Educating the Humans

Posted on October 9, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Killer Bees in the News

Killer bees used to be big news. Enough people are nervous around bees (even the pleasant, nearly harmless, garden bees) that the idea of massive stings is terrifying. “Bee venom is a cocktail of biologically active components that are designed to inflict pain. The honey bee stings only defensively — they don’t try to kill, they try to educate,” says May Berenbaum, a professor at the University of Illinois. Unfortunately, the Africanized honey bee sometimes forgets this important rule. Yesterday, four landscapers working at a southern Arizona house were attacked. One man died. The Douglas Fire Department Chief reported, “A witness said his face and neck were covered with bees.” That 32-year-old man died of cardiac arrest. Another man, stung more than a hundred times, was treated at the local hospital and released. The workers were part of a program teaching work skills to developmentally challenged adults. Our thoughts are with the families and friends of the people attacked and with the directors of this worthwhile charity.

It is claimed that the offending bees came from a nest of 800,000, according to the press. If that is true, it would be ten times larger than any colony I ever heard of. Most likely, someone miscopied 80,000 bees (which would still be an enormous hive) and wrote 800,000 and that number has been repeated over and over again in all the news coverage, all of which seem to buy the same story and repeat the same mistakes.

Once an error is published, it takes on a life of its own and is almost impossible to eradicate. If you look at this link, you can see how the number was picked up and unquestionably reproduced. The Weather Channel headlined with the absurdity “Arizona Landscaper Dies After 800000 Bees Attack” – only a small percentage of any hive attacks. Isn’t it enough to report the fact that hundreds of bees attacked the unfortunate workers? The Weather Channel headline is either hyperbolic exaggeration or careless fact-checking – both of which are unforgivable errors from an outfit that reports the weather. Meanwhile, the New York Daily rounded up: Nearly 1 million bees swarm Arizona men, killing one. Others repeating the 800,000 number include Gawker, Inquisitr, United Press International, The Mirror, and NBC News. Interestingly, the reporter closest to the source of the attack (Tucson News Now) wrote, “One person is dead and several others are recovering from bee stings after a huge swarm of about 300,000 bees attacked landscapers working outside a home in Douglas.” Hours after the story initially ran, CBS has written, “A swarm of about 300,000 bees killed one landscaper and critically injured another… The [Douglas Fire] Station initially reported that an estimated 800,000 bees were involved in the attack.” Better, but still not right. And why didn’t the initial reporter ask the fire department which entomologist at the station counted the bees?

Deaths from Africanized honey bees are still rare enough to make front page news as this story did on Canada’s National Post, UK’s Telegraph (which accompanied their story with a picture of a tiny cluster of bees in a tree), and the other sources (or repeaters) that I already mentioned. When the Africanized bee first arrived in the USA, there were concerns that thousands of deaths would quickly follow. This angst was led by an overly eager press and encouraged by researchers (some seeking grants to study the problem) who often were inexperienced around bees. To the novice, three bees chasing after an exposed face may elicit thoughts of a fifth apocalypse horseman. Place a young, untested grad student in Brazil next to an Africanized swarm, and he will live to tell some scary stories about the bees. So, for a few years in the mid-1970s, Africanized bees dominated the press whenever honey bees were mentioned. Today, of course, unfounded rumours of bee extinction lead the news stories. I guess that’s a bit more upbeat than the tales of wonton destruction and fears the Killer Bees once conjured. Nevertheless, exaggeration and hyperbole very quickly become tedious.

Posted in Killer Bees, Stings, Strange, Odd Stuff, Swarms | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Bees as a Small Business

Posted on October 5, 2014 by Ron Miksha

A lot of North American beekeepers operate huge operations. These days, 2,000 colonies is about average for a commercial operation. Help is usually imported seasonally and the beekeeper/owner is sometimes a bookkeeper/trucker who has more than a veil and gloves between himself and his bees. I asked one of these operators about this. He told me that’s the only way he can keep bees full time and feed his family. He is probably right.

Real beekeeping – shirtless, shoeless, without gloves and veil – is mostly confined to sideliners. This includes operations like the 26 hives run by actor Morgan Freeman (who probably doesn’t need the extra honey money). And it includes perhaps a thousand or so others in the USA and Canada who run 20 to 100 hives on weekends. For these folks, the bees (when profitable) provide a bit of income, but are mostly kept as a hobby. However, I know of a few others who keep a small number of hives to supplement retirement income.

