Apimondia 2019: Monday

Posted on September 11, 2019 by Ron Miksha

Monday, September 9, was a head-expanding day for me at Apimondia. This biannual event attracts thousands of attendees from across the globe. This year, it’s in Montreal – a mere 3,008 kilometres (as the crow flies) from my home in Calgary. There will be 269 oral presentations and 566 science/bee posters. There are also 50,000 square metres of exhibition floor space.

I feel like a kid with a dollar in a candy store. It’s impossible to decide what to take in when Honey: What is it and how to ensure its authenticity? and What’s New in Honey Bee Biology? and …possible effects of neonicotinoids on workers, drones, and queens, and Bee products – nutritional value, physiological vs. pharmacological effects, and Research on beekeeping development are all being presented at the exact same moment! It’s like this for four days – five simultaneous presentations, each in a different hall, each important and charming in its own way.

I couldn’t decide which presentation to hear. So I spent my time touring the exhibition hall instead.  It was a United Nations of bee gadgets, associations, exotic honey tasting, electronics, and business introductions. At least twenty countries are represented, with Brazil, Russia, and China each having spacious displays. United Arab Emirates, Moldova, Greece, Argentina, Mongolia, Korea, Slovenia, India, Ukraine, Malta, Romania… and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some.  Ethiopia and Chile had especially large displays as each is vying for a shot at the 2023 Apimondia Conference. Will it be Addis Ababa or Santiago? Where would you go, if you could, to learn about bees four years from now?

Here are some pictures from the exhibition floor at the Montreal Apimondia. Today, I’ll share the exhibits of some of the countries. On later posts, I’ll show world honeys, Canadian exhibitors, and then bee gadgets.

Chile, hopefuls for the 2023 Apimondia Expo

Ethiopia, hopefuls for the 2023 Apimondia Expo

Melita – queen producers from the Mediterranean Malta-island area

The next Apimondia conference will be in Russia.

Bee supplies from Greece.

The Brotherhood of Ukrainian Beekeepers

Russia will host the next Apimondia, September 2021.

Brazil: the world’s largest producer of organic honey.

Slovenia, the world’s biggest fan of beekeeping.

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Outreach, Travels | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Apimondia 2019: Saturday

Posted on September 7, 2019 by Ron Miksha

Landed in Montreal early this morning (12:15am) and reached the hotel over an hour past midnight. My wife and teenagers are with me. None of us had been to Montreal before, so it’s a nice treat. Unfortunately, the family flies back to Calgary Sunday night. They will miss all of Apimondia, but to be honest, they say they get more than enough bee talk from me and they don’t mind taking a pass on the conference. So, they head back to work and school while I stay on to party with the other 12,300 Apimondia delegates.

McGill, with a family friend and my family

McGill, with a family friend and family

This morning we toured McGill, one of Canada’s top three universities. (Alumni include Bill Shatner and Leonard Cohen.)

Both teenagers have an interest in McGill. For the 17-year-old senior in high school, the school is especially relevant. We met a family friend and had a nice tour. The kids (and we parents) were suitably impressed with the look and feel of the urban campus.

After the McGill walk around, we ended up at Schwartz’s, also known as the Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen, for a fantastic smoked-meat sandwich with sweet soft pickles and coleslaw. The latter two tasted just as Mom used to make them.

We were able to squeeze my wheelchair through the crowded, 100-year-old deli to a table where our family devoured the incredible food. In Montreal? Eat at Schwartz’s.

Ethnicity runs deep in this city. Just down the street we passed two Hungarian food stores and – a first for me outside Europe – a Slovenian butcher shop. I’m not sure what makes the Slovenian meat shop different from other meat shops, but it was cool to see such a place outside Ljubljana.

From there, we continued down Saint Laurent Boulevard, past an anarchist bookstore called l’Insoumise (“The Insubordinate”). My 17-year-old went in to talk shop with the guy at the counter and to see if they had any Jordan Peterson books. I would have gone in, too, but this little revolutionary bookstore has steps and I was in my wheelchair. I should have a chat about inclusivity with the bookstore committee (the comité libraire) which runs the place. Also, I would ask why they have bars around the shop window and door. Was that to protect against, you know, lawless anarchists?

I guess even anarchists in Canada worry about anarchists on the street.

Our walk took us through Montreal’s Chinatown. We didn’t stop as none of my family ever buy much of anything (except for books), we had just eaten (though I love Chinese food, I was full of Schwartz smoked-meat), and besides, I had nearly knocked down someone with my wheelchair and didn’t want to risk a second almost-crash.

