A few days ago, I wrote about the way new beekeepers are generally sure about the right way to keep bees while oldtimers are reticent when it comes to answering questions. Sometimes there are a dozen ways to solve a bee issue but maybe only one of them is right at any particular time. Anyway, on that earlier post, I introduced the following questions which were overheard at a recent bee meeting. I intend to eventually answer all of them. Just keep in mind that my solutions are likely wrong.
Here are some questions that were tossed around at the meeting:
Wasps are attacking my hives. How can I stop them? (Today’s topic)
What’s the best extractor to buy?
There was a pile of brood in front of my hive. Why?
I have four good hives, but I think that the fifth might be queenless. What should I do?
I tried to answer the first question, about uncapped honey, a couple of days ago.
Today, I’m going to look at those nasty wasps. But first, an awful joke: What do you do with a limp wasp? Take it to a waspital. Or, step on it a second time.
Wasps deserve their bad rap. I’ll admit that I don’t like wasps (the insect kind) at all. Their stings are dreadful – one knocked me off a ladder years ago and I’ve never forgiven any of them for that. Even now, I can feel the pain of those stings on my forehead while I was holding paintbrush and paint can. Even now, as I type these words, I get a shutter down my back. The pain is unmended.
My dislike of wasps goes way back. I was a farm kid. If insects didn’t pollinate or produce some sort of crop, they weren’t welcome. I’m trying to come around to the PC view that all of nature’s little buddies have their job to do, but wasps will take me a while.
A decoy wasp nest, spotted in Banff, Alberta. Does this actually work?
Around the apiary, wasps may mean the end of your beekeeping career. We don’t see many wasps in Calgary, where I live now, but up near the Rockies, beekeepers seem to have serious wasp problems. Now that autumn is close and bee populations are dwindling, the harassment caused by wasps is increasing.
What to do? I think you really need to minimize beekeeping activity, reduce entrances and keep colonies strong. Minimize activity by working quickly and deliberately. Don’t leave the covers off while you’re eating your lunch. Reduce entrances. Maybe duct tape holes in boxes and close extra entrances if the wasps are attacking. Keeping colonies strong is good policy all the time. Bees will defend themselves if they can. What about decoy wasp nests? I have no idea if they work.
Strong hives try to fight wasp invasions. Here’s a picture from China. Wasps there attack Apis cerana and Apis mellifera with equal malice. You can see that the bees have surrounded a wasp and are killing it. They have tightened around the intruder, raising body temperatures by 5 ºC – they’ll persist until the wasp is dead.
Last August, my friend Dieter sent me the picture below. It shows a honey excluder which has trapped large black wasps by the dozens. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I don’t know the whole story – maybe wasps had found an upper entrance and were trying to get down to the brood nest. If you look closely, you can see a honey bee near the center, clasping a dead wasp, probably pulling it towards the great garden cemetery just outside the door. All of this is good evidence that small restricted passages (especially since the honey season is over now) and a strong colony are the best defence against these awful dreadful horrible foul deadly creatures.
Dead wasps stuck on excluder. Bee near center is dragging one to the exit. (Photo credit: Dieter Remppel)
The Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Gazettehad a story yesterday about a fellow in Monticello who ran afoul of the law for something he’s growing in his back yard. His crime? Cultivating (Milk)weed.
Bee and butterfly enthusiasts know milkweed. So do curious kids who squeeze the stem and watch white sap drip out. I used to love pulling apart milkweed pods in the fall. I’d liberate the seeds, back in the day when such activity was legal.
Milkweed is the main plant that stands between the fluttering wings of a Monarch Butterfly and extinction. But milkweed is a noxious, obnoxious invasive plant within the city limits of Monticello, Iowa. Mostly because it’s unsightly. Considered invasive in places where manicured lawns and Wal-Mart discount flowers flourish, milkweed is actually native to Iowa. It has fed migrating monarchs for centuries. But Monticello has its rules – no milkweed, no matter how hungry the butterflies get.
At a city council meeting, defendant Michael Felton explained how his property is a designated waystation and restaurant for monarchs heading to Mexico. His milkweed patch is registered and supported by Monarch Watch (and possibly by Prince Charles & Sons’ lesser-known charity, Monarchs for Monarchs).
