There’s a big brain behind those big eyes.
A bee brain is bigger in the summer, when there are more things to learn, experience, and think about. It shrinks in the winter, which must be a blessing because bees spend weeks on end doing nothing – an active brain might lead to boredom and depression if you are one of thirty thousand bees assigned the job called ‘cluster’ for six weeks. You and I know that the same bee who experiences the bliss of spring and summer is unlikely to be alive in mid-winter, so this would be an average. As such, it is possible that there is something fundamentally different about summer versus winter bees (like nutrition), but researchers think that the variation in brain size is due to the lack of meaningful thought during the winter months.
Researchers at Monash University (a huge campus of 65,000 students in Melbourne, Australia) found something else, too. Professor Charles Claudianos at the Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences thinks he and his colleagues have discovered part of the controls which influence bees’ aggression.
Beekeepers know that smoke and certain scents (like lavender) calm bees while other odours (human sweat, expensive cologne, whiskey breath, and perfume) agitate them. Using this knowledge, Claudianos studied bee brain chemistry and neurological function. According to a news release issued by Monash University, “the team has shown that odours such as lavender block aggressive behaviour not by masking the alarm pheromones, but by switching the response off in the brain.” This is different from what I thought. I figured that my smoker provided a camouflage odour that hid my own manly scent. Maybe not, says the research.
The resulting report (“Appetitive floral odours prevent aggression in honeybees“) was published in Nature. There is more work to do, of course, however, the entire field of examining bee brains and neurological function is an exciting and potentially mind-altering way to understand both honey bees and humans.
Humans? The human application of bee brain discoveries is potentially huge. Bee genetics is relatively simple. Despite their intricate social behaviour, bees have fewer genes than most living creatures, even including plants. Working with a highly developed social insect which displays advanced community and language activity – but which possesses a limited number of genes – is a smart choice to analyze aggression, nurturing, and cooperation. Applicable human corollaries are being investigated, including the bees’ ability to learn, remember, and read The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture, which seem similar to our own.
It speaks volumes that Dr Claudianos, one of the authors of the bee brain research paper, is actually a brain scientist focused mainly on human neurology. His university biography tells us “his research topics include the molecular basis of learning and memory, human DNA variations associated with autism, RNA and epigenetic regulation of brain plasticity.” And now, bee brains.
Should you clip your own, use bare hands, gently (gently!) hold the queen’s head and thorax in your non-dominant hand, and ease the open scissors around the tip (one-fourth inch, or 6 mm) of both wings on one side and snip. Some beekeepers hold the queen’s legs, but I’ve felt the queens wiggle and try to pull loose and have worried about damaging a leg. And believe me, making a splint for a queen bee and getting her to use it is a lot of work that care and caution could have prevented!
You may have heard about dozens of 
The numbers are in and the prize goes to Alberta. Alberta, a province in western Canada, has once again won the prestigious honey production award. For those of us who learnt beekeeping where 50-pound crops are the norm (in my case, Pennsylvania), the size of western Canadian honey crops seems the thing of fairy tales, right up there with fire-breathing dragons. Last year’s crop was 145 pounds. (66 kilos) That’s the average per hive from over 250,000 colonies in Alberta. Many colonies did much better. The average would have been higher, but about 30,000 colonies were rented to seed growers – pollination bees didn’t make much honey.
When I was a kid growing up in western Pennsylvania, Groundhog Day was a big deal. It didn’t hurt that it was also our elementary school principal’s birthday. We didn’t get the whole day off (unless Feb 2 was on a weekend) but we did participate in many rousing games of ‘catch your shadow,’ ‘catch your friend’s shadow,’ and, of course, ‘catch your shadow’s shadow’ – looking back, I think the teachers used this time for a coffee break. Or maybe they were in the principal’s office, cutting cake. Here in western Canada, the day passes with barely a salute. My young children said that they don’t even draw pictures of groundhogs. It was ‘business as usual’. I wonder if their school is a bit too serious?
Sitting in traffic, smelling everyone else’s exhaust (you know yours doesn’t stink), you begin to worry about the bees out there. They smell the fumes, too. But if you look closely, you won’t see them gasping or coughing. That’s only because bees don’t have lungs. I just 
A similar thing happens when bees decide to swarm. There are lots of physical inputs. Days are getting longer. The colony population is growing. Less and less of the queen’s limited swarm-suppression pheromone is distributed among more and more bees. Swarming occurs during nectar flows – all available space is filled with honey, contributing to crowding and congestion. There are few places left for the queen to lay eggs. Her body shrinks from her egg-laying hiatus, allowing her to fly with a future swarm. Scout bees return to share their discovery of a hollow tree as a future possible home. A lot of natural triggers work simultaneously. Then, a brief spell of rainy weather keeps the bees stuck in their hive for a day or two. Finally, the sun comes out, it’s hot, humid, and flowers are dripping with nectar. The colony swarms.
I first saw the phrase ‘hive mind’ years ago. It appeared in the 1943 book, The Bee Craftsman, by 
Economists have long described similarities between honey bees and human activities. There is “an invisible hand” in the market place assuring enough shoes, socks, and karaoke machines are manufactured each year. And these things are sold at a price largely determined by collective free-market bidding among all the people interested in foot apparel or in bar tab receipts. As with the bee making comb in her hive, our improvised choices contribute to the operation of a larger society.
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