March 2026
Researchers in the US Department of Agriculture had a look at how bees reacted to a poor diet, removing pollen from foragers, simulating a pollen dearth. It turns out that pollen-deprived colonies became significantly more defensive, indicating that nutritional stress alters behaviour, and leading to the tongue-in-cheek title “Hangry bees: Pollen dearth impacts honey bee behavior and physiology”. This suggests that developing bees receive environmental cues during rearing that influence their adult behaviour. Given the increasing frequency of drought and resource scarcity, we beekeepers will need to keep a closer eye on their forage or we’ll end up with nasty bees.
A new study “Where do honey bees mate?” came as quite a surprise to me. It turns out that our understanding of Drone Congregation Areas is simply a set of assumptions for which there is no evidence! While the attraction of drones and queens to Drone Mandibular Gland pheromones has been well documented, and drones have been tracked by radar, but all that shows is that drones travel between DCA’s along flyways, suggesting that they may be no more than reorientation points. At the same time, in flat featureless landscapes, there are no DCA’s. On top of that, the only queen that was tracked on a full mating flight didn’t mate in a DCA. As Prof. Jurgen Tautz said “We are still guessing more than we know about sex in the private life of honeybees.”
I imagine we’re gearing up for a potentially problematic season ahead with the threat of Yellow-Legged Asian Hornets hanging over us. A citizen science project, “Performances of Selective Mechanical Traps for Autumn Control of the Invasive Asian Hornet Vespa velutina nigrithorax in Western and Southern Europe” looked at 5 different traps and several baits to try to identify the most effective solution to trapping the invaders. It turns out that the best trap was the VelutinaTrap from BeeVital. I don’t see that for sale by any of the Irish suppliers, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time. It’s quite a big device and complicated too, but it seems robust and clearly does the job. The report also said that best bait was a cheap, simple fermented bait of sugar, water and yeast – that’s a pleasant change from the usual cost of bee equipment.
I’m sure you’ve all come across articles and social media posts that claim feeding sugar to bees is bad for them. However, the article “Effects of various fall feeding sugar sources on survival, health, and productivity of honey bee colonies” sheds new light on this area. The Canadian researchers compared 46 colonies that were fed summer honey, autumn honey, organic sugar syrup and non-organic sugar syrup, 9 being only fed each of these and the remaining 10 fed a mixture. The results showed that there were no differences in development, honey productivity or pathogen development. However, 4 of the 9 colonies that were exclusively fed summer honey, and 6 of the 9 fed exclusively autumn honey did not survive the winter, while all 28 of the sugar-fed colonies survived. While it might appear that honey is less healthy than sugar, it may be that the issue is that the bees need more honey than sugar, so it’s important to check that they do indeed have enough stores if you’re relying on the ivy crop to carry them through to spring.
A typical question in FIBKA’s exams asks about the composition of honey. We know there are some 200 identified compounds in various honeys, and the folk in the University of Oradea, Romania, have just published a review of the literature on this subject. For anyone planning on taking the exams, it might be useful to have a look at “The Chemical Composition of Honey – The Complexity of a Natural Food” where they list the contents in a relatively easy-to-read format.
I was asked about how to access these various articles. The best place is to search Google Scholar – https://scholar.google.com. Here you’ll find articles that are usually well-researched and peer-reviewed, rather than the sea of opinions that all conflict with each other and make it difficult to ascertain what might actually be correct.