According to the Gazette, Felton was reminded that inside Monticellian limits, all weeds over 8 inches tall must go. Felton explained that the plants are lovely and he considers them flowers, with all the rights and privileges generally granted to flowers. Council, which apparently sets standards for lawn care as well as definitions for beauty, wasn’t budging on that.
Felton then asked how he should get rid of his cone flowers and milkweed. The answer came quickly from an attending councilman: “Roundup.” Most of my readers know that Roundup is a dandy herbicide that can clean up the nastiest herbal lifeforms, even milkweed, unless the plants contain a patented anti-Roundup GMO gene. That’s an option that could make Mr Felton’s milkweeds Roundup-resistant and I’ll bet money that he hasn’t thought of it.
If you are a beekeeper or beefriend or monarch lover, milkweed has already captured your heart. The lanky, homely weed has nondescript leaves that only a monarch caterpillar would munch and dull flowers that only a hungry bee would seek. But when the weather is right and the stars are aligned, milkweed nectar is collected in great gobs.
Honey from milkweed fills supers and honey jars. Frank Pellett’s American Honey Plants reports that bees sometimes stored over 100 pounds of milkweed honey and, Pellett wrote, in northern Michigan, beekeepers used to expect 50 pounds of light-coloured, mild-flavoured honey every year. Berkshire Farms in western Massachusetts tells us that milkweed is a good honey plant there and it grows in meadows near their old mill house along a river.
So easy to get tangled up here. Also, note the ‘milky’ latex at the branch joint.
There are 55 milkweed species. Some, like the swamp milkweed at the top of this post, have flat flowers, but most are globular, like the one to your left. Honey bees are fond of fragrant milkweed flowers, but sometimes find big trouble while milking the milkweeds. Bees can get trapped by the pollen-containing pollinia. Rather than face certain death in the flower trap, some bees manage to rip off their stuck legs or antennae and then hobble home with a tank of honey. (Others just sit there and die.) If homeward hobblers manage to make it back they’re greeted as disabled veterans by their hive mates – they are dragged out of the nest and exiled until dead. (So much for embracing the bees’ utopian society.)
If you have a hankering to be a rebel with a cause and make urban mischief, here’s a link on How to Grow Milkweed. But beware that you may be breaking some stupid archaic nanny-state law and also be aware that I’m not Donald Trump – I can’t afford to pay your bills if you get sued and need a lawyer. You’re on your own. But here’s that link again, just in case you missed it the first time: How to Grow Milkweed.
Ready or not? This frame is 60% sealed. To be sure it can be safely extracted, test it with a refractometer.
Yesterday, I droned on and on about how beekeepers who are smart and mature don’t know anything. It’s the new beefolks who have all the answers. I’m not quite at the point where I know nothing, so I’m going to try to tackle a few questions that I heard from some bee folks.
Here are some of the questions tossed around last night:
My honey isn’t capped. What should I do with it? (I heard that one from three different beefolks.)
Wasps are attacking my hives. How can I stop them?
What’s the best extractor to buy?
There was a pile of brood in front of my hive. Why?
I have four good hives, but I think that the fifth might be queenless. What should I do?
Each of these deserves a long, winding, exhaustive answer, so that’s what I’ll do. And I’ll just answer the first one on this blog post.
My honey isn’t capped. What should I do with it?
It depends on the moisture content and on your plans for your bees. Since it’s mid-September and we are in the Ice Kingdom of Canada, our honey season is pretty much over. Especially out here on the western prairies were minus thirty is only a few sleeps away. So, get those stupid boxes off the bees and quit hoping that they will seal everything. They probably won’t. (Though there was late September 1987 when the bees gained 40 pounds around October 1. And a huge late flow in 2008. So, I may be wrong.)
Most beekeepers properly worry that unsealed honey will spoil. That’s what they’ve heard at our beginner bee courses. It’s true – it may spoil, but maybe it won’t. Usually (but not always) bees reduce the moisture in honey to a non-fermenting level (below 18.6% water) before they seal it with wax. If honey has less than 18.6% water, yeast usually can not grow in it. Below 18.6%, the honey rarely becomes a bubbly, fermented or sour product best suited for bibation. Bees usually don’t seal properly dried honey. However, the bees are sometimes wrong. A beekeeper in our area came to my house last week with a sample taken from sealed combs. We tested it with a refractometer. It was 21% moisture. Why was it so wett when it came from sealed frames? I don’t know – maybe the hive was in a damp forest, maybe the honey was gathered and sealed during mid-July when we had four inches of rain in a week. I’d not seen sealed honey with such high water content, but bee stuff happens.
