September 2023
Most Irish beekeepers are very familiar with the smell of ivy around the hives in Autumn. However, we never consider how many of the ivy flowers are actually visited by pollinators. In an article in August’s BeeCraft, Prof. Francis Ratnieks and Ciaran Harris of Sussex University tell of their research into this aspect. It turns out that much of the ivy crop is lost, with drops of nectar drying and crystallising on the flowers, so that as much as 59% of the nectar and 44% of the pollen remained uncollected. This indicates that there is quite a surplus of food in autumn. Let’s hope this is true this year after what has been a disappointing summer harvest for many.
A reprinted article from 1948 in August’s American Bee Journal in their From the Archives series refers to “The Vanishing Bee”. In it, they talk about payments to farmers and the pressures on them to produce more in what was described as “clean cultivation”. The situation sounds only too familiar to us today, where they say that this “wiped out the nesting places of the wild bees and other pollinators; they were made homeless and left to die, which they did by the millions”, claiming that the farmers “continued to destroy the basic means of a full crop”. It says a lot about humankind’s willingness to fix difficult issues when 75 years later we’re only starting to address this problem.
It's always bad to hear about the theft of hives. In North Wales, 14 hives, described as among their most productive, were stolen from West Coast Apiaries. To make off with that number of hives in one go requires expertise, and shows that this is a crime by beekeepers on beekeepers, making this an especially egregious thing to do. The owner estimates that this will cause a loss of around £10000, a lot of money to have to make up. This comes after the sad story earlier this summer when a beekeeper from Lincolnshire decided to quit beekeeping entirely after his hives had been stolen for a fifth time. The last time, they took only the brood boxes, once again indicating that the thieves were experienced beekeepers.
In the latest news emphasising how clever honeybees are, they are apparently contributing to smart decision-making for AI solutions. Scientists from the University of Sheffield have published a paper, “How honey bees make fast and accurate decisions”, which describes their research into how they provided different nectars in flowers that were five different colours, with blue flowers containing sugar syrup, green flowers containing tonic water, and the others sometimes containing glucose. When released into a field containing a variety of coloured flowers, the bees took less than a second to decide to head for the blue flowers and avoided the green flowers. They developed a model to map onto the neurological pathways in the bee’s brain and claim that this system can be applied to decision-making processes in robots.
Asian Hornets have been busy in the UK, with 15 nests found and destroyed this year, more than the total combined number of nests over the previous 6 years since Asian Hornets started arriving in the UK. While most of the sightings have been in the Kent area, a couple of nests have been found much further west, around Plymouth and Portland. They believe that most of the foundress queens were carried over the channel on the wind, but there’s no doubt that the ferries from France are a potential risk vector. We too have ferries crossing from Cherbourg and Roscoff to Dublin, Rosslare and Cork, as well as from the UK, so we really cannot be complacent. We all need to learn to distinguish Asian Hornets from other flying insects so we can respond appropriately if something unusual turns up.