Last friday I attended a seminar on beekeeping, organised by Biodynamiska Föreningen (the Swedish biodynamic association) together with the Swedish Board of Agriculture. I wouldn’t have gone if the latter hadn’t been involved, given what I already know about biodynamics.

In case you’re not familiar with the term “biodynamic”, or belong to the majority of people who think it’s a synonym for “ecological” (or possibly “holistic”), let me disillusion you. Biodynamics has ecological/organic agriculture as its foundation, but adds an absolutely insane mess of superstitious nonsense gathered from the hallucinations of Rudolf Steiner.

The practitioners are extremely tacit about this, however, which is probably because biodynamics was invented as part of anthroposophy, and anthroposophers are notoriously good at hiding their religious agenda. Just like no one seems to be aware that waldorf schools are actually religious indoctrination-centres, people are equally unaware that when practicing biodynamics, you’re supposed to take the position of the planets into account when sowing. Oh, and did you know that filling the skull of a pet with pieces of oak bark and burying it in the autumn somewhere where a lot of rainwater flows past will produce a compost additive that adds calcium to the earth in ideal form?

Now, thankfully, you can’t convert anyone to anthroposophy by making sure to always plant the crops on a fruit-day (as opposed to a root-day) - there will be no essence of Steiner in the resultant bread to slowly turn people’s minds - so I’m not nearly as opposed to biodynamics as I am to waldorf schools, at least so long as no animals are involved. Treating sick animals with homeopathic remedies is arguably worse than treating humans, as it’s not voluntary and the placebo effect is out of play. What I really dislike, however, is the dishonesty in their advertising: Omitting the truth is also a kind of lie. (Illustrative of how good they are at hiding the truth is a recent article in Dagens Nyheter about ecological food, where the above mentioned biodynamic association is mentioned without so much as a hint that they’re something other than just “ecological”.)

Workers clearly not paying attention to astrology.

The beekeeping seminar wasn’t much different. There were some good talks presumably organised by the Board of Agriculture - on chemicals in agriculture, the problems associated with honeybee breeding, and on allowing bees to organise their hive the way they want - but there were also a couple of people invited to talk about “Demeter beekeeping”. Demeter is the chosen brand name for all kinds of biodynamic products.

Their talk was actually quite alright, although I can’t say they said anything particularly revolutionary. It was mostly just common sense. For instance: Bees want to swarm, so producing artificial swarms is a good way to keep them happy without losing the swarm.

The only times I could detect the biodynamic approach was some talk about how bees are the only animals that build “from heaven to earth” (which isn’t true, as bees may build from the ground up as well - and off the top of my head I can name wasps and swallows as other animals that build “downwards”), how they smell “heavenly”, and how fresh wax is “immaterial”. Also, at one point there was a rant about how “the scientists” don’t “want” to research for instance formic acid’s effect on bees because they don’t “want” to know the truth. This was immediately followed by lamenting the lack of money to research homeopathic remedies against bee diseases. It is of course unthinkable that “the scientists” might have the same monetary problems as the homeopathers…

Although at the time I was quite relieved to realise they were pretty much keeping quiet about the weirder aspects of their beekeeping, in retrospect, it annoys me. I suspect a lot of people - including the woman from the Board of Agriculture - got a very good impression of these Demeter beekeepers and the methods they represent. No one seemed to react to their mention of homeopathy, indicative of how people simply cannot get their heads around the fact that it’s been shown, over and over again, that it doesn’t work. Perhaps it’s the case that beekeepers are so distressed about the varroa invasion that at this point we’re ready to try anything.