I have great respect for a beekeeper in my area who retired at age 45 from a rather good job that had him traveling all over the world. He had saved some money, but certainly did not have enough money to live on. But he was determined not to work for anyone ever again. For the past 25 years, he has been keeping about 50 hives of bees. Each year he makes about 8,000 pounds of honey. He owns one small truck, makes his own equipment, hires no one, sells all the honey out his backdoor, and grosses $40,000 a year. With expenses at around $10,000, the profit nicely enhances his unpretentious lifestyle and supplements his modest income from retirement investments. And he genuinely enjoys beekeeping.

There is another beekeeper, this one a world away in northern Russia, who wrote a short interesting piece in a recent issue of American Bee Journal. This fellow, age 63, is a retired professor. He has been running bees for a long time. He has a lot of experience. He stays fit, enjoys the outdoors, and makes a complementary income from his 60 colonies. About the numbers, he writes:

“One ton of honey I produce yearly for about $6 for one pound. In addition, I sell 10-20 overwintered colonies, about 100 kg (220 lbs) of sealed [comb] honey and about 50 kg of a homemade mixture of pollen and honey. So it all adds up to about US $20,000 of gross income. I net about $17,000 a year.”

Both of these beekeepers are retired from professional careers and have found satisfaction and a modest income from keeping a small number of colonies of bees. It can be done. I suppose it can also be done by beekeepers who decide to retire from 40 years of running 2,000 colonies – though most of these folks can not dismount from their behemoth bee businesses (and associated obligations and mortgages) and will never get back to the small scale endeavours that would evince more pleasure than meeting pollination deadlines and payrolls.

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Hives as Art

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Sharpening the keeper’s tongue

North Americans are missing a great canvas. The beehive. Solid, often white and publicly visible, it should be used by artists more often. I’ve been lucky enough to work hives in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Europe, and South America. Surprisingly, the most decorated colonies are in one of the most traditional cultures. Slovenia – a tiny country wedged between Italy, Austria, and Croatia – is known for its somber, hard-working folks. Slovenians honour seriousness. They tend towards understatement and practical good sense in their homes, architecture, and businesses. One might think them dour but they sure have some funky beehives. Like the one to your left. Hideous, isn’t it? It shows a woman – the village gossip – with her tongue against the sharpening stone, held in place by devils. The hive panel, called a panjske končnice, is nailed to the front of the hive, near the hive entrance. It helps the bees find their home. Slovenian hives are sometimes stacked atop each other, sometimes squeezed onto semi-permanent trailers, sometimes lined up tightly on the porch near the kitchen door. Without colourful markers, bees could easily flounder. The entrance panels serve a dual purpose – they keep both bees and souls from being lost. Traditional thought remains strong in Slovenia. These message boards are still pretty common, as are their moral messages.

Creative queen nucs

In Chile, my friend Francisco Rey stocks queen-mating nucs like the ones in the next picture. He told me that he turns his helpers loose with paints and brushes, telling them, “Divertirse!” And they do have fun. The only instruction is to be creative. The Chilean paint job serves the same function as the Slovenian entrance board – to help bees find their way home. This, as you likely know, is particularly important when young queens are on their nuptial flights. It would be too easy to end up in the wrong nuc if the boxes looked like houses in Smallville, Indiana. And residents would be like so many party girls coming home late on a weekend night, not quite sure where they belong. (For that, the Slovenians also have an appropriate hive panel.)

The artistic hive

Meanwhile, in North America, we aren’t much into hive art. I think that’s a legacy of our puritanic heritage. Functional and practical and white are preferred. I am just as guilty as most beekeepers here, as you can see in the picture below, from an incredibly dull bee yard we have in Vulcan County, Alberta, Canada. The bees might make more honey if their boxes had eccentric colours and if the hives were aligned less straightly. But don’t they look great?

Our colourless beeyard

Exciting beehives are rare on this continent. It is so uncommon, in fact, that painted hives make the news. At least, beekeeping news. American Bee Journal featured artist Jill Sanders‘ great hive art on their June, 2014, magazine cover. And out at UCLA Davis, Diane Ullman’s half-acre bee garden, the Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, has a whole bunch of interestingly painted beehives. In this case, too, the painted bee boxes are cool enough to be written about, as you will see if you follow this link. I like the colourful hives, they certainly help bees find their homes, but we North Americans mostly employ drab monotonous unaesthetic hives, rarely straying from “white” as a fashion statement.


