Smokers, beware: Stuff I’ve Smoked

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Yesterday, I started a discussion about whether beekeepers should use a smoker. (Smoke or no smoke?)  I think you should use one, but you’ve got to be smart about it. I’ll write more about smart smoking tomorrow, in a piece intended for newer beekeepers. I noticed that most of yesterday’s comments were about types of smoker fuel, which is today’s subject. If you aren’t able to  read yesterday’s piece, here are some of the combustibles that readers puffed about:

As for fuel, I have been using the waste paperboard egg cartons. Takes 1/2 a carton when I do light up.
– Mark

I’m new – and using pellets I purchased from a bee supply place. Difficult to get smoking and incredibly harsh smoke – if the breeze shifts direction when I’ve set it aside to work the hive – my eyes burn and I start coughing, and have to walk away.
– Valbjerke’s Blog

I use pet bedding that can be found in grocery stores or pet stores for smoking and I find it stays lit surprisingly long.
– Al

I’m also pet bedding! A huge bag of dust extracted wood chips costs £6 and will last me several years!
– Ray

Used coffee burlap bags as fuel with starter of paper that comes with foundation wax.
– Pamela

When we began we tried using a spray bottle of just water as recommended by some of the natural beekeeping folks. It did not work for us.
Then we switched to spraying sugar water. It still did not work for us except to make everything sticky including ourselves.
– The Prospect of Bees

I normally use a mixture of paper, wood pellets, and broken up dead tree branches in the smoker, and it seems to work pretty well.
– Erik, Bees with eeb

I’m a smoker! I started using egg boxes this season having always used hazel kindling before that. I got tired of chopping the kindling and find the boxes a cooler smoke the bees seem to prefer.
– acquest13

Any beekeeper who regularly uses a smoker (that’s 98% of us) will tell you that you want fuel that 1) lights easily, 2) gives cool, white smoke, 3) doesn’t make you and the bees gag, and 4) smolders for hours. That’s a long list, but there are plenty of fuels that meet the grade.

I’m going to mention what I know best, autobiographically stretching from my childhood through my rather mature current age. I was one of ten kids on a small farm on the edge of the Pennsylvania Appalachians. We grazed a cow and calf in a small pasture and occasionally bought feed. Empty burlap grain sacks became smoker fuel for our bees. Burlap is fairly common among beekeepers, and even has a tiny Wikipedia entry, which describes Hessian fabric (burlap) as “often used as smoker fuel in beehive-tending because of its generous smoke generation and ease of ignition.”

Lighting burlap.

I liked burlap’s cool white smoke. Regardless the Wikipedia description, it was occasionally hard to ignite, especially if dampened by the humid Pennsylvania climate. Some beekeepers start by lighting some newspaper. Newspaper is risky, though, as pieces get lifted by the heat’s up-current and bits of burning paper drift away and start forest fires.

One of my older brothers had a trick which I’ll share but not recommend. After stuffing burlap into the bottom of the smoker canister, he squirted lighter fluid on it, then dropped in a lit match. Basically, you get an explosion. He did this regularly, even after burning off his eyelashes and singeing the hairs under his arms.

Explosions are not necessary when lighting a smoker. Unlike my brother, I’ve never used petrochemicals to encourage flames in a bee smoker. Instead, I saved blackened, partially burned burlap from the last time I used the smoker. It ignites fairly easily, as you see in the picture here.

One of the main drawbacks with burlap is that it’s made from sisal and can smell a bit like a different weed. I discovered this at age 18. I was stopped by state troopers while I drove between bee yards. I was stopped for speeding, of course, but the nice cop asked me what I’d been smoking. I didn’t smoke, but my smoker was smoking. I showed it to him and removed some smoldering burlap. He was satisfied and suggested that I drive more slowly on his highway.

Trail into my farm in Bay Lake, Florida.
These pines grew smoker fuel for me.

I switched from burlap when I moved to Florida and started working for a couple of beekeepers, including my oldest brother, David. All the Florida beekeepers used pine straw. Since I was still a teenager, I wanted to be just like them. I used long pine needles scooped from under stands of southern pines. That was the loveliest smoke I’ve seen in my life. It blew glorious clouds which you’d be happy to have wafting around you for hours on end. It was cheap and easy to collect (but watch out for diamondbacks!). I stored it in unburnt burlap sacks. The only downside is that pines have some natural tar which can clog a smoker, but the billows from the bellows are clean and white. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay in Florida forever. Although I’ve tried other pine straw collected from other parts of the continent, I was always disappointed. Central Florida’s pines spoiled me for life.

When I kept bees in southern Saskatchewan, I knew a lot of cattle ranchers. They put up thousands of bales of hay every year. One of my best friends, Buzz Trottier, a native Cree rancher, saved his baler twine for me. He collected it from bales which fed his cattle during the winter. In turn, he let me help out on his ranch. Sometimes in winter, I’d scatter bales from the back of his pickup truck while he drove. He also let me brand cattle one spring, though that was about the limit of my cowboy experiences.