Still, in the end me and my father came out of the seminar feeling pretty inspired, so it can’t have been all bad. Inspired to do what, exactly, I’ll come back to in future posts!

beekeeping, biodynamics, anthroposophy

I get a steady trickle of hits from people wanting to know what to do with their crystallised honey. They find this post, where I explain why honey crystallises, but I don’t actually say anything about what to do with it if this happens to liquid honey you’ve bought. So, here goes:

Uncrystallised honey

First of all, if you’ve bought something marketed as liquid honey and it crystallised, don’t buy honey of that brand again. If you absolutely have to have liquid honey, make sure it’s labeled as coming from plants such as acacia, the honey of which never crystallises. (Personally I find acacia honey bland and tasteless, but I guess everyone’s different.) Otherwise, just get already crystallised honey. As you will shortly see, it’s not like it’s difficult to liquify it.

Here’s the very simple trick: Heat it.

If you heat honey too much for too long, you will destroy the antiseptic enzymes and hence it won’t be any good against sore throats anymore - but it’ll still taste great. But the glucose crystals will dissolve before the enzymes are rendered dysfunctional. Make sure the temperature gets no higher than around 40 centigrade and you’re fine. Just place the jar/bottle in hot water and the glucose crystals will dissolve.

Eventually, the honey will begin to set again. It’s possible to prevent this (for a time) by heat-shocking the honey, but an easier way to deal with it is to simply allow it to happen. If you stir it regularly, you will break the crystals into small pieces and get a nice, smooth texture instead of big sugary lumps of glucose in a fructose solution. Absolutely perfect texture can be attained if you put the honey in the fridge and whip it twice a day. It will become pale and fairly hard, and it’ll be smoother than silk.

If you have smoothly crystallised honey that you want to use for cooking (such as glazing meat for a bbq or as a replacement for sugar in a spongecake), just put as much as you need in a container and stick it in the microwave a few seconds. Since you’ll be cooking with it you don’t need to worry about it getting too hot.

If you have other questions about honey, honeybees or bee-related products, I’ll be happy to do my best to answer them.

honey, food, acacia, crystalized honey

It’s that time of the year again, when we try to get rid of the honey we painstakingly extracted from our ten hives over the course of the summer. Unfortunately, or perhaps in this context thankfully, this has been an extremely poor year in terms of honey harvest: From our nine productive hives we collected no more than 190 kilos. That’s about as much as we’d get from four hives on a good year. But there is of course a silver lining, in that we’ve been able to use this season to get used to some new ways of packaging our product.

Anyway. I have had a bit of a bad week and I could feel this somewhat impeding my skills as a saleswoman today. So in this post I wanted simply to whine a bit about things that really get on my nerves when doing this honey-selling gig:

1. People who think bees are wasps. “Hi, I’m a beekeeper.” “Oh? Where do you keep your wasps?” “Nono. BEES. You know. Honeybees.” “They’re all the same.” “*facepalm*”
2. People who think they know more than I do because they were in the same room as a beekeeper once. “This is rapeseed honey.” “Well actually…” “It’s rape. Rapeseed honey is always pale and hard.” “Yeah but…” “It’s rapeseed.” Ok, so everyone can’t have studied formal logic (which would tell them that “A is B, therefore all that is B is A” is wrong), but could they at least listen?
3. People who think it’s perfectly ok to accuse me of tampering with my honey to my face in front of an audience. Maybe the beekeepers where you come don’t take any pride in their work, but I certainly do.
4. People who think it’s a good idea to take up my time by telling them how they, or their father, or grandfather, or someone else vaguely related to them in some way, kept bees 40 years ago in Nowhereland. How I would like to tell them: “I’m here to inform people about beekeeping and the lives of honeybees as well as to sell honey. I may look young but I’ve done this for 12 years! Do you honestly think I haven’t heard your beekeeping stories a hundred times before? Also I’m smarter than you. Go away.”
5. And on a completely unrelated note, I really hate the way cafés insist on making sandwiches. I want the cheese, ham and vegetables evenly spread between the bread, not perching precariously on the edge of it with cheese on one side, ham on the other and the veggies in the middle. I always have to remake the sandwich myself so what the hell am I paying for?

