February Bee Blues

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Ron Miksha

Got the mid-winter missin’ messin’ with them bees blues? Me too. So, here’s a link to a great video, Beekeepers of Kenya, that should help you survive this dismal season. The film shows beekeepers using western-style hives, keeping bees in Africa. Watch the whole video, and you will see the harvest being filtered into pails. Beautiful stuff. I suspect – and sincerely hope – that Africa will one day be a prosperous continent. Reform, followed by prosperity, has followed quickly behind the growth of beekeeping in other places, too.

Like most North Americans and European kid-beekeepers, I grew up believing that most honey is produced in July, after a long cold winter had ended. It did not occur to me that the upside-down people had their seasons reversed and were warming up their humming extractors in February. It’s true that much honey is gathered in Canada, Russia, central Europe, the northern USA.

However, honey making has spread far beyond areas mimicking the honey bees’ original climate zones. In a remarkable testimonial to the bees’ fantastic adaptability, the honey bug prospers in Brazil, Australia, Mexico, Vietnam, India, and Belize. These are not the native homelands of our honey bee, Apis mellifera subspecies – yet today, more honey is produced in the jungles of these hot climates than on the prairies of the north. As an example, Canada makes around 25 thousand tonnes a year (50 million pounds), but Iran 36, Ethiopia 44, and Mexico 56 thousand tonnes of honey. The hottees have it.

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Zombie Bees

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Ron Miksha

More bad news: a deadly fly parasite was spotted for the first time on honey bees, reported researchers at San Francisco State University in 2012.  The fly, Apocephalus borealis, deposits its eggs into a bee’s abdomen. After the honey bee dies, fly larvae “push their way into the world from between the bee’s head and thorax”.  (I hope you’re not eating breakfast right now.) After the parasitic fly has laid those eggs, the bees abandon their hives in “a flight of the living dead” and hang out near lights. See if you are following this: bad fly lays eggs in honey bee’s bottom, which hatch into worms, which creep out from inside the bee, which is driven mad and flies off with the parasites at night to hang out under street lamps. These zombie bees frequently carry the deformed wing virus and Nosema ceranae fungus, according to John Hafernik, Andrew Core, and Geraldine Lindsay, who have been studying this phenomenon. There are a number of unanswered questions about the parasites and the affected bees, so the researchers say they will radio-tag the bees and use video cameras to monitor them in their next round of study.

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Mexico

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Ron Miksha
Ron Miksha

Ron, on Acumel Beach in Mexico,
waiting for another nut to fall…

To get through our frigid Canadian winter, we usually slip down to Mexico  for a few days. This year, we ended up in Acumel, north of the Belize border. When I was young, I knew a gentleman in Florida who owned a couple thousand hives in Central America. The Yucatan Peninsula is honey-heaven for tens of thousands of colonies of Apis mellifera. The neighbouring nominally English-speaking country of Belize (formerly British Honduras) shares the nectar-rich Yucatan with Mexico, so it would not be surprising to learn that an enterprising young American might set up a honey farm there. The thing that surprised me, though, was the beekeeper would routinely leave his Florida ranch and drive down to Central America in his truck to check on his more southerly bees. That’s about 3500 kilometres (2300 miles) – the same distance I was hauling my bees from Lake County, Florida, to Saskatchewan, Canada at that time. His trip seemed a lot more exotic to me than mine…. But that was a long time ago – I doubt he’s making that trek any more. (And my long-haul own adventure ended thirty years ago.)

At an open-air market in Mexico this winter, I was approached by a Mayan couple who had a few jars of fresh pollen in hand. Not all Mayans speak Spanish, but these folks did, so I learned that the pollen was from the city of Merida. They had bought it from a beekeeper, repacked it, and wanted to sell a small jar to me for twenty dollars. Ten dollars. Five? They quickly bartered downwards while I waited silently in my wheelchair. I was impressed by their courage – they were wandering around the market, had no booth, so they could be evicted at any moment. They approached this Gringo in a wheelchair without apparent trepidation. I wish I could have helped them out, but I wouldn’t take any raw food products from Mexico to Canada – raw bee pollen can carry exotic bee pathogens. I left them, but wanted to suggest they change their sales pitch. Not mention buying the pollen from a commercial beekeeper a hundred miles away. Without that honest information, a tourist such as I might imagine that they hand-picked the stuff themselves, in a forest where huge parrots and tiny monkeys watched them plucking the pollen from wild comb while killer Africanized bees hovered around their faces.

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