February 2026
Unfortunately, we find bees with deformed wings only too often in our colonies. Recent research indicates that not only honey bees are susceptible to DWV – researchers in Hungary have also found that virus along with the Acute Bee Paralysis Virus (ABPV) in European hornets, Vespa crabro. A couple of years ago these were also found in V. orientalis by Italian researchers, and they also appear to affect Vespula germanica, one of our common wasps. While beekeepers are aware that these diseases are passed to bees by Varroa mites, the infections of hornets and wasps begs the question: how did they catch it? The obvious route seems to be from eating contaminated bees, but this is far from certain. Perhaps there’s an environmental element in the transmission, in which case perhaps honey bees too are infected this way. Lots of questions but no answers yet!
A salutary warning about the problems facing any beekeeping magazine arrived with the news that The Australasian Beekeeper has ceased publication. It had been running for over 125 years, so this comes as quite a shock for many of our antipodean friends. This could potentially be the fate of An Beachaire if people don’t provide content. Loads of us have stories about beekeeping we could contribute but the same names appear again and again – it’s time for ordinary beekeepers to practice their penmanship.
Kris Fricke, erstwhile editor of the above-mentioned now defunct The Australasian Beekeeper, had a couple of articles in recent issues of BeeCraft about bees that actively seek novelty, usually expressed as scouting behaviour. This apparently was associated with increased amounts of the neurochemicals glutamate and octopamine. To prove this, they dosed ordinary workers with octopamine and, lo and behold, the bees began to take on more scouting duties. It appears that this also makes foragers more likely to dance, even though the quality of the forage may not warrant such advertising. It turns out that octopamine improves a bee’s ability to learn, increases her sensitivity to rewards and influences communication of forage sources. The complexity of honey bee behaviour is simply amazing.
In January’s American Bee Journal, Jamie Ellis responded to a question about whether bees can determine if the queen is going to be productive. He referenced a paper with the rather long title “Choosing the best: honeybee workers can assess reproductive quality of the queen through pheromonal signalling in simultaneous choice assays” which simply means that the bees were allowed to freely choose between two queens, one of which was known to be productive and the other less so. The workers selected the more productive queen, leading to the conclusion that queen selection is determined by the queen’s pheromones which accurately and honestly indicate her potential. The exact indicator wasn’t identified but if it’s not too difficult to emulate the mix of the winner queen, it might be a useful addition to the beekeeper’s arsenal to make the bees more readily accept a new queen.
Canada plan on updating their requirements for organic honey, including not allowing feeding with traditional sugar syrup, requiring the use of organic sugar syrup or honey instead. However, without having full tests examining the effects of this change, beekeepers are understandably concerned. So, researchers evaluated colonies fed with either conventional sugar syrup, organic sugar syrup, summer honey, or autumn honey assessing winter survival, colony development, honey production, and pathogen development. Interestingly, the results showed that there were no differences in the outcomes for any of the feeds, although they had concerns about feeding honey which could result in dietary problems and carried increased risk of spread of diseases. At least organic beekeepers no know that they can use alternatives.
For those who have read the book The Mind of a Bee, you may be interested to know that the author, Lars Chittka, has won an unexpected award – Best Actor for his role in the film The Last Bee due to be released in 2026. The movie has Lars trying to repopulate the world’s bees from the last handful of survivors in Mexico using genetic engineering with predictably disastrous results.