Other than this, it has been an enjoyable day. Most people - customers or just curious bystanders - are open, interested and willing to listen to my ramblings about honey and flowers and shit. I got a fair amount of honey sold (only a few jars to take back home), and it’s always enjoyable watching kids squeal and stare wide-eyed at the tiny demonstration hive. Teenagers just go “eww!” and shy away (I was a very unusual 13-yr-old to take up this hobby) but younger kids are all absolutely fascinated by the creepy-crawly-buzzy things.

bees, beekeeping, honey

PaddyK sent me a link to this interesting story on ancient beekeeping.

Excavations in northern Israel at a huge earthen mound called Tel Rehov revealed the Iron Age settlement. From 2005 to 2007, workers at Tel Rehov uncovered the oldest known remnants of human-made beehives, excavation director Amihai Mazar and colleagues report in the September Antiquity. No evidence of beekeeping has emerged at any other archaeological sites in the Middle East or surrounding regions.

What’s more, the hives they unearthed were part of an apiary that was huge, considering the rather limited technology of the time. 25 hives have been found so far and excavation director Mazar estimates that between 75 and 200 hives fit in the apiary. Today, a lone beekeeper can take care of that many hives, but it’s a full-time job. Of course, I suspect that beekeeping today is rather more “interventionist” and hence more work-heavy than it was back then, but when you have that many hives, you tend not to do much with them other than give them more supers to put honey in. Still, the size of the apiary and its position in the centre of town implies that whomever owned it was quite well-off.

The hives themselves are cylindrical clay structures measuring 80 by 40 centimetres with a small hole for the bees and a lid in one end. Remnants of beeswax have been found by chemical analysis on two of the hives. Mazar estimates that the apiary had a potential annual yield of “500 kilograms of honey and 70 kilograms of beeswax” - rather less honey than we get these days with our improved bees and honey-extraction techniques, but still quite a respectable amount of a substance which must have been worth a lot more then than it is now.

One thing that really confuses me:

Many scholars assume that ancient Israelis made honey from fruits such as figs and dates. Nowhere does the Bible mention beekeeping as a way to produce honey, according to Mazar.

Apparently these scholars have a radically different definition of “honey” to the one used by modern beekeepers. As far as I’m concerned, honey is by definition made by bees. If humans create a mixture of fructose and glucose syrup, that’s what it is - syrup. Honey is defined as a product bees create by digesting nectar and other sugary secretions from plants. In fact, in Sweden, if you add even a tiny bit of fructose to your honey to make it liquid, you’re not allowed to market it as honey anymore.

beekeeping, archaeology, honey

Reader kai shared this interesting story: Why Flowers have Lost their Scent (making it more difficult for bees to find them), and points out that perhaps the most interesting bit of the story is the deluge of irate comments denying global warming. Global warming denialism is of course nothing new, but it’s interesting that the denialists feel compelled to attack even a story that doesn’t even mention climate change.

People are accusing the story of being a sloppy bit of - well, either science, or science journalism, or both. They seem entirely incapable of separating the original study from the dumbed-down media version. Someone said that the stupid scientists should’ve moved away from their ivory towers universities and instead gone to the countryside to do the study, as apparently in the countryside there’s no pollution at all. Someone else snorted derisively about the scientists magical ability to sort out pollution from car exhausts from all the other kinds of pollution (planes, factories, what have you) - as if it cannot possibly have crossed the minds of the scientists to find out exactly what these different pollutants actually are and how much they contribute to average pollution.

In short, many commenters display an absolutely baffling lack of respect for these working scientists, seemingly assuming they’re paid off by liberal politicians who want to make people feel guilty about driving cars. When all the scientists have really done, as far as I can tell, is figure out that scent molecules from flowers are easily degraded by pollution. They claim there is “no separation between science and politics”, which is clearly a case of projection, as they themselves are unable to look past their denialist agenda to consider the actual science behind the story.

