Bee Time Again: Lessons from the Hive

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Ron Miksha

It’s Bee Time!

A few months ago, I had high praise for Mark Winston’s latest book, Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive. Now I have heard that Winston’s book has been awarded the prestigious Canadian Science Writers Association recognition as 2014’s best “science and society” book. This is a great accolade: the 5 members of the short list were outstanding books. It was nice to see Winston’s Bee Time chosen from well-written books about such diverse subjects as memory and Alzheimer’s, the science of work hazards, and Canadian space-walking astronauts. If you have not yet read Bee Time, I encourage you to get a copy.

Bee Time is 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

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Solving the World’s Problems

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Ron Miksha
Closing in on the Rockies, near Bragg Creek, Alberta

For the past short while I’ve enjoyed meeting some beekeeping friends each month. We have a two-hour coffee and try to figure out how we can fix the world. Well, actually, we get together to talk about building stuff and about beekeeping. I look forward to these rambling discussions. I don’t get out enough – too often, I stay home and talk to myself. I am a good audience for myself, but tend to be a bit weak on objectivity while talking to the wall. The two guys I’ve been meeting up with are able to pull my chain back to earth and help me examine my thoughts a little more rationally. So here is my suggestion to you for the day: find a group or two to regularly bounce ideas off. It is worth a lot. If you are stuck in a box of your own making, the only way out is through the help of friends. I originally met these guys at the local bee club, and you should be able to encounter some idea-bouncers of your own in a similar venue. Meetings are great for mixing and learning, but a two-hour coffee with just a couple of friends creates opportunities you don’t get at structured formal bee meetings.

We didn’t solve any of the world’s worst problems, the planet is too messed up for even us to fix in a single day. So instead we talked about the drippy hippy honey-tap hive (Sorry, we voted it down on mechanical and ethical grounds.) and we talked about how package bees are installed and how to best prepare hives for winter. (I know, it’s spring here, but you can never start planning too early for a Canadian winter.) Over the three cups of coffee and two hours of chatting, I was reminded that there are a lot of really interesting beekeeping ideas out there. And those ideas usually need adapted to fit our climate and geography. That’s another way that gabbing with beekeeping friends can help. They often have faced the same stubborn location-specific issues as you and they can offer suggestions or commiserate with your struggles. So, I urge you to find your own mini-group to discuss your bee issues. If you do, I hope you can find as great a meeting place as we had today – our coffee shop was in Bragg Creek, in the foothills of the Rockies. My buddies live near there. For me, it was just a 50 kilometre drive west of my city, through rolling farmland then up into the alpine forest. The Rockies were gorgeous with glistening late spring snow while the air was fresh and warm. Made me happy to talk bees, even if we ended our session with some of the world’s problems unresolved.

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A 60-year-old Image Problem

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Tisdale’s eye-catching sign

After 60 years, the good people of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, are thinking of changing their slogan from “Land of Rape and Honey” to . . . something else. Well, it’s about time. Every town and village should reconsider logos, symbols, signs, and slogans that have been around for 50 or 60 years. Shake things up a bit.

Apparently, the old slogan made sense at the time. Tisdale, up in the northeast part of Saskatchewan’s black soil district was a great place for farmers and beekeepers sixty years ago. There was so much honey produced in the area that a big co-op warehouse was built to handle, process, and export several million pounds of the sweet stuff every year. Rape seed – genetically engineered and rebranded as canola – was the biggest cash crop. When I kept bees in northern Saskatchewan in the 1980s, canola was just catching on. Farmers loved the stuff – it grew well on freshly deforested parkland, and it sold for a fair price. (It is remarkable to realize that new farmland was still opening up by the thousands of acres a year, just thirty years ago in Canada.) Farmers loved canola, but they still called it rape. Just as the 60-year-old slogan in Tisdale still does.

Tisdale is thinking about changing with the times. The obviously crude slogan became even more crude when rape disappeared and canola took its place in the fields of Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, the farmers’ vocabulary remained stagnant. The town held a survey 20 years ago, trying to decide if it was time for an update back in 1992, but the vote was evenly split, so the slogan stayed. But times change. Today, less than one percent of the local cropland is planted in rapeseed. So the change-the-words campaign is holding another vote and is inviting submissions for a new slogan. “A Great Place to Bee” and “Hub of the Northeast” seem to be front runners. But “Less Rape and More Honey” will probably be the winner.