Just as wet honey may be found under cappings, dry honey can appear on unfinished frames. Late in the season, if the flow abruptly ends, the bees usually won’t cap half-finished frames even if the honey is completely cured, dry, and ready for storage. In a dry climate, it’s entirely possible that unsealed honey will be dry enough at any time – even mid season – to be harvested and extracted. The only way you can be absolutely certain is to test the honey with a refractometer.
So, here’s my suggestion. Bring the boxes in from the bees. Prepare your bees for winter – in our area, that may mean feeding and medicating. If the bees need feed and medicine, those should have been on the bees yesterday because the season is getting late. For those using Apivar to fight varroa, treatments must be removed from the hive within six weeks, so you need to be on that right now. All of this means that pulling the last honey supers is something that needs done immediately.
In the extracting shop, scoop a few drops of honey directly off the frame from a few different unsealed spots and blend it together on the refractometer prism. (Connfused? See the video above.) Test the honey with the refractometer. If it’s below 18.6% moisture, you may sell it or use it without too much concern for spoilage. If it’s over the moisture level and still in the frame, you may try drying it by keeping the combs in a warm, dehumidified room for a few days (or at least use an electric fan to circulate dry air – you’ll remove some moisture).
Calgary and District Beekeepers Association. I was about half way up the aisle when I snapped this. Big swarm of beefolks!
Last night we had another meeting of our local bee club, the Calgary and District Beekeepers. These are becoming legendary events with over 150 bee people, sipping coffee and doing bee-talk. Although it’s great fun mixing with so many nice folks all at once, many bob up with peculiar questions, issues, or observations in tow.
Our meetings’ organizers always leave a bit of time for questions, but most beekeepers don’t want the weight of 300 ear lobes thrust upon their personal bee problem. So old timers get questions before the session starts, during the coffee break, and while we are packing up and sneaking towards the exits.
Here are some of the questions tossed around last night:
My honey isn’t capped. What should I do with it? (I heard that one from three different beefolks.)
Wasps are attacking my hives. How can I stop them?
What’s the best extractor to buy?
There was a pile of brood in front of my hive. Why?
I have four good hives, but I think that the fifth might be queenless. What should I do?
There is only one correct way to answer these questions. Start with “It depends…” and then draw out details that help form a decent answer.
However, when such questions float among us, beekeepers with just a little experience often step forward, answering quickly and confidently. Sometimes they nail it, but too often they confirm Abe Lincoln’s admonition about keeping one’s mouth shut (and looking foolish rather than opening it and removing all doubt). Actually, that’s not quite fair. Usually any answer will be correct in some situations. Either “Kill your bees” or “Don’t touch nuthing” might nail it. It depends.
In contrast, the ‘mature’ beekeepers in the club drone on and on with long-winded explanations which beeginers find annoying. “I just want to know what to do, I don’t want the history of beekeeping since Aristotle.” However, mature advice should begin with “It depends” followed with several scenarios. To me, this is the only way to answer cold-off-the-street beekeeping questions.
Beware of the confident beekeeper who can answer all your questions quickly and easily. When most people start beekeeping, they understand it thoroughly. They have it figured out. They know everything. But as time goes on, they realize that bees do unexpected things and each season and each location adds nuances to bee behaviour.
My favourite beekeeping adage goes like this:
Beekeeping is one of those things where you start off knowing everything, but as time goes on, the bees show you that you know less and less – finally, if you live long enough, you realize that you don’t know anything at all.
About those questions: unsealed honey, wasps, extractors, dead brood, and weak hives. Will I answer them? …It depends on whether I have time tomorrow.
Today (September 9) is the 94th birthday of Warwick Estevam Kerr, the man who made the Killer Bees. Just like his bees, Kerr comes from hot, tropical Brazil. And just like his bees, Dr Kerr has been much maligned and misunderstood in the popular press. But Kerr did more to help his country’s agriculture than perhaps any other individual.
When the Africanized hybrid honey bee entered our awareness in the 1970s, the bee was described as a killer bee (in Brazil, they called it the assassin). The man who brought African honey bees to South America was turned into a mysterious fiend who had “disappeared from sight” after “he turned killer bees loose”. Well, he did disappear for a while. He was in prison. But not for any reason you might guess. First, some background.
What was Kerr’s crime?
