Does Royal Jelly Make Royal Queens?

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Ron Miksha
School kids need a new lesson about royal jelly.

School kids need a new lesson about royal jelly.

The kids in the Grade 5 classroom knew all about royal jelly.

“The bees feed it to their babies and they turn into queens.”

And so it is. We think. Royal jelly – countless journal articles (and Wikipedia) tell us – stimulates the latent she-ness in a female larva. It removes her from a future life of weary drudgery as a worker destined to live six short weeks who then dies wedged between some dusty stigma and anther. Royal jelly gives the lucky larva a future life as a queen employed in monotonous drudgery as an egg-laying machine destined to deposit progeny for three years in a crowded dark den, then die in a palace coup.  There’s not much of an advantage in the queen’s life. But it’s longer. And there must be a crown or something that comes with the job.

The Queen's Breakfast: Royal Jelly (Source: Wikimedia)

The Queen’s Breakfast: Royal Jelly (Source: Waugsberg)

The reason the queen lives three or four years instead a few weeks and lays eggs instead of stingers is because of nutrition. As a child, she was given the special food. At least that’s what I always thought. Now some upsetting scientists are trying to change the bees’ narrative.

In a nutshell, University of Illinois researchers have found that pollen-based food called bee bread, given to larvae that become worker bees, contains an acid that works as a DNA methylation agent. Methylation of DNA was discovered just a few years ago. It can shut off the way DNA makes proteins, changing the way living things look, grow, and function. Scientists think it controls epigenetics (the way the environment affects gene expression). This is nearly as important as DNA itself in changing the future of a creature. Environment affects DNA methylation which can turn off the way some genes work. So this new theory suggests that an important component of the environment – diet – turns off some genes in the female, suppressing their expression, resulting in worker bees.

My brother, David, feeding royal jelly to future queen bees.

My brother, David, feeding royal jelly to future queen bees.

Professional queen breeders, such as my brother, seen here grafting queen cells, know the value of keeping future queen bees swimming in a surplus of royal jelly. The new science changes nothing about that. But we now have a different way of thinking about what royal jelly actually does.

We used to think that royal jelly made queens and a lack of it led to sexually shriveled, stunted workers. Instead, it appears that bees provide their future workers with food which suppresses the natural tendency for a larva to become a queen. Worker larvae start off with royal jelly (for three days) but then the diet is modified to include honey and beebread (made from pollen). Honey and pollen are excellent foods for all of us, but they contain p-coumaric acid which works as an off-switch for bees.

The U of Illinois researchers, led by May Berenbaum,  confirmed their theory by raising queens in vitro, giving them the same amount of royal jelly that hive-reared larvae receive when they develop into queens. But by spiking the jelly with p-coumaric acid, less well-developed queens resulted.

This turns the bee world upside down and I like it. It’s great to challenge age-old assumptions about how things work. We naturally assumed that better nutrition results in better bees – in this case queens instead of workers. Some people carry this idea so far that they eat royal jelly so that they, too, may live much longer and lay insect eggs. The notion being promoted by this research is that the royal jelly isn’t what makes the queen. Instead, all fertile honey bee eggs will become queens – unless they are fed honey mixed with fermented pollen (bee bread).  Now that’s a game changer.

But this result (which you can read about here) is not without its critics. It is doubtful that it’s as simple as one chemical (p-coumaric acid) having full control over the sexual maturity of honey bees. Some scientists are pointing to different compositions of bee spit that gets mixed into the worker/queen foods in the bees’ kitchen. Others say they have been able to raise queens without using any royal jelly. However, the work by entomologists Berenbaum, Mao, and Schuler has opened a new look at the roll of royal jelly in the beehive. And this may lead to some revised lesson plans for the Grade Five kids at our local elementary school.

Posted in Bee Biology, Genetics, Queens | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Bees, Beer, and Dead Mites

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Ron Miksha
Bees and Beer (Source

Bees and Beer   (Source: YouTube)

Can beer save the bees? No, but with enough beer, bees may not care that mites are crawling all over them.  There have been headlines over the past month suggesting that beer will save the honey bees, but that’s not quite the real story.

Instead, there is a new natural miticide that kills Varroa mites. It’s based on hops, a product used to make beer.  A study from the Carl Hayden Bee Lab in Tucson showed that a solution of 1 per cent hops beta acid swabbed on worker bees’ backsides killed Varroa mites but not honey bees. Cardboard tabs dipped in a hops beta acid solution also eliminated mites when inserted into a beehive.