I’m using some of Buzz’s baler twine as smoker fuel.

Baler twine burned about the same as burlap but had a heavier, darker smoke. On the other hand, it lasted longer in the smoker. A lot of prairie beekeepers – from Kansas to Alberta – were recycling it in their smokers. However, in recent years, sisal has been largely replaced by plastic twine. That would be about the worst thing in the world to burn/melt inside a smoker.

Earl, examining some fuel.

I owned two bee operations in Saskatchewan, one in the south, near Montana, the other much further north, right where agriculture ended and parkland forests began. There, I had a mentor, a semi-retired, 65-year-old beekeeper with 500 hives. Earl Emde began beekeeping in Whittier, California. As a teenager, he hauled bees around the deserts and mountains of southern California. Later, he owned 5,000 hives in Nebraska and the Dakotas, wintering those bees in Florida. His retirement project was raising queens and packages in Florida and hauling them to the north Saskatchewan bush where I occasionally helped him.

One day, Earl Emde and I were at a farm near Big River, working his bees. I’ll quote a few lines from my book, Bad Beekeeping, to describe what happened:

This apiary was fenced inside a cattle pasture. The ground was littered with dry, hard cow pies. Halfway through the beeyard, Earl did something unexpected. Normally, as fuel for his bee smoker, Earl used sawdust and tiny scraps from wood that he turned into new beehives. But I caught him hefting a dry, hard cow patty. He dropped it into his hot bee smoker. I gave him a puzzled look.
“You’re wondering what I’m doing?” he said. He puffed the bellow until thick white smoke gushed from the bee smoker.
“Seems a bit weird,” I said. “Why stick a cow pie in your smoker?”
“Well, reminds me of when I was a kid – a smell I don’t get to enjoy, except a couple times a year.”
“When you were a kid – you had a job burning manure?”
“No, I kept bees in the California desert. No trees, no wood, nothing to burn in the smoker except dried cow dung. Fifty years ago, I used this all the time.” He breathed, his lungs ballooned out.
He grinned. “Nothing like it.”

Smoker fuel has been a big part of my life. From burlap to pine straw to baler twine and cow dung. I didn’t mention that an Appalachian beekeeper taught me how he cut and dried sumac blossoms. And a prairie beekeeper kept a stack of wet cardboard, rolled into tubes which he dried. Several others whom I’ve encountered use wood chips, like Earl Emde did. To me, smoker fuel is somewhat tied to geography, though some stuff, like wood chips and burlap, are almost universal.

Now I’m in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, keeping two hives in the back yard. I’ve been experimenting with a variety of material – as long as it’s clean and food-grade. But nothing was really satisfying me. Last week, I was visiting friends at Tsuut’ina Nation, a few kilometres from my house. We were checking bees and I was running low on smoker fuel. The beekeeper said, “Wait a minute, Ron,” and disappeared into a nearby shed. She returned a few minutes later with a neatly-cut piece of burlap for my smoker. It looked and smelled every bit like the smoker fuel of my childhood.

Posted in Beekeeping, Books, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , , , , , | 17 Comments

Smokers, beware: Smoke or no smoke?

Posted on June 28, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Daniel, at age 4, twelve years ago. His hands were too small for gloves so we tied the ends of his beesuit. We didn’t think of giving him an air filter mask!

Smoke or no smoke?  Good question.

It surprises me that there are beekeepers who have completely forsworn smokers. Such quixotic folks ply their trade without smoke, believing (perhaps correctly) that a bee smoker invalidates the organic status of their honey.

My father, about 40 years ago, smoking bees in Europe with his pipe.

Chemicals from a smoker are potentially hazardous. Smoke from my father’s corncob pipe proved carcinogenic, at least after 66 years of piping caught up to him and he, at age 80, developed a tiny knob of cancer under his tongue. It was spotted early and removed before causing serious damage. He used his pipe (and a conventional smoker made by Dadant) for decades. Smoke became mixed with the food we ate at the family table, from my father’s pipe, not a barbeque. Honey harvested with a bee smoker probably wasn’t good for us, but it’s not likely to have been a major health hazard – at least based on the anecdotal evidence of the health and longevity of most of my immediate family.

Still, some beekeepers are philosophically opposed to using a smoker. If you are considering working your bees without one, history is against you. Rather early, humans learned to carry smoky torches up trees when they liberated honeycombs from lofty wild hives. It seems rather obvious that bees evolved to peacefully turn over their honey to humans upon smelling smoke.  What else would explain their docile smoke reflex?

But some modern beekeepers have decided that they should work bees without smoke. That’s nice. But if you are not an accomplished, experienced beekeeper, I’d advise against it. A tiny amount of smoke, judiciously applied to the entrance before the hive is opened and along the top bars once or twice during your bee work is all it usually takes to calm the bees and allow a few minutes of personal bee immersion.  Without smoke, the entire hive can quickly become unmanageable, stinging the beekeeper severely and possibly taking down neighbours in the process.  I was once called to a house where the resident beekeeper had opened his hive without smoke, the bees erupted, and the beekeeper ran. I was asked to replace frames taken out by the fleeing beekeeper. He watched through his kitchen window.

