Pure Sweet Honey and the ALS Run

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Ron Miksha
Left, my son Daniel and my wife Eszter – Daniel is giving Calgary Mayor Nenshi his runner’s T-Shirt.
Right, Co-ordinator Jane tries to defend the mayor from an apparent Star Wars attacker.

Once again, our friends at Pure Sweet Honey Farm have made a wonderful contribution to Calgary’s ALS fundraiser – a walk/run/roll called Betty’s Run. Here is a great big THANK YOU to Willi and Stan at Pure Sweet. They help this organization a lot. The money raised each year by the ALS Society in Calgary helps with all sorts of equipment and aids to daily living for victims of the disease. Contributions to the society also supports research. It is all appreciated so much!

For all my readers and friends (Man, there are a lot of you!), I’ll do my annual quality-of-life update. I’m OK. My type of ALS is really, really slow. Diagnosed 14 years ago, but I can still walk a little, still drive my van, still write my blogs, and still do my geophysics. The quality-of-life department includes family and friends and they have all been a great support. Thank you!

Left, Stan and I with Helen (sporting rabbit ears)
Right, Back side of Mayor Nenshi’s T-shirt. Can you spot the Pure Sweet Honey label?
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Your Dead Bees are in the Mail

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Canadian Queen – photo by Stephen Bennett, Calgary

 

Well, this is pretty sad. Canada Post killed some bees. Queen bees are in short supply in Canada. Because of our late springs and short seasons, most queen bees are imported from warmer climates – Hawaii, New Zealand, and Chile are prime sources. These are used to replace colonies that have died over winter or to increase a beekeeper’s number of hives. It would be great if Canadian beekeepers raised queens and sold them to other beekeepers, but Canadian beekeepers sell fewer than one-tenth of the 300,000 or so imported queens used here each year. The rest arrive from far away. Beekeepers order the queens months in advance, send full payment in advance, and wait for the overworked and harried queen-producers to send the queens during the Canadian spring. The queens are fragile – they can’t survive in a parcel for long. So, when a batch of them go missing, it is a rather tough problem.

Canada Post lost one hundred queens! They all died. The most probable cause of the deaths of these insects was heat exhaustion, the result of being confined without proper ventilation and air circulation. It’s also possible they simply ran out of food, though the shippers would have likely provided enough honey or supplements to last a couple of week. The really sad twist to this story is that these queens were not coming from the other side of the world. This bunch of queens was raised in Canada – out in the eastern townships of Quebec. They were only being mailed as far as Montreal. Canada Post found the parcel after five days – the (now dead) queens and their attendant bees were in a warehouse instead of in the beekeeper’s hands. The post office is willing to refund the $200 freight they had charged. But they are not willing to pay the thousands of dollars that the post’s negligence cost the beekeepers who ordered the queens, even though they admitted internal miscommunication had caused the loss. However, Canada Post wrote to the beekeeper and said, “We sincerely apologize for the results of this experience.” They are very, very sorry.

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Teaching the Bees to Speak

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Visit the Welsh Beekeepers

“I keep the Welsh language alive through bees,” Welsh beekeeper Wil Griffiths told a Financial Times reporter. This could be a huge scientific break-through. Around the world, linguists have been alarmed with the rapid loss of many of the world’s 6,000 languages. They expect half of those languages will suffer an unspeakable future by the end of this century. The Welsh language could be among them.

Teaching bees to speak might stop that decline. Already, bees communicate to each other through their fancy dances and they communicate to us through their angry buzzes. Maybe they can learn Welsh. Unless, of course, Mr Griffiths means something else when he talks about keeping his language alive through bees. You can check out the whole story here. Maybe you will find an interesting story about a bee club in Wales that holds its meetings in Welsh (instead of English) in order to keep the endangered language alive. “Pob lwc iddynt!” as my Welsh neighbour used to say when he heard about something that was going to be hard to do.

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The Ultimate Bee Beard

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Ron Miksha
 

 Perhaps “National Cover Yourself in Bees Day” is underway in China. This 55-year-old beekeeper (seen smoking, center of the pictures) from Shandong Province was assisted in growing the ultimate bee beard by a team wearing army camouflage fatigues. His helpers can be seen shoveling honey bees over the beekeeper (literally – watch for the shovel near the end of this video). The beekeeper set a new record – 1,100,000 bees, weighing 110 kilograms (about 250 pounds), cover the man as he seems to bear a cross in the last scene of the film. It took an hour to pile on the bees. The insects were probably not hurt, but would have been rather confused. To keep them on the beekeeper and not on the Chinese Army, the beekeeper had “dozens of queens” strapped to his clothing. When not performing stunts, the million plus bees can normally be found foraging for nectar and pollen.