Alpha and beta hops acids are used in beer making. The beta acid is even more bitter than the alpha line. Bees avoid sipping bitter stuff, so they are unlikely to imbibe the brew material. Further, it appears to be safe for honey bees when used in the beehive. In the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently approved the use of a commercially made hops beta acid application. This is important because it clears the way for yet another mite killer, this time a natural product, to be used inside the beehive.

Flowering Hops Plant

Flowering Hops Plant Source: Wikipedia

The new product is a biochemical miticide, Potassium Salts of Hops Beta Acids, which is derived from the cones of female hop plants, Humulus lupulus. The EPA registration allows beekeepers to use it in the fight against varroa mites. Significantly, it should allow beekeepers to take a break from other chemicals, disrupting the mite’s cycle of resistance which grows if the same products are repeatedly used to fight mites. The registrant is Beta Tech Hop Products,  which will make plastic strips containing the biopesticide.  According to a news release from the EPA itself, a biopesticide is a “naturally-occurring substance with minimal toxicity and a non-toxic mode of action against the target pest(s). There are numerous advantages to using biopesticides, including reduced toxicity to other organisms (not intended to be affected), effectiveness in small quantities, and reduced environmental impact.” That sounds good.

It’s not surprising that mites succumb to hops acid. Some of the other standard miticides are also acid-based. Oxalic acid and formic acid are examples. All of these – hops, oxalic, formic, and other acids – even pass the test for “organic” in most cases. (It depends on who’s rules you’re following.) But the difficult thing about these natural acids is that you have to use them at high enough concentrations to kill mites but low enough concentrations to not slaughter bees. And that can be really tricky. Air temperature, draft, and colony populations need to be factored in when preparing to fumigate with acids. Plus, beekeepers are notoriously inept at following instructions. Although these treatments usually work, they can kill your bees. Perhaps hops acid will not be so finicky to apply.

Initial reports about the safety and efficacy of hops is encouraging. The December 2012 report from  the Arizona bee lab shows Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman as the contact researcher. Dr Hoffman is noted as a careful and thorough scientist. Her work was made public three years ago and already a commercial product has been derived from the research and is now available to beekeepers. A big hurdle was EPA approval, which was granted in October, 2015. Here is a summary of the research:

“Hop (Humulus lupulus L.) beta acids (HBA) were tested for miticidal effects on varroa destructor Anderson and Trueman, a parasitic mite of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.). When varroa were placed on bees that had topical applications of 1 % HBA, there was 100 % mite mortality. Bee mortality was unaffected. Cardboard strips saturated with HBA and placed in colonies resulted in mite drop that was significantly greater than in untreated hives. HBA was detected on about 60 % of the bees in colonies during the first 48 h after application. Mite drop in colonies lasted for about 7 days with the highest drop occurring in the first 2-3 days after treatment. There was a reduction in the percentages of bees with HBA and in the amounts on their bodies after 7 days. Bee and queen mortality in the colonies were not affected by HBA treatments. When cardboard strips saturated with HBA were put in packages of bees, more than 90 % of the mites were killed without an increase in bee mortality. HBA might have potential to control varroa when establishing colonies from packages or during broodless periods.”
.

In late October, the EPA released its ‘tolerance’ exemption for hops acid, apparently offering a free pass if any is later found in honey. Here is part of what the government released:  “This regulation establishes an exemption from the requirement of a tolerance for residues of the biochemical pesticide potassium salts of hops beta acids in or on honey and honeycomb for the control of Varroa mites in accordance with label directions and good agricultural practices.“ This is good news for beekeepers – they can use what they need without risking contamination to their honey by a harsh chemical. Hope hops works as well as a cold beer to reduce everyone’s concerns about mites.

Varroa destructor on a honey bee, photographed by USDA Ag Research Service, using an electron microscope.

Varroa destructor on a honey bee,
photographed by the USDA Ag Research Service, using an electron microscope.

Posted in Diseases and Pests, Save the Bees | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Bees Do the Darndest Things

Posted on November 8, 2015 by Ron Miksha
Bees stuck below the mite screen. Janne cut an escape for them to move up.

Bees stuck below the mite screen. Janne cut an escape for them to move up.