Dr Warwick Kerr brought Africanized genetic stock to South America in 1956. In today’s context, importing an alien creature from another continent seems horribly reckless. In Dr Kerr’s day, the importation of bees from Africa was hardly daring. First, recall that all honey bees in the Americas are imported from somewhere else. Honey bees are not native to the western hemisphere. Second, Kerr was not introducing a new species. The African bee (Apis mellifera scutellata) is a cousin of a common European honey bee, Apis mellifera iberiensis, which was in Brazil when the African queen bees arrived. Kerr’s importation of 26 queen bees from Tanzania is in league with importing Clydesdales long after Arabians and Morgans were already established. Kerr’s goal was to improve the non-tropical honey bees which farmers were using in Brazil. He rightly assumed that tropical genetic stock would be more successful in his tropical country.
Warwick Kerr’s sour reputation came directly from the Brazilian government. Although he was a geneticist and was at first entrusted with developing a better bee for Brazil’s farmers, the Brazilian military dictatorship attacked Kerr’s stand on civil rights. He was imprisoned in 1964 when he publicly fought government corruption. In 1969 he was re-arrested, this time for protesting that Brazilian soldiers who had raped and tortured a nun went unpunished. Sister Maurina Borges, who ran the Ribeirão Preto Orphanage, was an activist; the soldiers were part of Brazil’s military dictatorship, committing crimes encouraged by the government. [See page 16 of this 2005 interview with Kerr.] Most of the western press didn’t bother to investigate the reasons behind the Brazilian government’s dismissal of Kerr’s work and his qualifications.
Creating a clown
All of this is lost on most people who write about this subject. For example, this is from a blog promoting a book called The Animal Review: A Report Card. The writer calls Dr Kerr a clown:
“It is strange and unfortunate that there is not a Nobel Prize for Really Bad Mistakes In Science. This international award could be presented annually in Stockholm by a sad clown wearing a lab coat and goggles, giving scientists that much more of an incentive to get things right for once. Brazilian geneticist Warwick Estevam Kerr would have made a fine nominee. For it was Mr. Kerr who introduced Africanized honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata) to the Americas. Oops. Bring in the clowns…
“The full scope of the blunder was not immediately apparent to Kerr. Being a brilliant geneticist, he brilliantly assumed the African queen fugitives would breed with feral bees — thus diluting their infamous aggression.
“But on the bright side, Africanized honey bees pollinate plants and plants are crucial to agriculture production everywhere in the blah, blah, blah, blah.”
” Warwick Estevam Kerr, Grade: F- ”
Almost everything in the preceding story is wrong, but I put it here to illustrate how the popular press saw Dr Kerr – a clown deserving an F- grade. In fact, it’s the lazy reporters who earn a big Fail.
Here’s another example: National Geographic blunders portraying Dr Kerr in their 2006 documentary, Attack of the Killer Bee.“Incredibly, nearly one trillion killer bees can all be traced back to just one man…” [I’ll bet you know who they’re talking about.] In Africa, says NG, Kerr “chose the best specimens he could find, but he noticed something disturbing.” (At this point, the actor playing Kerr gets stung on the finger and yelps “Ouch!” in pain. “Doctor Kerr was wrong. Very wrong. And the western hemisphere is still paying a steep price.” This is verbiage that sells.
You should watch the first few minutes of the NG fantasy. The devilish portrayal of the black Africans who sold Kerr the ‘deadly’ bees is also vile National Geographic reporting, but that’s fodder for a whole different story. I have the video below queued up to start at 3 minutes – that’s where an actor playing Kerr gets ready to leave for Africa. Don’t bother to watch more than a minute of this.
The Killer Bees
Warwick Kerr was responsible for bringing African genetic stock to Brazil in 1956. As a geneticist, he wanted to improve the health and hardiness of the European honey bee which came from Portugal in 1834. That European strain was poorly adapted to the tropics, so the Italian honey bee (Apis mellifera ligustica) was imported in the 1880s, but it wasn’t much better. A few farmers and monks kept the languid bees, mostly to collect beeswax for church candles.
In 1956, Brazil’s annual honey production from the European honey bees was just 15 million pounds. Brazilian agriculture was expanding and needed a tropical honey bee for pollination and honey production. After the African bees arrived, Brazil’s beekeepers produced 110 million pounds. Brazil went from 43rd in the world to 7th largest honey producer. By 1994, L.A. Times headlined: “Brazil’s honey production has soared since the ornery invaders took over beekeepers’ hives”. Today, most of the world’s organic honey is produced by Africanized honey bees in Brazil’s forests.