Pollution in various forms is affecting the world around us. One study isn’t going to tell us exactly to what extent. But to discount the effect of pollutants on flower scents entirely just because you can smell the roses (the people who said this must have missed that the flowers haven’t stopped producing scents, the scent just doesn’t reach as far as it used to - you’ll still be able to feel it if you’re standing in the damn rose garden!) … I don’t know whether to blame this on scientific illiteracy or just plain stupidity.

flowers, bees, science journalism, pollution, global warming

One thing I have noticed as I have learned more and more about bees over my years of keeping them is that invariably, if someone who isn’t a beekeeper (or an entomologist) writes a text on bees, they always get something wrong (usually about reproduction). It seems as though bees are so incredibly mysterious that unless you are an expert, or handle bees regularly, bee biology is virtually impossible to get basically right. Thus it was with some trepidation that I started reading The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us (ISBN 0719564093) by aptly nicknamed author Bee Wilson.

Wilson is not a beekeeper, or an entomologist - she is a food writer and a historian. It was her love for honey that prompted her to write this book, which is not about natural science but anthropology and history. She takes us on a journey through history and literature; through the minds of people who have kept, loved, revered or sometimes disdained the honeybee. The book is divided into large chunks with the headings “Work”, “Sex”, “Politics”, “Food and Drink”, “Life and Death” and “The Beekeeper”, and each chapter is riddled with references as well as - gasp! - illustrations.

On the whole, it’s a very pleasant and often amusing read. Most of the book concerns how humans have always imposed their own preferences when trying to interpret the mysterious insects. The way the beehive has been invoked by various writers to represent the perfect monarchy, the perfect oligarchy, the perfect meritocracy and even the perfect republic, depending on the particular preferences of the writer, is a perfect illustration of how humans employ Matthew 7:7 (to get a little biblical). Whatever behaviour or opinion you want to justify, you will find something in nature to support it, if you just look hard enough.

Of course, looking for justification of political ideas in the beehive is mostly a matter of interpretation - it gets much more surreal when it comes to the sex of the queen. To beekeepers today, it seems extraordinary that no one in ancient times, or even a couple of hundred years ago, seemed to bother actually observing the queen, as that surely would have let them realise that she lays eggs. However, not only have people been exceedingly confused about her gender, but also about whether she’s a virgin or not. See, no one actually saw the queen mating, so therefore she must not have. And, according to an altogether different kind of logic, she couldn’t possibly have been female either, as, after all, she carries a weapon. And everyone knows women just don’t do that.

Unfortunately, while Wilson appears to be as amused by this as I am, she does at one point embarrass herself by doing exactly what I was afraid of - making an egregious mistake when it comes to the reproductive behaviour of bees. To any modern beekeeper the error is so blatant and obvious that I’m shocked it made it through to the final edit. Perhaps she didn’t let any beekeepers proofread the book, but that’s hardly an excuse. The error itself consists of her sad misunderstanding of the parthenogenetic birth of drones. While she’s obviously understood that drones are born from unfertilised eggs, she appears to believe that these eggs are laid by the queen before her nuptial flight. This is wrong, very wrong, as the queen’s egg-laying apparatus isn’t fully developed until after she has mated, by which time she’s too fat to fly any greater distance (if a queen fails to mate within a few weeks of her birth, she develops her sexual organs anyway, remaining an “old maid” forever, and the hive dies). Once she has mated, she stores the sperm in special chambers, and makes a choice every time she lays an egg to either fertilise it or not.

Still, just one blatant mistake about bee biology in the whole book is pretty good, I think. And the rest of the book contains enough entertaining stories about other people’s faulty beliefs to make up for it. Wilson is unabashedly harsh on those she considers too kooky to deserve any respect - mormons and anthroposophers fall in this category - while she treats other, more innocently confused sources, with gentle amusement.

