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?

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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.

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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.

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Beetox: Sting relief for tired skin

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Ron Miksha

Joan Rivers, without Beetox

Natural Beetox

 81-year-old comedian Joan Rivers died last week. The world is now without one of its truly acerbic wits. Ms Rivers loudly paraded her much-sculpted face before crowds, saying that it wasn’t right to pretend she wasn’t getting Botoxed. Lying about having Botox treatments “says to the average woman: I’m naturally beautiful and you are not.” When Gwyneth Paltrow said she was afraid to try Botox again because she was scared she’d end up looking like Joan Rivers, the comedian cleverly retorted “She should see what I look like without Botox – that’s really scary!” Gwyneth is afraid of Botox. Maybe she should be. Botox is a paralyzing toxin derived from botulism, a sometimes fatal illness. She might prefer being stung on the face instead of poked with Botox needles. Beetox, instead of Botox. Adventurous entrepreneurs are advocating this weird bee therapy to smooth tired skin. I have seen products – creams and gels – made of bee venom. Some people are enthusiastic and say it works; others not so much.

But perhaps skip the expensive creams and go straight to the source. A few stings on the face stretch the skin as smooth as a baby’s tummy. By the way, the young lady in the picture to the left took a nasty sting, but she will be alright. If you should accidentally undergo a Beetox adventure, be sure to scratch the stinger loose without squeezing the venom sac. Some clever folks pull bee stingers with tweezers grasping the poison bag – that injects an extra dose of venom, making the cure worse than the ailment. So please scratch, don’t squeeze.

Should Joan Rivers have tried Beetox? Certainly her dear friend Prince Charles could have rustled up a few bees from the Royal Hives for her. But does Beetox actually work? I don’t know. But I can tell you that most beekeepers get stung on the face. And beekeepers are undoubtedly among the most handsome people you will ever meet.

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See You in Court

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Ron Miksha

A few hours ago, Bayer and Syngenta were hit with a $450 million lawsuit for producing a pesticide which has allegedly hurt beekeepers’ businesses. This might be the largest claim ever filed in the history of beekeeping. Two Ontario honey-producing outfits – Sun Parlor Honey Ltd and Munro Honey started the nearly half-billion-dollar class-action lawsuit against the neonicotinoid manufacturers. I had never heard of either Sun Parlor or Munro, so I checked their websites.

As of this morning when I looked, I didn’t notice anything on Munro’s website that indicates their beekeeping activity (maybe I missed seeing that), but Sun Parlor’s website (September 4, 2014) says that “This year their 1,600 hives . . . will produce more than 300,000 pounds of award winning Ontario honey” – a very respectable 187 pounds per hive. Since Ontario’s long-term historic average is only around 100 pounds, that tells me that Sun Parlor’s beekeepers are exceptionally good. Congratulations to them for achieving something that most beekeepers are finding very challenging!

Despite Sun Parlor Honey’s self-reported anticipated bumper honey crop, Ontario beekeepers have generally been suffering. Last winter, losses were reportedly 58%, according to Better Farming‘s article “Cold weather blamed for high bee hive losses in Ontario”. Some Ontario beekeepers are directing blame towards pesticides. But others point out that viruses, destructive varroa mites, nosema, monoculture farming practices, a harsh winter, and bad beekeeping are among the causes of Ontario’s beekeeping woes.

They also point out that Alberta – Canada’s most productive honey province – is saturated in neonicotinoids, but has not seen the devastating losses experienced by Ontario’s beekeepers. In fact, southern Alberta’s canola-growing zone saw only 15% winter kill last year. In Alberta, neonics are used on the province’s most prolific honey source, canola. In Ontario, neonicotinoids are mostly used on corn which doesn’t secrete nectar and does not attract bees as seductively as canola does. The difference between Alberta and Ontario has been difficult to understand. Neonics are, of course, insecticides and they kill bees. If bees are fed toxic levels of neonicotinoids, it has been, well, toxic. But the levels fed in such cruel experiments have been greater than the amounts bees normally encounter. Perhaps Alberta will yet see huge losses of bees, but neonics have been used in the west for nearly ten years and Alberta has yet to see the dramatic problems encountered in Ontario.

