Zombees in Canada

Posted on August 16, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Fly laying eggs inside a honey bee. The first step in zombee-ification. (Credit Wiki)

Fly laying eggs inside a honey bee. The first step in zombee-ification. (Credit Wiki)

I wish I had good news. Canada’s first confirmed case of zombees has appeared – on Vancouver Island, out in the Pacific. Hundreds of kilometres from my home in Calgary.  Zombie zombees, like the human kind, are undeads who are unalive and have little control over their bodies. Zombees would like to cluster and enjoy family time in the evening, but their inner demon forces them to fly out of the hive and head towards street lamps as soon as it grows dark.

(Trigger warning: Yuck stuff ahead.)  Zombees are ordinary honey bees whose bodies have been invaded by the larvae of a small parasitic fly. The Apocephalus borealis deposits eggs into a bee’s abdomen. These hatch into worms that live inside the bee. Honey bees with parasitic worms end up out of control. They are doomed to die miserable deaths and seem compelled to visit porch lights at night. Eventually maggots erupt from the honey bee, escaping near the spot that the bee’s thorax and head join. Not a good time for the bee.

zombie walkI first wrote about Zombees over four years ago, when they were discovered in honey bees in California. Since then, a few have appeared in Vermont, the Dakotas,  and now Nanaimo, British Columbia.  Researchers believe that the parasitic fly normally uses other bee types as hosts and their move to honey bees may be new. This is possible.  To me it may indicate that native bees are stressed and have reduced populations, making them harder for Apocephalus borealis to find and infest. As a result, the much more common honey bee has become their occasional target. It’s also quite possible, I think, that we’ve only now begun to pay attention to bees around lights at night. That would explain why there are few cases and why they are scattered around the continent. We tend to only find things if we look for them. (If you think you’ve made your own zombee sighting, you can report it on the ZomBee Watch website.)

Zombee map: Red markers indicate confirmed sightings, including Vancouver island. None in Calgary. Not yet, anyway. (Credit: ZomBee Watch)

Zombee map: Red confirms zoms –  including Vancouver Island. (Credit: ZomBee Watch)

Hopefully, zombees will not be a serious problem. Beekeepers don’t need another pest. It’s likely that this parasitic fly, which is native to North America, has been mixing it up with various bee species for a long while. The rarity of Zombie bees is likely to remain. Perhaps they will be such an uncommon novelty that we will want to buy Apocephalus borealis kits to infest a few bees at children’s birthday parties or at the local bee club’s pub night. For amusement.

Oh Yuck! Maggot emerging. (Credit: Wiki)

Oh Yuck! Maggot emerging. (Credit: Wiki)

Posted in Bee Biology, Diseases and Pests, Ecology, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Identifying the “Wild Bees” in John Clare’s poem – UPDATED

Posted on August 11, 2016 by Ron Miksha

All of my life I have assumed that when a poet writes about nature, he/she is just winging it. To me, “…As trod the crimson twilight’s face…” is just a pleasant concatenation brewed in a dark basement by a moody wordsmith. It’s delightful to learn that some poets actually describe their environment with details that a keen sleuth can turn into a biodiversity record that indicates the decline of the Red-shanked Carder. Thanks, Jeff Ollerton, for your post. It was enjoyed! And now it’s shared…

Jeff Ollerton's avatarProf. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author

P1030210John Clare is one of the most celebrated English poets of rural landscapes and nature in the 19th century. To quote his biographer, Clare was “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature”.  Not only that, he was born and lived for much of his life in my adopted county, hence his epithet as “The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”.

One of his less well-known poems is called Wild Bees and is a stunning example of Clare’s ability to make detailed observations of the natural world and to translate those observations into poetry.  So good are those observations that, as I show below, it’s possible to identify Clare’s bees from the descriptions he gives.  First of all, here’s the full poem:

Wild Bees

These children of the sun which summer brings
As pastoral minstrels in her merry train
Pipe rustic ballads upon busy wings

View original post 656 more words

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Bee Vandals

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Vandalism: it least it wasn't bee hives.

Vandalism: it least it wasn’t bee hives.  (Credit: Wikipedia)

I’ll never understand vandalism. Theft I understand. I don’t like it, I don’t condone it, I’ve been victimized by it. But I can understand how it might sometimes happen. Vandalism, however, is strange. And stupid.