Bad ideas go up in smoke.

If you’ve been working bees for a while, you may have become a smokerless beekeeper. If so, you should have learned how to pick the right weather to lift the lid, how to move smoothly amid the bees, and how to replace the frames and lid when the bees become seriously defensive, as is their custom.

These skills are not learnt the first time a hive is opened, yet I’ve known bee-gurus who insist that their new, inexperienced disciples must never own a smoker. As in most things in life, balance is good. So is safety. For some gurus, this isn’t an option. It’s all or nothing. No smoke, they tell me, is the natural way to keep bees. Period. I’d rather see new beekeepers taught to use caution and smoke very, very gently than to totally eschew the calming effect of judicious cool smoke.

I mentioned the inorganic nature of smoked honey. This is probably a valid concern. I don’t know how to address it, except to ask whether some of the beekeepers who imagine themselves as ‘working with nature’ could advise me.  Please send me a note, I’d love to hear if you are a natural beekeeper producing organic honey even if you apply smoke to your bees. I guess it could be natural, organic smoke, sourced from the dried pods of organically grown sumac.

I realize that some beekeepers are worried that smoke – even in tiny amounts – will hurt their bees. I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately, without smoke, any hive examination is precarious. When Betty Bee alerts Henrietta and Suzy who then alert their four best friends who tell sixteen more about an intrusion, hundreds of bees may go wild in a minute. The beekeeper may suffer a lot of stings. The key is to learn to use smoke in very carefully delivered doses. This is something learned from experience, though I’ll mention some tips in coming posts.

So, I strongly recommend using a bee smoker (or corncob pipe).  Next blog post (maybe tomorrow), I’ll write about lighting and using a smoker. We’ll also consider the many types of fuel. My favourite was pine straw but I don’t use it anymore – later, you’ll see why.

A little smoke from a little smoker

Just a little smoke from a little smoker.

Posted in Beekeeping, Tools and Gadgets | Tagged , | 32 Comments

Fish Cooked in Beeswax

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Why not?  I’d love this!

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Hive Products, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Minding the June Gap

Posted on June 23, 2018 by Ron Miksha

I ran this piece last year, but it’s worth repeating. After the natural spring bouquet has begun to fade, honey bees may become hungry. The hives are (usually) strong with lots of brood. If there is a long gap between the last spring flowers and the first summer ones, bees are at risk of cannibalizing their brood (Yummy!) and then starving to death. Neither is desirable. I guess you know that.  This week might be the most critical week for a lot of readers, so here’s my gap post.

If you travel metro in London (and many other cities) you might hear a polite admonition from the public address system, “Mind the gap!” It’s advising you not to get your footwear stuck between the train and platform while boarding. Beekeepers have their own gap to mind and it’s here now.

The June Gap is pretty common across the northern hemisphere. (Perhaps there’s a December Gap down in Chile.) The gap is so renowned among beekeepers that someone built a wikipage called “June Gap”. It relates mostly to the UK, but we also gap here, in western Canada, too. This is what the wiki says:

The June Gap refers to a phenomenon in which a shortage of forage available for bees occurs (typically in June) and has been observed in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Subsequent to the massive volume of pollen and nectar produced by trees and hedges in the spring, there is a reduction in the amount of nectar available to the bees due to long grasses and dandelions suppressing many wildflowers.[1] Before the herbaceous “summer rush” of July-through-September which reinstates the high level of nectar, the high hive populations brought around by trees in the spring struggle to produce honey and may lay fewer eggs. Beekeepers need to pay special attention to the levels of honey in the hive as well as the level of water the bees use during this gap. Annual weather patterns can cause this event to occur later or earlier.

Some plants which can help provide nectar in this gap are Cotoneaster, the closely related Pyracantha, common garden [herbs], and perennial garden plants.

That’s all the Wikipedia entry says, then a few references are cited. The June Gap isn’t limited to England and Ireland. We also gapped in western Pennsylvania, where I learned to keep bees. In April and May, we saw a nice early flow from willow, dandelion, and fruit blossom. Most years, black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) straddled late May and early June followed by tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) and basswood (linden, or Tilia americana). Then there was a (summer) gap until the autumn goldenrod and aster. Farther north and west, most beekeepers on the American plains and Canadian prairies suffer a real June Gap, a dearth between spring flows and our main summer honey flow.

