My comments on the American Honey Producer Association (AHPA) and American Beekeeping Federation (ABF) split last month deserve some updating and clarification. Humberto Boncristiani at Insidethehive.tv has now published videos on his Youtube.com channel explaining the current thinking of the AHPA, as well as his reflections based on visiting the 2020 convention See also an interview of ex president Daren Cox , and Canadian member Simon Lalonde’s experience with the association.
On the heels of the conventions, our world has been turned upside down by the Coronavirus COV-19, which at the moment is devastating New York City, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Los Angeles, California . The wave may soon be encompassing the Sunshine State (Florida). We await with baited breath. For an article about Chinese apiculture and corona virus see this Reuters story.. It looks like this virus is going to be a bee meeting wrecker throughout the Spring and Summer, so get ready for a record number of cancellations, including EAS, WAS, and HAS among others.
The viral situation has caused at least one alcohol distillery to begin making hand sanitizer out of honey, according to a Bee Culture Catch the Buzz: “A small Buckinghamshire distillery that usually makes gin and vodka out of honey has begun making hand sanitizer amid a global shortage — highlighting how businesses both great and small are throwing their weight behind efforts to fight Covid-19.
“The British Honey Company said on Tuesday it had been given the green light by UK tax authorities to use its spare capacity for producing hand sanitizer ingredients. The British Honey Company’s distillery in Worminghall, Buckinghamshire, will now start producing hand sanitizer out of 70% alcohol and extracts of British honey and green tea.
“Michael Williams, chief executive of the British Honey Company, said the effort ‘enhances our existing business model at the same time as assisting with the efforts to combat the spread of Covid-19.’ ”
An American Bee Journal Extra published updated in formation on a technique known as Indoor Storage of Honey Bee Colonies in the United States published by Project Apis m. This is not a new idea but has mostly been practiced by northern beekeepers to protect colonies from extreme winter conditions. Like so many other practices, however, the Varroa mite has now provoked beekeepers to shift to considering indoor housing. This factor impacts both traditional cold weather requirements, can be used colonies long before winter preparation occurs, and needs to be adjusted to location .
“The health of strong young winter bees determined generally in August and September is highly negatively correlated with Varroa populations. It is possible to have strong colonies with low Varroa levels in November and have heavy winter losses if Varroa are allowed to feed on and spread viruses during the production of winter bees in August and September, even if the colonies were properly treated for mites in late September or October.
“The following statements might have made for a good title for this publication and reflect underlying principles for the recommendations found herein. These sayings have become something of a mantra from beekeepers with experience in managing indoor storage. “You get out what you put in” “Garbage in, garbage out” “Storages are not hospitals” Indoor storage is not a cure-all and they are not suitable for all operations. All the work and preparation in the month leading up to the storage period are critical.” This publication is worth a look by all beekeepers no matter their location and wintering situation.
All beekeepers should also become informed about the ELAP program, given recent changes according to another American Bee Journal Extra: “WASHINGTON, Feb. 26, 2020 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) today announced updates to the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honeybees and Farm-Raised Fish Program (ELAP). These updates include changes required by the 2018 Farm Bill as well as discretionary changes intended to improve the administration of the program and clarify existing program requirements.
“ ‘Honeybee producers should pay close attention to the ELAP insurance program changes to ensure they meet the new deadline requirements,” said FSA Administrator Richard Fordyce. These changes better align two key disaster assistance program deadlines to provide consistency and ease of management for honeybee producers.’ ”
Program Changes
“ELAP was previously administered based on FSA’s fiscal year but will now run according to the calendar year. Producers are still required to submit an application for payment within 30 calendar days of the end of the program year. This is not a policy change but will affect the deadline. The signup deadline for calendar year 2020 losses is January 30, 2021.
“Starting in 2020, producers will have 15 days from when the loss is first apparent, instead of 30 days, to file a honeybee notice of loss. This change provides consistency between ELAP and the Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program, which also has a 15-day notice of loss period for honey. For other covered losses, including livestock feed, grazing and farm-raised fish losses, the notice of loss deadline for ELAP will remain 30 days from when the loss is first apparent to the producer.
“Program participants who were paid for the loss of a honeybee colony or hive in either or both of the previous two years will be required to provide additional documentation to substantiate how current year inventory was acquired. If the honeybee colony loss incurred was because of Colony Collapse Disorder, program participants must provide a producer certification that the loss was a direct result of at least three of the five symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder, which include: the loss of live queen and/or drone bee populations inside the hives; rapid decline of adult worker bee population outside the hives, leaving brood poorly or completely unattended; absence of dead adult bees inside the hive and outside the entrance of the hive; absence of robbing collapsed colonies; and at the time of collapse, varroa mite and Nosema populations are not at levels known to cause economic injury or population decline. “ For further information see https://www.farmers.gov/service-center-locator.
Most of us know about “green washing,” but how about “bee washing?” “Amid the worry over the loss of honey bees, a far quieter but just as devastating loss is occurring among lesser known native bee populations. Wild native bees are vital to pollinate plants. Their populations are declining due to a warming climate, pesticide poisoning and lack of flowers and other environmental pressures.
“As awareness increases about native bee death, some companies are taking advantage of public concern by touting their products as bee-friendly or making other claims. This marketing strategy, called bee-washing by critics, uses the plight of bees to mislead consumers. While many people are worried about honey bees, it’s also important to understand the jeopardy that native bees face.
“Bee-washing is a term coined by researchers at York University in 2015 describing the use of bees by retailers to mislead consumers. Bee-washing is a form of green washing, a description conceived by environmentalists to define a marketing spin that persuades the public to think that a product is environmentally friendly. Examples of green washing may include green packaging or the term clean coal to deflect attention from a highly polluting process. Charlotte de Keyzer, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, created a website, bee-washing.com , to draw attention to bee-related marketing practices and document examples of how bees are mischaracterized for profit.”
I wrote something back several years (and also in the last edition of this newsletter) concerning the coming of Spring and the value of long-term record keeping. At the end of that piece, I added some information about an outfit called “Niature’s Notebook” This is part of the National Phenology Network, which has just posted thoughts from meteorologists concerning the 2020 Spring in the Southeast U.S.
A Bee Culture Magazine Catch the Buzz has been posted concerning the Bee Informed Partnership’s 2020 Sentinel Apiary Program: “Last year, 2019, marked our fifth (fifth?!) year of the Sentinel Apiary Program. It was another record breaking year: 2,221 samples were taken from 461 colonies in 85 apiaries! The program continues to grow each year, and we are so excited about the progress we have made, and for what we will continue to do in the future. Take a look at the map below. Don’t see an apiary in your state? Join us and be the first!
“One exciting thing to look out for in 2020 is another partnership with the American Beekeeping Federation (ABF). ABF is sponsoring ABF members with $100 off a 4 or 8 colony Sentinel Apiary Kit. If you’re an ABF member and would like the promo code, please email Dan Reynolds at danrbrl@umd.edu, or stay tuned for an email from ABF. Sponsorships are limited and are going quickly, so don’t delay!
Another Bee Culture Magazine Catch the Buzz looks at how the smallest of creatures can affect even the largest when it comes to honey bees versus elephants: “Africa is home to especially aggressive bees that have a tendency to pursue and harass people and animals that they consider to be a threat. Researchers from the University of Oxford have conducted experiments by utilizing African bees as a non-violent means to scare foraging elephants from village farms.
“Using beehives strung on wires around a cultivated plot can keep the pachyderms away, they have found. If a jumbo brushes up against any of the beehives, the disturbed honeybees will swarm out and launch an attack. This simple trick can keep away 80% of elephants, according to the researchers.
“’If we could use bees to reduce elephant crop-raiding and tree destruction and enhance local income through the sale of honey, this could be a significant step forward towards sustainable human-elephant coexistence,’ said Lucy King, a zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
“The method is not only used by more and more farmers in Africa but has also been put to good use by some communities around protected areas in Thailand. Even though bees in Asia are less aggressive than their cousins in Africa, the measure in Thailand still has a reported success rate of 74%. In fact, it works better than other common methods such as electric fences, which can kill elephants.”
Will the wax moth solve the human-caused problem of plastic waste? There’s some optimism among scientific circles. Researchers at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada, found that wax worms are able to “ingest and metabolize polyethylene at unprecedented rates” thanks to the microorganisms in their intestines. The caterpillar’s gut microbiota seem to play a key role in the polyethylene biodegradation process,” the researchers wrote.
“Researchers found a greater amount of ‘microbial abundance’ in the caterpillars’ guts when they were ingesting plastic than when they ate a traditional diet of honeycomb. In waxworms, polyethylene metabolizes into a glycol, which is biodegradable. Unfortunately, wax worms are not an end-all solution to plastic waste, however. Wax larvae are pests for bees, naturally feeding off honeycomb and running the risk of reducing their populations – and those of plants and crops.
“It remains unclear how the plastic breakdown process works in the wax worm, and how its health is affected by its consumption. The hope, Cassone said, is that if researchers can harness what in the gut bacteria helps caterpillars so easily break down plastic, it can be used to design better ways to eliminate plastic from the environment.” Time will tell; I never thought I’d be rooting for the wax moth! I always calle them the honey bee’s garbage man. Now I can expand that definition to the same role in humans.
“In the era of antimicrobial-resistant superbugs, researchers are racing to find new drugs that can eliminate harmful bacteria and avoid pandemics. Now, they have some help from artificial intelligence. In a new study published in Cell, researchers used machine learning to predict molecules with antibacterial activity. After going through several chemical libraries, they found a molecule—named halicin—that could counter a wide sample of pathogens, including the dreaded Clostridium difficile, and was effective in mice, STAT reports. ‘Overall, this is an impressive paper,’ wrote Derek Lowe in his blog, In the Pipeline. The advance could accelerate the effort to find a new generation of antibiotics.: “
Great news, but what does this have to do with beekeeping. Not much, but the technology in play, artificial intelligence (AI), does. The above story reminded me that the beehealth.guru project out of Jerry Bromenshenk’s Montana company (Bee Alert Technology) is gearing up. Spring has almost sprung and Jerry is urging everyone to start listening to their bees so that the work can continue using AI to tune and train the beehealth.guru smartphone application to generate reports. There’s a lot to unpack from his post. The project has around 1600 supporters and backers.. Sign up now or be left behind!
Six things honey bees do that are remarkable and take center stage in a post from Contact Radio Canada. It’s worth exploring this site using both print and video. “A Bee’s Diary” makes a great story. We know they sting, but can they dream? “A honey bee’s brain is made up of almost one million neurons. That might sound meagre compared to the estimated 86 billion neurons found in our own heads, but for an insect, it’s a lot.
“Bees are intelligent, with impressive navigational skills that they combine with their powerful sense of smell to locate distant food sources. Incredibly, studies have suggested that they can also count and understand the concept of ‘zero,’ something that many mammals are unable to do.
“With all the work their brains do, honeybees need to rest, and they sleep between five and eight hours a day. Scientists have observed that while they’re snoozing, they move their antennae in distinct patterns. They could be dancing, and possibly dreaming just like we do.” Again, watch A Bee’s Diary on The Nature of Things. Not available “outside of Canada?.
“Making sugar syrup might be more complex than one thinks. Check out the post from Bee Scientifics out of Australia: “In theory, making sugar syrup is not hard, mix water with sugar and you’re done. The challenges really lie in the equipment needed to make the quantity you need in order to successfully feed bees. If you only are feeding a few hives, this task is easily done in a home kitchen. Feeding tens or hundreds of colonies requires a bit more thought, space, and equipment. We are not experts in all the ways to make sugar syrup, but thought helpful to show you the process we use to make syrup and some of the tricks we have learned along the way.
A Bee Culture Catch the Buzz release emphasizes that there’s a lot more neonicotinoid pesticide seed treatment being used than being reported. “in part, because farmers often do not know what pesticides are on their seeds, according to an international team of researchers. The lack of data may complicate efforts to evaluate the value of different pest management strategies, while also protecting human health and the environment.”
Beekeepers are often urged to renovate their combs in the modern beekeeping environment. One reason is that pesticide contamination might build up over time. A current release reports on comb age in Carniolan honey bees and comes to the following conclusion: “
“A study on the relationship between the age of comb and the activity of the hybrid Carniolan honey bee colonies in collecting pollen activity, worker brood production, colony strength, and honey yield was conducted. In comparison to colonies with combs aged 4-years, colonies with combs aged 1, 2 and 3-years significantly exceeded in the number returning workers, number returning workers with pollen loads, rate of storing pollen, rate of worker brood production, and size of colony population. Colonies with combs aged 1, 2 and 3-years produced significantly more honey than colonies with combs aged 4-years (5.25, 4.90 and 4.65 kg/colony vs. 4.45 kg/colony, respectively). It can be concluded that the foraging rate, gathering and storing pollen, brood production, colony population size, and honey yield significantly depended on the age of combs. Beekeepers can replace old combs with new ones to increase brood and honey production.”
This report emphasizes that the findings were for only one ecotype of honey bee, Apis mellifera carnica. Few studies take into consideration the fact that all honey bees are not the same and much study often does not take this concept into consideration. It’s possible to see more on this subject at Bee Health Extension.org.
The previous issue of this newsletter promised to look at recent developments at the extension.org site given, the following message: “The site https://impact.extension.org/extension-articles/ has been unsetted!” In its place appears to have emerged a new site , basically composed of three entities, so-called “Funded Collaborators”:
Managed Pollinator CAP containing articles from the old site accessed using a series of key words.
USDA-ARS Areawide Project to Improve Honey Bee Health, which also refers to the same articles and key words as the CAP above.
Bee Informed Partnership, completely divorced from the former entities, not containing any of the articles above with key words, but emphasizing the services typically associated with the BIP.
There is an expanded history of the old extension site on the new home page of this effort. It appears, however, to be little more than simply parking the many articles that originally were found on the old site again indexed to key words, as noted above, with no real information on what might happen in the future. In conclusion, the “unsettled” status of this site will no doubt continue. This suggests funding of the effort is at risk of being reduced if not suspended, a state of affairs that could well result in the site’s senescence over time. It should be on every beekeeper’s mind not to let this happen. I have yet to make a serious investigation of what’s going on with this site, but am going to in the near future.
Ninety five units of Storey’s Guide to Keeping Honey Bees, second edition, were sold on Amazon.com February 24 to March 22, 2020. Pittsburgh led the way in sales.
From the editorial endorsements:
“A well-balanced and extremely thorough guide for new beekeepers.” — Hilary Kearney, Girl Next Door Honey
Malcolm T. Sanford
https://beekeep.info
https://patreon.com/beeactor
