Dear Subscribers:
We are in a mini drought of sorts in northeast Florida. No rain for a long period, then some spotty showers have showed up and more are expected this weekend. However, we are not as dry as the southern part of the state. Florida’s dry season usually begins in November and continues through May or June, with the driest months being March through May or June depending on the latitude. It’s swarming season so we will be on the lookout for this activity, the most exciting and sometimes frustrating time if you are a beekeeper.
The video series being developed via the Youtube.com channel insidethehive.tv has just released a program on my website known as the Apis Information Resource Center. This continues a collaboration between Humberto Boncristiani who runs the channel and myself looking first at the book Storey’s Guide to Keeping Honey Bees, that also incorporates what’s called a “giveaway, where copies of the book are being awarded based on a set of rules currently in progress, ending April 21, 2019.
We are in the process of developing a third presentation focusing on our reflections on changes in the art and science of beekeeping over the last three decades. In total, this is an exciting innovative project, and we hope to receive comments on it at the site itself, as well as through the readership of this digest/newsletter.
We are seeing more and more information all the time about something that humans have considered their own realm for millennia, effectively communication among themselves. The latest published in The Atlantic Magazine looks at how flowers might talk to pollinators:
“First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee’s wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That’s probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around.
“’This shows yet again that plants can behave in remarkably animal-like ways,’ says Heidi Appel from the University of Toledo, who has studied plants’ responses to animal vibrations. Crucially, she says, the study is ‘ecologically relevant’—that is, it involves a sound (bee buzzes) and a response (nectar sweetening) that actually matter to the plant. It’s a far cry from past studies that showed plants reacting to sounds they would never normally encounter, such as classical music, in ways that are hard to interpret (certain genes might switch on or off, but to what end?).
“Here, the plants’ responses make clear evolutionary sense. Sweeter nectar is more enticing to pollinators, and by attracting more pollinators, the plant increases its odds of making more plants. But it takes a lot of energy to make supersweet nectar, and the resulting brew could be degraded by microbes or stolen by non-pollinating thieves. Far better to sweeten the fluid when it most needs to be sweet—and the buzz of a bee is the perfect cue that the time is right.
“But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team’s answer is surprising, yet tidy: It’s the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose’s petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee’s wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!) “The results are amazing,” says Karban. “They’re the most convincing data on this subject to date. They’re important in forcing the scientific community to confront its skepticism.”
Perhaps, but it is important to understand, as embedded in the article above, that this work “has not yet been published in a scientific journal.”
The concept that sounds coming from flowers communicates with pollinators, including honey bees, jibes with the idea that honey bees themselves might communicate via the same manner. The folks at Bee Alert Technology are now looking at a smartphone application that analyzes beehive sounds, providing vital information on the state of colony health. We can look forward to a Kickstarter.com campaign in May to explain more about this initiative. Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk and crew are famous for their studies using honey bees to locate various pollutants, including explosives/land mines, as reported here:
“Beekeepers have long known that bees’ buzzing changes when the queen bee is removed from the hive, the result of changed chemical transmissions that typically instruct the worker bees in their tasks. Similar changes, it was found, result when various toxins are introduced to the hive. ‘We found bees respond within thirty seconds or less to the presence of a toxic chemical,’ said company spokesman Jerry Bromenshenk, also with the University of Montana.
“But the real surprise was that the sounds bees produce can actually tell what chemical is hitting them. Of course, these changes cannot be detected with the naked ear, so Bromenshenk and his colleagues devised voice recognition software that is able to identify the specific buzz for each chemical. Next on the agenda is a hand-held device similar to the bee box described above. We cannot wait to see which competitor comes out on top.” . See more about Dr. Bromenshenk at the Apis information Resource Center.
The fact that honey bees may communicate among themselves via several different ways (languages?) is reminiscent of the “tower of Babel.” The Wikipedia page reveals, “The narrative of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1–9) is an etiology or explanation of a phenomenon. Etiologies are narratives that explain the origin of a custom, ritual, geographical feature, name, or other phenomenon. The story of the Tower of Babel explains the origins of the multiplicity of languages. God was concerned that humans had blasphemed by building the tower to avoid a second flood so God brought into existence multiple languages. Thus, humans were divided into linguistic groups, unable to understand one another.“
Again, most of humanity has always believed that all this applies to our species alone. This brings us to another language of honey bees, that developed by Dr. Karl von Frisch, who famously is the only bee researcher to win the Nobel Prize for his work on the insects’ “dance language.” This line of study is mentioned in a recent article concerning two researchers at Virginia Tech, who “have decoded the language of honey bees in such a way that will allow other scientists across the globe to interpret the insects’ highly sophisticated and complex communications.