 

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Dandy Season

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Dandelions make their grand appearance

A few weeks ago, I wrote that spring had arrived and pollen (plus a little nectar) was coming into the hives – mostly from willow and crocus. I also wrote that the main spring flow here in western Canada (along the Rocky Mountain foothills) is from the lowly dandelion, and it doesn’t reach peak bloom until around May 25th. After I posted those words, the weather turned startlingly warm (it set a record high) and masses of dandelions started to open three weeks early. So, I figured that I got my guess wrong (wouldn’t be the first time). Then it snowed. We had a week of cold weather. Now, finally, on May 25th, the dandelions are making their grand appearance.

In much of North America, the despised dandelion is the beekeeper’s best spring-time friend. Rather than sprinkling the lawn with Ortho® Weed-B-Gon MAX® Weed Killer For Lawns, the beekeeper is more likely to collect dandelion seeds and quietly spread them by helicopter at night. It’s a communing with nature sort of thing.

The battle between lovers and haters of dandelions got me wondering about when and how people got so uptight about their lawns. By people, I mean mostly northern Europeans and their cultural descendants in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The rest of the world is a bit more relaxed about the state of their greens. For example, over the years, I have spent several months in central Europe. Flower baskets and public gardens are everywhere. But yards around family homes tend to be left a bit natural. A bit ragged. Grass may reach knees while dandelions and their associates live safe comfortable lives. It’s different further north – our word for lawn comes from an Old French word (launde) which means barrens or heath. A dead place – or at least a place of little vitality.

Somehow, keeping a barrens around the house has become a middle class pursuit among those of us lucky enough to be middle class members of the world’s wealthier nations. It messes with our minds when stray yellow dots break through the green monotony of the well-tended lawn. Meanwhile, many of us with the nicest yards and the snarkiest sneers for the untidy neighbour are also wondering what is happening to nature’s little pollinators. We bemoan the loss of butterflies and fuzzy bumbling bees, wishing they would drop by to enjoy our neatly manicured lawns. But they seem to be missing.


							

	
			

													
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Elementary Beekeeping


			

				Posted on May 22, 2015 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
Proof of Sherlock Holmes’s residence


Today is the world’s most famous detective’s birthday. No, not James Bond. Sherlock Holmes, if he ever lived at all, would have been well over 150 years old today. Or, at least, his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would be – he was born May 22, 1859.


You likely know some of the old Sherlock Holmes stories. With incredible wit, problem-solving skills, tenacity, deduction, and plain old-fashioned stubbornness, the detective solved the most complicated and beguiling mysteries. So what does such a witty, smart, and stubborn person do in retirement? He becomes a beekeeper, of course.


We are told that Holmes retired to the countryside to make his living from bees. The detective never had much money – Watson helped with his rent at 221B Baker Street – so he probably didn’t notice a big drop in income when he became a retired gentleman selling honey at the farm in Sussex Downs. I am thinking he continued wearing tweeds and certainly his pipe would double as a handy smoker. His bees would have worked wildflowers and made batches of dark pungent honey for the master detective.


One wonders why author Sir Doyle chose to outfit Holmes with a hivetool when he could have left him teaching at Scotland Yard, sharing his tricks with future generations of detectives. Doyle seems mum on this. He doesn’t divulge his thoughts, he just retires his star character to a small holding near a small village and he puts him to work keeping bees. Perhaps it was because Holmes was suffering from a touch of rheumatism near the end of his career (according to Doyle) and bee stings have always been rumoured good for stiff joints.


The bees are introduced rather shyly. There are no long passages describing the bees or any misadventures of the detective prowling among the garden hives, harvesting honey. Quite the contrary. Here is the sum total of the bee references in Holmes’s retirement story, His Last Bow, taking place in the first decade of the twentieth century:

Says Watson: “But you have retired, Holmes. We heard of you as living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs.”

Holmes replies: “Exactly, Watson. Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter years!”

He picked up the volume from the table and read out the whole title, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.