We continued on to the old city, near the St Lawrence River, where we found the Notre Dame Basilica. Its first stones were laid by the parish 450 years ago. There was a wedding just leaving, fittingly in a drizzle that turned into a heavy rain.

At this point, having travelled around six kilometres, we headed back (soaked) to our hotel. We will do a bit more sightseeing tomorrow, then in late afternoon, three-quarters of us are flying to Calgary. I’m the quarter who stays for five more days. Then it will be all about bees as I tour the acres of bee equipment and take in as many of the 269 talks and 566 posters as I can. My idea of fun.

If you are in Montreal for the Apimondia bee conference, drop by and see my presentation about foraging distances of leafcutters, honey bees, and bumble bees (Foraging distances of commercially-deployed bees: A meta-analysis; 1:45pm, Thursday, September 12, Room 517B) or see my poster (“Who becomes an urban beekeeper?”), which is formally titled Demographic and socio-economic influences of urban beekeeping. My poster will be up all day on Tuesday, September 10 – look for poster P.07.143.

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Apimondia 2019 starts next week!

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Ron Miksha

Apimondia is the bi-annual international bee festival. Two years ago, it was hosted by Turkey; two years from now, it will be in Russia. This year? Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

There are a lot of reasons to visit Montreal. The Notre-Dame Basilica and 21,000-species of plants in Montreal’s botanical gardens come to mind. If island living is not for you (Montreal is on an island), Apimondia’s organizers have tours that will take you away. You can see what’s available at this site. But with 350 oral presentations, 566 posters, and thousands of feet of exhibits and vendors, sight-seeing might not fit your schedule. You can find the complete program guide (a 117-page book) on line, here.

If you have time, drop by and see me present a talk about foraging distances of leafcutters, honey bees, and bumble bees (Foraging distances of commercially-deployed bees: A meta-analysis; 1:45pm, Thursday, September 12, Room 517B) or see my poster (“Who becomes an urban beekeeper?”), which is formally titled Demographic and socio-economic influences of urban beekeeping. It will be up all day on Tuesday, September 10 – look for poster P.07.143.

See you at Apimondia 2019!

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You thought bees were vegetarians?

Posted on August 25, 2019 by Ron Miksha

These bees are arriving with more than vegetables. (Photo: Miksha)

Well, looks like another sacred truth has been shattered. Bees eat beefy little microbes as part of their regular diet. Never again will I stand in front of a class of new beekeepers and implore them to marvel at the wonderful fact that bees get all their nutrition from flowers: carbohydrates from nectar; protein (and vitamins and minerals) from pollen. Apparently, the “meat” of microorganisms also makes up an important part of a bee’s lunch.

I was just getting over the unrelated bacterial facts that (1) our bodies contain ten bacteria for each human cell; and, (2) bacteria thrive in oppressive heat and pressure kilometres below the Earth’s surface. Well, if they are everywhere, and if they exist in nearly infinite numbers, I guess our bees couldn’t avoid eating a few.

But this Scientific American magazine article, reporting on this bit of research, suggests that bees actually need the meat that microbes provide. They seek it out. If you keep bees long enough, you’ll believe almost anything about them. Many of us have seen how a starving colony of honey bees will cannibalize its brood (eating the youngest first). It’s a dirty little secret that we don’t share in public (except on bee blogs). Bees were never strictly vegetarians, and we knew it all along. But bee cannibalism is one of those things we can accept – the brood was going to die anyway and maybe the colony will survive. Sort of like eating the seed corn during a deep famine, or participating in the Donner Expedition. But this latest news is new and unsettling. For me at least.

Dr Dharampal, U of Wisc.

Prarthana Dharampal and Shawn Steffan, both at the Madison branch of the University of Wisconsin, found that bees eat enough microbes to qualify as omnivores – animals that consume both plants and animals. In fact, Dharampal speculates that bees who are collecting pollen may actually be foraging for microbes – a good place to find micro-organisms is pollen. If this theory is substantiated, my head will hurt adjusting to another new reality.

Part of the University of Wisconsin team’s experiments included feeding sterilized pollen to mason bee larvae. A control group of bees received regular, microbe-contaminated pollen. The larvae fed sterile pollen ate the same pollen with its array of lipids and vitamins and minerals, but with none of the ‘germs’. The larvae that were fed the ‘clean’ food soon died.

But wait – there’s more.  Some are speculating that the damage we are unintentionally doing to the environment is killing the nutritious microbes that live on plants that are visited by bees. Is this yet another factor making life unlivable for bees?