Will the beekeepers win their lawsuit? The rebel in me wants to say “Yes!” But here in Canada, litigation is extremely expensive, extremely time-consuming, and is very much fact-driven. The Statement of Claim was filed in Ontario’s Superior Court. I have read its 30 pages, and you can, too – it is at this link. (I will comment on the Statement of Claim in a future blog entry.) The claim was filed on Tuesday asking for $289 million dollars, but was amended the next day, now seeking $400 million dollars for general and specific damages plus another $50 million dollars in punitive damages – or such other sum as the “Honourable Court finds appropriate.” The claim alleges that Syngenta AG and Bayer CropScience were “negligent” in the “design, sale, manufacture and distribution” of neonicotinoid pesticides. This may be true, but it will be difficult to prove. Lengthy discoveries will question the beekeepers’ management skills, sales receipts, expenses, and the pesticides generally used by beekeepers to fight varroa – and lots more. I don’t envy the beekeepers who will need to provide documentation and answer those questions. Eventually, years from now, there will be a trial. Considering the long battle ahead, these beekeepers are brave crusaders.

The courts may decide that the product is legal and safe except when misused. This would be a result similar to failed attempts to punish car and gun makers when their products are used irresponsibly. If beekeepers lose the case, it would probably be effective to issue claims against individual family farmers whenever they are deemed guilty of handling pesticides unsafely. On the other hand, it may turn out that neonicotinoids are viewed by the court as similar to tobacco and the makers may be forced to pay damages – especially if the manufacturers have not accurately portrayed their products, have not divulged all their studies’ results, or have otherwise misled users. If the product is found culpable by the courts, then corn farmers could be bankrupted by statements of claim for having used the nasty stuff. Either win or lose, I can see lots of future litigation directed at bean and corn farmers in Ontario – after all, they were the ones actually applying the poisons. But whatever the courts decide, it may take five years for a decision. And then there will be an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, with litigation lingering on for several more years.

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Braving the Beards

Posted on September 2, 2014 by Ron Miksha

An itchy growth of facial bees

Almost anyone can grow a beard. Especially if honey bees are the nubs. The young lady in the picture to your right is showing off a sporty growth of facial bees. Surely there is some medicine or therapy that could have prevented this? A few days ago, the web master of a new beekeeping site (Beekeeping Planet) sent me a link to his site’s Top Ten Bee Beards page. So, it got me thinking about bee beards.

Perhaps a stylish bee jacket?

What is the fascination with bee beards? Not everyone likes the appearance of a shaggy face. (Although Darwin, Lincoln, Marx, and Castro all got good mileage from theirs.) And not everyone enjoys having small stinging creatures buzzing the cheeks. But combine the two, and you could make a documentary feature for PBS. I suppose that photos of bee-bearded folks are almost as old as photography. I guess it’s because the bee beard combines the yucky, the creepy-crawly, and the daring-do in a delectable way. Having a potentially dangerous motley crew of stinging creatures hanging under one’s nose has an almost universal appeal.

I started this blog entry with the idea that almost anyone can grow a bee beard. But then I was reminded of this tragic story about a 34-year-old gentleman in Vermont: Man Has Trouble Growing Full Beard Of Bees. It seems to be true – patchiness, uneven color, itchiness, and the odd stray gray bee seem to plague the young man whose father “always had a full thick beard of bees his whole life.” There is a solution, which The Onion news story didn’t report: some young men have been going for the full bee jacket to take attention off the lack of bee beard. It is easier to maintain and has just as much “Wow Power” as the facial bees. However, the bee jacket is not recommended attire while motorcycling.

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Back to the Cave

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Ron Miksha

This hunter eats honey (and brood).

 Not long ago, a friend of mine was on The Caveman Diet. He devoured raw seeds and nuts, burnt meat, and handfuls of fruits and berries. It was probably a healthy diet. But he couldn’t give up either coffee or cigarettes. (I’m not making this up – he told me that cavemen must have had vices, too.) He moved away. I don’t know if he is still a caveman, but I am pretty sure he is still sipping coffee and smoking expensive cigars. I had forgotten about his culinary habits until this afternoon when my National Geographic magazine arrived. The magazine devoted 20 pages (mostly pictures) to an essay about the dinner habits of our paleolithic ancestors. It’s a good article. Partly because one of the best pictures in the story features a Hadzu gentleman (the story suggests he has a “caveman” diet) gnawing on a chunk of heavily brooded honeycomb.

Some modern dieticians are advocating a return to the primitive diet. The theory is that our forefathers evolved bodies adapted to stone-aged catching and cooking habits and we would be healthier to eat as our bodies expect us to eat. Evolutionary nutritionalist Loren Cordain, author of The Paleo Diet suggests that we could lose weight and get healthy by “eating the foods we were designed to eat.” Cordain studied modern hunter-gatherers and found that a huge amount of the calories in their diet is meat. As much as 70% or so. I guess that’s why we have canine teeth. The Colorado State University scientist recommends we eat lots of lean meat and fish and eggs and avoid foods that were tamed since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago – that means skipping cereal, bread, beans, peanut butter, milk and cheese. Among a whole lot of other things. But you don’t have to pass up the honey.