Janne, a bee-club friend, called one afternoon and described something weird that was going on in one of her hives. She told me that her queen and all the brood had somehow ended up in the tiny space below the mite-screen at the base of her hive. The bees were living between the screen and the base of her bottom board. That’s right, a space about two inches thick. Above that towered a two-story stack of bee boxes with some bees in them. As it was October and she was getting the bees ready for winter, she wondered what she should do. Find the queen among the burr comb? Cut out the brood and move it into frames? Put a strong hive over the little hive that lived in the bottom board?  What would you do?

I told her what I might do, but your answer is probably different because that’s the way beekeeping is. We all have ideas, based on our experiences and knowledge. Problem is, none of us has the same experience nor the same amount of information. That’s why beekeeping is an art, or craft, and not a science. Entomology is a science, of course, but not beekeeping.

I usually dread phone calls from new beekeepers. They tell me that they think their queen is dead or they wonder if they should feed their bees.  “How the heck would I know?” is the right answer, but I never say that. I ask for as much detail as possible, but this puts the new beekeeper in an awkward position as they struggle to find the vocabulary and make sense of what they have seen. With enough information from the newbee, I might come up with some answers. But to be honest, I often guess wrong even when it’s my own bees and even though I have access to everything I should need to know to figure out a way to help the bees.

But my friend Janne is not a new beekeeper. She is smart and articulate. She even took pictures and e-mailed them to me so I could be even more sure of what her bees were doing. I think she asked my opinion to get some ideas, but maybe she just wanted me to hear her really odd bee story. Bees do the darndest things and Janne knows that I love these tales of woe from the hive.

I told Janne to get a knife and cut the screen. This might entice the queen to move up into the lower brood box. She told me that it already had some bees in it. The queen generally moves upwards as she lays eggs, so I figured releasing her would get her laying in frames instead of the crowded comb the bees had made in the bottom space. I also thought she should reduce the hive to one brood chamber but leave her mutilated bottom board in place because the brood would hatch and the young bees would move up to care for the brood.  Winter is coming, so I told Janne to feed the hive heavily and wrap the single-story with a lot of insulation. Bees here usually need two deep brood chambers to winter well, but if she keeps an eye on the colony and then feeds it in early March, it might make it.

Well, two weeks earlier, Janne had actually cut a ‘T” shape incision into the screen of her screened bottom board. She had probably already mentioned that to me in our first phone chat but I had missed hearing it.  So, we were thinking alike about the remedy. The day after we spoke, she was back in her little apiary again. She sent me the pictures you see here and an e-mail describing what she saw.

brood nest below mite screen

Looking down into the bottom board. The queen had been stuck here for a few weeks,
building her entire brood nest in this narrow little space!

Before opening the troubled hive, Janne spent a few moments watching the hive entrance. This is always a good idea. When you work your bees, take the time to really look at their flight. Are the bees jumpy, as if robbing is going on? Are they listless, like sick bees might be? Is there a huge flight? Or no flight?  Janne saw lots of bees using the proper hive entrance and just a few bees using the false entrance – the gap that led to the little chamber between the screened bottom and the hive base.

Janne pulled off both brood chambers and set them aside. Since I had recommended that she reduce the two-story hive to a single because the population would be small, she pulled the cover off the top box to begin the consolidation process. That’s when she discovered brood in the top box. The queen had wandered up from the narrow bottom board space in the two weeks since Janne had cut the mite screen.

My beekeeper friend then had a dilemma. Should she consolidate everything into a single box, or leave the hive as a ‘proper’ two-story assemblage?  (I had recommended consolidation into one box because I figured there would be just a few bees in the hive and they would have trouble ‘heating’ a bigger home.)  Janne decided to reverse the hive (and consolidate all the brood into the lower chamber) and keep it as a two-story hive.  She has to make that decision herself.  She knows how many bees are there what shape things are in. She still has the option to trim it down to a single, using a bee escape to empty bees from the top box.

All of this was two weeks ago. Now it’s November, we are getting chilly weather, and bee work has to end for the season.  In a few months, I’ll let you know if this little hive makes it through the harsh Canadian prairie winter.

 

Posted in Beekeeping, Friends, Hives and Combs | 1 Comment

Time and Time, Again

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Most North Americans moved clock hands back last night.  Others in the northern hemisphere did this a week earlier. Meanwhile, some folks in the southern hemisphere did the deed in the opposite direction. Others never changed to Daylight Saving Time, so they aren’t moving any time soon. It’s a gemisch of spinning clock dials, but the world’s biggest mess is in the United States, on the Navajo Nation in the state of Arizona.