Honey bees with African genes are more aggressive than European bees. Beekeepers in Brazil had to learn appropriate management techniques. Although the venom is the same, more bees attack if their colony is disturbed. People have died from massive stings. Those deaths are sorrowful and this story about Dr Kerr’s bees should not dishonour personal tragedies. Some of the traits which make Africanized bees exceptional pollinators (refined olfactory sense, quicker movements, flights in inclement weather, superior navigation skills) also make them more likely to sting. However, they are managed by farmers and beekeepers. Indiscriminate killers they are not.
Decoding sex among stingless bees
At first, Warwick Kerr worked with Melipona bees, not honey bees. Some of Brazil’s poor and indigenous were wild honey gatherers, or meleiros. Meleiro, isolated and rural, is named for the meleiros, who are named for Melipona honey trees. There are only 7,000 meleiros, but their precarious existence in the 1940s – which included raiding Melipona bee trees – concerned Dr Kerr during his bee research. He hoped that his work would draw attention to the importance of preserving Melipona and their habitat. Understand and help the Melipona, and you help the meleiros, figured Kerr.
Melipona quadrifasciata is a eusocial stingless bee, native to southeastern coastal Brazil. The meleiros call it Mandaçaia, which means “beautiful guard,” as there are always guard bees defending the narrow entrance of their colony. Brazil’s Melipona builds mud hives inside hollow trees. These have narrow passages allowing just one bee to pass at a time. Stingless bees, they can give a nasty bite, but their intricate passage system also defends against predators.
Dr Kerr’s first influential paper, “Genetic Determination of Castes in Melipona” (1949), researched the development of males, females, and workers among Brazil’s common stingless bee. Kerr found that their caste development was different from honey bees. Drones in both species are haploid, but in Melipona, things get weird for the girls.
In Apis mellifera, “a larva develops into a queen or into a worker depending upon the food it receives. In Melipona, on the other hand, caste determination is genotypic. Fertile females (queens) are heterozygous in some species for two, and in other species for three, pairs of genes, homozygosis for any one of which makes the individual develop into a worker.” – Kerr, 1949.
For the exotic Melipona quadrifasciata, alleles (one-half of a gene that controls an inheritance, for example the ‘b’ in a ‘Bb’ gene) determine caste. Drones (as in honey bees) are haploids with a single set of chromosomes; queens and workers are diploid (two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent), but queens have some specific alleles that are different, or heterozygous (for example, AaBb), while workers have identical, or homozygous, caste-determining genes (AABB, AAbb, aaBB, or aabb combinations). If you find this confusing, imagine sorting it out with 1940s technology.
Kerr was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1922, into a middle class family with Scottish and American roots. He received an agricultural engineering degree, then specialized in genetics. His work as an entomologist spanned decades, with research that included genetics of honey bees and native Brazilian bees, as we’ve just seen.
Warwick Kerr’s education included post-doc research at the University of California, Davis (1951), and at Columbia University in New York, under the renowned evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky. One of Kerr’s influential papers, “Experimental Studies of the Distribution of Gene Frequencies in Very Small Populations of Drosophila melanogaster“, cites Dobzhansky as an adviser and is co-authored by a University of Chicago genetics statistician. This fruit fly research was done way back in 1954 and the paper was one of the first to deal with the nascent field of genetics statistics. Kerr published 620 research papers during his 60-year career.
Warwick Kerr is largely responsible for establishing the study of genetics in Brazil. He was a director of the National Institute for Research in the Amazon and worked at the University of São Paulo. Later, at the Universidade Estadual do Maranhão, he created the Department of Biology and served as Dean of the University.
Warwick Kerr says that his most important work was developing staff, technicians, teachers, and researchers in his country. At the University of São Paulo, he established a department of genetics which focuses on entomological and human genetics, using mathematical biology and biostatistics. Kerr has memberships in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, the Third World Academy of Science, and the US National Academy of Sciences.
I’ll end with a pleasant little video made three years ago. In it, you will see that his interests have shifted to botany. The film is in Portuguese, but even if you don’t understand the language, you’ll get a good idea of Warwick Kerr’s enthusiasm and curiosity.