Although I think Wilson perhaps exaggerates the importance of bees through the history of humanity (as providers of sweet, sweet honey as well as candle-light), I can hardly fault her for that. Bees are amazing, after all.

bees, honeybees, beekeeping, bee wilson

Via Skepchick I found this blog on Wired about bees as a superorganism. I’m not going to comment on it really, as it pretty much speaks for itself (also, I haven’t quite made up my mind about how useful the “superorganism” idea is), but! The author refers to a scientist (a honeybee expert, it seems) saying this:

…the worker behavior of honeybees. They’re one example of the superorganism. They have a very intriguing division of labor. That’s one of the hallmarks of superorganisms: individuals do different things, like organs in the body. An organ is different from another organ in the context of the body. The division of labor in honeybee workers is between bees in the nest and those out foraging. And between foragers, there’s specialization of a bee collecting a mixture of pollen. Just as people can do different jobs, based on interest, these bees are doing very different things.

Okay, maybe I have myself to blame for the confusion, perhaps I’ve missed a few years of groundbreaking research that hasn’t yet made it into the beekeeping textbooks, but I find this outright misleading. Honeybees, as opposed to many species of ants, only have three castes; Queens, Workers and Drones (whereas ants may have more than one kind of worker). Workers are identical to one another and an individual worker, during the span of her life, carries out all or most of the tasks essential to the working of the colony. Worker labour division is sequential; specialisation depends on the age of the individual worker. Newborn bees start their life by cleaning themselves and the cell they came out of, then they start secreting royal jelly and help nurse the larvae, then they develop their wax-secreting glands and become builders, etc. There is also a certain degree of plasticity where the workers can switch to a task that is currently in demand.

I’m sure the person quoted must know this, so why use an analogy that is just so preposterously false? My lungs didn’t start out as excretory organs and won’t switch tasks to circulation in the future. They’re morphologically distinct from other organs and only carry out the tasks they’re made for. In short, worker bees are nothing like organs in a body, but more like members of a household, where small children may carry out certain tasks, teenagers other tasks and adults yet others.

Another thing that strikes me as really odd about the Wired blog post is that the picture at the top, while beautiful, cuts a queen in half (notice the large, dark and shiny abdomen at the top edge of the picture; very different from the striped, fuzzy bottoms of the workers). The photographer was obviously aiming for the queen and whomever cropped the picture completely missed out on this…

bees, honeybees, worker bees, superorganism

Another picture from last summer, although this one was taken indoors:

Beekeepers habitually replace the queen in their hives every or every other year, as colonies with young queens are often more productive and less likely to swarm. To do this, you obviously need to raise and mate new queens under controlled circumstances. Me and my father don’t own any breeding stock, nor do we have a mating station (usually an island where you can easily control the bee population and make sure only drones from breeding stocks are available to mate with your young queens) or whatever is needed for artificial insemination (where you simply take the sperm of drones from good stock and insert it into your queen). So last year as we first embarked on the exciting new task of raising queens for our own use, we did it with larvae very helpfully donated from a local professional beekeeper with lovely breeding stock, whom we normally buy our queens from.

It seems all people who keep pets as a serious, involved hobby end up doing some form of breeding, sooner or later. And strangely enough, it’s just as amazing with bees as it is with kittens or budgies. Here’s how we do it: We choose very young larvae from a queen of good stock and move them carefully with the help of a small paintbrush from their cells to special plastic cups. Then we put the cups in a box of bees that have been isolated from their queen for a while and hence in the mood to raise new queens. After they have started feeding the larvae and build waxen walls on the cups, we can put them back into their hive, which will then take care of the larvae. When they are old enough to be capped, we take them out of the hive, put a small cage around each capped cell, and put them in an incubator.

Finally the queens hatch, usually within the space of 24 hours. [ETA: I meant that all the cells hatch simultaneously, not that it takes 24 hours for a capped cell to hatch. The pupa stadium is rather longer than that.] Newborn queens, like all young bees, are adorable to look at; slightly clumsy in the beginning but quickly picking up speed as they investigate their surroundings, with thick, fuzzy fur covering their head and thorax. The queen above has just been marked with a small plastic tag, which is a bit more advanced than the regular method of simply painting the back of the thorax. A colour code is used to know what year a queen is born (last year was yellow, this season it will be red). As you can see, the queen in the picture was not at all interested in being photographed - although queens that young are unlikely to try to fly away, they’re very, very fast.

