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For the Love of Bees

Some of the ways backyard beekeepers benefit commercial operations and vice-versa
By: Ross Conrad

The beekeeping community is generally divided into two primary categories. There are commercial entrepreneurs and small-scale part-time backyard beekeeping enthusiasts. Commercial operators can be further broken down into full-time and part-time sideliners. It turns out that while all these groups all tend to have very different underlying motivations, they all share many similar types of knowledge and practices, and mutually support one another.

The Australian beekeepers studied rely heavily on meetings, events and conferences to keep up on the latest research. However, while knowledgeable speakers are valued, a lot of information exchanges take place between programs, out in the hallways where beekeepers share ideas and management practices.

The similarities among these different groups and how they interact with each other is the subject of a 2023 paper authored by Kirsten Martinus, associate professor of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. The paper titled, ‘It’s a love interest’—Enthusiasts and regional industry cultures of practice, explores some of the similarities, differences and relationships between commercial and backyard beekeepers. While this study focused on a specific region of beekeepers in Western Australia, the information documented can be of benefit to beekeepers the world over due to the universality of the issues beekeepers face globally.

Dr. Martinus’ work suggests that commercial beekeepers and backyard honey bee enthusiasts both stand to benefit by cooperating and working together to share knowledge and information. As Dr. Martinus notes, “the findings point to the importance of informal non-firm actors in place-specific problem solving through a culture of exchange and mutual endeavor. This suggests that developing a regional industry culture of practice and entrepreneurship may support collaborations between hobbyists or enthusiasts and local business counterparts, which in turn will enhance regional competitiveness, identity and placemaking.” To put it simply, backyard beekeepers and commercial beekeepers can, and often do, support and benefit one another.

The Australian beekeepers studied shared a sense of local beekeeping tradition and long-time commitment, given that the majority use the Langstroth hive as opposed to alternative hive designs. For commercial operators, this was partly because other methods are not seen as commercially viable, due to the large capital investment in equipment required to change. It is also because some hive designs were not seen as authentic, as in the case of the Flow Hive.

Whether it’s a few hives in the backyard or thousands, beekeepers of all sizes love their bees.

Although much of the technology and management used in beekeeping is similar globally, this study acknowledges the importance of generalized regional variations depending on local weather, climate and whether colonies are located in urban, farmland or rural settings. ‘It’s a love interest’ notes that beekeeping “is an activity that requires both scientific and practical knowledge on bee behaviors, husbandry and hive care, as well as knowledge that is deeply embedded in ‘place’ such as weather, flowering times and places, and state and local laws around bee management and ownership.”

Commercial beekeepers are widely understood to be “regional assets” or “resources” that can help local beekeeping groups and shape new industry paths. Meanwhile backyard beekeepers have the luxury of being able to experiment and explore novel beekeeping techniques since their apicultural activities are decoupled from their livelihoods. The lines between commercial and backyard beekeepers often gets blurred however, such as when commercial operators retire and transition to part-time, when professionals mentor backyard beekeepers, and when commercial beekeepers receive fresh insights through informal exchanges with part-time enthusiasts.

A relatively low conversion rate from backyard to commercial beekeeper was observed. A backyard beekeeper’s commercial transition depends not only on “innovation but on willingness to upscale operations after acquiring skills and knowledge.” Some of the greatest barriers to commercializing a backyard operation are related to finances, liability and beekeeping competence. My own observation is that many commercial beekeepers get their start working for a commercial beekeeping operation. This allows them to get paid while they build the skill level they need to be successful on their own.

We beekeepers are free to practice an ever growing array of different types of beekeeping management with hives of various styles, different types of bees, and hard chemical, soft chemical or non-chemical treatment options just to name a few. We also adopt a wide variety of underlying motivations for engaging in beekeeping activities. Backyard beekeepers may enjoy the intellectual, educational and social aspects of beekeeping, while others may simply be looking to provide pollination for their gardens. Commercial beekeepers are primarily concerned with earning a living, managing colonies efficiently and reducing the physicality of their bee work. They were found to primarily work collaboratively on issues that address profitability and business viability.

