, search YouTube for “Arkansas Division of Agriculture” and you’ll find the course in the playlists.
I’m sure many of you have heard about the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) investigation of honey imported into the EU. For us beekeepers, the results were probably unsurprising, with almost half of the samples tested suspected of being adulterated with syrup, in particular those from Turkey and China showed a high percentage of questionable honey. Interestingly, all ten samples from the UK were marked “non-compliant”, apparently imported from other countries, blended in the UK and then exported to the EU. Recent advances in analytics now allow detection of substances it was difficult to identify just a couple of years ago, so maybe it’s time for all honey to be routinely tested, rather than a few samples. They kindly provided the QR code reproduced here which will bring you straight to the EU report if you want more in-depth information.
There has been a lot of talk recently about how smart bees are. Professor Lars Chittka from Queen Mary University in London, author of The Mind of a Bee which describes his discoveries after decades of research on bee intelligence, published a paper in March in the journal PLOS Biology entitled “Bumblebees acquire alternative puzzle-box solutions via social learning” on the ability of bumble bees to learn how to solve puzzles by watching other bees. In the same month, Shihao Dong published the article “Social signal learning of the waggle dance in honey bees” in Science magazine, on the subject of how novice honey bees generally make quite a few mistakes when they perform a waggle dance. However, as they get older, they learn how to fix these errors from watching other waggle dancers, indicating that honeybees can alter their behaviours based on social learning, just like bumble bees.
Coincidentally I just started reading a book also on the subject of the waggle dance, Communication Between Honeybees. In it, Professor Jürgen Tautz claims that the waggle dance doesn’t provide the location of forage with anything like the accuracy we have all thought for years. I suppose we should have realised that it’s very difficult to provide such precise information from a dance: clearly something else is going on. Professor Tautz’s research shows that it’s not just the dance that allows bees to fly to a precise source of nectar, but rather a more complex system of communication, including outside the hive. While it’s a bit disappointing to learn that the waggle dance is not the perfect solution I always understood it to be, the book’s subtitle, More than Just a Dance in the Dark, emphasises that there’s probably much more to bee dancing that we previously thought.
David Beckham is quite well known for his beekeeping and has been posting to Instagram about his hobby, most recently showing him assembling a hive, as shown in the photo. From the parts visible in the video it looks like he has acquired a Flow Hive. Another celebrity beekeeper is Rupert Grint who played Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films. Over ten years after the series ended, Rupert has diversified his acting and has started beekeeping. In an interview with GQ magazine, he tells the story of how the roof of a nuc came loose when he was transporting them home on the motorway, and some bees escaped into the car, apparently leaving him terrified of them since, although happily it hasn’t curtailed his beekeeping.