Much is made of a human’s ability to make free choices. It’s an illusion, of course, but if people should be awarded this mysterious power, then why not bees? To bolster this notion of bees and free will, we’ll look at a series of maps created by researchers in the UK. Using radar, they monitored the flights of bumble bees (Bombus terrestris).
From the variety of foraging paths shown below, it appears that the bees exhibit unique personalities. Some forage close to home, some make multiple exploratory trips, some find a good foraging spot and persistently return to it. None of the bees behave the same. They each use different learning strategies during exploratory stages and differ in foraging style during exploitation. Does such variation imply that bees exercise free will? First the maps, then the free will. See if you can resist looking ahead, but your choice (study the map or go for the goal) is already predestined.
Here are the maps generated by Woodgate, Makinson, Lim, Reynolds, and Chittka in “Life-Long Radar Tracking of Bumblebees“. The blue dot is the nest location for all four of the observed bumble bees. Bee A engaged in 156 recorded flights, mostly close to the colony. Bee B seems to become less and less focused with each successive flight, scattering her attention across the fields, while Bee C and Bee D likewise display rather different foraging patterns: C makes few excursions while D going farthest, even beyond the researchers’ map.
Researchers explain their project:
“Every flight ever made outside the nest by four foragers was recorded. . . We identified how each bee’s flights fit into two categories—which we named exploration and exploitation flights—examining the differences between the two types of flight and how their occurrence changed over the course of the bees’ foraging careers.
“Exploitation of learned resources takes place during efficient, straight trips, usually to a single foraging location, and is seldom combined with exploration of other areas. Exploration of the landscape typically occurs in the first few flights made by each bee, but our data show that further exploration flights can be made throughout the bee’s foraging career.
“Bees showed striking levels of variation in how they explored their environment, their fidelity to particular patches, ratio of exploration to exploitation, duration and frequency of their foraging bouts. One bee developed a straight route to a forage patch within four flights and followed this route exclusively for six days before abandoning it entirely for a closer location; this second location had not been visited since her first exploratory flight nine days prior. Another bee made only rare exploitation flights and continued to explore widely throughout its life; two other bees showed more frequent switches between exploration and exploitation.” – “Life-Long Radar Tracking of Bumblebees“
A bee’s free will
In 2012, Gene Robinson at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology in Illinois compared behaviour in honey bees as they scouted for new homes for their swarms and as they scouted for food. Robinson says that a test of behaviour where the same task (in this case, scouting) is performed under different conditions (scouting shelter vs scouting food) potentially reveals existence of personality. In the case of honey bees, about 5% are willing to perform ‘scouting’ tasks. For either food or shelter, it tends to be the same 5% of the bees which are ‘scouts’.
Having determined that ‘personality’ differences exist in honey bees, the researchers set about studying the cause. Could bees simply be choosing (‘free will’) to be adventurous thrill-seeking scouts, or is that activity due to some neural chemical stimulus? The answer was tentatively discovered at the molecular level. Similar to humans and other vertebrates, hormones and proteins are linked to thrill-seeking. Glutamate, catecholamine, glutamate, γ-aminobutyric acid, octapamine, and dopamine are among the chemicals which control whether a particular honey bee may be one of the 5% willing to seek a new home or a new patch of clover. The results of this research and the experiments conducted can be seen in “Molecular Determinants of Scouting Behavior in Honeybees”.
We are just beginning to unravel the decision-making process. All signs point to molecular biochemistry. The hapless bumble bee fumbling around the English countryside is simply a victim of a particular surge of proteins and hormones released into her tiny brain. She has no choice but to cooperate. Whether that results in wide-arcs of adventurous flower-seeking or careful and measured foraging is beyond the bee’s willful control.
A friend sent these pictures of some of his honey harvest. It was part of his second pull, taken September 4th. He says there’s more to gather and he’ll collect it in a couple of weeks. Looks like great quality! Stephen’s a skilled photographer (he took these pictures and I’ve used others on this site before), but we have to also give credit to the honey containers who were willing to line up so nicely for the photos.
Water-white honey; 16.2 to 16.4% moisture. (Note to self: buy some of this guy’s crop!)
The honey farm is called “Bearspaw Bounty” and is just outside Calgary. The label on the lid is a detachable coffee coaster and honey-order reminder.