Caveman ate honey. Likely brood and bees, too. The modern African Hadzu diet includes baobab fruit, berries, and plenty of game. But they – and their ancestors – must have loved honey. Who wouldn’t? If the caveman diet works, people could be eating a lot more honey. If it really works well, people will be living longer, and will remain honey customers for a long, long time. Especially if they give up their coffee and smokes.

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Robo-Bees to the Rescue!

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Ron Miksha
robotic honey bees

US Navy’s flying bug prototype, 8 years ago!

Beekeepers are having a tough time keeping their hives alive. So far, they have been succeeding – there are more colonies of honey bees in the world now than there were 20 years ago. (Contrary to hype, honey bees are not becoming extinct.) However – and this is big – beekeepers have been losing more colonies than usual because of mysterious ailments. To cope with losses, beekeepers raise more queens than usual, make more increases each year than usual – and spend more money than usual. This is expensive, very expensive. In places like Ontario and parts of the American mid-west, over half of all kept colonies died during the winter of 2013-2014. This means those unfortunate beekeepers had to shell out a lot of cash to raise replacements so they could stay in business. This has also forced beekeepers to charge more to the groves and orchards that rent honey bees for pollination.

Growers are getting nervous – with the high cost of rental bees and all the hype about honey bee extinction, growers have begun to look at other ways to pollinate crops. Enter Robo-bees.

Harvard University researchers are coming to the rescue. Harvard’s Robobees website says that autonomously pollinating a field of crops using a fleet of tiny robotic bees is 20 years away. I think the scientists are being modest. In the U.S. Navy photo above, you can see the big clunky insect robot developed in 2006; below, you can watch a video of the newest device. The contrast is amazing. With the ever-accelerating pace of electronic technology, I think the engineers will be able to work the bugs out of their creation much sooner – and in turn, work the real bugs right out of the pollination business. (The pace will also be hastened by the military application of using spy-bugs. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory just signed a $38 million deal with a company called BAE which will lead development of spying dragonflies.)

So what’s next? Beekeepers as mechanics and computer technicians? Robo-bees that both pollinate and carry nectar? Mechanical bees that are drones? Mechanical bees with a honey tummy as big as a bus? I can see the future… Robots harvesting and extracting the honey produced by robo-bees that pollinate robo-trees and gather nectar from… dandelions. Let’s face it, there will always be dandelions.

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Thoughts on Being a Fair Fair Judge

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Ron Miksha
honey judge fair contest jars bottles ribbons

Judgment Day for Honey

What makes first-class honey? Is it the taste? The flavour? The colour? A lack of bubbly foam, dirt, bee lips, and assorted bee organs? It’s a personal choice, of course. Some like it spicy; some like it mild. But the honey judge at the County Fair has to rise above personal quirks and has to select the Blue Ribbon Best of Show on something approaching non-biased criteria.

I was a honey judge at the Millarville Fair today. For some reason, the number of entries was small. A few years ago, there were 40 jars of honey to critique. This year, there were far fewer – it is turning into a good honey year, so maybe all the beekeepers were busy with their bees. Nevertheless, judging proceeded and in the photo to your right you can see the First, Second, and Third Ribbon winners. It takes courage – and time and patience – to enter your honey into a contest. Kudos to those who dare to compete. And filter, fill jars, and finally present their homemade treasure for inspection by some odd character such as I. I tried to be fair. But we all know that wine and honey connoisseurs are snobs.

Well, here is how you, too, can be a honey snob. If you can see the chart in this photograph, you can see how the honey entries are scored here in southern Alberta. Most of the graded factors are entirely objective. Container, for example, worth 10 of the 100 points, includes the appropriateness of the jar (sorry, re-used pickle bottles get fewer marks), cleanliness (not too sticky, please), and the container’s lid and surface condition (no chips on the glass or bent metal on the lid). And so it goes through the list. The only somewhat subjective attribute relates to flavour and taste. But this has nothing to do with the judge’s appreciation of honey. I may like the foulest, blackest buckwheat (an obvious personal defect in my psyche), but I have to rise above that and treat the whitest, mildest honey with equal respect. The attributes of flavour and taste must associate with the honey entry’s degree of suitable (or unsuitable) in quality despite any ravishes of heat or water. Too much heat in the processing spoils otherwise wonderful honey, darkening it and imparting a caramelized flavour. Too much water (moisture) in the honey quickly results in a sour or vinegary flavour – it will spoil. These are the things the judge is judging when flavour and taste are being examined. In the end, then, honey should be judged on its suitability as a food and on its bright and clean presentation. If you would like a copy of the scoring sheet I used for this purpose, you can download it here.

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