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Beekeepers’ Problems Solved

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Tew’s Problem Solver

A publisher sent a new beekeeping book to me. As usual, I promised to read and review it – but warned the publisher that I am an awfully slow reader, and even worse – I can be awkwardly honest. (As you may have noticed in my reviews of the movie Bee People and the “Honey Tap Hive” – both of which I’d avoid like mites and measles.) I am never paid for spewing my inner beekeeper on these pages – but if I am going to review your book or movie, you should send me a free copy, else my basal ganglia’s inertia may prevent me from ever buying your Tolstoyesque tome. If you do send me a review copy, I’ll remind you that I am a slow reader and an honest critic. But if I like the work, I’ll gush the truth, as I will do here with James Tew’s new book.

The Beekeeper’s Problem Solver, was sent to me by Quarto Publishing of Minneapolis (USA). It was written by James Tew, a veteran beekeeper (over 40 years behind the veil). Tew sports an entomology PhD and a way with words (see his semi-eponymous blog, onetew.com). His new book is very nicely arranged. Each left-hand page lists a Problem, followed immediately by the Cause (as Tew perceives it), and then a lengthy Solution. These are supported by colour photographs, inset boxes with side-issues, and enough detail in the text to resolve the problem. It’s a friendly format.

I could try to convince you to buy a copy for every beekeeper you know (especially a NewBie). I could easily persuade you, simply by referring to Dr Tew’s willingly dispersed largesse of experience and his commitment to bees and beekeepers. Instead, I will show you what his book offers. Tew tackles issues as diverse as the serious (My apiary has flooded), the practical (My hive equipment doesn’t match), and the unusual (My neighbour has found bee droppings on their car). You will have to buy Professor Tew’s book to get his answers to these.

I will, however, give one example from among his hundred problems:

The Problem: “I’m unsure how to guarantee varietal sources”

The Cause: “Honey is frequently promoted by varietal source, such as orange blossom, blueberry, or basswood. In reality, it is difficult to guarantee what percent of the extracted crop is specifically from the source listed in the name. Normally it is not an issue, so long as the source is not a popular type of honey such as Melaleuca or Sourwood.”

The Solution: I’ll paraphrase part of Dr Tew’s answer. He points out that a conclusive guarantee is usually not possible. Large packers may send samples off for pollen and ‘DNA profiling’. For average beekeepers’ needs, Tew gives advice on timing of supering and harvesting. He points out that not all honey can perfectly match the label, just as “from similar areas there are good and not-so-good varieties of wine, yet they are all from the same area. The consumer is the final judge.”

As James Tew says about honey varieties, I will likewise say about bee books. “The consumer is the final judge.” You will have to decide if this book is worthwhile. I think it is. The book is very good and quite attractive, but not perfect. For example, in the example just given, Dr Tew refers to Melaleuca honey as ‘popular’ – it is if you like vile honey that looks, smells, and tastes like motor oil. I suspect that Tew intended to write Manuka, not Melaleuca. Manuka is touted as an antioxidant honey from New Zealand and its pedigree is important to justify its high price. However, such slips are rare in this book. If you’d like a copy, you’ll find a place to order it at the end of this sentence.

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“The bees are coming!” said the hotel.

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Ron Miksha

If you have been a beekeeper for a long time, you will remember the days when you had to hide your nasty habits (and your nasty bees) from the public. Bees were once very uncool. The Africanized bees terrorized America. One wasp at a picnic was a swarm of angry honey bees in the eyes of ordinary concerned citizens. But times have changed. (Except at the White House lawn – see the story just below.) Last month, I spent a weekend on Vancouver Island, partly a business trip, partly a family holiday. Our hotel – the Chateau Victoria – was fine, reasonably underpriced, and close to the work I needed to do. It is an 18-story building in the Inner Harbour area and it has a restaurant and resident hives of bees. I didn’t see the bees, but I saw a sign about them. It was posted in one of the elevators and I reproduced it for you here.

In the recent past, a hotel would not announce the arrival of bees. It might not even admit that bees sometimes visit flowers on the property. But these days, the executive chef serves locally produced honey (very locally produced – the bees are kept at the hotel) and guests are invited to celebrate the arrival of the buzzers. And to buy hotel honey.

This is progress. Another piece of progress worth celebrating is a fantastic garden a few minutes’ drive north of downtown Victoria. Butchart Garden’s beautiful spring flowers – lots of hyacinths, tulips, azaleas, daffodils – were a delight. But I was intrigued with the history of Butchart Gardens. One hundred years ago, the Butcharts made a fortune by digging a huge hole in their backyard. They excavated limestone, set up furnaces, and produced cement. When mixed with beach sand and stream gravel, the family’s cement made the concrete that built Victoria. Mrs Butchart found the dig rather unsightly. The family had lots of money and a nice mansion, but Mrs Butchart was surely the first person to have said, “Not in my backyard” when the limestone quarry started.

