Our summer is drawing to a close. After record-breaking heat, we’re now getting seasonal temperatures (though no frost yet, which is unusual). Fortunately, we are having some much-needed rain. In the heat of summer, I set up our solar wax melter. Now it’s time to put it in the garage.
In all my decades of beekeeping, I never owned a solar wax melter. (Actually, one of my brothers built one for my honey farm a few years, but the design wasn’t quite right – it was too big, too deep, and not easily turned to catch the sun.) Two years ago, I bought a small one, designed for hobby beekeeping. It is light-weight, easily rotates into the right position, and produces beautiful sun-drenched yellow wax.
This melter, built by Uncle Lee’s Bees in Calgary, is almost perfect. It quickly builds a high temperature. It is easy to load and clean. I find it hard to believe that it was designed, produced, and sold for just a few hundred dollars. (You can buy one from Worker and Hive in Calgary.) On the other hand, it would take a hobby beekeeper a few years of wax sales to earn the $335CAN ($260US) that it cost. But that’s not the point. Producing nice-quality wax and doing it cleanly, efficiently, using the sun’s energy – and not on the kitchen stove! – is the real point. We found that this melter took the pressure off the kitchen, kept bowls and cutlery from being destroyed, and saved on our electric bill.
If you don’t have one of these remarkable gadgets, consider getting one. There are a lot of designs available. We like ours, especially since it works so well and was manufactured in our own city. If you don’t have your own solar-wax-melter factory nearby, here’s the link to buy one made in Calgary.
To keep debris out of the wax, we use a disposable dish cloth (a roll of 50 will cost less than $10) – disposable, but also reusable (we run three or four cycles on each, depending on how much junk is in the wax being melted). Here in Calgary, the melter only works on bright sunny days, though melting begins at ambient temperatures as low as 15C (60F). We usually revolve the box three times (or whenever we think about it) to catch the most direct sunshine. We don’t use any water in the plastic tray that catches the wax drippings. If the wax is from fresh cappings, there will be quite a bit of honey in it, which will be dark but not burnt-flavoured. I save it for my tea.
Some photos of our deck’s summertime conversation piece:
If you sell your wax at craft-store prices (and you should), you might get $20/pound and actually pay for the melter within your lifetime. Amazon has some good-quality beeswax at $160/pound ($10/ounce). At that rate, the melter pays for itself in a couple of sunny days.
Or, you might simply make some duck candles and charge a couple hundred dollars for each.
Good scientists do their best to remove bias from their observations and experiments. Statistical methods such as blocking, double-blind trials, use of appropriate controls, and randomization are among their key tools. Results are suspect when hypotheses are designed after data are collected, when confirmation bias, cultural bias, and other errors of judgment creep into experimentation, analysis, and interpretation.
The researchers performed a deep dive into literature associated with studies of plants in the southwestern Alps, determining which species were most researched by scientists exploring the plants in this biodiverse area. They looked at a few hundred published papers and demonstrated that
morphological and colour traits, as well as range size, have significantly more impact on species choice for wild flowering plants than traits related to ecology and rarity.
Specifically, the Martino team found disproportionate research was conducted on pretty flowers.
This analysis indicated how the choice of investigated species across the literature in the last 45 years has been strongly influenced by plant traits related to aesthetics.
Aesthetics. Prettiness. It’s sad that this equates to greater scientific curiosity. But it does.
The researchers found a significant relationship between the number of published papers and flower colour. Blue flowers were the most studied. White and red/pink were much more studied than ugly-duckling brown or green flowers.
. . . traits such as bright colours, accessible inflorescences and conspicuousness are shown to drive research attention, highlight what we call an aesthetic bias in plant research. While aesthetics is today used to refer to art and beauty (often in direct opposition to scientific values like objectivity), the Greek root of the word refers to sensory perception. . . Here it is interesting to note that humans have evolved trichromacy, that is the separate perception of wavelength ranges corresponding to blue, red and green regions through specialized structures. It has been speculated that the evolutionary acquisition of colour vision in humans and other primates led to an increased ability to locate ripe fruits against a green background. The human eye is thus optimized to perceive green, red and blue which, according to colour psychology theory, also greatly impacts people’s affection, cognition and behaviour. The evolved and physiological aspect of human perception is also demonstrably affected by sociocultural factors, since education, class, gender, age, cultural background all shape how we perceive the world. . . What matters is that this bias affects the representativity of data used to ground research priorities and conservation policies and, as such, risks compromising efforts to effectively focus plant conservation activities and preserve plant biodiversity.