Holmes continues:“Alone I wrote it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.”


Thus we learn that the great Sherlock Holmes had written a practical beekeeping guide in his retirement. If I find a copy, I’ll do a book review for you.


Sherlock Holmes’s retirement house, near Tiger Inn, East Dean, England.

							

	
			

													
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A Swarm of Biblical Proportions


			

				Posted on May 14, 2015 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
The headline reads:

 Swarm of bees that turned sky over British town black

was like “something out of the bible”


OMG: Straight from the Bible! 
Bees blacken the sky over Farnham!


Biblical. That’s the way frightened victims in the English town of Farnham reportedly reacted when their daily ritual of buying nappies and playing snookers in the establishments edging the village square was interrupted by a swarm of bees that “Came from nowhere.” and “Blackened the sky.” If indeed the insects “came from nowhere” then the hand of God was certainly involved. Only God can make an entire swarm of, say, 40,000 bees appear instantly from thin air – as he has done on at least one prior occasion. (I looked it up in my huge Bible Concordance – there was the incident of bees forming in the carcass of a lion.)


Curiously, if you go to the news/gossip site reporting the incident, you will see a 30-second video filmed from an office suite. The camera is pointed outside and – if you look very closely – you will see a few dozen bees dotted around the bright clear blue sky. The sky is not blackened, Armageddon did not happen in Surrey County yesterday.


Not to downplay the horror and distress that a swarm of unexpected bees inflicts upon a village, but swarms are usually very tame. And swarms are quite natural – they are God’s way of fighting colony collapse disorder, so they may actually be ‘biblical’, too. It’s too late to give advice to the Farnhammites of Surrey County, but if a swarm ever blackens your sky, here is what you should do. Be calm. Don’t swing your arms around the air (that’s an invitation to fight). Slowly retreat to the doorway of the Black Swan, or any other place that helps you blend into the scenery. And by all means, stiffen the upper lip and continue with the snookers game.

							

	
			

													
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May Flowers and May Frosts


			

				Posted on May 13, 2015 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
May Flowers in the Snow


My kids picked these flowers as a Mother’s Day gift for my wife. All the blossoms were collected from the yard around our house. Nice bouquet, eh? There is not much in the vase that a honey bee would find attractive (except for the apple and cherry blossoms) but the kids’ mother really liked the little bouquet. The flowers were picked on Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day. It was 21° C (70° F). Then it snowed. A big heavy snowfall with gigantic flakes. Made me wonder about those flowers still out on the shrubs and trees.


They were OK. It turns out there is a difference between a frost and a freeze. We had a frost. The air temperature, despite the snow and its skiff of accumulation on the ground, stayed above freezing. The ground cooled, of course, but it was breezy and humid so the air temperature stayed mild enough to prevent damaging our future crop of crab apples. It is often like that in this part of the world in the spring. On the other hand, autumns are almost always rather dry here. Many years, the honey season ends abruptly on cold August or September nights when the dry air and lack of cloud cover combine with still calm air. On those sort of nights, the thermometer plunges five or more degrees below freezing. The clover and alfalfa blossoms turn black the next day and the bees are irritable and suddenly without nectar.


There is another dimension to the frost-freeze issue. Weather, as just described, is clearly important (Clear calm nights are bad; breezy cloudy nights are sometimes OK), but obviously the type of flower is important, too. Some plants can produce flowers and keep them blooming even in rather frigid conditions. I assume they are fortified by some sort of natural antifreeze. Flowers such as crocus, willow, skunk cabbage, and asters are quite cold-resistant. On the other hand, many species of plants native to tropical climates are injured in cool weather – even if it stays well above the freezing point. For generations, researchers have tried to breed plants that can survive ambient temperatures cooler than the plant’s comfort zone. But breeding for cold weather tolerance has largely failed.


However, geneticists have recently isolated some of the genes responsible for weathering the cold. In the case of rice, as many as 242 different genes interact to invigorate hardiness in cooler weather. One March, while I traveled in northern Vietnam, in an area near Hanoi, I saw the delayed planting of rice while 1200 kilometres south, near Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) the first of three sequential harvestings was starting. Stretching the season could feed millions. But modifying even some of the more critical genes out of 242 is a huge challenge. The goal of researching the genetics of frost is motivated by the need to more efficiently feed people. In Vietnam, three crops are grown on each plot in the south; just two in the north. A third crop in the paddies near Hanoi would not require tilling more scarce land; it would require a faster maturing, cold-resistant variety of rice. I would not want delicate begonias blooming in mid-winter in our yard, and would object to research that made such an ugliness of such a beautiful flower possible. We are quite happy with the natural bouquet that our kids picked this spring. On the other hand, if the people with tiny plots of land near Hanoi could each harvest one extra tonne of rice, I would not want to prevent the research that would make it happen.