We’ll get to the Navajo in a minute. But first, the whole notion of springing forward in the spring and falling back in the fall shall be examined.

Ben Franklin, America’s inventor/publisher/scientist/statesman/postmaster proposed the idea back in 1784 as a way to save money. His father was a candle maker. From an early age, Ben realized how expensive it is to light a house at night. Instead of “early to bed and early to rise” making a man wealthy, Ben figured that pushing the clocks ahead in the spring could do the same trick. Thus, he invented daylight Saving Time. While ambassador to France, Franklin told a Paris audience that their city would save 128 million candles a year if people simply moved their clocks one hour. But his idea wasn’t adopted anywhere until 1916, when Germany and Austria used clock setting as part of their war effort. The USA began saving time in 1918, but not every American state joined in.

Saving time really does save money. Roosevelt instituted War Time from February 1942 to September 1945 – non-stop Daylight Saving Time. In 1973, Richard Nixon decreed an extra-long summer savings of time during that year’s fuel crisis. That summer, people used Saving Time for an extra few months, saving millions of dollars and tanker loads of oil – 3 million barrels a month, according to the US Transportation Department. With such success, one wonders why we don’t move the clock back two hours and keep it there. But there are dissenters.

Maybe you don’t move your clocks at all? For a few years, I lived in  Saskatchewan, Canada. It’s one of the few northerly places that doesn’t bother with Savings Time. It’s a cow thing – Saskatchewan cows rarely wear wrist watches, so the cows of Saskatchewan saw the idea as so much BS. They knew when they needed milked and the farmers had no choice but to stay with natural time. But within Saskatchewan, there’s a group of timely dissenters: The Hutterites.  I was their Honig Mensch, many years ago.

Sask Hutterites

Saskatchewan Hutterites – from another time zone. (Image: Miksha)

Hutterites don’t use Daylight Saving Time, and they don’t use Saskatchewan Time, either. They use Slow Time, instead.  When I visited Hutterite colonies, I was careful not to show up at the communal farm during daily prayers, which were at 5 pm, slow time. This Mennonite-type group set their clocks to their own unique slow time, which is an hour behind the rest of Saskatchewan. This way they coordinated prayer time with other Hutterite colonies across North America. Slow Time put their clocks at the same time as Quebec, in the Eastern Time, 3,000 kilometres away, instead of Saskatchewan’s Central Time Zone which began at the edge of each Hutterian. 

Saskatchewan time, with immobile clocks that never experience ‘savings’ has apparent merits. Since Saskatchewan bees have the highest annual per colony honey production in North America (about 180 pounds per hive),  we need to consider that keeping the bees on a stable clock has its advantages, too.

Elsewhere, in August, the wizard of North Korea magically moved his country even further back in time, making news by shifting clocks back thirty minutes.  Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un created the new Jong-un Time Zone where un-time not only stands still, but occasionally even runs backwards.

Saskatchewan and North Korea are not the only places with idiosyncratic time shifting.  There are numerous enclaves of other-time peoples. Arizona does not change to Daylight Saving Time when the rest of the United States does. However, within Arizona, the Navajo Nation does move clocks ahead to Saving. However, within the Navajo borders, the Hopi Reservation does not change its clocks. However, living on a ranch in Hopi country is a family where the mother works on the Navajo Reserve, so that house moves its clock. This results in a complicated situation where a family’s clock is ahead of their neighbours’ clocks that are behind a surrounding community that is ahead of a state that is behind a country that moves ahead.

Mixed times on the Navajo Nation (Wikimedia)

Mixed times on the Navajo Nation (Wikimedia)

 

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Friends, History, Humour | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Halloween Trick and Treat

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Ron Miksha

halloween pumpkinIf you grew up in the British Isles or North America, you probably dressed as a ghoul or a super-hero each year on Halloween. For those of you outside the sphere of Celtic autumn rituals, you might not know that Halloween grew out of a pagan tradition that playfully invited participants to mimic zombies on October 31 (on the Reformed Interdenominational Celtic Calendar). That’s the day that dead people annually leave their graves and walk among the living. If you looked and acted like one of the undead grave dwellers yourself, the real dead folks would leave you alone. The church also got in on the fun. The church leaders didn’t stop the ancient tradition but instead created a new religious holiday, All Saints’ Day, to follow the day after pagan Halloween, then called Samhain. By All Saints’ Day, the dead have returned to the cemetery. There relatives and pious people would visit them, bringing candles.

