October 2023
Professor Thomas Seeley is one of the most respected bee scientists on the planet. He has written a number of fascinating books on bees and their behaviours, and the good news is that he has another book in the works. Unfortunately Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-Runners: 20 Mysteries of Honey Bee Behavior Solved won’t be released until April 2024, although I’m sure the intervening time will pass quite quickly.
Researchers from the US Dept. of Agriculture have found that bumble bees are less faithful to flower patches than honey bees. It seems that 0nly 47% of bumble bees returned to the flowers while a full 76% of honey bees did so. To achieve this, it requires that the bee navigate complex landscapes while remembering attributes about the location, so these revisits are impressive. The reasons for this difference are unknown but they speculate it could be because of the bumble bee’s exploratory foraging behaviour as opposed to the honey bee’s communications systems, in particular the famous waggle dance.
We all know that honey is around 80% sugar, but this fact hasn’t lessened its impact on health. At the University of Toronto, they have discovered that eating around 40g (or 2 tablespoons) a day lowered levels of fasting glucose, “bad” LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, while increasing the levels of “good” HDL cholesterol. They found these benefits were from raw honey, so it’s yet another reason for consumers to avoid the supermarket honeys and support their local beekeeper.
We all know that honey is around 80% sugar, but this fact hasn’t lessened its impact on health. At the University of Toronto, they have discovered that eating around 40g (or 2 tablespoons) a day lowered levels of fasting glucose, “bad” LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, while increasing the levels of “good” HDL cholesterol. They found these benefits were from raw honey, so it’s yet another reason for consumers to avoid the supermarket honeys and support their local beekeeper.
Do you use a honey dipper, you know, that funny wooden tool with a ridged lump on the end? In September’s American Bee Journal, Master Beekeeper Rusty Burlew talks about the etiquette and the mechanics of using one. While it’s clear that a dipper is ideal for picking up viscous honey, forming a glob due to gravity: apparently when the force of gravity Fg exceeds the force of cohesion Fc, the glob separates and drops into the target dish (hopefully). Of course, other aspects are important. For example, should you return the dipper to the honey? What if you have swirled it around in a cup of tea – is it OK to return it then? Should it be washed after every use? Is it OK to leave it in the honey or will that provide a route for moulds, etc.? She doesn’t provide answers to these questions, there is apparently an online survey that indicates that most people will actually return the dipper to the jar after swirling it around in their tea, possibly introducing water and increasing the risk of fermentation.
Something that really took me by surprise was an article on Penn State Extension’s web site entitled Honey Bee Diseases: American Foulbrood. This is a well-written article with a lot of very good information. However, what really caught my attention was the fact that apparently AFB scale fluoresces under UV light. This means that if you have a black light, you can shine it on a suspect frame to see if there’s anything to worry about. Of course, this won’t work if you’re doing this in the middle of a sunny summer day, but it’s another tool that can be used in the battle against this awful disease.
I always push for good record-keeping, believing that it gives the beekeeper a far better understanding of their mistakes and successes, as well as helping to identify both good colonies and problematic ones. This is especially important for anyone who want to breed their own queens. While those starting out with queen-rearing will be happy to successfully raise any queens at all, after a couple of years, they’ll want to raise the best possible queens. Randy Oliver has been focused on selective breeding for Varroa resistance for the past six years or so. The articles on his scientificbeekeeping.com website (search for “selective breeding”) make for very interesting reading. He is very detail-oriented and tracks every piece of data he can, with the result that his methodology is now starting to produce noticeable results, as he reports in American Bee Journal. One problem with breeding mite-resistance is that its heritability is low, i.e. a complex set of recessive genes is difficult to propagate and can easily breed out of the population. However, with around a third of his colonies exhibiting strong resistance, which he says is a 300x improvement, it seems like his methodology is working.
Most people have heard of AliExpress, the global website that sells cheap Chinese products. One of the suppliers there, the Mr. Ye Store sells photorealistic tee-shirts with various picture of bees and comb. Thise are quite eye-catching, and I imagine they would grab a lot of attention. They are certainly not something you can easily ignore!