							

	
			

													
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Mother’s Day at the Hive


			

				Posted on May 10, 2015 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
All bees are mothers – see the video.


Biologists have been debating the role that mixed genetic heritage plays in your beehive. As children, we learned that there are three castes of honey bees – queen, workers, and drones. [That’s wrong – it’s two castes (queen/worker) and two genders (male/female) – but, thanks to those grade-school teachers, I sometimes still mess this up sometimes!]


Queens are mothers (Happy Mother’s Day), drones are males, and workers do all the work. A genetic quandary grew out of the recognition that few animals willingly tend the offspring of others – it makes no sense from a purely evolutionary-biology perspective. Yet, worker bees are perpetual spinsters, devoting themselves to the care, feeding, training, and safety of their younger sisters. According to modern genetics theory, that probably shouldn’t be happening.


It wasn’t until the 1960s that the idea of eusociality (the social activity of the caste division in animals) was more generally understood and the odd behaviour was explained. Biologists have come to learn that sister creatures with haploid fathers (as drones are) are extremely closely related – each sister shares 75% of the same DNA. (In humans and most other animals, the relatedness between sisters is 50%). So, by caring for many sisters, a worker is assured that much of her own DNA is passed along for another generation.


But there is another aspect to the genetic success of the honey bee, and that’s the idea that the colony itself is a live organism – each bee is a tiny unit, each bee acts effectively like an individual cell. Groups of bees make up organs in a manner similar to cells making up organs – within the colony, there are groups of bees that work together to feed, clean, circulate air, build new tissue (wax), defend against intruders, and care for offspring. Unlike cells in a body, of course, bees are almost identical and can move from one organ-activity to another. Seen in this context, the colony represents an individual which reproduces by swarming. As a unit, the colony’s DNA is preserved and spread.


Relatedness and eusociality are fascinating parts of the honey bee’s natural history. Eusociality has been described by Suzanne Batra (1966), and later E.O. Wilson, to include the social structure of creatures such as ants, wasps, and bees (Hymenoptera) and termites (Isoptera) which practice communal living where (1) generations overlap, (2) there is a reproductive division of labour (sterile and non-sterile members), and (3) cooperative work occurs, including foraging and raising of brood. There is much more to this, including the idea of super-sisters, or blocks within the colony which are extremely closely related, and the controversial aspect of kin selection, but those stories will wait for a future posting. Until then, Happy Mothers’ Day to all the bees in the hive. (Except for those lazy, inept, and mostly useless drones, of course.)

							

	
			

													
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Searching for Flowers


			

				Posted on April 25, 2015 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
The long-awaited bling-bling of spring
The long-awaited bling-bling of spring


I had a road trip earlier this week and was struck by the paucity of natural bling-bling. It’s almost May. Where are the flowers? I ask this lachrymose question every spring, especially after we’ve had a pleasant string plus 20 °C (70F) days. It takes a long time for the ground to warm up, though at this time of year we already have sunshine from 6 am to 9 pm – with quite a long dawn and dusk atop that. So, the slow emergence of flowering plants is always an annoyance. Bees have been sporadically gathering sanguine flakes of pale pollen from crocus and willow blossoms, but our main spring nectar and pollen flow is still a month away. Typically, we expect billions of dandelions to yellow our yards and alfalfa fields around the 25th of May. Good colonies and good weather can result in 40 pounds of honey from dandelion in the Calgary area.


I mentioned that I had driven around Calgary and the surrounding region on a floral scavenger hunt a few days ago. I was quite surprised when I returned to our drive and saw a little sapling tucked away at a hidden southeast corner of our house. That’s today’s picture, the fruit tree with white 5-petal flowers, weighing upon it like late spring snow. There may be a lesson in this somewhere – stay home and smell your own flowers, for example – but I will do my best to ignore any implied trenchant messages.

							

	
			

													
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