A great pasture for bees: dandelions, before the gap

What happens during the gap? There is often a little pollen coming in, but rarely is there much nectar. For those of us lucky enough to live in Alberta, Canada, we may have a good flow from dandelion (this year it peaked on May 25th, which is normal) but the drop after that major source is precipitous. We have sparse flowers (goat’s beard, buffaloberry, Siberian olive, caragana) which tease the bees a bit, but we can see hives lose weight, even on sunny mild June days. Most years, we have gaps (of varying significance) from about June 5th to June 25th. During those three weeks, queens curtail egg laying. Crucial workers that will help make the late July and August part of the honey crop might not materialize in the numbers you need.

Beekeepers have taken to feeding their bees up to a few days before honey supers go on. If the dearth is severe and hives have built up strongly on the early season flows, the gap will result in less brood rearing. But the gap can be so serious that bees destroy their developing brood and then, if it continues, they may starve. It’s possible to lose hives from starvation days before the main flow starts. Leaving plenty of reserve honey in the hive will, of course, prevent such a fate. But even a well-provisioned colony usually stops egg laying when the nectar shuts off and pollen becomes scarce.

The solution? Mind the gap. Keep a couple of eyes on your hives at this time of the year. The crop (for most of us) will start flowing in a few days. This is not the time to ignore your bees.

Posted in Beekeeping, Ecology, Honey Plants | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

William Woodley – An Introduction

Posted on June 20, 2018 by Ron Miksha

This is the first in a series of videos about a Victorian-era beekeeper who had the largest honey farm in England at the end of the 19th century. You can learn more about William Woodley on the Beehive Yourself blog site.

Posted in History, Movies, People, Reblogs | Tagged , | 1 Comment

National Pollinator Week

Posted on June 18, 2018 by Ron Miksha

National Pollinator Week has arrived: June 18-24! Today, I’m re-running part of a blog I posted last week.  It had some ideas on what you might do to celebrate Pollinator Week.

Pollinator Partnership tells us, “National Pollinator Week is a time to celebrate pollinators and spread the word about what you can do to protect them.” Eleven years ago, when colony collapse was at its peak and the end of civilization was near, the US Senate approved “National Pollinator Week” unanimously. Unanimously! Has the US Senate ever approved anything else by undissented decree? That’s a hundred out of a hundred. Congratulations to them for collaborating, for once, on something important. They wanted every American to recognize the pollination services provided by birds and bees and beetles and bats.

Birds and bats working saguaro. (USDA photo)

To help you celebrate, the pollinator people at Pollinator Partnership list some activities on their website. Here are some suggestions:

• Host an educational event at a local library
• Host a pollinator festival or native plant sale
• Plant habitat in your backyard using native plants
• Host a nature walk or pollinator expert lecture
• Screen a pollinator film
• Pollinator planting day at your school, office, local park, or library
• Build native bee houses
• Display pollinator artwork and outreach materials in your office lobby
• Encourage your governor to sign a proclamation

It’s a little late to ask your governor to make a pollinator proclamation, but most of them have already done it, apparently without your help.  If you have time, read a few of the proclamations yourself. If you are in the USA, look up your own governor’s proclamation. If you like what you see, send your governor a note, or suggest changes if you must.  And don’t forget to plant some native flowers this week.

(Credit: David Miksha, Calgary)

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Outreach, Pollination | Tagged , | 2 Comments

What if my pet gets stung?

Posted on June 17, 2018 by Ron Miksha

Me and the dog: handsome but dumb.

Calgary has a dry climate. After it rains, some of our bees celebrate by sucking cedar water from our deck. I’m not sure what the attraction is, but a few bees always sit on the wet deck and lap up whatever it is they are finding attractive. Maybe there are salts and minerals leaching from our year-old deck. Bees, as you know, need minerals. Some beekeepers, keeping colonies in monoculture areas, supplement their bees’ diets with mineral and vitamin supplements. I’m not sure that’s legal, but try to stop a beekeeper who thinks she is helping her bees.

Our colonies are sitting amid a diverse ecological landscape with quite a variety of pollen nearby, so I’m not sure why the bees would be collecting mineralized/salty water, but a dozen or so drop by and mop our deck. Of course, it could be that the only attraction is water – bees use water for cooling and for baking beebread. However, even though there is water everywhere after a rain, the only bees that I see gathering water are on our deck. (It’s possible that I simply don’t see bees that are in the grass or on nearby rocks.)

I don’t mind. There aren’t many.  If there were hundreds, I’d try to figure out how to evict the bees.  However, I have a minor concern for our dog. He’s a handsome yearling, smart when he wants to be, but sometimes dumb as a stick. He tries to sniff the bees. I’ve also caught him trying to pick one up with his teeth. He is yet to be stung, but it seems inevitable.

Close encounter with a honey bee.

I’ve asked beekeeper friends who tell me that pets can have similar reactions as humans, ranging from benign, but painful, learning experiences to severe systemic reactions.  It’s the latter that I worry about, of course. If he only gets a big swollen face, we can feed him with a syringe for a couple of days. But if it’s a serious reaction, do we give the little fellow antihistamines and a stab from the epipen?