An almost dead honey bee with two zombie fly larvae emerging near the bee's head. (Wikipedia)

An almost dead honey bee with two zombie fly larvae emerging near the bee’s head. (Wikipedia)

I don’t have any dead walking bees, but I can tell you about zombie bees. Zombees, as the poor creatures are lovingly called by entomologists, are just normal honey bees which have the larvae of a fly, the Apocephalus borealis, living inside the bee and feeding on the bee’s brain while the parasitic fly develops. Rather unfortunate, isn’t it? Female flies lay their eggs in the bees. The larvae grow and attack the bees’ brains. The result is out of control bees that sometimes fly in the dark and on cold, rainy nights when they would normally be sleeping. The zombie flies and their infected zombees have recently been found in San Francisco and Vermont. Why they showed up on opposite coasts is a mystery, but there are a few occurrences mid-continent, too. A website called ZomBee Watch documents discoveries and has a map here.

I don’t want to scare you with more tales of zombees, so I’m ending with a cute picture taken by my niece Martha in Florida earlier this month.  Halloween colours are orange and black – as are the colours of the pollen stuck to these bees’ corbicula.

Black Pollen - Martha Dresko

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Diseases and Pests, Strange, Odd Stuff | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Bee Time, for the Third Time!

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Ron Miksha

It’s Bee Time!

Well, this is the third time that I’ve written about Mark Winston’s latest book, Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive. I don’t usually do three reviews on the same book – so I am not going to review it at length this time – but something really great just happened to the book.

I mentioned Bee Time this spring when it won the Canadian Science Writer’s award for the best book of the year. I was at the award ceremony in Saskatoon when the prize was announced. It bested some great entries, but Bee Time is a very good book.  I also wrote a bit about Winston’s book last fall when I read it.

Today, my comments will be brief. The book is in the news again because last night it won Canada’s Governor-General’s Literary Award for the best non-fiction book released in the past 12 months. Congratulations to Mark Winston. I’ll just add a few words about the book and remind you that it’s available at Amazon for about $20. If you haven’t read it yet, it might be time to put the book on your holiday gift list.  Now, about time for  Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive…

It’s a personal story. I especially appreciated the last segment of the book, the Epilogue – Walking Out of the Apiary. But I will quote from the penultimate section, from Winston’s chapter called Lessons from the Hive. It’ll give you a bit of the flavour of the book:

“Bees can be the richest of guides to the most personal understandings about who we are and the consequences of the choices we make in inhabiting the environment around us. Conversations with beekeepers about how they are affected by their time in the bee yard show a remarkable consistency. Words like “calming,” “peaceful,” and “meditative” come up over and over again, and beekeepers visibly relax when talking about their bees.” – Mark Winston, 2014

Posted in Books, Culture, or lack thereof, People | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Naturally Imperfect

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Ron Miksha

imperfect applesThis might be old stuff to you, but our local grocer has started selling imperfect apples. It’s about time. My kids, who are properly brain-washed, love the smallish bruised apples and understand that these specially priced (Cheaper!) fruits are better than apples of perfection. I know that some readers are thinking “Yea, but I’ve been shopping at the farmers markets and get plenty of spotted apples.” We like the markets, too, but they aren’t open year-round here and apples don’t grow locally (except domesticated crab apples – which we have in our yard).  It’s nice to see this alternative for city folks.

Imperfection will save bees. The demand for spotless fruits is satisfied by tonnes of spray. But to be fair to the farmer, it is hard to keep a monoculture crop alive when mites, worms, and fungi jump easily from tree to tree. And though the apples we bought are imperfect, I am aware that they are not organic. Apples are likely the most sprayed of all commercial fruits. USDA data shows that 98% of American apples have residue from at least one of 48 pesticides – even after washing! But buying some small, odd-shaped, bruised and battered apples that may have a scab, worm hole, or fungus ring helps farmers reduce chemicals. It’s a step towards the right finish line.

Sales room on the family farm. You should be able to see the dark jars of goldenrod honey, and to the left, a crate of freshly pruned cabbages.

