Life Before Death

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

I have on a few occasions (most recently on Agricultural Biodiversity Blog) been asked to give my view on various aspects of Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious syndrome that seems to be killing honeybee colonies primarily in the USA but possibly also in Europe. Because I’m a beekeeper, apparently my opinion is considered “expert”.

The thing is, no one really knows what CCD is all about. The symptoms include adult bees vanishing from the colony, while the queen is still present as well as brood and some food stores. Adult bees will usually not abandon a hive while there is still capped brood present, and if the colony is starving, uncapped brood are usually eaten before the adult bees start dying. Also the bees in a colony dying from starvation or disease normally die in or around it rather than simply vanishing.

CCD has only been defined in the past couple of years and has mainly been reported in the US. There are historical sources speaking of similar events in the past but the records are incomplete and, just like today, everything is mostly based on beekeepers’ own reports. In short, very little actual trustworthy data exists on the true extent of the disorder.

It gets even worse when you start looking at possible causes. Pretty much everything has been suggested and there is no conclusive evidence for anything. Varroa destructor mites, the most pervasive and destructive pest faced by beekeepers and their colonies today, appear not to be linked to the disorder. The Israeli acute paralysis virus has been shown to be correlated with incidence of CCD, but no causality is implied and it might simply be that colonies suffering from whatever is causing CCD are more receptive to the virus. Electromagnetic radiation has been implicated by the press but the one study on which the media based this ridiculous rumour had nothing to do with CCD.

Here in Sweden, most of the senior beekeepers I have spoken to are extremely skeptical about the disorder and consider it mostly a problem for American beekeepers, who tend to truck their hives around a lot during the active season as well as use antibiotics to a much greater extent than we do over here. Beekeeping is much more of an industry in the US, and that has to affect the bees in some way. In short the general opinion over here seems to be that US beekeepers had it coming, because they are exposing their colonies to stressful situations that never occur in nature, which likely weakens their immune system and generally renders them more vulnerable to all natural enemies.

In fact, there are quite a few beekeepers as well as scientists of the opinion that the recent mass-deaths of colonies in the US are within the bounds of what can be considered normal: Some years, a lot of bees simply die because of poor weather conditions.

Either way, I don’t want to pretend I know something that I can’t possibly know. There are scientists hard at work at figuring out what is causing CCD, and until they have produced some evidence in any direction, I won’t offer an opinion on the subject. I am of course very interested in seeing what will happen and hope that a cause and treatment is found soon, but meanwhile, I think I will focus on battling the Varroa in my own hives.

ETA: One possible cause I haven’t seen discussed anywhere is the possibility of genetic stress due to breeding. We already know that honeybees are very sensitive to inbreeding due to their sex determination system (I think I’ll write about this in a future post, it’s very interesting), but what if there are other, less obvious problems with the way we breed honeybees? Could it be that breeding for docility, repressed swarming behaviour and increased harvests produces other unwanted effects such as a weakened immune system?

colony collapse disorder, ccd, honeybees, beekeeping, varroa

Martin of Aardvarchaeology asked me to write about what beekeepers give the bees to eat throughout the winter. A very good question, considering beekeeping is all about stealing the colony’s store of food that it worked so hard to accumulate.

Adult bees are all grown up: they don’t get bigger and they don’t renew tissues (to any great extent that I know of, anyway). All they need to survive is energy, and energy they get from carbohydrates - sugar. Honey contains (as I recently explained) glucose and fructose, which are derived from more complex saccharides present in nectar. The alert reader will now have surmised that honey is actually partially digested. The reader who has some knowledge of the chemistry of carbohydrates will also have figured out that the basic components of honey are also the basic components of table sugar - sucrose.

As it turns out, bees are perfectly happy to accept sucrose in return for honey. In the summer, it is common for beekeepers to give the bees table sugar, either dissolved or in its crystalline form to hives that are weak and need an extra boost. In the winter, all hives need sugar dissolved in water, as they can’t possibly gather enough water themselves to dissolve solid sugar and store it.

Practically, this means that sometime in late summer or early autumn, the beekeeper has to remove every bit of honey in each hive that can possibly be extracted. Immediately after this, one has to start giving the bees their supply of winter fodder, or the hives will start starving. There are a few ways this can be done. I give my bees their entire supply in one go, utilising a method that essentially involves a plastic bag in a box on top of the hive, filled with straw for the bees to walk on (otherwise they would drown in sugar!) and a column of air on the side so the bees can get into the box. The bag is filled with approximately 21 kilos of dissolved sugar. This is a lot more than some beekeepers give their bees. The advantage of giving the bees a lot of sugar is that there’s no risk that they’ll starve in the spring. On the other hand, if spring comes and the colony has already died, you’ll have wasted a lot of sugar. Many beekeepers therefore give the bees less sugar in the autumn and check in on them early in the spring and give them extra food then.

For ten years now my dad and I have had four hives, which has meant that simply buying table sugar and making the winter fodder ourselves has been entirely manageable. This year, we decided to drastically expand our apiary and are now the proud owners of ten hives. It turned out that making our own winter fodder was NOT as manageable anymore. Next year, if we still have that many hives, we will most likely be buying already prepared winter fodder by the bucket. Of course, this means no more fun comments from random people as we buy huge amounts of sugar from department stores…

So what do the bees DO all winter? Well, mostly, they sit around and try to keep warm. Nature documentaries are rife with the image of male emperor penguins shuffling around in winter storms, well, bees do essentially the same thing. The queen stays in the middle of the colony, and the worker bees take turns at being on the outside of the winter cluster. The drones are ostracised in the autumn and forbidden to enter the hive at all, and hence die from cold and starvation. Some beekeepers try to isolate their hives and help the bees keep warm, but most research seems to say that the bees really don’t care at all. Scandinavian stock is very adept at keeping the temperature up inside the cluster and the most important thing a beekeeper should do is make sure there’s adequate ventilation, to prevent stagnant air and condensation (which leads to mould), and obviously to prevent asphyxia.

On a final note, it’s interesting to note that bees actually seem to winter better on a pure sucrose solution than on honey. Honey contains various indigestible ingredients and given that bees can’t fly out into the cold air to relieve themselves, they end up having to store those contaminations all the way through the cold season. A common winter problem is therefore dysentery; the bees relieving themselves inside the hive. This can kill a colony if it gets bad. But pure sugar solutions, free from these indigestible ingredients, vastly alleviates this problem.

Please note that all this is about Swedish bees and Swedish beekeeping. Certain sources (*coughwikipediacough*) seem to indicate that the situation may be different in other parts of the world.

bees, apis mellifera, honey, sugar, beekeeping

I have a guest post on Aardvarchaeology. It’s about bees! Go read it, the rest of this post will make more sense then.

Above, one of “my” bees can be seen diligently working on what I think is a Centaurea phrygia. The picture was taken sometime mid-summer, after the rapeseed bloom and before the heather. The Centaureas seemed to be popular with the bees, as were white clover (Trifolium repens) and the entirety of the rose garden. As a beekeeper you learn to pay attention to where the bees are going, and eventually you learn why they go where they go - roses don’t yield much nectar, but they are excellent pollen sources. And since we built the rose garden, we have definitely seen an increase in stored pollen in our hives, which should mean they winter better as they can start a new brood season earlier in the spring.

In reference to my post on Aardvarchaeology, we did end up getting heather honey after all. About 15 kiloes of it remained firmly stuck to honeycombs after extraction, and many combs broke from the pressure of the honey that wouldn’t unstick (honey is extracted from combs by putting them in a kind of centrifuge).

But it’s not all bad: Heather has a special taste that many people seem to favour. This means our autumn batch tastes subtly different from the honey extracted earlier this summer, which makes it more interesting to sell. It’s my experience that people are more keen on buying something if there are two versions and they like one better than the other. Not that I’m in this for profit, of course …

Now the beekeeping season is pretty much over, as far as this part of Sweden is concerned. What remains is removing the yearly treatment of varroa, and then the hives are closed for the winter. Sometime early in the spring, we take a quick peek inside to see that the colonies aren’t starving, but beyond that, no real beekeeping is done until, say, May.

Thankfully, talking about bees is an activity that can go on all year round!

bees, apis mellifera, honey, pollen, beekeeping, heather