I just got off the phone. I was chatting with a buddy who lives in the USA. (I am in western Canada.) He tells me that the FDA is completely revising US label laws. In the near future, Calories will appear in big bold font on nutrition labels. And (something new), the FDA wants consumers to know how much added sugar is in the food they buy.
Maybe an ADDED SUGAR alert is a good thing. But it includes honey, which the FDA considers a sugar that consumers need alerted about. If honey roasted ham has 1% honey, the “Added Sugar” will be labeled as 1%. In the past, honey would have appeared in the list of ingredients and the calories per serving would reflect the bit of honey in the food. But the news gets worse.
Added sugar usually means ‘added by processing or manufacturing’ – therefore, fruits and vegetables are exempt, as are some sugars used in making jams, jellies, preserves, and fruit spreads. Take a look at how the new guidelines define added sugar and see what’s missing:
“The definition of added sugars includes sugars that are either added during the processing of foods, or are packaged as such, and include sugars (free, mono- and disaccharides), sugars from syrups and honey, and sugars from concentrated fruit or vegetable juices that are in excess of what would be expected from the same volume of 100 percent fruit or vegetable juice of the same type. The definition excludes fruit or vegetable juice concentrated from 100 percent fruit juice that is sold to consumers (e.g. frozen 100 percent fruit juice concentrate) as well as some sugars found in fruit and vegetable juices, jellies, jams, preserves, and fruit spreads.”
I’m sure that you noticed “honey” is not mentioned as an exempt food. But honey is not manufactured – bees make it in their hives. Honey has no added sugars, however, as things stand today, the new Nutrition Facts label would show that the “Added Sugars” in honey is 82% (the other 18% of honey is water).
I’m hoping that the new rules will be amended to exempt honey. My guess is that American beekeepers are talking to FDA rule-makers even as you read these words. But if this goes unchallenged, honey jars would need to list the natural sugars in honey as “added” sugars on every jar of honey sold. To most consumers, this would imply honey is manufactured. Consumers would think that the natural fruit (fructose) and grape (glucose) sugars coming from nectar are somehow “added” at the packing shop. And that’s just simply wrong. What do you think? Maybe I don’t have the story right – if you know more about this, weigh in with a comment or send me a note [miksha(at)shaw.ca] and I’ll add more to this blog piece.
The best beekeepers are not the best grammarians, but that’s OK. There might be an inverse relationship between bee skill and word skill. So we overlook ads that say “Bees’ For Sale” or an e-mail suggesting that “you should of used more boxes on you’re bee hive’s!” But if you are writing for publication (a letter to the editor, a bee article, a bee blog), then you should try to follow some basic rules so that poor grammar doesn’t detract from the points you are trying to make.
I’ve certainly had my share of gaffes. I appreciate when a reader sends me a note or tweet letting me know that I have mistyped or poorly phrased something. I try to remember to keep “spell check” on and I try to put an hour or two between something I’ve written and the ‘Publish’ button. Whenever I give myself at least a bit of time between writing and sending, it always results in uncovering some confusing and rambling sentences – like this one, for example.
Occasionally, my wording is intentionally unusual or obscure for effect. However, I strive for clarity over comedy, even if that’s not always apparent. Sometimes I just can’t help but toss in a few bee puns. Nevertheless, if you find my prose bewildering, or if a typo makes something unclear, please let me know. [Last week, I wrote something about Alberta Einstein, and I wasn’t writing about Albert Einstein’s twin sister. A kind reader brought the typo to my attention.]
A few guidelines
If you write about bees, here are a few suggestions. First, our insects are honey bees – not honeybees. There is some confusion on this – according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, “honeybee” and “housefly” and “bedbug” are all spelled as one word. However, according to the Entomological Society’s Common Names of Insects Database, they should be spelled as two words — “honey bee” and “house fly” and “bed bug.” Do the right thing and use two words if you are writing a bee story. This is the way honey bees are denoted in bee journals and beekeeping books. The explanation given by entomologists goes like this: dragonflies and butterflies are not actually flies so butterfly (Lepidoptera) would incorrectly describe the bug as a butter-type of fly, but it’s not a fly (Diptera) at all. A house fly (two words) describes a type of fly commonly found in a house while a honey bee is a type of bee found floating in a jar of honey.
We keep beehives in bee yards, not bee hives in beeyards. If you have trouble remembering these, try this: beehives are glued together, just like the word, but hives are scattered around the bee yard, separated like the words in “bee yard”.