I’ve checked a couple of vet websites. The information is surprisingly familiar – try to remove the stinger to stop the injection of venom, monitor the amount of swelling, call a vet.  All of that’s the same as I would do for a toddler, including calling a vet. If breathing becomes impaired, Benadryl is recommended (our dog is mostly fluff so the dose would be really small). I saw no mention of epinephrine, but I think I would steer clear of that, unless it looked like our puppy was about to cross the River Styx. I’d like to hear from readers – has your pet been stung? Have you trained your animals to avoid sniffing venomous insects? Do you have any suggestions that might reduce the risk of stings?

Posted in Stings, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Eva Crane: Nuclear Physicist, Beekeeper

Posted on June 11, 2018 by Ron Miksha

June 12th.  I have an excuse to write a bit about the amazing Ethel Eva Widdowson, born in London on June 12th, 1912. By age 30, she had defended her doctorate in nuclear physics, begun to teach at Sheffield University, married stockbroker James Crane, changed her name to Eva Crane, and took home a beehive as a gift from a wedding guest.

It may seem odd to receive honeymoon bees, but it was 1942. England was at war. Sugar was rationed. Those bees were intended to help the newlyweds through the wartime food shortages. Unexpectedly,  the bees led to a whole new career for Dr. Eva Crane.

Photo from cover of the book
Eva Crane : bee scientist 1912-2007
edited by Walker and Jones

Eva Crane studied the sciences. She was one of only two women earning a maths degree at King’s College London in 1933. This was followed by an MSc in quantum mechanics in 1935 and her PhD in nuclear physics in 1937. Shortly after, she began lecturing. She could have led an outstanding life as a theoretical physicist, but alas, her bees got in the way.

In the early 1940s, she moved from the male-dominated math and physics field to an amazing career in the arguably more male-centric world of bees. Today, with about half of new beekeepers female, we forget that bee clubs in Crane’s day were completely under the thumbs of men – usually fussy old gentlemen with starched collars. They tolerated women as organizers of beekeepers’ picnics and (sometimes) as secretaries of their clubs.

To suggest women had a subservient role is to make an understatement. During the 1940s, Gleanings in Bee Culture hosted a regular column about beekeeping titled ‘Spinster Jane Says’, which I presume was written by a female writer. In Dr. Crane’s day, women also appeared in bee magazines as authors of “Home Cooking” pages, as did ‘Mrs. Benj. Neilsen’ who explained how to make Christmas fruit cake with honey in the December, 1943, issue of Gleanings.

There were rare exceptions, as Kentucky Chief Apiarist Tammy Horn Potter notes in her books Bees in America, and especially Beeconomy. In many cultures, bees are a thing that women do, but in the west during the past centuries, it’s been largely a male domain. As late as the 1970s, when I moved to Saskatchewan to beekeep, I was appalled when the Saskatchewan Chief Apiary Inspector published a piece about the woman’s role in operating a honey house. In the July, 1979, issue of the American Bee Journal, he wrote,

“I maintain that women have a penchant or inclination towards tidyness and cleanliness. It is both part of their nature and part of their training. . . One of the prime answers to an untidy, unsanitary honey extracting set-up would be to get the man out of the extracting plant and into the field and put a tidy, neat and authoritative woman in charge of the extracting, for where cleanliness has become a habit it has ceased to be a chore.”  – Ed Bland, 1979.

So, in 1979, an authoritative woman might have been running a honey kitchen, but few were researching and writing about bees. For example, roughly 300 of the volumes in my home bee library were published before 1960. Of those, only eleven were written by women. That’s about 4%.  (I also have 550 bee books published after 1960 – 15% written by women.)  My point is not to redress any historic bias against women in the western world’s beekeeping (I’m not the best person to do that!), but rather to describe the world of beekeeping when Dr. Eva Crane became part of it.

Upon receiving her beehive/wedding gift, Eva Crane subscribed to a bee journal and joined the local bee club. Three years into beekeeping, in 1945, she published an article about mead and another about honey.

True to the times, soon after acquiring her first hive, Dr. Crane became secretary of the British Beekeepers Association’s research committee. I assume they picked her because they figured that she would listen well, have good penmanship, and take notes accurately. Besides, she had a PhD in nuclear physics.  Actually, I suspect that being ‘secretary’ of the BBA research committee was more akin to being the person who got things done. She quickly moved ahead.

By 1949, Dr. Crane was editing Bee World.  She turned it into a prestigious place to publish. The same year, she was the founding director of the Bee Research Association, later renamed the International Bee Research Association (IBRA). From 1949 to 1962, the IBRA offices were in the Cranes’ living room in Berkshire. But it grew. The organization eventually ended up in Cardiff, Wales.  Beginning in 1962, Dr. Crane edited the IBRA’s Journal of Apicultural Research, as well as Bee World (1949 to 1984).