NIMBY (Not-in-my-back-yard) is a common enough expression these days when citizens try to keep drug rehab centres and recycling stations out of their neighbourhoods – while admitting this are good and necessary things that should be built in some other neighbourhood. Mrs Butchart of the Gardens was stuck with her ugly stone pit so she went about decorating it. She turned the quarry into a ‘Sunken Gardens’ and hired a native of Japan to design the nearby Japanese Gardens. An Italian landscaper built the Italian Gardens while elsewhere on the property someone named Rose planted a rose garden. That was a century ago. Today, people pay thirty dollars or so to stroll around the grounds for a day. It has become the iconic Canadian gardens and it proves that abandoned stone quarries can become things of beauty. As Mrs Butchart might have said, “If someone hands you a hole in the ground, plant a garden.” Of course, it helps if that hole in the ground made you a millionaire.

sunkengardens

Butchart Garden’s Sunken Gardens – the old limestone quarry

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Bees are Good.

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Ron Miksha

This is one of the best things I’ve seen on the news in a long time. The American president is on the lawn on a beautiful spring afternoon. He’s reading Where the Wild Stings Are to a hundred kids who are distracted by . . . a BEE. Goodness. From the screaming, you’d think Obama was presenting medical insurance to Congress. Then the president says the three coolest words of his six years in the White House. “Bees are good.”

I’d like to say that the kids settled down upon hearing the soothing tone and wise words of their president. But, as I suggested earlier, this was a Congressionalish crowd of children. One screamed out, “I’m scared.” Certainly, the child was scared. Where does that come from? Perhaps a parent who has trained the child to fear things that could be beneficial. But, as the American president said, “Bees are good.” On this, hopefully we can all agree with him.

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What’s wrong with this picture?

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Ron Miksha

To celebrate spring, Google’s Doodle uses an artsy little bumblebee disturbing some pretty flowers. As a beekeeper I am always happy to see bee thingies, but I wish that such artists would consider a wee dab of natural science in their creations. It is a common myth that bees like garden flowers. Usually they do not.

Although bees and flowers partnered up about 100 million years ago, not every flower is enticing to every bee. Among the 20,000 bee species, there are specialized bees (long-tongued bees, early-morning bees, etc.) filing ecological niches matched by specialized flowers (deeply recessed nectaries, early-morning bloomers, etc.). The flowers that are the most attractive to bees seldom match the flowers selected by human eyes to beautify parks and gardens.

I am not a botanist, but it seems to me that the bumblebee in the Google Doodle would have little interest in the flowers shown. The most identifiable, the tulip farthest on the right, is certainly a spring flower, but I have rarely seen any bee on a tulip – unless she is tired, lost, or confused. In the Google image, the tulip is red (as is a flower near the center, which appears to be a carnation). Bee vision is spectrum-shifted. Red (to us) appears black to a bee and is not attractive at all, while the colour we perceive as boring white is often a very attractive ultra-violet in the bee’s mind.

Nevertheless, I know it is all the rage to “Save the Bees” (even though they are not disappearing) and it is a fine gesture on the part of the Google Doodlers to show the flowers and the bee. Even if their science is a bit amiss.

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You, me, the bee, and the wind

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Saturday was Windsday here. The forecast claimed we would see record high temperatures and some wind. They were almost right with the temps – it was close to a record and continued the trend of the past two months: warm and dry. T-shirt weather, in the winter, in Canada. But the weather folks were a bit subtle when they told us to expect some wind. It was the wind that legends are made of.

What happens to bees on a windy day? Even though it was quite mild and honey bees would normally enjoy a bit of exercise, windy-day bees stay home, eat honey, and play cards. Or they become argumentative grumps like the rest of us. Beekeepers know that bees are aggressive on windy days. This weekend, it would have been impossible to work bees anyway. The smoker couldn’t be tamed and lids and frames would be airlifted to other apiaries. But it is windy-day aggression that intrigues me at the moment.

Decades ago, scientists noted that flat, expansive, windy places have sadder people. Statistically, North Dakota leads the nation in both depression and dusty wind. Abroad, Hungary has long been studied as Europe’s nation with the highest rate of suicide and depression. (Hungary is a land-locked, mostly flat country with a huge windy prairie.) Is there a link between the wind and depression statistics, or are these just coincidental? The Swiss Meteorological Institute believed the link and looked into health problems appearing during spells when the Foehn Winds blew down from the Alps. The people at the institute attributed stress, anxiety, depression, exhaustion, fatigue, dizziness, and body aches to the winds, resulting in increased rates of suicide and highway accidents. It seems winds can sometimes bring misery and chaos. But why?