Sales room on the family farm. You can see the dark jars of
goldenrod honey, and to the far left, a crate of freshly pruned cabbage.

I grew up on a farm that had a vineyard, apricots, chestnuts, peaches, and about 200 apple trees in its orchard. People would come to the farm to buy these, as well as potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and cabbage. I was about 10 when I realized that we sold more cabbage when we peeled off the brownish outer leaves. Give people less and they’ll buy more, it seemed to me at the time. Of course, our customers liked to see the solid green and white heads with all the cabbage worms removed. It seems that consumers are easily fooled. Maybe that’s finally changing. Can we learn to say “Yuck” to perfect apples, knowing they carry unseen chemicals, and embrace the less pretty ones? We can try.

scabby appleThere is a movement to honour, praise, and eat so-called ugly apples. An apple afflicted with flyspeck fungus, for example, looks especially unappetizing, but the blotches and scabs do not affect the safety or taste of the apple. In fact, it is likely safer than most apples without the fungus.

I think the idea is catching on here.  Hopefully the Naturally Imperfect line won’t become so popular that the price will go up or the crates will empty out.  Imperfection, though, shouldn’t run out – the grocery store can always use a bat to beat up some of the shiny apples.  But I think we’ll know the difference.

Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Ecology, Pesticides, Save the Bees | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Staying the Course

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Ron Miksha
Bert's beginning with bees lecture

Bert’s beginning with bees lecture

I had a great time helping teach Beginning Beekeeping to 40 new beekeepers this weekend. Our local bee club, Calgary and District Beekeepers, organized the 2-day event. I was invited to speak for three hours about Spring and Summer Hive Management, followed with Honey: Harvesting and Fun-with-Honey.

Liz, talking wintering

Liz, teaching wintering

Well, of course, the second lecture wasn’t really called Fun-with-Honey, or anything even remotely similar. But it’s hard to indicate processing, grading, storing, using, and selling in one succinct title. Other teachers covered things like starting with bees, bee biology, diseases and pests, and fall/winter management. I guess I don’t need to say that it was a lot of material to cover in one weekend. I felt sorry for the newbees in the classroom. It was an incredible amount of information, all presented in the wacky vernacular of bee-people-speak. But the end-of- class evaluations given to us by the students were almost all excellent. And in the spring, the participants will be taken to an apiary for a refresher and for some hands-on practical experience.

Although I have been messin’ in bees since I was a kid and became enthused in a big way around age 17, I learned a lot from my fellow teachers, Liz, Bert, and Neil.  That’s one of the nicest things about beekeeping – you can work with bees for years and years and still learn a lot. My introductory bio told participants that I have been working with bees for over 40 years, raised thousands of queens, and made a lot of honey. I wanted the students to know that I still have a lot to learn, so I used a story I heard once from another beekeeper.

When you first start to keep bees, you think you know everything. You do this, and the bees do that. You do this other thing, and the bees react this other way. After a year or two, you have made a bit of honey and you have grown comfortable in the beeyard. But then the bees surprise you. And as time goes on, you begin to realize that you don’t know everything. “Beekeeping,” said my friend, “is one of those things where you start out knowing everything and as time goes on, you know less and less until finally you realize that you don’t know anything at all.”  Well, it’s not quite that bad. But the beekeeper who brags the most and acts the smartest is almost invariably the least experienced amid any party of beekeepers.

Neil, explaining bee diseases and control

Neil, explaining bee pests and disease control

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

Bees on a Caffeine Buzz

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Ron Miksha

     Video:  Dr Couvillon shows that caffeine tricks honeybees into working harder.

It seems bees may suffer from the same drowsy morning moods and weary fatigued afternoons as their human cousins. And it may be similarly cured with a jolt of joe.  For bees, the caffeine kick is sometimes provided by shrewd flowers that may cheat them out of copious volumes of nectar by supplying the mildly addicting drug instead. That’s right, some flowers may be tricksters that offer coffee instead of sugar in their nectar. The bees love it.

It takes substantial resources for a plant to secrete nectar. Nectar is largely fructose, glucose, and sucrose. Those sugars are expensive to assemble – plants use sunlight, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen drawn from the environment and manufactured into nectar that attracts pollinators. A few plant species cleverly lace nectar with a little caffeine. This keeps the bees coming back to sip the spiked nectar and inadvertently pollinate blossoms.