							

	
			

													
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Lessons from the Hive


			

				Posted on September 27, 2014 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
It’s Bee Time!


In the mood for a good read? Looking for a holiday gift? Mark Winston’s latest book, Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive, is as good as his other bee-related books. Which means it is very, very good. I haven’t read it cover-to-cover yet, but I have jumped around a bit like a bee in clover – so much to take it! Those of you who have read some of my reviews on other books (and movies) know that I can be pretty harsh. So, if I tell you that this book is worth more than the $20 Amazon is asking, you know that it is.


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

							

	
			

													
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Sweet New Year!


			

				Posted on September 25, 2014 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
Shanah Tovah!


Shanah Tovah! Rosh Hashanah, or the Jewish New Year, is the only holiday I can think of where honey is an integral part of the celebration. Without honey, the New Year just isn’t as sweet. I came across a really neat article published in the Toronto Star about the sweet new year connection – the article even tries to explain how honey can be kosher, even though it is made by bees. But the main part of the article is about Jewish beekeepers in the Toronto area who have a strong commitment to the environment and to connecting with the soil. It is an interesting story.


By the way, the gorgeous jar of honey in this photo is in season even after the holiday. You can check it out on the Oh! Nuts website.



							

	
			

													
						Posted in Culture, or lack thereof, Honey					
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Bees Back Up on their Knees?


			

				Posted on September 25, 2014 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
In today’s unlikely Op-Ed article in the New York Times: Are Bees Back up on their Knees? beekeeper Noah Wilson-Rich makes the case that the worst of the mysterious colony collapse syndrome may be over. He reviews what many of us have been saying for a long time – this isn’t the first time bees ‘disappeared’ from their hives. This fact does not reduce the seriousness of the current malady nor does it mitigate the expensive – sometimes bankrupting – losses many beekeepers suffered in the past few years.


However, Noah reminds us that unexplained colony’collapses occurred in “the years 950, 992 and 1443, when Ireland’s beekeepers noted remarkably high mortality events. Reports from the Cache Valley in Utah in 1903 described thousands of dead hives; around the same time, the Isle of Wight in England faced a near total loss of honeybees.” My father told me similar stories of almost totally empty hives a couple of seasons in the 1950s in Pennsylvania and New York. Anyway, the New York Times piece is an interesting read and gives a little balance to today’s situation. As the editorial points out, all is not well and rosy, but neither is it all dire and death. The writer makes valid points about the difficulty commercial beekeepers face in a world of diseases, chemicals, and habitat loss.

							

	
			

													
						Posted in History, Save the Bees					
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Bees: Targeted and Poisoned!


			

				Posted on September 19, 2014 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
Three million bees were apparently poisoned. The RCMP is investigating.  A commercial beekeeper with about 1,200 colonies now has fewer than a thousand. The Winnipeg Free Press says that Manitoba beekeeper Jason Loewen suffered a “targeted attack.” Beekeeper Loewen told the press, “If there was a disease, or if farmers had sprayed pesticide, those bees would’ve all been hit.” Instead, apparently random colonies within four bee yards were attacked and residue was found on the boxes and lids. The hives are being tested to determine what sort of poison was used. Loewen lost 60 hives and another 40 were badly weakened.


Dispute Resolution Centre


Who kills bees? Other beekeepers, usually. Although, of course, I have no idea who would have wrecked Mr Loewen’s bees, in other cases where honey beehives have been systematically ruined, the culprit often turned out to be other beekeepers. When I kept bees in Florida, it occasionally happened that big commercial outfits with dozens of outyards competed with other similar outfits for bee locations. Apiaries are often hard to get. If one fellow is doing just fine with his hives and someone else (usually from a northern state) suddenly appeared with a couple thousand hives, the first beekeeper would sometimes lose control of his rationality and damage the newcomer’s property. A cheap way of hurting the other man’s bees was to enter unguarded apiaries at night, dislodge lids, and dump gasoline from a jerry can into each cluster of bees. (I suppose you’d want to do this without lighting a smoker.) Cruel, mean, and effective. And one way to find oneself in the county jail. I was never targeted like that – I didn’t have enough hives to make anyone nervous, but I knew people who were hit.