Why does the wind make us sad and make our honey bees aggressive? Some research points to the tendency for dry dusty places to have more particulate ionization during windy weather. The friction of moving air with and against dust ionizes the particles. An excess of positive ions occurs in some windy conditions and it seems that the positive ions are not a very positive thing when it comes to human moods. Possibly related are the effects of living near wind turbines, which may stir the air and further ionize it. Complaints have been coming from people living near large wind farms (you can read a CBC news story here) with people citing depression, elevated blood pressure, and mood swings – although it may simply be the result of the noise and the unsightly turbine views.

Medically, the increased positive ions around our heads may be enough to disrupt neural activity. Even at a very minor level, such disruption could make it harder to concentrate, think, and even motivate movement. The brain may compensate for the stress by working harder, bringing on headaches, fatigue, and sleeplessness. All this may sound like pseudo science (and maybe it is), but there probably is some general malady at play. Obviously, not everyone responds the same and the grumpiness is not universal. Personally, I am not prone to depression, but when I farmed in southern Saskatchewan, my motivation and energy were invariably sapped on windy days.

How about the bees? People and insects don’t always respond the same way to similar external pressures, of course. It’s not usually safe to extend our attitudes and motivations to our bees – that’s a tendency called anthropomorphism and it leads to comments like, “Hey, look at that bee on the clover – do you see that? She’s smiling!” It may be true that ionic particulates make bees aggressive, but it may be a stretch to believe their lips are sweetly curled on nice days. However, it is pretty good advice to avoid working bees on days when it is so windy that both the smoker and the smoke become airborne.

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Knowing Nothing

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Ron Miksha

He might teach you something.

When I wrote my book Bad Beekeeping, the title came to me as a response to meeting a pompous, self-absorbed beekeeper. You know the sort – the person with a year or two experience who has an undeservedly inflated ego. Such a fellow is likely to write a book about his idea of brilliant beekeeping. But if he persists at keeping bees, he may eventually discover that he doesn’t really know very much. My favourite beekeeping adage is “Beekeeping is an activity where you start out knowing everything and as the years pass, you figure out you know less and less. Eventually, you realize that you don’t know anything at all.” The next time you meet a beekeeper who confidently has all the answers, remind yourself of that adage. Then slowly back away from that expert’s fountain of wisdom.

If you would like to avoid the pitfalls of knowing everything, there are two things that might fix you. (1) You can keep blundering along with an attitude of smarty-pants-ness and after enough years, your confidence will break and you will become a better beekeeper. Or (2) you can seek out a local beekeeper who seems to have a humble demeanor and years of experience. Marry him/her. If that’s not to your liking, see if you can be adopted. Whatever it takes, stick around like granulated honey. Offer to carry a hive tool. Smoke her bees. There is really no better or faster way to learn to be a beekeeper. Our local bee club has a mentor program. Perhaps yours does, too. You can hook up with someone who needs help and offers training. Good luck with your education. May you one day discover that you know nothing. And that’s not such a bad thing. It keeps beekeeping interesting.

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Airport Honey

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Ron Miksha

Apiary at Prague’s Vaclav Havel Airport

Looking for a noisy place to keep some bees? Urban beekeepers struggle to find spots to set landing boards for their hives. Most towns and cities have limits on the number of hives that can be kept in the backyard. Three? OK. Thirty? Probably not. But there are a few areas tucked within some city boundaries where as many as 75 colonies are comfortably kept. Big city airports.

I had not thought of this before, but apparently the idea has been around for at least 15 years. Airports want to be noticed as the eco-friendly green patches that they think they are, so inviting bees on the property gets some positive attention. Sometimes the honey is sold at the airports’ gift shops, boosting the airports’ meagre profits.

Bee hives next to busy airports has probably been happening ever since the Kitty Hawk Apiaries were established in December 1903, but according to a New York Times article, the modern trend dates back to Hamburg, Germany, in 1999. At least a dozen other airports in Europe have also welcomed beekeepers. America’s O’Hare has 75 hives, making it both the busiest and the buzziest airport on the continent. Prominently featured in the NY Times is Montreal’s Mirabel which has 6,000 beckoning acres. The airport authorities reached out to Montreal’s Miel Montreal, a honey makers’ cooperative. The group responded with the five hives of bees now kept at the airport.

You might wonder how the bees feel about their new location. It’s almost certainly a good thing. The hives are kept out of sight, somewhere on the back 6,000. They aren’t going to bother anyone – no one ever wanders around on a commercial airfield and any pilot who runs into the hives has bigger problems to think about than the hives he just hit. The fields at most airports are not farmed so pesticides are not likely an issue. What about the noise? The bees won’t complain – they don’t have ears.

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