Dr. Crane not only edited bee journals but wrote hundreds of research articles herself. I used to think of her as a master librarian, a person with an encyclopedic grasp on bee literature. I saw her 700-page books (which featured hundred-page bibliographies) as the tedious and conscientious work of a sequestered bookworm. Then I discovered her travels in pursuit of bee lore. From her New York Times obituary:

For more than a half-century Dr. Crane worked in more than 60 countries to learn more and more about honeybees, sometimes traveling by dugout canoe or dog sled to document the human use of bees from prehistoric times to the present. She found that ancient Babylonians used honey to preserve corpses, that bees were effectively used as military weapons by the Viet Cong, and that beekeepers in a remote corner of Pakistan use the same kind of hives found in excavations of ancient Greece.

The meticulousness of Dr. Crane’s research showed in her examination of ancient rock images involving bees and honey. She studied 152 sites in 17 countries from a register of rock art she established herself for her book “The Rock Art of Honey Hunters” (2001).

Dr. Crane wrote some of the most important books on bees and apiculture, including “The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting” (1999). In a review in The Guardian, the author Paul Theroux, himself a beekeeper, called the book a masterwork “for its enormous scope and exhaustiveness, for being an up-to-date treasure house of apiaristic facts.”

The Guardian wrote this:

Everywhere she went she sampled the life of local people, sometimes in the remotest areas of the world. She went to share her beekeeping knowledge and teach governments, NGOs and farmers, recording these travels in Making a Beeline (2003). Typically, she always claimed to have learned much more than she taught. She acquired a huge collection of beekeeping artefacts that, combined with other materials, constitute the IBRA historical collection. Some 2,000 items have now been digitally photographed and recorded while the actual items will be in an international museum, being established in Belgium.

Eva Crane, 1957, at the world’s largest bee farm (Miel Carlota) in central Mexico.

From her own book, Making a Beeline, written in 2003 at age 91, Eva Crane summarizes her travels to 60 countries, always looking at bees. She recounts the people she met, the hives and flowers she saw, in Cuba (1957), the USSR (1962), Egypt (1978), India (1980), Nepal (1984), Pakistan (1993), Spain (1998), and dozens of other countries. In 1965, Dr. Crane was in my part of Canada.  Here’s a small piece from Making a Beeline which will give you a bit of a taste of the way she saw the world:

In Edmonton [Alberta, Canada] we first went to the provincial TV station, where I was put on a programme “June is the ice cream month”. I was then interviewed at the national TV station, and finally gave a lecture in the university. From Edmonton I went by airbus to Calgary, then to the Federal Research Station at Lethbridge with Jack and Lorraine Edmunds. Dr. Geordie Hobbs was rearing the wild bee Megachile rotundata there, as a substitute for bumblebees which suffered too much from parasites in that area to be useful for crop pollination.

Next day I caught a plane at Calgary to fly east to Saskatchewan for yet another bee meeting and TV interview, at Saskatoon. With Doug McCutcheon the provincial apiarist and Everett Hastings, I went to Everett’s isolated queen mating apiary by Candle Lake. It was some 30 km north of the inhabited area, in forest which stretched uninterrupted to the tundra. To enter the apiary we had to disconnect the anti-bear fences from their batteries, and then unhook five separate strong wires. In the evening sunshine we also explored the edges of Candle Lake, where there were yellow water lilies that the moose liked to eat. Gulls and killdeer (a plover) were on the beach, many duck and mergansers were flying over, and a solitary loon – a diving bird– was just offshore. Moose, elk and bears all live here but none of them came our way.

Doug took me further east to Nipawin to visit Dr. Don Peer whom I had met in 1953 when he was a graduate student in Madison, Wisconsin. He had now developed large-scale beekeeping on scientific lines, and had 1,000 or more hives. He bought packages of bees each spring and made two-queen colonies from pairs of them. Each of these had 90 to 100,000 bees by July, and could store 20 kg of honey a day from the main flow – mostly from legumes, alfalfa and fireweed.

Lest we dismiss her life’s work as last century news, I would argue that the relevance of history is eternal. Dr. Crane’s endless travels, writing, and documenting played a role in understanding something of concern to almost every beekeeper today – varroa mites.  During her travels in the 1960s in the USSR, she noted that western honey bees kept in Russia’s far east Primorsky Krai area (just north of Korea’s Apis cerana bees) had become hosts of varroa. The mite came from the local Asian bees which have had varroa for aeons.

You may know that varroa coexists with cerana without killing Apis cerana but when the mite jumped to our western honey bee (Apis mellifera), it was devastating. Dr. Crane noticed that some Russian Apis mellifera had managed to adapt to the parasites. She wrote about it. Researchers, reviewing the bee literature when varroa arrived in the USA, noticed Crane’s article. They sent scientists to Russia and came back with the (somewhat) resistant bee which North Americans now call ‘The Russian Bee’.  If you have these, you can thank Dr. Crane. (And, of course, the USDA.)