In the Manitoba case, reported to the police a couple of days ago, it is hard to imagine that the damage was done by a competing beekeeper. It is almost impossible to over-graze western Canada’s flora and farmers usually are eager to have beekeepers on their land, so fights over forage and locations shouldn’t exist. Besides, this is Canada. Such disputes are supposed to be settled over coffee at the village cafe. Not in the cover of darkness, jerry can in hand, eh?

							

	
			

													
						Posted in Bee Yards, Beekeeping, Culture, or lack thereof					
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Neonicotinoids and western Canada


			

				Posted on September 16, 2014 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
Canola’s flea beetles – enjoying a taste of heaven


I am still trying to understand why neonic-otinoids have not been a problem in western Canada. 40% of all seeded crops in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta are canola. And 100% of the seed is treated with neonics. So, at least 40% of western Canada’s cropland is treated with neonicotinoids every year. (I say “at least” because some of the other crops out here are also treated.) I just attended a meeting in which guest speaker Greg Sekulic, a canola growers’ agronomist, spoke about the importance of bees to the canola growers. Greg spoke about the relationship of canola and bees, which can be boiled down to this: Canola needs bees; bees need canola. What’s good for bees is good for canola. Simple enough. Canola seed is vastly more plentiful if healthy bee populations are around to pollinate it.


Unfortunately, commercial plots of canola can not survive without pesticides. This monocultured oil seed is heaven on earth for the little flea beetles, which seem to imagine that the gods planted all those yellow flowers just for them. In the past, farmers ran across their fields with spray booms – or hired airplanes – to kill the nasty pest. I know, because beekeepers used to lose hives when foliar sprays were used exclusively in the old days. Beekeepers who have never stared in horror in a bee yard as spray planes pass overhead don’t understand this. It would be tragic to go back to the old ways and the old chemicals. I wish farmers would grow canola without pesticides, but I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime. Canola, related to cabbage, is affected by cabbage worms, cabbage root maggots, cabbage pod weevils, aphids, thrips, cutworms, blister beetles, grasshoppers and locusts, lygus bugs, flea beetles and their cousins the striped flea beetles. Poisons will be part of the farming business for a long time.


So we have the odd situation that a hugely important mid-summer nectar source for honey bees has been treated – 100% – with neonicotinoids for years, yet bees are not suffering. Before the hate mail starts again, let me remind you that I know neonicotinoids are poisons and I have written about this many times in the past. One tragic case of neonics sprayed on blossoming orange trees in Florida killed millions of bees and cost beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars. (The offending party had not followed label instructions which clearly state no spraying during blooming. The state of Florida slapped a couple of tiny little $1,500 fines on the bad guys who killed the bees – which turned out to be a huge multi-million-dollar conglomerate. You should read the whole story.)


Last winter Ontario beekeepers suffered horrific losses – almost 60% of the hives put into winter died. Some are blaming neonics used on corn seed. Maybe they are right. But southern Alberta beekeepers with their hundred thousand hives sitting in nico-treated canola fields lost only 15% of their colonies. Figuring out this paradox should make a fascinating – and important – research project.

							

	
			

													
						Posted in Honey Plants, Pesticides, Save the Bees					
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Alberta has been ‘Harvest Mooned’


			

				Posted on September 11, 2014 by Ron Miksha			


					

				
Last night’s Harvest Moon in Calgary – with snow on our pines!


Usually the Harvest Moon is appreciated by farmers. It heralds the cool night that may put the first frost on the pumpkins. The cool weather sweetens apples and brings on the colours of fall. The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the first day of fall, and that’s what we had a couple of nights ago. Sometimes the sun is just setting when this moon rises. Since it is equinox time, the moon is a lot brighter. This means a little extra time in the field for the farmers’ harvest. This year, Alberta was mooned in an unusual way. The weather turned nasty with a record snowfall (half a metre, or 19 inches, in places). The snow crushed unharvested wheat and buried drying canola. First estimates are that yesterday’s snow will cost farmers tens of millions of dollars. For many of them, what was shaping up as a nice crop is no more.


