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…

Hives prepared for winter

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

So what was that about honey again?

Yesterday I spent some five hours at a small event at the local mall talking about bees and selling honey. The municipal government wants to encourage environmental thinking in its citizens and apparently, bees do that. So there I was, with a couple of associates, a small demonstration hive with live bees, various merchandise and a few different kinds of honey.

Now, when you’re participating in events like this, present in some sort of expert capacity and informing people about something you have plenty of experience with, there’s a rule that says that a certain portion of your audience know more about your own bees and honey than you do. And they love to tell you about it. This wouldn’t be too difficult to deal with if it wasn’t for the fact that some of them consistently, every year, accuse us beekeepers of putting table sugar in our honey.

One particularly grumpy man pointed his hand at our honey jars and said, “That one contains 10 % sugar cubes, that one contains 50 % sugar cubes, that one contains 90 % sugar cubes.” (He seemed to judge them by runniness, where the newly extracted, uncrystallized honey was the least tampered with; the solid, fragrant linden honey was the biggest villain; and the pale gold, creamy summer honey was somewhere in the middle.) When we unanimously and rather tersely stated that no, we don’t put any fracking sugar in our fracking honey because that would be illegal, he ignored us and blurted, “Oh yes, I know, I bought this jar of honey and two days later there were sugar lumps in it!”

Uh-huh, that’s conclusive evidence, that is.

This is what I told those who actually listened to us when they asked if the honey was “real”: Honey contains two kinds of sugar, glucose and fructose. How much of each depends on which flowers the bees have gathered nectar from. Fructose will always remain fluid, whereas glucose, once the honey is extracted from the hive, eventually crystallizes. How quickly this happens and how hard the honey gets depends on the relative proportions of the two sugars, as well as temperature and other factors. For example, rapeseed honey has a notoriously high glucose content and sometimes crystallizes in the hive before extraction - pure, it can get so hard you have to carve it out of the jar with a knife.

If you leave the honey unattended between extraction and crystallization, the glucose will form large, lumpy crystals at the bottom of a solution of fructose. The honey is essentially inedible at this point, at least it is considered such in Sweden. Which is why Swedish beekeepers never sell uncrystallized honey, but always take care to make sure the honey crystallizes evenly, by stirring or other methods. We desire fully crystallized honey that is completely free from crystals so large that they can actually be felt on the tongue - if the honey feels like sand or gravel on the tongue it’s sub-par.

Now, the area I live in has a very high proportion of immigrants. I haven’t seen any figures for a long time but it’s well over 50%. Most of them are from the middle east, a fair few from south america and a minority from africa and far east. In many of these parts of the world, there are several species of plants that yield honey with such a high fructose content that it never crystallizes (acacia and orange being the most common ones). Hence many of these people are used to honey always being clear and runny, and I suspect get rather suspicious when they see our opaque and creamy-to-solid honey. We have also heard anecdotes from various countries about how common it is for beekeepers to cheat and either mix sugar in their extracted honey, or give the bees sugar and then extract that from the hive.

In Sweden, doing something like that would be completely unthinkable. A beekeeper caught cheating in such a way would be immediately ostracised, if not lynched. We may not be that many, but we are extremely proud of our all-natural product and the fact that it isn’t necessary to add or do anything to it to improve the taste or increase shelf-life. (At the blogmeet earlier this week I was asked if we pasteurise our honey. I was really confused - firstly I don’t understand why it would be needed, and secondly heating the honey ruins it!)

27 sept 2008: In this post I explain what to do with unevenly crystallised honey.

honey, honeybees, beekeeping

Most people who have found this blog through search engines recently have been looking for various variations of Mohammad caricatures and Nerikes Allehanda. However, today I had a visitor who searched for, and I quote, “DEATH AND BEES”. Since I don’t want to disappoint anyone, here’s some information about death and bees.

Normal people have nothing to fear from bee-stings. They hurt like hell for a while, you swell a bit and then there’s the goddamned itchiness to deal with for days. Bee venom is a carefully composed cocktail of peptide snippets designed to annoy the hell out of anyone who gets stung, teaching you to stay the frack away from bee colonies. Of course, these days, most beekeepers (at least in Sweden) keep bees who really could care less about humans. The only times you get stung is when you yourself make a mistake, such as squashing a bee or kicking over a hive. Even then, you have the satisfaction of knowing that most of the bees that sting you die a horrible death of having their insides torn apart as their stinger sticks in your skin.

Now, if you are truly allergic, instead of a mildly (or incredibly, in some cases, such as mine) annoying local reaction, you will suffer anaphylaxis. If you’re not prepared, this leads to death, which can happen within half an hour. Anaphylactic shocks are so dangerous they always go first in emergency wards - wait a few minutes too long and you’re dead. Essentially, what happens is that your body reacts way more than it ought to to the venom, and ends up shutting itself down. If you don’t choke to death as your throat swells, eventually you die anyway as your heart simply stops beating. Taking a cortisone pill may help give you a little extra time, but what you really need is a shot of adrenaline.

Now that you’re sufficiently freaked out I guess I ought to tell you that this only happens to a few people and most of those are beekeepers. Most other people never get any bee-stings at all. But if you get a sting and you start feeling lightheaded and nauseous, your armpits, groin, palms and the soles of your feet start itching, then the whole torso, and if your throat starts to feel swollen - that’s when you find someone to drive you to the hospital, pronto.

Of course, non-allergic people can also die of bee-stings if they have the misfortune of blundering into a lot of really angry bees (such as the africanised variety). If you get ten stings inside your throat, it really doesn’t matter how desensitised you are to bee-stings because you’re going to swell and choke anyway…

All in all, death by bee-sting is very rare. A quick google only gave me one statistic: In Australia during the years 1960-1981, only 27 people died from bee-stings. That’s hardly anything.

bees, bee-stings, allergy