Don’t capitalize queen unless Queen Elizabeth is your subject, then you should write Queen Elizabeth. But avoid the mistake made by the British branch of Reuters. Reuters insisted that ‘queen’ must always be capitalized and must always be referred to as Queen Elizabeth, not just the queen. A few years ago they mindlessly printed this sciency piece:
… tens of thousands of worker bees are commanded by Queen Elizabeth… Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.
The queen, I think, was not amused and it must have been rather embarrassing for Reuters’ ex-employee. You could avoid such an epic mistake by being flexible in your rules and by reading over what you’re publishing before hitting the ‘Send’ button. For other relevant suggestions, peruse American Bee Journal’s Writers’ Guidelines.
N-Grams
Another set of words we often see misused involves hyphens. Centuries ago, it was fine to write about bee-keeping and queen-bees. You would have been dandy-smack in style a hundred years ago, but not so much today. To prove this, I direct you toward Google’s cool N-grams feature. N-grams counts all the times your target words appear in books, journals, newspapers, and magazines for any years you select. With this tool, we can compare the frequency of bee-keeping and beekeeping over the past two centuries. Here’s the graph from Google:
It’s a little hard to see, isn’t it? (This link takes you to a larger image.) The vertical axis is linear and shows frequency. It’s actually the percentage of times that the target word (“bee-keeping”, for example) appears in print. Both words appeared much more often during the 1940s than they do today (as a percentage of all printed material). The lower (blue) horizontal track shows how frequently bee-keeping was written in the past. Until 1910, bee-keeping was seen more often than beekeeping. But since that time, beekeeping has been the standard. You may continue to use the old hyphenated word if you prefer, but it will make your writing appear a bit archaic. I don’t always advocate the downward spiral that accompanies the common vernacular, but if you are striving for clarity and don’t want to distract your readers with old expressions and inappropriate usage, than your better-off using the write word’s! (Please don’t bother sending a note telling me that you’ve discovered mistakes in that last sentence.)
Millions of bees are dead following aerial spray of the neurotoxin Naled. The spray was released Sunday morning between 6:30 and 8:30 by a South Carolina county trying to control mosquitoes which may or may not spread Zika and West Nile viruses in the area. Unfortunately, it was hot, bees were bearded out, and many were in the air when the spray planes circled and repeatedly dropped the poison. One witness said she saw the pesticide plane make three separate passes over her farm. She described the aftermath near her bees as being as quiet as a morgue after the bees had “been nuked”.
Neurotoxins, anyone?
Dorchester County says they warned beekeepers with a newspaper ad two days earlier (who reads newspapers anymore?) and with a Facebook posting one day earlier (Facebook?). Beekeepers said they hadn’t heard or seen the warnings. Even with warnings, precautions are difficult to implement. Hives need screened so bees are stuck inside, then they need cooled so they don’t die of heat exhaustion.
Moving hives is an option, but beekeepers need access to emergency temporary safe locations and need trucks and equipment for moving their hives. Again, that’s not easy to pull off on short notice. Some places register beekeepers and send them direct alerts when pesticides are imminent so counter-measures can be attempted, but I suppose that Dorchester County, South Carolina, is not one of those places.
The South Carolina experience reminds us how vulnerable honey bees are to conventional pesticides. Naled was invented in 1959 and kills immediately on contact. The EPA says it is quick-acting, kills immediately on contact by torturing animals (including people) with a complete nervous system shutdown. Beekeepers used to see a lot of this sort of poisoning and death in the 70s and 80s, with entire bee yards wiped out. Commercial beekeepers here in Alberta, Canada, have told me repeatedly that they have not seen such losses from neonicotinoids. Neonics are used ubiquitously on canola in western Canada. They say that farmers used to use millions of tonnes of organophosphates like Naled to control canola-consuming beetles. Before neonics, pesticide bee kills in western Canada were common. This does not absolve neonicotinoids of all guilt in bee deaths elsewhere, but it does indicate why large-scale prairie beekeepers don’t want neonics banned.
I tried to answer the first question, about uncapped honey, a couple of days ago.
Bee and butterfly enthusiasts know milkweed. So do curious kids who squeeze the stem and watch white sap drip out. I used to love pulling apart milkweed pods in the fall. I’d liberate the seeds, back in the day when such activity was legal.
I just got off the phone. I was chatting with a buddy who lives in the USA. (I am in western Canada.) He tells me that the FDA is 