Once the queens have hatched, they can either be introduced to a new hive (after removing the old queen), which will then have no fertile queen for a while, or they can be put in a “miniature” hive with just enough bees to get by, until they have mated and have started laying eggs. Mating can be dangerous and may result in the queen never coming home, which is why you don’t want to introduce an unmated queen to a fully working hive unless you have no other choice. Our queens are allowed to mate with whatever drones prowl the area, but a queen with a pure-bred mother can mate with wild bees and still produce very good-natured and gentle offspring. The next generation of bees however, if you allow them to swarm or try to breed new queens from the freely mated queen’s larvae, will not be as nice to work with.

bees, honeybees, beekeeping

In a depressingly alarmist article on BBC News UK, Finlo Rohrer encourages us to imagine an idyllic image of British countryside, complete with the harmonious buzzing of busy bees, and then asks us to fast forward ten years to this desolate vision:

The hedgerow is deteriorating, the birds are silent, the orchard is disappearing and the countryside is changed. Why? The hives are empty. Their once-buzzing occupants mysteriously vanished.

Excuse me?

I’ve encountered this idea before. I suppose it’s not entirely far-fetched; after all, I’m sure a lot of humans feel as though they would die without sex. But let me assure you, this is not the case for apple trees. An orchard in the absence of beehives might yield less fruit, and if all pollinating insects disappeared, perhaps none at all, but the poor trees, albeit sexually unfulfilled, wouldn’t die from it. Nor would the birds stop singing (that doesn’t make any kind of sense - would the birds go quiet in mourning?).

Although I love my bees and think they are fantastic little creatures, I don’t think they have a special place in the world. Although bees may be important for agriculture, I don’t really believe that the prevalence of our particular favourite species of honeybee is absolutely vital to the survival of plants. There are many, many other pollinating insects (and in some places other animals as well) out there - including a variety of bees other than Apis mellifera - and I suspect many of them would fare quite a lot better in the absence of bees. And I’m not aware of any predator that subsists primarily on honeybees (not even bee-eaters).

The rest of the article is marginally better. British beekeepers are complaining that unusually many hives died last winter, which may or may not be true, but at least the article includes a more reasoned voice, stating that “Beekeeping always goes through periods of prosperity and dearth. People do enjoy a good panic.” Someone complains that varroa mites are getting resistant to the chemicals we use to combat them, which is true, but usually this happens only when people use the chemicals wrong.

Case in point is Apistan, which is applied to a hive during a few weeks in the autumn in the form of plastic strips from which the chemical slowly leaks into the hive, and are then supposed to be removed. A lot of ignorant beekeepers reason that longer exposure to the chemicals will kill more varroa, so they leave the strips in, and/or reuse old strips, exposing the hives to gradually lower concentrations of miticide. Anyone familiar with how bacteria gain resistance to antibiotics can figure the rest out for themselves.

In short, when it comes to varroa, it’s entirely manageable if you’re smart and follow the proper instructions of whatever methods you’re using to battle the “infection”. If beekeepers actually started behaving rationally it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

The article also dwells on CCD, essentially saying that if beehives started to die in the UK … beehives would die in the UK. Oh, dear. In the end, the conclusion is that we don’t really know if the hives are all going to die, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, someone is writing a book about all the horrible things that will happen if bees disappear. Because people’s enjoyment of a good panic is, as we all know, quite profitable.

bees, honeybees, beekeeping, varroa, colony collapse disorder

The parade of amusing google hits continues, but sometimes I really wish I could anticipate questions and answer them before they’re asked. You see, today someone found my blog by googling the phrase “honey contains all you need to survive”.

NO! No it doesn’t! You have to eat other kinds of food! You can’t live on sugar!

Unless, of course, you’re a bee, in which case I apologise and withdraw the above statement, although if you want to survive the winter I’d suggest eating some pollen as well. Hummingbirds may also wish to ignore my advice on this matter (just avoid the idiots feeding you nutrisweet).

honey