There is something about beekeeping and books. Both words marry well together and just happen to be two of my favorite pastimes. The smell of a finely aged book purchased from a local book shop can bring similar emotions as when opening the hive up for the first time following a long winter. The flood of memories is both nostalgic and hopeful. And like farmers, hope is one thing beekeepers always seem to have plenty of. Hope for a better season, hope that our hives won’t succumb to the mites, and hope that the honey market will boom and we will be selling half pint jars of liquid gold at 800.00 a pop. Whoops I fell into a pipe dream.
When I first got into beekeeping I read all of the standard newbie literature on the subject. And unlike my high school Algebra, I absorbed it like a sponge. But by far the most interesting book concerning the nature of bees was written by an almost blind man with the help of his wife, Karl von Frisch. It was called, “The Dance Language and Orientation of Honeybees”.
Karl von Frish was an Austrian ethologist and zoologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work with animal behavior. One aspect of his research delved into the ability of honey bees to transmit information concerning the quality and direction of a nectar resource through the “waggle dance”.
Karl von Frisch - "Now we dance"
As foraging bees search the area around their hive for nectar they will come across resources with varying degrees of worth. Nectar is mostly water and to turn it into honey by the bees, they must evaporate most of the nectar’s water content level to about 18%. To do so requires the honey bees to use their high speed wing action and create a flow of air through the hive that pulls the moisture out of the nectar. The higher the water content, the more time and energy is spent by the bees to reduce its levels. Knowing this, it is in the honeybees best interest to locate nectar resources that already have a lower level of water compared to similar nectar resources.
Karl von Frisch realized upon a behavior of honeybees that points out to other foraging honeybees the compass direction of a resource in relation to the sun and its distance from the hive. This behavior is known as the “Wag -Tail Dance”. When a honeybee performs the “dance” she is making any one of several types of movement patterns that each translate to a key piece of information about a resource. Below is an image of several types of dances.
Bee Communication Dances
The type of dance they perform partly translates to the distance the hive is from the nectar source. If the nectar source is about 0 – 10 yards from the hive a bee will perform the Round Dance. When 10 – 100 yards from the hive the dance will transition from the Round Dance into a Crescent Dance. Beyond 100 yards the dance will transition again into the Wag-Tail Dance. Karl von Frisch observed that the number of “straight runs” the bee makes as she performs the Wag-Tail dance is an indicator of how far away the nectar source is. A straight run is the middle course the honeybee takes as she performs the looping pattern.
Cant touch this!
Graphically we as humans can see the pattern of this dance from looking down on to a 2-D surface. However, to the honeybees this visual reference is useless. They rely on a phenomena caused by the dance itself. Following Karl’s discovery it was later learned that honeybees also pick up information related to distance from sound signals that occur during the dance. Honeybees can perceive “airborne sounds by detecting air-particle movements, rather than pressure oscillations as in human hearing.” The Hive and the Honey Bee (page 284) As the bee dances, her wings emit low frequency pulses in the 250-300 Hertz range with a pulse duration of about “20 milliseconds and a repetition frequency of approximately 30 per second.”
The honeybees surrounding the dancing bee pick up on these pulses using their antenna which are placed near the abdomen of the dancing bee. The number of pulses detected translates into the distance of a nectar source from the hive. The greater the number of pulses, the greater the distance the nectar source is from the hive.
So now we can see how bees communicate distance but how do they communicate directional information. Honeybees use a compass not based on the magnetic poles but upon the location of the sun over the horizon during a given time.
During a bee’s flight in search of nectar she may happen to come across a large cluster of plants within the midst of their nectar flow. For the purpose of our first example we will assume it is directly in front of the hive, at least 100 yards out, and the sun also happens to be in straight alignment with the food source and the hive. In this scenario the honey bee would come back to the hive and do her wag-tail dance with the “straight run” going right up the vertical face of the comb as seen in the picture below. (Image 1)
Hive, nectar source, and sun are in alignment.
Hive and nectar source are in alignment. Sun is 45 degrees to the right of the hive.
If the sun was 45 degrees to the right of the hive and the nectar source was in the same place as in the previous example, the “straight run” of the honeybees dance would change accordingly.
So, the angle of the run is 45 degrees left of the compass direction of the sun. 45 degrees left of the sun puts the food source in straight alignment with the hive. (Image 2)
Now if the food source was to the right of the hive by 45 degrees and the sun was straight in front of the hive as in the first example the angle of the “straight run” would also point 45 degrees to the right. (Image 3)
Honeybees are also able to communicate to one another about the quality of the nectar source. When a honeybee forager returns to the hive other forager bees in the hive will vibrate the honeycomb using a 380 HZ frequency. These “begging signals” will stimulate the forager to regurgitate a droplet of its new found nectar source for the others to “analyze”. This is very useful in that it will alert other forager bees whether another source of nectar has been found and if it is better than the resource they are currently culling from.