“In a paper appearing in April’s issue of Animal Behaviour, the researchers present an extraordinary foundational advance—a universal calibration, or for science fiction aficionados, a ‘babel fish,’ that translates honey bee communications across sub-species and landscapes. By deciphering the instructive messages encoded in the insects’ movements, called waggle dances, the teams hope to better understand the insects’ preferred forages and the location of these food sources.
‘Before we can feed pollinators, we need to know when and where they need food. We must decode waggle dances,’ said Schürch, the paper’s lead author. ‘So, this is a fundamental first step.’
“Nearly six decades ago, Karl von Frisch, a Nobel-prize winning ethologist, discovered that the angle of the dancer’s body relative to the vertical encodes the direction of the forage, and the distance to the food source is communicated by the duration of the bee’s dance.
“During the waggle dance, a successful forager returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction from the hive to the food source by performing multiple, repeated figure-eight-like movements called waggle runs.
“Because of the challenge and cost of creating an original duration-to-distance calibration, von Frisch’s calibration model, which is based on averages rather than data on individual bees, has served as the gold standard in the bee research community.
‘We have collected this information from many bees in two different landscapes separated by an ocean and several years,’ said Couvillon. ‘However, there is still a lot we don’t know about what the bees are feeding on. So, imagine decoding many dances and plotting them on a map to see where the bees are going. We wanted to do this by season to provide a comprehensive look at what they are foraging and where. This way, we can also see when it’s harder for them to find forage and when it’s easier.’ “
The above article contains no discussion about the role of odor in honey bee communication. This other language was emphasized by Dr. Adrian Wenner, who continues to promulgate a controversial opinion that it had a prime role in honey bee communication.
More discussion from The Atlantic looks at another pedestal humanity stands on that could, perhaps like the tower of Babel, be at risk of being toppled. In “What the Crow Knows,” the author, Ross Anderson, looks at crows primarily, but also discusses other critters:
“Wasps, like bees and ants, are hymenopterans, an order of animals that displays strikingly sophisticated behaviors. Ants build body-to-body bridges that allow whole colonies to cross gaps in their terrain. Lab-bound honeybees can learn to recognize abstract concepts, including ‘similar to, ‘different from,’ and ‘zero.’ Honeybees also learn from one another. If one picks up a novel nectar-extraction technique, surrounding bees may mimic the behavior, causing it to cascade across the colony, or even through generations.
“In one experiment, honeybees were attracted to a boat at the center of a lake, which scientists had stocked with sugar water. When the bees flew back to the hive, they communicated the boat’s location with waggle dances. The hive’s other bees would usually set out immediately for a newly revealed nectar lode. But in this case, they stayed put, as though they’d consulted a mental map and dismissed the possibility of flowers in the middle of a lake. Other scientists were not able to replicate this result, but different experiments suggest that bees are capable of consulting a mental map in this way.
“Andrew Barron, a neuroscientist from Macquarie University, in Australia, has spent the past decade identifying fine neural structures in honeybee brains. He thinks structures in the bee brain integrate spatial information in a way that is analogous to processes in the human midbrain. That may sound surprising, given that the honeybee brain contains only 1 million neurons to our brains’ 85 billion, but artificial-intelligence research tells us that complex tasks can sometimes be executed by relatively simple neuronal circuits. Fruit flies have only 250,000 neurons, and they too display complex behaviors. In lab experiments, when faced with dim mating prospects, some seek out alcohol, the consciousness-altering substance that’s available to them in nature in broken-open, fermenting fruit.
“The neuroscientist Björn Merker has suggested that early animal brains solved these problems by generating an internal model of the world, with an avatar of the body at its center. Merker says that consciousness is just the multisensory view from inside this model. The syncing processes and the jangle and noise from our mobile bodies are all missing from this conscious view—some invisible, algorithmic Stanley Kubrick seems to edit them out. Nor do we experience the mechanisms that convert our desires into movements. When I wished to begin hiking up the mountain again, I would simply set off, without thinking about the individual muscle contractions that each step required. When a wasp flies, it is probably not aware of its every wing beat. It may simply will itself through space.”
The article is based around the author visiting the Jain community in India. In one meeting, he noted: “The monk was wearing a white mask like those that some Jains wear to avoid inhaling insects and other tiny creatures.”
I had a discussion with my niece recently, who lives in a Buddist community in Hawaii, concerning the honey bee as a “sentient being.” According to Wikipedia, “In Buddhism, sentient beings are beings with consciousness, sentience, or in some contexts life itself. Sentient beings are composed of the five aggregates, or skandhas: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness.
This discussion reminds me of the book by Zbigniew Lipínski, Essence and Abandonment of Honeybee Swarms, published by the author in Poland, Lipinski@sprint.com.pl. In a long discussion about “Sensitization Dr. Lipínski concludes that several lines of evidence “…support the thesis that the natural distribution of stress sensitivity in bees resembles the stress sensitivity of other populations. It is known that bees react by emotion? Excitation sounds emitted collectively by other bees.” Thus, he says something known as “swarming fever” may result whether bees are ready to swarm or not.
That honey bees may have “emotions” is noted in many places elsewhere in the volume. You can read more about this book published as part of Apimondia 2001 in South Africa, as well as a review short review from the Centre for Ecological Apiculture.
The microbiome is getting attention in the research community. This is an area of growing concern not only in honey bees but also in humans, which is an amazing complex of organisms in our species. We can expect no less than that of honey bees as noted in a recent article:
“Researchers from Virginia Tech were part of a collaborative $958,415 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study the host-microbiome-parasite interactions in the honey bee gut, with $750,000 coming to Virginia Tech.
“Researchers Lisa Belden, David Haak, T.M. Murali, and Richard Fell from Virginia Tech and Jenifer Walke from Eastern Washington University are collaborating to study the critical role of the honey bee gut microbiome in health and defense against parasites using a systems biology framework.
“Using the honey bee gut microbiome as a model to study host defense against parasites could have implications for understanding the human microbiome and host defense, as well,” said Belden, the lead investigator on the grant and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.”
I recently came across a great leaflet on honey types in Spain. It’s in Spanish but gives a great deal of information that I have not seen anywhere else. It could serve as a model for other publications of its kind.
Australia’s BeeAware newsletter for this month has an article on Varroa and bee viruses concluding: “’Our work therefore changes our understanding of the effect Varroa has on Deformed Wing Virus and the health of honey bee colonies,’ Prof Beekman said. ‘It means we don’t have to be scared of the virus. Instead we need to focus on eliminating the mite and reducing its numbers.’
“The results will also have an impact on the ways the Australian beekeepers can prepare themselves for the arrival of Varroa. ‘Many countries actively select for honey bee populations that can tolerate the Varroa mite without treatment. Australian beekeepers would like to import the sperm from such populations to start preparing their honey bees for when the mite arrives,’ Prof Beekman said.
“But the importation of the sperm is currently forbidden because of the threat of Deformed Wing Virus, which can be present in bee sperm. Perhaps beekeepers can now convince the authorities that bee sperm is safe.”
See the full newsletter here:
Contributor Ron Miksha has posted on his blog information that today is World Apitherapy Day. Although not necessarily skeptical of the treatment, he strongly advocates against doing treatments himself:
“I don’t want this blog posting to be an anti-apitherapy diatribe. I think that there is a lot of evidence that bee sting therapy can help some people some of the time. I’ve met people who claim that they are alive and active today because of bee stings. But I still refuse to get involved in administering the treatments myself – I’m not a trained first-responder. If something goes very badly wrong, the patient needs to be in the hands of someone with proper emergency experience.”
Rosanna Mattingly, Editor, Western Apicultural Society Journal has published her latest items of interest for beekeepers, March 30, 2019. see among other articles the following: 2019 Western Apicultural Society Conference Comes to Ashland, Oregon;Could Wildfires Benefit Bees; Researchers decipher and codify the universal language of honey bees; A study warns of the need to return to indigenous and local practices to conserve pollinators; Widespread losses of pollinating insects in Britain; West Linn now one of 80 Bee City USA spots; Program to Promote Pollinator Health Hits Milestone
March 2019 Bee-L discussions feature 41 messages for “apiary inspection programs” and 11 messages for “pitting wild bees against honey bees“
As always, check the latest extension efforts at the Bee Health Extension site.
One hundred fourteen units of Storey’s Guide to Keeping Honey Bees, second edition were sold February 25, 2019 through March 24, 2019. Salt Lake City led the way.
From the editorial endorsements:
“Storey’s Guide to Keeping Honey Bees is a thorough treatment of beekeeping for anyone looking to practice the craft. It spans the range of topics from beginning to advanced beekeeping, while including a suite of personal testimonies that humanize the art. It will be an important resource for years to come.” — Jamie Ellis, PhD, Honey Bee Research and Extension Laboratory, University of Florida
Malcolm T. Sanford
https://beekeep.info