Posted in Bee Biology, Diseases and Pests, Ecology, Pesticides, Save the Bees, Science | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Feel like a MOOC?

Posted on August 24, 2019 by Ron Miksha

You can never know too much about bugs.  That’s why I signed up for Bugs 101, offered by a rival school, the University of Alberta. (That’s up in Edmonton – I’m in Calgary, at a different, and arguably warmer, closer,  maybe better, university.) If you are curious about bees and other insects, you will like this Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). It’s free (or you can pay a little and earn a certificate). You learn at your own pace (though there are flexible deadlines meant to encourage you to keep moving ahead. You’ll need two or three hours a week to cover the material. Here’s where you can enrol in the course.

The folks at the University of Alberta put a lot of effort into creating this MOOC. Lots of videos, interactive practice, discussion forums, well-selected readings. Here’s Bugs 101 own description:

Of all the animals on earth, which are the strongest for their size? What about the fastest? Who were the first animals to evolve flight? Insects take all of these titles and more! As the most abundant animals on the planet, insects and other arthropods affect our lives in so many ways. From beneficial interactions like pollination and biological pest control, to the transmission of life threatening diseases; this course will teach you about the big ways that these little arthropods impact our lives.

In Bugs 101: Insect-Human Interactions, you will be plunged into the diverse (and sometimes alien) world of arthropods to learn how they work, what they do, and how insects and humans interact every day.

After completing this course, you will be able to:

Describe the evolutionary relationships between insects and their arthropod relatives
Inventory major groups of insects and their diversity
Demonstrate evolutionary adaptations that make insects successful
Discuss insect biology and human-insect interactions
Evaluate positive and negative interactions between insects and humans
Propose practical and symbolic roles insects play in human societies

If you are like most bee enthusiasts, you’ve never really studied the biology of bees. As this MOOC is about insect-human interactions, there is even a week focused on honey bees, too. Sign up and we’ll be classmates.  Course ends December 1, 2019.

Posted in Bee Biology, Beekeeping, Ecology, Outreach | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

How did your bees do?

Posted on August 24, 2019 by Ron Miksha

You hear the question every time beekeepers meet. “How did your bees do?” The answer is usually in pounds, barrels, or dollars in the bank. The question came up recently here within Calgary’s bee club.

We have an extremely well-run bee association. Among our 400 members, there are many experienced beekeepers who work hard at mentoring newbies.  Sometimes mentoring means inviting folks into a bee-filled backyard (either one-on-one as friends, or as part of a formal “Saturday at the Hive” event.) We, of course, also offer bee courses with field days. They sometimes end up looking like this:

Here I am (seated, in the wheelchair) surrounded by one of our groups of eager students.

Other mentoring happens at the monthly Bees and Beers evening where loose lips have rescued many sunk hives over the years. Mentoring also takes place monthly at our well-attended meetings:

We also mentor from afar by contributing to our bee community’s gossip group (an online gab and Q&A fest). Here, everyone uses real names and tempers only rarely result in insults or threats to show up at someone’s home with a baseball bat because of, you know, differing approaches to beekeeping.

Every now and then, someone starts a particularly interesting thread in the gossip-and-advice chat group. Last week, a member asked people to comment on honey production. Here, in Alberta, Canada, crops often reach 200 pounds, so exaggeration isn’t necessary. Western Canada can be a great place to make honey. When asked about honey production, several hobby beekeepers answered. I was impressed with the consistency and honesty of the answers. Beekeepers, like fishermen, tend to exaggerate. But almost universally, the respondents this year claimed between 70 and 90 pounds per hive as their expected extracted crop for 2019. A friend with a dozen hives emailed me privately to say his crop is just 75 pounds. Some folks whom I help occasionally made a similarly small crop from 35 hives west of the city. Meanwhile, a very good commercial beekeeper told Global News that his crop will likely be half of his normal 160 pounds per hive.

It was a discouraging year for honey bees here in southern Alberta. Cool wet spells were interrupted by only a dozen nice honey-making afternoons. Such are the vagaries of honey production. Some years simply yield fewer pounds in the jar. Sort of wrecks the bragging.

But maybe we brag about the wrong things?

I’m as guilty as almost all other beekeepers when it comes to boasting about the size of my crop. But years ago, I heard that beekeepers in Sweden give the highest bragging rights to those beekeepers who lose the fewest colonies each year. I don’t know if that tale is true, but I’d like to think so. In that case, the metric for measuring greatness focuses on what the beekeeper does for the bees rather than what the bees do for the bank account.