All of this information compounds upon the initial discoveries during Karl von Frisch’s research during the 1950’s. Although the idea of the honeybees having their own means of communication was put forward earlier by Ernst Spitzner in 1788, it was not until Karl von Frisch published “Uber die Sprache der Bienen” was attention truly devoted to this aspect of the honeybee’s behavior.
It is very interesting to read these older works and learn what was considered “current” for the time. Science is always evolving and building upon itself and to appreciate it one should try reading these little gems. The information may be out of date or completely wrong but being a beekeeper I am fascinated by all that we have learned since the time of their writings. My next endeavor is to complete Lorenzo L. Langsroth classic, “Hive and the Honey-bee”.
Hive and sun are in alignment. Nectar source is 45 degrees to the right.
Lets Roll
Today I drove down to Chatam, Virginia to pick up my bee equipment for the upcoming season. I was originally going to take my wife’s Diesel truck down to Chatam but the rain/snow that was on the radar dictated I used a more covered approach. It was a 2 and a half hour drive but it probably saved me about 150.00 in shipping. On the way down I drove straight through the heart of Christian Fundamentalism as I passed Jerry Falwell’s, Liberty University. The Darwin Fish on my car exploded into metal shards.
I purchased all of my gear from Dadant and Sons. What I purchased:
Next item on the agenda is a bee suit. Dadant has a nice one called the Cricket but they will not let their distributors sell them. I have to order it straight from Dadan’ts head quarter’s office. I used to always buy my gear from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm however the shipping would have been atrocious and they did not have the nice little apiary package I was looking for. Because I am a only a weekend beekeeper I went the route of least resistance. I could have bought each item individually and hand assembled it like I used to but in our new house we do not have a any good spaces to work carpentry. I am also feeling lazy at the moment.
On another note I had some one email me about a more primitive form of beekeeping called Top Bar beekeeping. It is basically a method of beekeeping that uses one long horizontal hive. Top bars are placed at the top and the bees draw the comb down themselves. The upside is that you get a lot of nice wax for making candles and supposedly the honey tastes better. Also if you are on a tight budget you could basically make a hive out of your old dining room furniture or scrap lumber. The downside is you have to destroy your comb in a press to extract the honey and honey yields are typically much smaller. However, I think it would be fun to try it as a learning experience for new beekeepers or for the famed Guerrilla beekeeper written about in a past article.
The next order of business is to construct two hive stands. I used these at my uncle’s house with great effect. It helped keep the hives off of the wet ground and saved my back from snapping in two from lifting 80 pound supers.
It’s almost time. I am looking forward to this year’s season.
“The faster we can move away from reliance on tactics that introduce additional stress to the hive such as toxic mite controls and antibiotics, the sooner we are likely to see relief” – Ross Conrad- Author of Natural Beekeeping.
Amen Brother.
I just finished reading a small article in the February issue of Bee Culture titled Honey Bee Stress Reduction.
In the article, the author discusses how honeybees have been put under too much stress during the last century from a wide spectrum of sources. Pesticides, mites, you know the litany. It should be no wonder that honey bee populations are crashing around the world. What gets me is that we should have seen it coming. When our bodies and psyche’s are under stress what happens to us humans? We get sick, feel weaker, or decide one day to blow away half of our office mates after having Elf Bowling emailed to us for the nth time. The proverbial “straw” adds up until finally we succumb.
Well honeybees or any other living organism are no different.
I have a confession to make. I like gadgets. From the IPhone to the indoor remote control helicopter, I love technology. Even with beekeeping I once could have seen myself buying all of the latest gadgets and miticides to solve my problems of the instance. But I think what happens over the long term is we end up building a process of actions akin to a Rube Goldberg device just to maintain our bees health and make our life “easier”. When really what we could be doing is helping our bees over the long term through more of a hands off or natural approach. When I say “natural” approach I don’t mean stop brushing your teeth with fluoride but returning to a state of beekeeping that allows the bees to solve their own problems rather than relying on quick fixes.
Poppycock you may say. 90% of my hives will be lost. And to you I say you are probably right. This is a bitter pill that you will have to swallow but just listen to some of his ideas before you nay-say.
1. Our apiary’s medicine cabinet is full of miticides and antibiotics that were all designed to make life easier for our bees by not allowing them to suffer through tremendous losses. However this has caused several things to happen. It has left toxic residues in our hives which will vector into the food chain and has fostered the rise of a weaker bee. The antibiotics we use do kill off the bad bacteria in our hives such as AFB, but also the good pro-biotics which in the end, negatively effects the overall immune system of our honeybees.