Not a good day for being leafy


 Branches on deciduous trees were snapped throughout Calgary. Mayor Naheed Nenshi sent out a dozen crews of arborists, teamed with workers from city parks, city roads, and some sanitation engineers. They were assigned to a 24-hour emergency plan. The mayor warned us that we may be woken in the middle of the night as those crews with their chain saws worked to clear the roads. Chain saws at 3 a.m.?? Well, this isn’t Texas, so we weren’t worried. Folks here were making snacks and coffee for the chain saw guys. The city estimated that about a million branches were broken. Power was out most of the day for 30,000 people. Our electricity died; the local schools were closed. We lit the fireplace. Got cozy. An hour later, power was back on.


Deciduous vs conifers. Although leafy trees were damaged, the pines were not. They just whispered jokes about all the broken arms among their neighbours. Most deciduous trees can’t stand the weight of heavy snow. Their gangly limb structure can’t take the strain. It made me think about the way these different trees evolved. It took a long time. In the early Devonian (420 million years ago), no plants were even shoulder height – you could see over the tallest of them, if you had been around then. (But you’d be pretty old today, so it’s better that you missed that.) But 60 million years later, tree-things were 30 metres (100 feet) tall. By the Carboniferous, when most of our coal beds formed, trees reached 50 metres. All that in just a few hundred million years of competition and natural selection. It was an arms race, each plant trying to grab rays of sunshine while shading its neighbours to death.


Conifers as we might recognize them today developed around 250 million years ago. Leafy, flowering trees only 100 mya. Flowering plants have a faster maturity, more genetic diversity and mutations, and have been slowly pushing conifers aside almost everywhere – except where heavy unexpected snowfall gives the conifers an edge. Here in Calgary, in an act of retro-evolutionary defiance, the needles beat the leafies yesterday. How does a storm like this affect bees and beekeepers? Well, bees didn’t gather much nectar during the past few days. And after the storm, the sky cleared and the temperature plunged – we had a light frost. So, serious nectar collecting is done for the year. Beekeepers are reluctantly dragging the last honey boxes back to their shops and preparing their bees for winter. They are working long hours. Even beekeepers appreciate the light of the Harvest Moon.



Five Minutes of Harvest Moon with Neil Young 









							

	
			

													
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The Worst Place to Get Stung


			

				Posted on September 9, 2014 by Ron Miksha			


					

				


Where is the worst place to get stung? The correct answer is not “on the picnic table.” According to Cornell University graduate research scientist Michael L. Smith, in a study funded by the United States National Science Foundation, the worst place to take a sting is either the nostril or the upper lip. He places both within the same range of scientific error, though he admits that the nose sting was tearful. Smith’s neurobiology paper, Honey bee sting pain index by body location, does not miss a single body part.


The folks at Dadaviz, a cool website that makes charts and graphs out of all sorts of weird data, sent me their data visualization for Smith’s bee sting pain study. I reproduced their chart above, and you can see all the detail clearly by either clicking on the chart, or clicking here and going straight to the data at dadaviz.com. (Once you arrive there, you can click on the data visualization and it will expand to fill your screen.) I encourage you to take a close look, then come back here and I’ll tell you how these data were collected.


I had imagined that a team of white-jacketed doctors at Cornell experimented on hundreds of volunteer grad students, inflicting each with an exquisite sting. Turns out, it was not done that way. If you read the original research paper, you will learn that Mr. Smith self-inflicted 75 honey bee stings to gather the data. He stung himself (well, actually, he let bees sting him) five times daily between 9 and 10 o’clock each morning. Each location was stung 3 separate times, on different days. The researcher then rated the painfulness of each location’s sting. It seems the softer body parts (his nose, lips, and, yes, genitals) hurt the most following a sting. The nose stings, reported Smith, “were especially violent, immediately inducing sneezing, tears and a copious flow of mucus.” Not surprisingly, the least painful spot to take a sting was on the skull. We are hard-headed for a reason.


I know you are wondering where the thesis advisor was during all of this. That leads to one of the many interesting parts of this research paper. Smith wrote, “Cornell University’s Human Research Protection Program does not have a policy regarding researcher self-experimentation, so this research was not subject to review from their offices. The methods do not conflict with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, revised in 1983. The author was the only person stung, was aware of all associated risks therein, gave his consent, and is aware that these results will be made public.”


In my last blog post, I wrote about Beetox. What about Bee-agra? Alas, Smith reported only the pain levels, not the amount of swelling. No photographs were available in the research paper.



							

	
			

													
						Posted in Humour, Stings, Strange, Odd Stuff					
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