I’d add that good beekeeping also involves mentoring responsible beekeeping as well as successful wintering. That means doing your best for both neighbour and bees. By the way, below are my own two backyard hives with my 12-year-old daughter helping me. Next week, the whole family will extract the third deep from both hives and the five medium boxes. (About 200 pounds.)  The good news – the bees survived last year’s rough winter and developed into good colonies. Trying to do it right, Swedish style.

Posted in Beekeeping, Climate, Culture, or lack thereof | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Arrested for importing three bottles of honey

Posted on August 23, 2019 by Ron Miksha

This gripes me.  Here’s a guy, holding down two jobs (construction and cleaning) who had his life destroyed by US Customs because he brought three jars of honey home from Jamaica while returning from holidays.  He declared the honey in Baltimore when he landed (as one must). But customs insisted he had ‘liquid meth’ after a sniffer dog made a mistake.  After the man was arrested, jailed for almost three months, and lost his jobs, the results came back that the stuff was honey.  No controlled substances. The officers wouldn’t believe their own labs’ results (but they believed the dog), so they ran the tests again while the guy waited in prison.  Same results – no smuggled drugs of any kind.

“Someone dropped the ball somewhere,” Haughton’s lawyer said. “An innocent man spent 82 days in jail for bringing honey into the United States.”

Meanwhile, millions of pounds of rice-sugar honey are smuggled through circumvented routes and the offenders get…. nothing.  When will people wake up, insist their guards enforce the laws that need enforcing, and leave the average Joe alone?

Full story:

Innocent man spent months in jail for bringing honey back to United States

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Honey, Strange, Odd Stuff | 3 Comments

Photographs of readers

Posted on August 21, 2019 by Ron Miksha

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne (U of Chicago) has posted a piece on my research on his own website. This will help catch up the followers of my blog who have been wondering how I’ve been spending my summer!   – Ron

whyevolutionistrue's avatarWhy Evolution Is True

Well, I’ve run out of readers with fancy sports cars, but we have plenty of other interesting people on tap. One is Ron Miksha, who shows us that you can be a grad student at any age. All it takes is curiosity.

I’m a bee ecology grad student at the University of Calgary. I am  working with Lawrence Harder, a bee and plant ecologist, investigating  the effects that non-native honeybees may have on native bees. Here in  Calgary, the urban honeybee hobby grew from 120 backyard bee hives to  about 1300 in the past ten years. That growth may be displacing local native bees. We are measuring bee reproductive success compared to honeybee colony density around the city. We are also researching direct resource competition.

Although I am getting up in age and using a wheelchair to get around, this photo shows me doing what I like best.  It was…

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Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

National Honey Bee Day

Posted on August 17, 2019 by Ron Miksha

I haven’t quite recovered from World Bee Day (May 20th) and here it is, World Honey Bee Day, which coincides with National Honey Bee Day, as it’s practiced in the USA. Clever that they both fall on the same third Saturday of August. But both of the August honey bee days compete with the bigger, far more important May 20th world bee day. (And mid-way between these celebrations is Don’t Step on a Bee Day.)

I’ll not complain that bees are celebrated twice each year with special holidays – schools closed, solemn parades, TV specials. At dinners across the land, Einstein will be invited to stand up and say a few words about the plight of mankind if the bees all die. Meanwhile, the little pollinators go about their tireless sacrifices, pollinating with careless abandon, assuring that the apples and cherries are there for all those pies baked on Bee Day. The whole world celebrates.

Or am I the only one who has heard of this holiday?

I asked colleagues if they will party for the bees, but they looked at me as if I’m weird, maybe a beekeeper or something.  They seem oblivious and are a bit surprised to learn that there is such a holiday. Same with my calendar, which doesn’t recognize Bee Day – it’s not pre-printed on any of my calendars, in fact. Maybe the publishers haven’t recognized the importance of the day. (Halloween is on the calendar. And Christmas. Why not Bee Day?)

In the USA, the holiday started out as National Honey Bee Awareness Day about ten years ago. That worked out so well that they had to drop ‘Awareness’ from the name. (How can you build awareness for an insect that everyone is already aware of?)

If you are wondering how one celebrates August 19th’s Honey Bee Day, I found a website that offers some suggestions. Here a couple of their ideas and my reasons why these are bad ideas:

1) Collect local wildflower seeds and spread them to where nothing is growing.  Me: It sounds like a good idea – in mid-August, you sow your wild seed ‘where nothing is growing’ – like on a highway or in a lake. But seriously, planting seeds in August?