Dr. Eva Crane’s early affliction with the bee bug was total. She never recovered, remaining smitten sixty years later when she was still contributing articles to bee journals. You can access dozens of them at the Eva Crane Trust. They are free to download (but please read the rules). Articles cover subjects as diverse as Honey from different insects to  English beekeeping from 1200 to 1850 and Import of Packages into Britain in 1963.

Dr. Eva Crane was 71 when she published The Archaeology of Beekeeping (1983), 78 when she released Bees and Beekeeping (1990), and 87 when her 700-page World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (1999) was published.  She died in 2007. By then, she had 312 publications. The last, “The beginning of beekeeping in Siberia”, was an article printed in Journal of Apicultural Research months before her death at age 95.

Posted in Books, History, People | Tagged | 5 Comments

My Annual ALS Post

Posted on June 10, 2018 by Ron Miksha

I have a type of motor neuron disease, similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which most people call ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease because that’s easier to say. Every year I do a post about the disease in order to thank, in a small way, the people who participate in annual runs/walks/rolls and other fundraisers held around the world.  Things like The Ice Bucket Challenge have been phenomenal in raising money ($115 million) and awareness – a lot of good stuff has come out of that bucket.

Getting Soaked:  My wife and I accepted the challenge. This was back in 2014.
It looks like my son is enjoying this a bit too much.

After: We were OK.

I was diagnosed with motor neuron disease 20 years ago.  Lucky for me, my motor neuron disorder is atypical ALS, which means it’s not the typical fast-paced disease. Instead, mine has a much slower progression. Normally, ALS paralyzes within two or three years. All motion – walking, talking, breathing, everything – stops. Unless the afflicted chooses a respirator, feeding tube, and constant nursing care, the patient dies. However, the brain is unaffected.

hawking

Using assists like ventilators and aides is how Stephen Hawking survived to 76 – a respectable age for any man, but incredible for someone living with the ALS diagnoses for 50 years. His ALS started early and progressed slowly, but he had equipment and full-time nursing help.

When Stephen Hawking was diagnosed in his 20s with ALS, his doctors gave him a grim prognosis – they figured he wouldn’t see 30. Hawking said that he was devastated but decided to work on his PhD anyway. And get married. And have kids. And travel. And write. And, of course, he figured out a few things about the universe. Professor Hawking died earlier this year. We might not understand all of his maths and physics, but Stephen Hawking gave us all a lesson in perseverance and tenacity. I think that was his greatest gift.

No one knows why my form of motor neuron disease is so unusually slow. Mine started at age 44 so I’ve been living with my variant of motor neuron disorder for 20 years. Mine is progressive – I can’t walk much any more and my arms and hands are weaker every year, but that’s not too bad after such a long time. It will continue to get worse, but if the progression remains slow, I’ll be blogging for many years to come.

A friend asked me if all those thousands of bee stings I’d had over the years made the difference, but other beekeepers I’ve known (commercial beeman Ernie Fuhr from the Peace River country, up near the Yukon; and, Bill Turner from our own Calgary Bee Club) were both killed by this disease. Recently, a group looking at alternative treatments for ALS reviewed bee venom and found that it was unlikely to be helpful.

The discovery of a cure for ALS and the funding of equipment (motorized wheelchairs, ramps, beds, vans, ventilators) takes a bit of money. The Ice Challenge and all those fundraising programs contributed a lot. If you’d like to help, please give a few dollars to Margot and her family’s fundraiser. Margot, a geophysicist, has been a friend of mine since our days at the University of Saskatchewan. Here’s a link to the site where you may contribute ten or twenty dollars, if you like.

Calgary’s biggest ALS Alberta fundraiser is called “Betty’s Run”.  One of the corporate sponsors is a company called Pure Sweet Honey Farm, owned by my friends Stan and Willy. They have been supporting Betty’s Run for years. We owe a huge, huge thank you to these people. I met Stan and Willy when they kept bees in Florida and my hives were near theirs. We lived in the same cheap, rundown rental trailer park and we all owned our respective 20-year-old flatbed trucks. Business partners Stan and Willy went on to found the honey packing company, Pure Sweet Honey, and I disappeared to Canada, but we’ve been in touch ever since.  As Gold sponsors of Betty’s Run, their name and logo appears on signs and two thousand or so runner’s shirts  each year – a good reminder to participants to fuel up on honey for the run!  You can see the logo, left, and below, my kids are modelling this year’s shirts.

Betty’s Run for ALS (actually, Betty’s Run against ALS) was held today, Sunday, June 10th. Not long after 58-year-old Betty Norman died of ALS in 1997, some of her friends decided to honour her memory and raise awareness and funds to fight the disease. This year about 1,500 people participated as walkers and runners. They raised $400,000 for ALS research and to help the organization that provides support (vans, motorized wheelchairs, home care equipment) and outreach programs. During the 22 years of Betty’s Runs, nearly eight million dollars were raised here in Calgary.