It is true that through the use of chemicals/medicines we have prevented the immediate total collapse of our honeybee colonies but over the long term our bees are only going to become weaker and succumb to other stressors. However, if we can keep these pests and diseases in check using natural methods that don’t cause stressors of their own compared to the unnatural ones, we are able to eliminate or reduce several stressors at once. With each stressor eliminated we are able to increase our hives chances of survivability when dealing with other stressors effecting their immune system.
To this effort of eliminating unnatural elements in our hive Ross Conrad suggests we begin relying on ordering honeybees that have a proven reliability when dealing with these stressors. For instance purchasing honeybees that have come out of the program run by Dr. John Harbo and Dr. Roger Hoopingarner to develop Varroa resistance mites through Russian stock is a good option. Other breeders, such as Bee Weaver, are producing honeybees that have not relied on chemicals since 2001.
In the past it was popular to not use honeybees that generated huge amounts of propolis as this caused hives components to become stuck to one another. However this propolis has been known for years to be an extremely powerful antibiotic/antiviral and is responsible for extending the immune system of honeybees. Because propolis is so powerful it is surmised that throughout the course of natural history honeybees have not needed to develop an especially strong immune system to the same extent as required by other insects. – C. Ross, Bee Culture.
2. Another recommendation by Mr. Conrad is to rely on quality wax sources that are not infused already with chemicals as a source of foundation. However finding a source of chemical free wax can be hard to do and expensive. One suggestion is to allow the bees to draw out their own comb while providing them with a limited amount of foundation instead of a full sheet. He mentions when doing this to be sure your hive is level with the ground as bees will naturally draw comb parallel to the direction of gravity. So if your colony is situated on a slope, the honeybees will pull their comb down and miss the mark of the bottom frame.
I was wondering if maybe very thin sheets of balsa wood could work too. Maybe I will try this with one of my hives this year.
If these potential solutions work in conjunction with each other this may help reduce the total stress levels on a hive to the point that it will outweigh the necessity to rely on chemical solutions.
In my opinion, our best option is to purchase honeybees from producers of good survivor stock. This focused effort of forcing the bees to deal with the stressors through tough love may at first seem brutal but in the long haul may be to the benefit of honeybee populations in general. Evolution has brought bees through at least 35 million years of disease and predators. With human efforts we can narrow the time limit but it takes an initial dose of perseverance and a willingness to basically start over.
JPBELLAVANCE
When perusing my news websites I came upon this page. I had to submit my photo.
Must be a really slow news day.
Honey. Its whats for dinner.
Some of you may know that I am a sideline web developer. It helps provide a little extra fun cash especially when you have expensive hobbies and when you have to justify to your better half why you need that pimped out gold plated hive tool.
Coupled with that I also have an unhealthy interest in zombie movies. Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Shaun of the Dead are among some of my favorites. So I thought it would be interesting to marry the two together with a website that tests your ability to survive a Zombie Apocalypse. To take the test click here. ZombieComp.com.
To see what a zombie apocalypse might be like please read Max Brook’s, Mel Brook’s son, World War Z. It is a fictional account, written as a serious documentary, of the Great War between the humans and undead. Very good reading for when you are on vacation. In the book, civilization takes a major setback. Gone are the IPods, the venti coffees at your local Starbucks, and the comfort of walking down the street with your dog and not being chased by zombies. Life as we know is ruined but the government’s around the world are set to reclaim it from the cold dead hands of Charleston Heston.
During the recovery effort the world has flipped flopped. Once powerful lawyers, executives, bankers, accountants and low rent web developers have become the peons of society. The people who are now considered essential are the ones who know a trade. Machinists, welders, plumbers, gardeners, anyone that can contribute to the rebuilding of the country. All of those formerly at the top had no useful skills in a world where there was no need for web developers or M.B.A.s. As a result thousands of Brook Brother’s clad Stock brokers were handed a shovel and told to go dig.
I incorporated this aspect of the book into my Zombie exam with the question. How many trades do you know? When I wrote this I had to think what knowledge I had that might be useful to society or rebuilding the country. My wife is a potter so she can make functional items out of commonly found materials. Prior to being a web developer I made maps for the government so maybe I could fall on this as a useful trade. Unfortunately map making now a days is all done with computers. I would have to learn how to do things by hand and changing map projections from one form to another requires extensive knowledge of mathematics which I really don’t have. As a result my maps would probably look like the scrawl you write down to help your friend find your house party.
But alas. All of us here have a skill that would be of prime importance. Beekeeping. Lets quickly go through its merits.
There are probably a few more but you get the idea.
On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is equal to lets say a Treasury Secretary and 10 to a doctor; I think beekeepers fall into a 7 or 8. We would become the new elite. So next time you are on the road and that smug smart ass with a red power tie blows by you in his Lexus. Just think to yourself. You wont last long in the coming age of zombies.
This week I hope to buy all of my equipment. I will list my order for anyone interested. Sorry I have not written recently but I have been busy, which is a good thing.
JPB