Vandalism is nothing new. The very word comes from the Vandal people,  a fifth-century Germanic tribe. The Vandals sacked and looted Rome. They also allegedly defaced artwork and statuary, lending their name for all time to idiots who vandalize. When I was a kid, we experienced the occasional apiary vandalism. flipped smart carSomeone would enter one of our bee yards at night and flip over a hive or two. I suspect there was always more than one vandal involved – there would be little joy in hive flipping (or cow tipping or Smart Car flipping) if you are out in the dark by yourself, vandalizing alone. No, I’m rather certain its a participation sport. When I kept bees in the badlands of southern Saskatchewan, my hives were vandalized just once. Three ranch boys lifted two hives from one of my yards at night, planning to drive into town to dump the bees off the back of their truck. They didn’t make it. But they learned that the cover of darkness provides the worst time to abuse bees.

With the steady decrease in crime of all sorts in North America, vandalism also seems on the decline. So I was surprised to hear that a dozen colonies were wrecked by vandals in southern Alberta, about two hours from my home. Southern Alberta is a religious, family-farm, small-town sort of place. I was dismayed to learn that idiots are in their midst – but no place has immunity from the stupid.

It happens everywhere: These hives were near San Francisco.

It happens everywhere: These hives were vandalized near San Francisco.
(The owners need help: see their site.)

News reports (here and here) describe the vandalized colonies as being on pallets, pretty much ruling out hobby bees. The area is home to several big commercial operators who keep hives near hay fields and canola farms that fill the rich farmland.  Twelve commercial colonies were destroyed at a loss of $9,000. That’s $750 per hive. Maybe that sounds high, but this happened at the start of the honey flow which would have brought $400 worth of honey from each hive. Replacement packages cost $150 and won’t make any money this year, but still need care, attention, and investment to build up for next season. New boxes, frames, drawn-out combs, lids, pallets and the like aren’t cheap, either. And there’s the cost of cleaning up the mess.

If the culprits are found and if I were the judge, I think I’d take away their truck, charge them $9,000, and then force them to work as commercial beekeepers so they suffer for the rest of their lives.

Posted in Bee Yards, Beekeeping, Commercial Beekeeping, Diseases and Pests | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Another Reason to Avoid Walmart?

Posted on August 8, 2016 by Ron Miksha
parking lot

Evacuated Walmart parking lot.

Sounds like a drug deal gone wrong. They met at a Walmart parking lot to do their business, the public panicked and three bystanders ended up at hospital. It turned out to be a sting operation.

Hero beekeeper.

Hero beekeeper mops up stray bees and saves shoppers. (KOCO News)

The deal was a Saturday morning bee hive sale. The bystanders were stung and taken to a hospital. I suppose that the guys making the swap thought the Oklahoma City Walmart parking lot was a safe and convenient place to do some beekeeping. Definitely convenient, but apparently three hives were changing hands when something went dreadfully wrong. Bees got loose, people were stung, and the fire department was alerted. The guys with hoses called guys with veils as reinforcement. The Walmart had to close until the situation was secure. I watched the news videos – it looks like fire trucks, an EMSA van, several beekeeping trucks, and assorted police and emergency people were involved. Along with the hospital care for the sting victims and the big box store’s lost business, this must have cost everyone a few thousand dollars. There really are no other details about this weekend’s mishap, but you can read the story here, if you must.

I’ve done some similarly dumb things that sounded sensible during the planning stage.   This one is pretty embarrassing.  And I don’t want to sound mean, but it’s people like this who make the Walmart experience bad for everyone. In other news, the city of Philadelphia is asking residents not to swim in trash dumpsters.

Posted in Humour, Stings, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Rooftop Bees

Posted on August 7, 2016 by Ron Miksha
NYC rooftop apiary, 1905

NYC rooftop apiary, 1905

There’s a jolly fat man up on the roof. With a smoker and hive tool. Rooftop beekeeping seems modern, trendy, and new, but it’s been happening for generations. Ever since homes had rooftops. I’m surprised there isn’t a Rooftop Beekeepers Association somewhere.  (Maybe there is.)

Perhaps it never occurred to you that you could keep bees up on the roof. As long as you don’t have a habit of running whenever your bees get anxious, there aren’t too many hazards keeping bees on your roof. Of course, this might not work in Switzerland (a steep roof will dislodge winter snow as well as summer hives). But if you have a flat roof and if you are in a crowded urban community, maybe you could try beekeeping above the ceiling.  (Using a balcony is cheating.)

Keeping bees on the roof is a good way to hide hives from nervous neighbours.

Keeping bees on the roof is a good way to hide hives from nervous neighbours. No one would ever notice an apiary like this vintage 1912 bee yard, would they?

Advantages of rooftop beekeeping: Privacy (people might not even know you’ve got bees up there); Few of the bee-nuisance issues that arise from ground-level bees; and, Reduced roof vandalism. (Remember the last time you had to chase kids off your roof? Let the bees do it for you!)

lharperOur previous Canadian prime minister (Stephen Harper) has a fearless wife who grew up on an Alberta farm where bees were kept. A few years ago, a chef led Mrs Prime Minister of Canada (and an entourage of reporters) to the roof of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel where hives were kept. The chef seemed to have lost his way with the bees. The insects chased the poor guy, leaving the prime minister’s wife to replace the lid on an angry hive. To the left, you see the chef, a bit removed from the action, struggling with errant bees.  Bravo to Laureen Harper! (You can see a short video of the misadventure here.)

I didn’t see anything quite so exciting in British Columbia last month, but at Kelowna’s Delta Resort, where I ordered a most excellent salmon, I noticed a story about two beehives (oddly named “Stay in a Hive” and “Honey Cru”). The bees were featured in the restaurant menu, below. Not as part of a wholesome stew, but as rooftop hired help.  We were told that the colonies have names so that the bees “know which hive they belong to.” Scoff and mock if you must, but a lot of fine eateries are puttering around under rooftop honey makers. I think it’s generally a good thing. It’s upbeat free publicity for honey and bees.

O&C Hives

If you have been venting the excuse of postponing your beekeeping career because you lack space, your hive cover is blown. Almost everyone has a roof. If yours isn’t flat, flatten it. To tempt you further, here’s an artsy video of a New York City rooftop beekeeper. (Please ignore the stupid part that quotes Einstein – he was never a rooftop beekeeper.)   Nevertheless, watch, dream, then do:

Posted in Bee Yards, Culture, or lack thereof, Humour, Outreach, Save the Bees | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Dead bee, in the middle of the ‘shield…

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Bee collisions on an Alberta (Canada) highway. Can you spot all four?

Bee collisions on an Alberta (Canada) highway. Can you spot all four?

A few days ago, I had a road trip that took me two hours from my home in Calgary. Flying low at 130 kph, I expected to whack a lot of bees on the forehead of my van, but I only clipped two on the way, then another two on the way home. Both highway accidents occurred at the same location on the 4-lane freeway. I don’t know why the bees were hit only at that one spot. (Hopefully, it wasn’t the same two bees each time.)

It was a bright beautiful day, the sort when bees store ten or twenty pounds of net-weight honey. Nectar plants were at their prime everywhere.  Since the only bee collision occurred about half-way between Calgary and Lethbridge, perhaps that was the only spot with hives close to the highway. The bees should have looked both ways before crossing.

lookleftlookright

I was reminded of Loudon Wainright III’s classic folk song about the dead skunk in the middle road (“…should have looked left and he should have looked right…”).  Here’s the video. Replace ‘skunk’ with ‘bee’ and you’ll do fine. The point in the song about pollution remains unchanged.

(*Queasy Alert and Reaction Trigger: Video contains scenes of dead skunks, a cat, and other animals in the middle of the road – none were intentionally killed in making this film.)

A few years ago, I wrote about bee/windshield interactions and what they cost the beekeeper. Since most of you missed that piece (from August 2013),  I’m repeating myself here:

Road kill. In this case, it’s bees. I was out of the city yesterday, cruising the Alberta back roads at 110. (The posted speed limit was 100, so maybe that was really my speed.) I passed a few bee yards tucked into meadows within small groves of trees. On one moderately busy paved road three honey bees spit up on my windshield. Big blobs of nectar were the imprint on the glass where those unfortunate bugs made contact with my van. I spent the rest of my trip calculating how much money this collision cost the beekeeper in lost honey. Not much, it turns out. But I wasn’t the only traveler out there.

How many bees does it take to make a dollar? These days, a dollar’s worth of honey is about half a pound. Well, those hapless bees that damaged my windshield were fat, but there certainly was not half a pound of nectar among the lot. And nectar cures into honey at a pretty high ratio. So we are talking partial pennies, of course. (Canada no longer uses pennies, so this becomes a mote point.) The math (and the guilt of ending three promising foraging careers) was making it hard for me to think about my driving, so I decided to look at this in a different way. Yesterday, about one car every two minutes passed that bee yard at the same speed as my van – or faster. (Alberta’s farmers drive quickly – their grandparents all raced horses at one time or other.) At a rate of two vehicles per minute, that’s 30 each hour. If, like my van, they each kill three bees, then we’ve killed almost a hundred bees. That would be a thousand in the course of each of our very long, very sunny summer days. Over a period of thirty days of peak honey flow, that amounts to 30,000 dead honey bees. This is just an estimate, but it represents something close to half the foraging population of a producing hive for the month. The average crop here is 200 pounds, so the beekeeper – over the course of his season – has lost about 100 pounds of honey, or 5 pounds from each of the 20 colonies in that apiary. One hundred pounds of honey, at today’s prices, is $200. That’s something to notice. And, five kilometres down the road was another yard and another honey bee slaughter site.

What’s the solution? Always a believer in the benevolence of a big cumbersome government, I could advocate for more highway signs and stricter enforcement. Why allow drivers to speed along at 110 when there are bees at play? We should have heavy fines for offenders. Or, perhaps we could have police checkpoints where kindly RCMP officers scrape windshields or otherwise count the road kill and drivers then pay a fee, especially if they’ve been killing without a license. To be effective, the fee would be much greater than the pittance of lost honey from the few bees clobbered – a prohibitive penalty, if you like. Then there is the libertarian’s perspective. The government stays out of this particular issue. The marketplace takes over. Honey prices soar because of the reduced crop. Or beekeepers, counting all those partial pennies lost, simply move their bees to safer spots.

There is some good news in this story. The squashed bees on my messy windshield indicate the Alberta honey flow (at least in our area) isn’t over yet. And with the forecast predicting warm sunny weather, maybe it will last into September.

Update: August 10, 2016

I had another road trip, not as lengthy as the one reported at the start of the blog above. But this one had a lot more collateral damage. At least 30 bee/van incidents. Multiplied by millions of vehicles, it might be time for the Save the Bees-ers to ban summer driving.  Here’s a pic of part of my windshield when I got home:

windshield - signs of the flow (reduced)

Posted in Bee Yards, Beekeeping, Culture, or lack thereof, Humour, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Canola: Canada’s Yellow Carpet

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Alberta canola: about 1,000 acres of Canada's 20 million acres of canola.

Alberta canola: about 500 acres of Canada’s 20 million (!) acres of canola.

Yesterday I wrote about honey that hurries towards granulation. Canola (the honey plant formerly known as rapeseed) is our local example of quick-setting honey. Canola honey is nice:  white and mild with a slight minty flavour. I like it but I was always on guard against granulation in combs and the hardening of the workshop’s arteries of settling tanks, sumps, and pipes. They could hold solidify while filled with honey and without much warning.

Canola crystallizes quickly because of its high glucose content. Atop that, in our cool environment, combs stacked high on a hive may experience cool overnight temperatures – around 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit promotes granulation. The final factor is the low-water content of honey in our dry climate – the lower the moisture, the faster the granulation.

But canola is a great nectar producer. And there is a heck of a lot of it here. Western Canada has about 20 million acres of the stuff. Theoretically, that much acreage yields enough nectar for two billion pounds of honey – if there were enough bees to gather it all.

Canadian canola is found from Alberta’s north (Peace River Country, as it’s called), south into the USA, and makes an almost uninterrupted carpet of yellow all the way east to the Precambrian Shield region at the Manitoba/Ontario border. There’s even a wee bit grown north of Toronto on Ontario’s rich farmland. Here’s a map from the Canadian Canola Growers that shows canola’s extent:

Canada's canola district.

Canada’s canola district.

On Canada’s western prairies, canola blooms from late June to early August. The timing depends on the local micro-climate, the arrival of spring, summer heat, and moisture in the ground. It’s almost finished here now, mostly gone to seed. So here are a few photos from the past month to show you what it looked like.

On July 11, I flew west from Calgary. Most canola is east of the city, on the prairies. I was surprised to see this west of Calgary, near the Rocky Mountain foothills.

On July 11, I flew west from Calgary. Most canola is east of the city, on the prairies.
I was surprised to see this west of Calgary, near the Rocky Mountain foothills.

It's not hard to find a canola field in July in western Canada.

It’s not hard to find a canola field in July in western Canada.

Author's bee yard alongside canola field. Honey produced here will granulate quickly.

Some of our bees alongside a canola field, just south of Calgary

 

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Can’t Get it out of the Comb?

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Ron Miksha
Author's bee yard alongside canola field. Honey produced here will granulate quickly.

Author’s bee yard alongside canola field. Honey produced here granulates quickly.

The American Bee Journal  published a timely piece in their August issue. It just hit my mailbox. The article is about avoiding granulated honey in your extracting frames. It’s written by your favourite bee-blogger. Me.

I’m not going to repeat my article here because you can read the whole thing in the bee journal. If you don’t already subscribe to the ABJ,  you should. It’s a great resource for beekeeping and bee science. You can see my article in the magazine, but I will paraphrase part of it because it’s an important topic.

Granulated comb

Trouble: granulated comb

Granulation can be a big expensive problem for some beekeepers, but others never see combs of crystallized honey. Along north Florida’s Apalachicola River, beekeepers produce tupelo honey which almost never granulates. But in northern, dry regions of the plains and prairies, canola honey may crystallize in the hive a week after bees store it.

Most honey is between the extremes of canola and tupelo, crystallizing a few months after extracting. The primary causes of granulation are the honey’s glucose-to-moisture ratio, storage temperature, the passage of time, and purity of the honey. I cover these in detail in the American Bee Journal. Today, I will just give a summary of two points – moisture and glucose.

High-glucose honey - safely in a jar.

High-glucose honey – safely in a jar.

There are two main sugars in honey – fructose and glucose. They vary between species of honey plants. It’s the glucose that forms crystals. Just a little more glucose makes a big difference in granulation. Floral varieties high in glucose include canola, cotton, mesquite, and manzanita. Those with low glucose levels include tupelo, acacia (black locust), and sourwood. The low ones are slow to granulate.

Water is also important in this discussion. Think of honey as an unstable, supersaturated solution of just glucose and water. Glucose crystals precipitate if there is about one-and-a-half times more glucose than water in the honey. In other words, if your honey is 18% water, then 27% glucose is the cut-off. Very few types of honey have such low amounts of glucose.  Average American honey is 31% glucose. Canola averages 36% while tupelo is just 25.6%. These numbers are similar in other parts of the world – most honey has enough glucose to crystallize if moisture is below 19%. (Honey over 19% is less likely to granulate, but it will sour and ferment.)

Here’s how this relates to your honey crop.  You probably can’t avoid areas or crops with higher contents of glucose. You probably don’t want to – maybe that’s where you make most of your honey. But if you are in such an area, get the honey off the bees quickly (as long as it’s ‘cured’ or ‘ripe’ enough and below 18.6% water content. Then keep the boxes warm – combs granulate most rapidly at about 15 ºC  (60 ºF). Finally, extract as quickly as possible – don’t let the boxes sit around for weeks, but get at ’em and get ’em done!

There is more to this story. Temperature and timeliness are important. And there’s something I call ‘purity’ in my article. This involves avoiding dust and old granulation crystals in the honey frames. These serve as starting points for new granulation. These things (and more) are included in my American Bee Journal piece. The bottom line is keep things clean and warm and get things done on time – the same advice you’d hear from any beekeeper.

Which honey will granulate? Those at the top left are most likely because they have the highest glucose level and lowest moisture.

Which honey will granulate? Those at the top of the graph are most likely to crystallize because of their higher glucose level. Moisture varies with region and local climate, lower moisture honey granulates more quickly than higher moisture honey.

 

Posted in Beekeeping, Climate, Commercial Beekeeping, Honey | Tagged , , , , , | 10 Comments

Bird-brained Hunting Partner

Posted on July 28, 2016 by Ron Miksha
The Honey Guide (Source: CC/gisela gerson lohman-braun)

The Greater Honeyguide
(Source: CC/lohman-braun)

Scientists may have proven that African Honeyguide birds “communicate” with their human partners. You have probably already heard about this, as it’s been reported this week in Zaire’s Times, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and fine papers everywhere. The original report, Reciprocal signaling in honeyguide-human mutualism, by Claire N. Spottiswoode  is here. A very lucid explanation (I recommend that you read it.) was written by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne – his piece is Honeyguides and humans: a wonderful mutualism between our species and a wild bird. You will find it here.

All these stories have been produced by much better writers than me. My intention here is to simply give a quick summary of this bit of science, in case you’ve somehow missed it.  Then I will spend a moment on something that’s related.

The honeyguide story (in case you don’t plan to read the links I just gave you) informs us that humans make a distinct call to honeyguides whenever the human is in the mood to go bee-tree climbing. Birds respond to the humans’ Br-r-r-r-UHM by teaming up with the honey hunter. The guide bird finds wild swarms, the human hunter dislodges them and shares the wax and bee brood with the bird. Scientist Claire N. Spottiswoode is fairly certain that there is no training or coercion involved. Honey guide and honey hunter simply cooperate. Cooperative birds reproduced more abundantly, resulting in successful lineages of mutually cooperative birds.

I’m just a geophysicist and not a biologist, so don’t trust me on what follows. But a few years ago it occurred to me that we sometimes inadvertently manipulate species’ evolution in our environment. I’m not talking about planned breeding programs, but indirect consequences which have affected our world – such as the difference in temperament between Africanized and European honey bees.

The thing that occurred to me is that we may have influenced the genetics of honey bees. Central European bees (Apis mellifera carnica) are usually quite gentle. They can be handled easily. They rarely sting. For over a thousand years, these bees were kept on porches, along walkways, and in gardens in Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, and Croatia. Any hives that were irritable were given the sulphur treatment. The human goal was not to breed gentle bees for the future, but to reduce stings in the present. Nasty colonies were killed. Gentleness was thus encouraged.

Hives beside the house in Croatia.

Hives beside a house in Croatia, 1985.

Meanwhile, in equatorial Africa, native honey bees (Apis mellifera adansonii) tended to prefer life in trees. Moving them into hives near homes was less successful. If a person wanted honey, they had to climb trees (maybe after the bees’ nest was discovered by a honeyguide bird). In the tree, the meanest and most aggressive bees repelled the honey hunters while meeker colonies were eaten. Beekeepers in Africa learned to make hives and keep them in trees (partly to avoid predators). Without daily intimate contact, the emotional disposition of the bees wasn’t a great factor in determining which nests would be exterminated. In fact, aggressive bees chased beekeepers away. In this human-bee relationship, irritability was promoted.

1906 - Bee hives in a tree, at the base of the hills south of Munarago, British East Africa

Beehives in a tree, south of Munarago, British East Africa, 1906.

Undoubtedly there is more to this story.  Readers may offer corrections. I haven’t seen these relationships invoked elsewhere to describe honey bee temperament, so it might be wrong. Other environmental pressures (resulting in genetic changes) also contribute to adansonii behaviour (after all, it is a different subspecies).  However, it is interesting that in Brazil, where the Africanized honey bee was released in 1957, the invasive bees were at first extremely aggressive, but after 60 generations of interaction with Brazilian beekeepers, they seem to have lost some of their sting.

Posted in Ecology, Genetics, Hives and Combs | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Greatest Show on Earth

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Ron Miksha
That's me, brandishing the branding iron at the Trottier ranch.

That’s me, brandishing the branding iron at the Trottier ranch. TU was Buzz Trottier’s brand. This looks mean, but keeps the cows home.

My home town – Calgary, Alberta, Canada – hosts an annual 10-day cowpoke fest called the Calgary Stampede, aka, “The Greatest Show on Earth”. I’m not a cowboy, but I’ve been lucky enough to help friends with spring branding and fall herding. In the past, I was bewildered to see people with clean boots and pressed shirts swinging their lariats in town, but I’ve come to see it as a compliment to western and cowboy culture rather than some sort of awkward cultural appropriation.

So, I am among the fans of the Stampede.  Each year, a million or more folks wander around the exhibition grounds in early July to see things like blacksmith finals competitions and girls on ponies racing around barrels. This year there was a new and extremely popular display: The Calgary and District Beekeepers Association set up a big exhibit highlighting Alberta’s honey industry.

My friend Liz Goldie was one of the many beekeeper-volunteers on site and she gave me the pictures that follow, taken at the 2016 Calgary Stampede.

stampede-2

Pierre the Bear points visitors to the bee exhibit.

Getting down and Partyin' at the Calgary Stampede

Gettin’ down and Partyin’ up – at the Calgary Stampede’s bee exhibit.

stampede-4

The place was sooo crowded most of the time. Liz took the following picture early in the day, before the bee exhibit was overwhelmed…

stampede-5

Pierre the Bear bothering a bee. You can't get much closer at catching the spirit of the Calgary Stampede!

Pierre the Bear bothering a bee.
You can’t get much closer at catching the spirit of the Calgary Stampede!

Again, I’d like to thank Liz Goldie for these pictures. By the way, Liz was one of the three finalists in the Calgary Stampede Honey Show. Her honey is on the top shelf, below!

honey show winners

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Friends, Outreach | Tagged , , | 1 Comment