The walk/run/roll has become a social event with friends meeting and chatting. I was happy to have had my wife (who was an organizing volunteer for the local ALS society) and my four kids and three grandchildren on past walks. For the smallest kids, the bouncy castle was the main draw. For us older kids, walking 5 kilometres (or being pushed in a chair) gives an opportunity to think about people and the illness. Most participants wore tags that said things like “I’m Here for My Wife” or “I’m Here for Jim”. My tag said “I’m Here for Everyone” as a reminder that everyone is affected, directly or indirectly by this illness.

Posted in Apitherapy, Culture, or lack thereof, Friends, Outreach | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Celebrating Pollination Week

Posted on June 6, 2018 by Ron Miksha

National Pollinator Week is coming, June 18-24. You have less than two weeks to get your affairs in order.  I’m not always sure what a person is supposed to do when National (fill-in-the-blank) Day/Week/Month is celebrated. Well, it’s pretty obvious that National Honey Fudge Day is a day to eat lots of honey fudge without any thought about your islets of Langerhans. But what does one do during Pollinator Week?

We can take a clue from the Pollinator Partnership, which tells us, “National Pollinator Week is a time to celebrate pollinators and spread the word about what you can do to protect them.”  It’s significant that eleven years ago, when colony collapse was at its peak and the end of civilization was near, the US Senate approved “National Pollinator Week” unanimously.  Unanimously!  Has the US Senate ever approved anything else by undissented decree?  That’s a hundred out of a hundred. Congratulations to them for collaborating, for once, on something important.  They wanted every American to recognize the pollination services provided by birds and bees and beetles and bats.

Birds and bats working saguaro.  (USDA photo)

To help you celebrate, the pollinator people at Pollinator Partnership list some activities on their website. Here are some suggestions:

• Host an educational event at a local library
• Host a pollinator festival or native plant sale
• Plant habitat in your backyard using native plants
• Host a nature walk or pollinator expert lecture
• Screen a pollinator film
• Pollinator planting day at your school, office, local park, or library
• Build native bee houses
• Display pollinator artwork and outreach materials in your office lobby
• Encourage your governor to sign a proclamation

Look at that last line again: “Encourage your governor.”  I’m in Canada. We don’t have governors. We have a queen and a handful of English royalty on loan occasionally (the British queen is also the Canadian queen). The queen’s rep, when she’s not in Canada (and that’s almost always), is our Governor General, currently former astronaut Julie Payette. She’s the closest we have to someone called ‘Governor”, but not in the American sense. Canada has a National Pollinator Week which I think is on loan from the USA. Maybe we could ask our Governor General to issue proclamations about it.

Our lack of governors didn’t stop me from reading some of the Governors’ Proclamations that are posted on the Pollination Week website.  I was impressed. Several of the supposedly conservative ‘red’ states have remarkably progressive governor proclamation statements. I’ve lived in some of those places and have long realized that rural areas are populated by a lot of people who work to improve their neighbourhood ecology. They’ve told me that the health of flowers depends on the health of pollinators.  Here are a few proclamation excerpts. The full statements are worth a read:

Alabama: “Whereas, pollinator species provide significant environmental benefits that are necessary for maintaining healthy, biodiverse ecosystems, and…”  Nice!

And look at Texas! “Few things in life are as beautiful as a field of native Texas wildflowers. And you can thank a bee for that – or a hummingbird, or even a bat. Pollinators come in all shapes and sizes. While the iconic honeybee is the most well-known, moths, wasps, beetles, butterflies and birds share the load of spreading the pollen that helps plants grow healthy and strong. These creatures help maintain a beautiful and healthy ecosystem.”   The Texas governor even mentions ecosystems!

North Dakota: “Whereas, pollinator species provide significant environmental benefits that are necessary for maintaining healthy, biodiverse ecosystems, and…”  Oh dear. That’s exactly the same line they used in Alabama. Ouch!  Well, we live in a copy-paste world, don’t we?

Pennsylvania has a Pollination Week proclamation that might have been written by David Suzuki: “Whereas… contributing factors such as loss of habitat, chemical misuse, and invasive plant and animal species have affected our natural pollinators; and… Whereas, the domesticated honey bee, many species of butterflies, moths, birds, bats, and other pollinators are in retreat, threatening not only the production of commercial crops, but also a wide range of flowering plants, including rare and endangered species; and…”

In contrast, progressive California where left-leaning Jerry Brown is governor, has a rather subdued proclamation. What’s Jerry got against pollinators? Probably nothing, but his team could have written something more inspiring than “…the state of California provides producers with conservation assistance to promote wise stewardship of lands and habitats, including the protection and maintenance of pollinators on working land and wild lands…” and yaddah yaddah. Signed Jerry Brown.

If you have time, read a few of the proclamations yourself. If you are in the USA, look up your own governor’s proclamation.  If you like what you see, send your governor a note, or suggest changes if you must.  Although I tend toward cynicism, the statements seem more than trite political lip-service about good earthly stewardship. And that means something.

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Ecology, Outreach, Save the Bees | Tagged , | 3 Comments