2) If you can’t raise bees, talk to your friends who have space and get them interested in raising bees.  Me: If you can’t talk yourself into raising bees, do you really have the skill to talk someone else into raising bees?

3) Encourage beekeepers to open their apiary to friends.  Me: Yes! Bring your own jar and pick your own honey. Doubt you’ll see those friends again.

4) Buy some mead and learn about this amazing drink!  Me: OK. This one’s a winner. Celebrate Bee Day with some authentic fermented nectar of the gods.

Out of celebration ideas? On these lazy summer days (unless you’re a hard-working beekeeper), you might lie in the shade with a good bee book.

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Humour, Save the Bees, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Ulee Jackson has died

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Ron Miksha

Peter Fonda died today. Most accolades will mention his starring role in 1969’s Easy Rider. I won’t. Instead, I’ll talk about his performance in Ulee’s Gold. That movie gave Fonda his only Oscar nomination (he lost to his friend Jack Nicholson, in As Good as it Gets).

In addition to being a powerful drama about the sort of situations too many families fall into, Ulee’s Gold portrays the beekeeping lifestyle with clarity, accuracy, and compassion. From a beekeeper’s perspective, movies just don’t get any better. If you want to peek inside a beekeeper’s life a little, or introduce the beekeeping world to friends or relatives who don’t seem to quite understand it, this movie is the perfect vehicle to make that connection happen. Peter Fonda, in the role of Ulysses Jackson, acts as if he had kept bees for thirty years. This strong, inward-looking character is so completely believable that the Florida Beekeeper’s Association gave Peter Fonda their highest recognition – he was named Beekeeper of the Year when the movie came out.

The plot is entirely plausible, at times a bit measured, but the slow pace is necessary to build the drama and to keep the tale believable. A wayward son, an addicted daughter-in-law, a wild teen-aged granddaughter, an introverted younger granddaughter, a divorced (twice) neighbour, and more bee work than he can manage, make up Ulee’s immediate world. His internal world is haunted by friends he lost in Viet Nam and a wife who died six years earlier. The story becomes rough, with some crude language, as Ulee faces his son’s accomplices in crime. Parents may feel the language and some of the scenes – especially of the drug withdrawal – are too graphic for younger audiences. Despite these minor caveats (by today’s standards, the movie is tame and there are no gratuitous scenes of violence or sex) it is an excellent, powerful drama.

Ulee’s Gold opened among the top ten films in North America on its release week, with gross weekend ticket sales of almost one million dollars. The movie was not heavily advertised, so we might assume that many of the audience attended because of the absolutely stellar praise the media lavished on this work. IN Jersey called the movie “Pure Gold”. Variety described this movie as “A gem of rare emotional depth and integrity… graced by a completely unexpected performance from Peter Fonda that is by far the best of his career.” The New York Times Review called Fonda’s performance the best in his entire career.  Entertainment Weekly agreed, saying, “Peter Fonda gives the performance of his life… playing with almost biblical rectitude…with a hint of tenderness that can wrench your heart out.” Among Entertainment Weekly’s praises were a nod to Van Morrison’s closing credits tune Tupelo Honey, which the reviewer describes as “a gift to the audience”.

As a beekeeper (who kept bees in Florida), I was especially enamoured by the dialog:

When describing his work to his neighbour lady-friend, Ulee says, “What with moving bees, pulling honey. chasing bears… it’s pretty hard work. Most young folks wouldn’t be bothered. But don’t get me going talking about bees…”

In a scene where you would expect Ulee to crack someone’s skull, Ulee’s nemesis, Eddie Flowers, says, “I always thought it was a stupid business, messin’ with bees.”  Well, Eddie, you’re not far off the mark.

When his imprisoned son asks how the bees are doing, Ulee says, “Mites are choking them, pesticides are killing them, the drought’s starving them… they’re fine.”

The movie was written and directed by Victor Nunez, who says that he got the idea from a chance glance at a newspaper with a photo of a beekeeping family on the front page. Ulee’s Gold was featured as the Centerpiece Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival when it came out in 1997. Peter Fonda won a Golden Globe Award for his performance.

I’ll close this post with a gift to my audience: Here’s Van Morrison with the movie’s theme song:

PS: A second gift: I recommend that you see this movie. My family will be watching it again tonight.

Posted in Commercial Beekeeping, Culture, or lack thereof, History, Movies, People | Tagged , , | 8 Comments