There was also a significant positive effect of plant stem height and a weak negative effect of flower size on research interest – taller plants have more easily accessible inflorescences. (Who wants to crawl on hands and knees to examine ugly flowers?) Finally, the scientists found that there is a positive effect of range size on research interest. This might mean that a broad range makes a species available to more researchers, increasing the likely that it would be studied. But broadly distributed plants are less prone to extinction. For many ecosystems, uncharismatic species with a constricted range might manifest an unexplored, out-sized environmental niche effect of great importance. But we won’t know if we avoid studying ugly organisms.
All of this should be very concerning for anyone interested in understanding ecological systems as completely as possible – without ugly data missing. The authors suggest that “when plant scientists select to study a specific wild plant among the pool of species available in a given study region, it may be that factors unrelated to the biological question end up influencing species choice and introducing biases in the research outcome.” I doubt that many of us recognize how this unintended bias could skew our understanding of an ecological system or landscape.
But I’ll conclude with this contradictory message. If we realize that our research has a bias, and we focus on ways to mitigate it, then maybe it’s not so bad to disproportionately investigate the charismatic. Most of us don’t explore nature in a social vacuum. We are attracted to pretty things. We need funding. We want public appreciation for our conclusions. It’s easier to get money and attention for a project studying the handsome and beguiling than the homely and beleaguered.
Few creatures are as charismatic as bumble bees – except, perhaps honey bees. To me. They have my attention. So, I study them, day and night. But I’ll try to be more aware of the hundreds of other (less charismatic) animals with whom they share their patch of earth.
Some of the damage was already repaired when this picture was taken. (Credit: Charlotte Funke)
Our part of the world (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) has been home to black bears and grizzlies for about ten-thousand years. In recent days, they’ve mostly resided in the zoo and probably as household pets in a few basements – though I hope not. When bears wander into town from the Rocky Mountain foothills, they are quickly trapped and moved away. Rather than joining Timmy’s dog on a canine retirement farm in upstate New York, they tend to find themselves released somewhere along the eastern slopes.
People who live in our nearby foothills, or higher up along the slopes, are in bear country. Bears might wonder into a bee yard anytime from perhaps March to November, depending in the weather. One July, we had a grizzly dig under a fence at one of our higher-elevation yards, while another year, a gigantic early-August black bear was chased out of one of our locations by my brother, who yelled and chased the bear. My brother said that he made a big mistake. Don was armed with only a hivetool and ended up quite a distance from the truck when the bear stopped, turned towards him, and rose up on its back legs, over a head taller than my 6-foot-tall brother. As Don tells it, the bear looked at him from just a dozen metres away, then slowly dropped back onto all fours and ambled away – without eating my brother. Lucky Don.
I just received some notes and images from a beekeeper who lives half an hour west of Calgary. Charlotte Funke has a tidy bit of land with Bed and Breakfast lodgings in Bragg Creek, Alberta. She keeps several beehives near her house. All the pictures (and the video) on this web page are from her and her security cameras. One young black bear did all the damage you see here, all in one night. Although there is a well-constructed fence, she tells me that the gate to the fence was misaligned when it was latched this weekend. The hot line was grounded, and the bear entered the bee yard. You can see, in the next picture, that the fence, if properly-powered, should withstand most bear visits. (The arrow shows how the gate wasn’t hooked up correctly. It was accidentally hooked to the ground wire because the cotter pin on the last live wire had fallen off.)
It’s shocking how quickly a single bear can destroy an apiary. (A married couple is twice as bad.) I’ve seen big bears lift and carry away a hive, dropping it several metres away, probably thinking it had to take its food to the dining area. The bear featured on this page sat in place, eating. This awakened the human family whose approach scared the bear into a tree. It stayed there for an hour while they cleaned up the mess. You can see some of the damaged equipment. Bears eat wood, wax, and wires to get at the brood.
Finally, a video taken by security cameras. It was dark, the bear was at a distance, but you can see the bear, ‘hiding’ behind the tree before climbing up the first night, when the damage was done. The bear came back the following night, but by then the fence had been fixed and kept the bear out. A large, hungry bear might still bust through an electrified fence, anxious to fill its belly and add body fat, as bears must do in the autumn. Hopefully, this young one has had enough trouble and will look for easier pickings elsewhere.
Sound up. I was whispering in this voice-over . . .
Although my life has centred on honey bees, I realize that they are not the only bee species in town. Here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, we have about 200 species of bees – from giant bumble bees to rather petite sweat bees. Most have specific roles in our city’s ecology, pollinating wildflowers that few other insects visit.
Our local wild bees include over a dozen species of bumble bees. Through my research (investigating how honey bees and native bees interact), I learned to appreciate bumble bees for a lot of reasons, including their precarious lifecycle – a mated queen hibernates alone for seven or eight wintery months, emerges to find a home in the spring, lays a few dozen eggs (caring for the first batch by herself), then lays the eggs that become drones as well as next year’s queens before she dies in late summer). Anywhere along the way, the chain might be broken, the bee nest doomed.
Bumble bees aren’t tidy housekeepers. (Miksha)
Although the bumble bee lifecycle is insecure, we delight in seeing the husky bees affably buzzing among the flowers. Bumble bees look so clean and tidy that we are surprised by their unkempt nests with bits of leaf, seed, dead bees, and haphazardly strewn nectar and brood cell cups. (Bumble bees are messy housekeepers!)
Working with bumble bees, we also discover that they almost never sting while working away from their hive. However, they are indignant and persistent defenders when their homes are disturbed. I’ve been stung by bumble bees dozens of times while digging into nests during my research. They mostly strike eyes and lips, sting multiple times without losing stingers, and don’t respond to smoke. I find that their stings, while persistently striking an offender, have only about half the pain impact of honey bee stings, and a quarter that of wasps. Your own experience may vary.
A University of Calgary student, Tobyn Neame and their supervisor, Dr. Mindi Summers, have produced an excellent field guide of the various species of bumble bees in Calgary. Along with my suggestions and some data, the artwork of Sarah Ritchie and Tobyn Neame, and the contributions of taxonomist Lincoln Best (who can identify the species and sex of any local pollinator flying on its way to a meadow), the team produced a valuable book about bumble bees.
Reduced-size sample page from the bumble bee field guide by Tobyn Neame, Sarah Ritchie, and Mindi Summers
Even if you are not in the Calgary area, you will be enchanted by this field book’s information and artistry. The easy-to-use guide details locating, photographing, and identifying bumble bees. Many of these Calgary bumble bees also reside across the North American west, the prairies, and mountainous areas – so the guide’s utility stretches beyond our city. If your own environment does not include any of the species highlighted here, you may consider creating a similar book for your own community: Tobyn Neame’s work will inspire your effort.
I had a wonderful interview with Sylvia and Luca from Vitamina Bee, an Italian videography/website. We touched on everything from veganism to bee-on-bee competition, the history of beekeeping, my Master’s research, and my early life on a farm with nine siblings.
You’ll know more about me than you need to know, but it was quite interesting to contrast European beekeeping (in Italy) with my North American misadventures. Enjoy!
A couple of evenings ago, I Zoomed into a Western Apicultural Society mini-conference. This is a new monthly affair for the 43-year-old educational organization. The mini-conference is one of the few positive results of the dreadful Covid lockdown. Virtual conferences such as this have sprung up among civic groups, and I’m grateful to the Western Apicultural Society (WAS) president and leader, Jerry Bromenshenk of the University of Montana, for his tireless dedication to WAS. Jerry and a small group within WAS organize these well-attended monthly conferences. You can still watch any that you missed – WAS has archived a dozen conference videos on YouTube.
The mini-conference panelist musings will be posted next week on the WAS Video page. Meanwhile, I’ll write a bit about why I tuned in. Although my question was not directly addressed, I was keenly curious about the financial well-being and long-term prospects of printed bee media. With free beekeeping information available on podcasts, blogs, and free papers, will our favourite beekeeping magazines be around forever? (American Bee Journal is already 160 years old!) Of course, my question was intended to get the editors talking about the future and how they might adapt. But, as I said, my submitted question wasn’t tackled.
I did, however, glean a bit (albeit indirectly) from the conversation. The bee publishing industry is apparently healthy. Subscription numbers are similar to levels I remember seeing many years ago. I suspect that people are continuing to purchase magazines for two principle reasons: 1) Trust; and 2) Contact.
We trust a bee magazine where expert experienced beekeepers are the editors. They are gatekeepers who reject unsound articles (or relegate them to the ‘letters to the editor’ pages). Unfortunately, there are no sentries stationed atop YouTube channels or blogposts. Without a second opinion, a monitor, a referee, or informed judge, anyone can write anything for anyone on the internet. I know because I get a lot of notes from new beekeepers who have been persuaded by some really peculiar advice and then refuse to take the truth for an answer. Nevertheless, there is some good information on the web. But it’s not curated information – it is up to you to curate the authors. That can be a lot of work. Sometimes you think that you’ve found a good source but it turns out to be a dog that’s doing the typing.
Purchasing a subscription to a magazine gives a special contact, or connection, to a bee communicator. You don’t always get the same feeling from a keyboard and monitor. Paying for a magazine is a bit like joining a club. Your money helps pay the editor’s salary and the fee given to authors. You are not just a guest, but a co-owner. (Admittedly, my own blog’s viewers number in the tens of thousands each month and many have become ‘net friends and regular commentators.)
The other form of contact is purely tactile. One of the editors during the WAS discussion mentioned that he likes holding a magazine. Probably most people do, though I prefer reading from screens. However, I still get great pleasure from hoarding printed books and magazines. Nevertheless, I figured that most people are moving towards digital, but one panelist on the WAS program indicated that only 600 or so buy digital – that would be well less than 10% of the subscribers. I was quite surprised at the low number.
My conclusion is that bee magazine publishing is a healthy industry and may be around for a long time. Beekeepers’ habits are slow to change and we tend to be loyal customers. We will keep buying bee journals. In fact, the advent of the current windfall of free beekeeping information – with its biased foibles and irregular quality – may actually convince many people that a small investment in a magazine subscription is the safest way to stay up-to-date.
Today is a special day. It’s Nikola Tesla Day. But, it’s also the anniversary the first day of the “Scopes Monkey Trial”, which started on a sultry Tennessee morn, almost 100 years ago. And it’s Don’t Step on a Bee Day – let’s see if we can keep that up all week!
Also, on this brilliant July Tesla-Scopes-Don’t-Step-on-a-Bee Day, I am breaking my long self-imposed blogging hiatus. I’m doing that with an important public-service announcement.
Many of you know that I have a motor neuron disorder (similar to ALS). For me, typing, guitaring, walking, and singing Verdi’s La Traviata have become increasingly difficult. You’d think that would be enough of a challenge, but in late May, I decided to have a heart attack. For extra drama, I scheduled it on my wife’s birthday, following a lovely meal of our favourite East Indian take out. (Restaurants were still Covid-closed at the time, so we ate at home with the kids.)
Here’s my PSA. If you’ve just had a delicious dinner with family and you start to have serious heart burn, maybe it’s something else. After our dinner, I felt awfully unwell – dizzy and weak with uncomfortable chest pains. The birthday girl suggested that we visit the hospital, but I wasn’t interested in going anywhere. I was sure I had overeaten, and in half an hour, I was feeling better and shuffled off to bed. However, I had barely touched the pillow when I had a painful jolt to the chest, neck, and arms. No one in my large family had ever had a heart attack, so I quickly ruled that out. However, I was feeling quite badly and agreed to go to the hospital. Within half an hour, I was wired up and blood tests were happening. Then I had the third heart attack of the evening. It was very serious. A few hours later, doctors placed a stent in a primary artery entering my heart – it was almost completely clogged with bacon grease.
So, my PSA-warning to everyone reading this. Even if you and your ancestors have no history of heart issues, even if you are not overweight, even if your last cholesterol blood work was fine, you need to know the signs of a heart attack and be prepared to expect the unexpected. Some of the signs which I ignored were long-term fatigue and swollen feet. That had been going on for months. The immediate signs which took me to the hospital were severe pain in my chest and arms. Don’t be a Ron. Take these signs as deadly serious warnings.
I am still recovering and have reduced my work, but I hope to get back to blogging about bees regularly again. Today is a start. Meanwhile, pay attention to your body – and don’t step on a bee, either.
The link to this video came to me from Gorazd Pavčnik, who lives in the land where two of my grandparents were born. These Slovenian singers have incredible harmony. Singing and beekeeping are national pastimes in Slovenia – here they combine sweetly. Hope you enjoy the sound (and the scenes of beekeeping in the little Alpine country). Volume up!
World Bee Day, 2021: World Bee Day is on May 20 of each year. It’s not just about honey bees. Although the idea arose in Slovenia, a little country that’s really big on honey-bee keeping, it’s also a celebration of all the world’s bees – about 20,000 species – made up of several trillion individuals.
Bees of all sorts are the chief pollinators of the world’s flowers. The flowers that attract bees reseed meadows and forests with progeny that build soil, feed grazing animals, and provide us – the humans – with much of the beauty we see in nature and the food we eat.
Today, two popular sites have picked up my voice about the under-rated non-honeybees of the world. Vitamina Bee, an Italian bee blog, featured my recent American Bee Journal article about Bee-washing, the unfortunate phenomenon of making money by exaggerating the benefits of keeping a beehive atop an asbestos plant’s office tower – or doing some equally preposterous antics to advertise a corporation’s green credentials.
The other place amplifying my messages on biodiversity and bees is Twinkl, a website dedicated to helping teachers and parents. At that site, the Twinklers are celebrating World Bee Day 2021 by describing the importance of bees, giving tips on helping bees, and printing comments from Planet Bee, Linda’s Bees, and me. You can see Twinkl’s full 2,000-word resource at The Importance of Bees: An Easy Guide.
In a future post, I’ll come back to both Vitamina Bee and Twinkl with more details on Bee-washing and on the importance of bees. Meanwhile, I’m reprinting some of my pieces from World Bee Days of the past. Be sure to read my brief history of World Bee Day (below), which arose from the tiny European country of Slovenia and celebrates bees of all types while commemorating the work of the pioneering beekeeper, Anton Janša.
Dogwood tree in full glory
From 2020: Looking at things from a practical, but dysfunctional, utilitarian perspective, we might wonder if we really need 20,000 kinds of bees. Aren’t honey bees enough? They pollinate our foods – almonds and apples and so on – while many important foods (rice, wheat, corn) are wind-pollinated. Yet we have a vast array of bees that are not honey-makers. Some of the many ‘extra’ bee species are specialists. For example, the dogwood tree, genus Cornus, are kept alive in part by three rare species of miner bees, the Andrena. Take away the dogwood, with its bold early flash of spring brightness, and the Appalachians would be a more dreary place. In the years when I drove truck loads of honey bees from Florida to Saskatchewan, white and pink dogwoods and yellow forsythia were harbingers of the birth of a new year’s honey cycle. The irony is not lost on me – I carted millions of honey bees (which originated in Europe) from Florida’s orange trees (originally from southeast Asia) to prairie alfalfa (a native of the Middle East). Yet, during my 4,000-kilometre migration, one of the most beautiful sights was the blossoming native dogwood, sustained by a tiny native bee.
We might dismiss the role of the other (approximately) 19,999 species of bees as long as we are keeping our favoured western honey bee functioning. But every species has a role to play in our ecology. The loss of a few kinds of bees (some species have recently gone extinct) may seem trivial. They may pass unmourned, except by the plants which relied on them for transferring their pollen, and the animals which survived off those plants. The interconnection of the web reminds me of the centuries-old proverb which begins, “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost…” and continues until the entire kingdom was lost.
The BBC, in a little piece about World Bee Day, recounts the 17 bee species which have gone extinct in England’s southeast and the plight of 25 more species that are threatened. The article recognizes the interconnected state of biodiversity and ecology and illuminates the importance of a day for the bees.
So, on this year’s World Bee Day, I’m thinking of the ‘other’ bees as well as those two colonies of honey bees in my back yard. Meanwhile, I’m ending this note with a bit more about bee day, including a bit (published over the past few years) about how World Bee Day came into existence.
From 2019: May 20th should be a big date on the beekeeper’s social calendar. It’s World Bee Day. Why did I mention 1734? That’s the year Anton Janša was born. He was baptized on May 2oth, the closest date we know to his actual birthdate. Some say that Janša was the first modern beekeeper. You can learn more about him later in this blog post.
As an added bonus, May 20 is also another famous beekeeper’s memorial day. Charles Dadant, the scion of the infinite Dadant and Sons progression of beekeepers was born in France in 1817. Dadant thought he’d be a revolutionary back in the day, in France, but he ended up in America. (You can read his story in my piece celebrating his 200th year.) Charles Dadant, born on May 20, 1817, ended up in western Illinois where he wanted to grow grapes for wine. Lucky for us, his beehives did much better than his vineyards.
World Bee Day was initiated in Slovenia, Europe, and has been quickly catching around the world. For example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel concluded a major speech Wednesday with a rousing endorsement of World Bee Day, telling members of the Bundestag to do something good for the bees:
“I want to finish with something that some may consider insignificant but is actually very important: on May 20 is the first World Bee Day. On this day we should really think about biodiversity and do something good for the bees.”
World Bee Day became World Bee Day after a successful campaign by the country of Slovenia (Anton Janša’s birthplace) to promulgate the message. Their petition to the United Nations was accepted in December 2017, so this year marks the first official World Bee Day. I’ve been following (and promoting World Bee Day) ever since I heard the effort was underway a couple of years ago, so below you’ll see some of my earlier posts.
Well, a great big congratulations to the Slovenian promoters of World Bee Day. You made it happen on the world stage! And beekeepers, it’s your job to go out and spread the good word and “do something good for the bees”. If you need some further inspiration, watch this World Bee Day video to fortify your resolve – it’s about the first hive of honey bees kept at the United Nations in New York City.
FROM 2017: May 20 is World Bee Day. Seems an appropriate day to celebrate the bee. (So was yesterday; tomorrow would be good, too.) It’s spring north of the equator. I don’t want to neglect our friends south of Earth’s belt, but honey bees began their world-wide conquest by expanding from the northern hemisphere. For most of us in the higher (positive) latitudes, May is a fantastic bee month. Colonies expand, swarm, and maybe even make a little honey.
Portable apiary in Slovenia. (Photo by David Mikša)
May 20th is also the celebrated birthdate of Anton Janša (1734-1773), the first teacher of modern beekeeping. (It’s ‘celebrated’ on May 20th, which was his baptism date. We don’t know the exact day of his birth.) Anton Janša was Slovenian (hence the funny little squiggle over the ‘s’ in his name). He was so talented that Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa appointed him headmaster at the world’s first beekeeping school, which she built for Janša in Vienna. It’s remarkable that he chose to be baptized on the same day that we would pick centuries later as World Bee Day. That date was chosen and promoted by beekeepers in Janša’s native Slovenia – do the coincidences never end? Now here I am, Ron Mikša (anglicized to Miksha), a bee blogger with grandparents who were born in that part of the world, encouraging you to do a wiggle dance in celebration of World Bee Day this Sunday. Get out and do something beely.
FROM 2016: There’s a small country in Central Europe, a very beautiful alpine country, called Slovenia. Slovenia has only two million people, but this tiny country is very big in beekeeping. Tucked between Italy and Austria, it has both mountains and Mediterranean sea coast, creating enticing niches for bees and beekeepers.
Every Slovene family has at least one beekeeper. I think beekeeping might be enshrined in their constitution. I visited before Slovenia adopted the Euro and I paid for a Laško with coins that had images of bees, not presidents or queens. Beekeeping is taken so seriously that the nation’s unofficial motto is “Land of the Good Beekeepers“. The country produces gourmet honey, offers beekeeping tourism, and likes to point out that the Slovenes – the wealthiest Slavic nation in the world – takes its work ethic from the honey bee. On top of all this, I’m proud to say that two of my grandparents were born in Slovenia! What a remarkable place, eh?
Slovenia convinced the world to recognize World Bee Day, a day for the bees, on the presumed birthday of their most famous beekeeper, Anton Janša.
Janša (pronounced YAN-shah) is a Slovenian national hero and a beekeeper. We don’t really know his birth date – his parents were illiterate farmers and probably wouldn’t have even known (or cared) what year it was. But their church kept track. He was baptized on May 20 in 1734.
Beehive entrance plate, painted by Janša.
The Janša family was impoverished, but three Janša brothers built an art studio in a barn, got noticed by the village priest, and were whisked off to Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburg Empire, which controlled Slovenia at the time. One of the brothers became an arts professor. Another became a beekeeper. The royal beekeeper.
Anton Janša was the beekeeper.Empress Maria Theresa recognized his skill and appointed him as the queen’s own bee man. Janša created the world’s first beekeeping school, wrote a couple of important beekeeping books, and introduced modern apiary management. He championed expanding hive boxes to hold extra honey and he encouraged migratory beekeeping, moving hives toward the foothills in the spring to collect acacia (black locust) honey, the Alps in the summer for honeydew from the pines, and into lower pastures in the fall. He was among the first to realize that drones are not water-carriers, but instead mated in the air with queen bees. This latter discovery pre-dates Francois Huber’s similar observation by a few decades but was not generally known when Huber rediscovered it. Janša did all this before he turned 40 – he was only 39 when he died suddenly from a fever, likely the result of an infection.
Here’s a lovely, short video of what the Slovenes want you to know about World Bee Day:
World Bee Day is a great idea. The exhibition “Save the Bees” will be opening at the historic Ljubljana castle, on May 20. The Slovene embassy in Washington DC had a big party. Elsewhere, awareness and round tables on “Bees and Sustainable Development” and bee memorials abound. World Bee Day is intended as a day to reflect upon the much maligned and threatened bees. A delegation of the European Union is also meeting May 20 with luminaries of the American bee world at a World Bee Initiative, which you can read about here.
World Bee Day is immensely important. Maybe that’s why there are two world bee days. A group of Americans petitioned the USDA to create a World Bee Day of their own – on August 20th. While the Americans worked their idea through the US Congress, the Slovenes asked the United Nations to recognize May 20th as World Bee Day. I’m not sure how all this will play out, maybe the two world bee days will merge and be observed sometime in June or July. But I suppose both world bee days will persist, one on a world-scale, the other in the USA. As they say back at the bee lodge, “You can’t have too many World Bee Days, eh?”
I’m in western Canada, near the Rockies. We have long, cold winters. Spring comes late. So, I’ve always kept honey bee hives wrapped late into the spring. That used to be a real chore 20 years ago when hives were packaged in scratchy pink insulation shrouded in black building paper. Eventually, a beekeeper grows tired of all the fuss and puts away the material by about May first.
These days, with polystyrene hive bodies and/or easily installed winter jackets, it’s much simpler to remove wraps, work hives, then redress the colonies. Since this process takes just a few minutes, we can keep hives wrapped a lot later. How much later?
I recall friends in northern Saskatchewan who forgot one of their forty yards until early July, when the farmer/landlord called to ask if they planned on unwrapping their bees. That yard was in excellent shape, with beards covering all the winter wraps. I was told it was their best yard that year. Maybe it was a combination of luck, lack of mites, lots of feed, and all that insulation that helped the bees do so well. They didn’t do this unintended experiment again, and I wondered why. Is it because “it’s not what beekeepers do” or was it a recognition that they were just lucky? Next year, the planets might not align the same way.
One of the best rules-of-thumb for northern beekeepers on the American continent is an adage I’ve heard from other beekeepers: “Honey bees aren’t safe until the dandelion flow.” Until that time, a cold snap can chill brood and a long, lingering cool spell can lead to adult attrition – “spring dwindling” as it used to be called.
So, we have a clear milestone for unwrapping the hives and sleeping well at night: dandelion time. Depending on weather, dandelions bloom with intensity sometime between mid-April to late May.
For many years, here in Calgary, the peak dandelion flow was a few days either side of May 25. I used to teach this in our beginning beekeeping course. Then, a few years ago, peak dandelion was April 28. That year, the bloom was followed by strong sunshine and lack of rain, putting an end to the early flow. In thirty years of living and beekeeping in Calgary, I had never seen it come and go so quickly.
I started tracking peak dandelion and quit assuming it would occur on May 25. Now, thirty years on, it looks like May 15 is a better guess. An earlier dandelion flow is not necessarily a good thing. It might lengthen the dearth between spring flowers and dandelion and the typical start to sweet clover – unless, of course, sweet clover also begins to bloom earlier in these days of rapid climate change.
I have a few years of observations, but my records are nothing to boast about, especially compared to the longest-running ecological observations in the world.
Since 812, monks in Kyoto, Japan, have been meticulously observing peak cherry-tree blossoming every year. That’s 1200 years of notes. This year, 2021, peak cherry blossom happened on March 26, the earliest date ever recorded. Especially troubling is the trendline, below, which shows blossoms much earlier than in the past. (I created this chart from data kept at Osaka University. You can download your own copy here.)
The blue dots, above, are recorded peak blossoming dates while the red line is the polynomial trend line that best fits these data. If this trend continues into the future and is seen where you keep bees, be prepared for some unusual honey seasons. Already, here in southern Alberta, we have gained 17 growing days in the past 70 years. Whether you think a longer growing season in the area surrounding Calgary is good or bad, it certainly is different than it used to be.
Since 812, monks in Kyoto, Japan, have been meticulously observing peak cherry-tree blossoming every year. That’s 1200 years of notes. This year, 2021, peak cherry blossom happened on March 26, the earliest date ever recorded. Especially troubling is the trendline, below, which shows blossoms much earlier than in the past. (I created this chart from data kept at Osaka University. You can 
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