Dr Roger Schurch bee collecting caffeine

Part of the caffeinated nectar experiment. Photo: Roger Schürch

This might not be so bad, but it’s the insect world’s equivalent of spending the grocery money on booze. Addicted and unrepentant, the honey bee keeps heading back to the flower’s caffeine bar – even if the flower has quit secreting nectar. In a recent paper, researchers tell us that the plants’ tactics may result in 14.5% less honey production for the bees. To make things worse, the Swiss and UK researchers have discovered that honey bees get so hyped up on caffeine that they perform a wildly enticing waggle-dance, drawing four times the number of bee recruits towards the flowers with drugs than flowers without. Even more fascinating, earlier research has shown that caffeine significantly increases a bee’s memory, helping her find her way back to the garden drug pusher a lot more easily.

The scientists show that honeybees on caffeine are tricked into foraging harder for poorer nectar quality (lower sugar content) and tricked into recruiting more bees to forage caffeinated nectar than decaf. The full paper, Caffeinated Forage Tricks Honeybees into Increasing Foraging and Recruitment Behaviors, by Margaret Couvillon, Roger Schürch, and colleagues, can be found here, at Current Biology.

coffee tree in bloomYou may be wondering about coffee bean trees. They have flowers. The flowers secrete nectar. The plant needs pollinated. If caffeine is so seductive to bees, why isn’t the tropical world covered in coffee beans? Well, too much of a good thing can be a turn-off. The nectar from coffee plants carries a heavy bitter flavour which repels bees more than the drug attracts them. But an Italian foundation has been funding a project in Colombia with the goal of helping small producers supplement their green bean income with coffee honey. The program began its pilot project in 2011. Chemical analysis of the honey harvested from those Colombian coffee trees show it has more than 60% coffee pollen, making it eligible for unifloral marketing. However, although there are millions of acres of coffee plantations in the world, coffee bean honey hasn’t been generally available in the past. That’s because bees really don’t like working flowers with overly caffeinated nectar.  Bees, though, love the blossoms on citrus trees which offer both sufficient nectar and very discrete amounts of caffeine in a balanced and insect-friendly blend.

So, what’s the message here? Flowers are capable of becoming nasty tricksters in order to get what they need. But bees can be rather sly, too. If a flower’s floral tube is too long, the bee may chew through the side of the blossom, steal nectar, and by-pass pollination entirely. And in here in cowboy country, we regularly see a similar activity when honey bees work alfalfa, which has a rude habit of whacking a bee’s head with pollen as the bee tries to gather nectar. Smarter than the average legume, our honey bees quickly learn to sneak around the painful pollen trap, gathering nectar by the bucketful without doing the alfalfa any favours.

Posted in Bee Biology, Ecology, Honey Plants, Pollination | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Chinook Honey and Mead

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Friends of ours have a honey-wine shop in the town of Okotoks, just a few minutes  south of Calgary. They make their own mead from their own honey. They do it really well. Art retired from flying commercial airliners to spend time with his bees. He and Cherie built a store to sell their honey products – the wine making business just sort of happened. Now they produce thousands of bottles of internationally acclaimed award-winning mead.

You can jump over to Chinook Honey’s web site and see their business up-close. I’m not going to write a lot about their outfit got started and grew – you can read about that on their website. As far as the products go, I was at their shop yesterday and I figure a few of the pictures I took could do the talking for me.

Honey wine (mead) is basically honey, water, and yeast. But it’s not easy. Making mead takes an incredible amount of care and hard work.   Extra ingredients like saskatoon berries, cherries, and spices  make the specialty flavours. Here is part of the sales room display.

much wine

I had a peak in the back room where the wines do their wining. Here’s the master, Art.

Art in Meadery-2

More great wine. Everything is done right here – honey making and extracting, wine making and bottling. It’s a fascinating business.

honey wine on display

Chinook Honey, of course makes and markets honey, too. They sell all sorts (including raw honey still in the comb) along with health products like lip balm and supplements like pollen, propolis, and royal jelly. Here’s some pure Canadian honey. I can’t take credit for this picture – I’m not that good a photographer!

chinook honey bottle

If you are running a small honey business and are looking at expansion ideas, consider the retail store and meadery model. Be warned – it’s a lot of work. But it seems like an interesting business. Especially if you’re the sort who likes to wine a bit.

Wine a bit

Posted in Friends, Hive Products, Honey | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment