Please folks, don’t feed honey to babies. Just like spinach and sandbox bugs, honey may (rarely) contain botulism spores.
Today I heard about a huge celebrity bash in Washington, D.C., for a one-year-old’s birthday. It bugged me that the birthday treats included a frozen cake made of all-natural fruit juice (which is probably OK) and honey smeared on posts where party-goers could lick it. You can read the details here.
Just because the National Zoo serves honey to little Bei-Bei on his first birthday, that doesn’t mean you can give honey to little Jacob-Jacob on his. In fairness to the zookeepers, pandas probably have different tummies than people. And the panda’s mom ate most of the honey.
Neil Bertram apiary – Saturday at the Hive visitors
I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It’s a remarkable city. Economist magazine ranks us as the world’s fifth-best city (they place Vancouver and Toronto as 3rd and 4th) while the international agency the Mercer Group says Calgary has the cleanest environment of any city on Earth – clean air, clear glacial water, tidy streets. Both Economist and Mercer failed to mention that Calgary also has the best beekeepers’ club in the world.
I’ve spilled many a pixel raving about the Calgary Bee Club and its education programs, school outreach, swarm collection, bee community projects, honey shows, and diverse meetings, so I won’t do that again today. Instead, I have a few photos (thanks to Liz Goldie) from one of our club’s weekly summertime “Saturday at the Hive” events. A couple of weeks ago, my friend and fellow bee instructor Neil Bertram invited 35 of his closest friends to see his bees and tour his off-grid honey shop in central Alberta. Neil runs a bit over 300 producing hives and makes about 60,000 pounds of honey almost every year. He wholesales most of it and he keeps his costs down by doing his own building, repairing, beekeeping, and extracting.
Neil Bertram enthusiastically shares what he knows. Hundreds of beekeepers have become better beekeepers because of Neil’s commitment and his living example of better beekeeping. I’d better add this disclosure, too: Neil co-stars in our hit program Making Money from Honey. Without his work and support on that project, Money from Honey wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is.
Photos on this page were graciously provided by my bee buddy, Liz Goldie.
Saturday at the Hive, Alberta style:
Neil keeps several typically scenic Canadian apiaries.
Neil demonstrates his extracting line.
Some of Neil’s crop comes from his 3-way splits, housed in the nucs at the bottom. The bees share the honey supers, stacked above.
Recording bee visits on domesticated sunflowers in Alberta, Canada.
It can feel a little creepy, sitting on a bench on the edge of a sunflower forest with your back to the sun. In that position, all the sunflowers are looking at you. If it’s morning.
The marvel of the ‘sun’ flower didn’t escape the notice of North American natives. Various pre-Columbian cultures domesticated sunflowers about 5,000 years ago. Mexico’s Aztec adopted the sunflower as a religious symbol, as have some new-ager cults. It’s a sun symbol because of its solar shape and colour, not because it ‘follows the sun’ across the sky.
Not only are a sunflower’s eyeless- and lipless-heads creepy, but math profs tell us that the flower goes out of its way to creep them out, too. Its florets form a Fermat’s spiral, building a 137.5° angle that is related to da Vinci’s golden ratio, because 137.5° is 55/144 of a (360°) circle and the numbers 55 and 144 are Fibonacci rabbit numbers.
Most of us think that the huge sunflower flower always twists toward the sun, but most of us are wrong most of the time. We cheerfully live with the sunflower misconception – until it’s interrupted by Wikipedia or some other reliable source. As it turns out, sunflowers do face east to catch the morning sun and rotate west as the day progresses (here’s a video)- but they only do this while they are young and gaining height. Once mature, the sunflower blossom gets stuck facing east. Bee scientists think that the flowers are stalled on “east” once their heads mature because the massive flower collects solar heat, which enhances nectar secretion, which attracts pollinators.
A Dakota beekeeper told me that he liked to place his bees on the east side of big acreages of sunflowers so that his bees would see the flowering heads first thing in the morning and they wouldn’t waste time flying around to the other side of the plant, which they’d have to do if he put his colonies in a different spot. (He was a fussy beekeeper.)
My friend favoured sunflowers because, in his area, they make a nice bit of honey – usually about 30 kilos (60 pounds) per hive per year. Most of that honey comes on warm July days, though up here in Alberta the flowers peak in early August. Each head has about 1,500 florets. The first to open seem to offer the most nectar. From first flowering to last withering sunset, about three weeks passes. With staggered timing of seeding and individual plant variations, beekeepers may have a four or five week sunflower nectar flow. When given a choice though, beekeepers in my part of the world (western Canada) prefer sweet clover and alfalfa – sunflower honey is darker and it granulates quickly because of its high glucose content. But the plant is a fun flower and some mystic types off folks like to eat honey from the symbol of the sun, so the stuff sells well.
The sunflower does, in fact, spin around as it chases the sun across the sky, but only when the plant is gaining height.
This was discovered years ago. The side pf the stem receiving more sunlight grows a tiny bit faster, hence twisting the plant as the day goes on. It’s the twisting that makes the immature sunflower follow the sun. When growth stops, the flowery faces face east.
The biggest mystery is the immature sunflower’s nightly backward twist. Returning to the east where it waits for sunrise. Turns out that domesticated sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) have a circadian clock that tells the plant when to return to the east. This idea was established in a sealed lab where sunflowers were raised with constant light but no sunshine. For a few days, young lab sunflowers continued twisting towards the east every twelve hours, but with the constant light, they got smart and the habit died.
All of this – circadian rhythms, internal clocks, memory – reminds me that plants are people, too, and should be treated with respect. Unless we’re hungry.
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.
I 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 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.
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…
John 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
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. Someone 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 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.
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 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.
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. 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!)
Our 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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
It’s not hard to find a canola field in July in western Canada.
Some of our bees alongside a canola field, just south of Calgary
A Dakota beekeeper told me that he liked to place his bees on the east side of big acreages of sunflowers so that his bees would see the flowering heads first thing in the morning and they wouldn’t waste time flying around to the other side of the plant, which they’d have to do if he put his colonies in a different spot. (He was a fussy beekeeper.)
The sunflower does, in fact, spin around as it chases the sun across the sky, but only when the plant is gaining height.
I first wrote about Zombees over four years ago
Someone 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 
Our 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 