The study found that the “novel and diverse local and technical know-how, personal experience, scientific and technical skills and occupational backgrounds, and social and work networks” that backyard beekeepers bring to their craft may offer commercial beekeepers an “external and complementary knowledge source”. The value of this contribution to the industry however, is not widely recognized. As one operator is quoted as saying, those in commercial beekeeping “think hobbyists don’t know anything, and hobbyists know they don’t want to do it on a big scale.”

The backyard beekeeping enthusiast plays an important role in improving community and social acceptance of beekeeping and helping to raise awareness of the importance of bee decline. They are more likely to get involved in honey bee related activities within their communities and this improves the industry’s profile overall by increasing social awareness of the industry and the plight of the bees. Their community engagement helps to strengthen society’s connection to beekeeping and the environment. This in turn can also help change local policies and laws that relate to beekeeping activities.

Dr. Martinus found that backyard beekeepers are generally less knowledgeable about bees and beekeeping than commercial operators, which may be why they are more willing to spend more time seeking and sharing knowledge. While backyard beekeepers tend to be quick to share know-how and experiences, commercial operators were found to generally be more protective of industry secrets and information.

Historically, a beekeepers commitment and profitability have been judged by asking questions like “How many hives do you run?” and “How long have you been keeping bees?” In the age of varroa and neonicotinoid pesticides, a new question is often used to quickly evaluate ones seriousness as a beekeeper: “What percentage of your colonies did you lose this Winter/year?”

Enthusiasts viewed the sharing of ideas and experiences as a way to enhance the beekeeping community. This process is facilitated through formal activities such as bee club and association meetings, classes and workshops and informally through mentorships. All this is in addition to more open access forms of accessing information through blogs, extension service and scientific websites, association or government newsletters and beekeeping journals and periodicals.

The primary focus of backyard beekeepers on basic beekeeping information makes sense given the steep learning curve necessary to get up to speed in bee culture. Less experienced beekeepers tend to be highly dependent on the knowledge of seasoned beekeepers and often adopt a “belief in the person”. The study notes that most enthusiasts felt “they received more information than they passed on, and that information was ‘unlocked’ through a gradual process of increased community status and credibility as they gained knowledge, experience and skill.” This process also impacts how a beekeeper is viewed within the wider beekeeping social network ‘because everyone knows everyone’.

All too often we beekeepers can be judgmental and seek to establish an ego driven pecking order and try to improve our status amongst our peers. A quick and dirty method many of the Australian beekeepers studied used to evaluate another’s commitment and profitability as a beekeeper is by assessing the number of years keeping bees (part-time) or the number of hives one manages (commercial). Of course, the use of such proxies to judge another’s seriousness as a beekeeper is fraught with error and can often be wildly mistaken, but they are commonly used nonetheless.

While keeping bees typically is an isolated activity, learning how to keep bees has a strong social component. This study documented the beekeeping community’s openness and willingness to share management techniques and has built into its ecosystem various opportunities for enthusiast-professional interactions at meetings, conferences and events, all of which serve to strengthen the overall beekeeping community. According to Dr. Martinus, “…hobbyists can be conceived as ‘apprentices’ engaged in legitimate peripheral participation where learning and mastery occurs through participation” in beekeeping. Furthermore, “…interactions between individuals produce a shared identity, related to both individual skill acquisition and an individuals’ existence within a certain context of and having competencies within the group.” Additionally, “…learning of practice then does not always occur in the same locality or in organized forms (e.g. work teams), but also informally through shared experience, passion or expertise and can occur across space and may include professionals, semi-professionals and hobbyists.”

The sharing of beekeeping information and techniques is facilitated by the fact that we are all working with the same insects and have a similar base of knowledge. There is a wide network of both formal and informal opportunities where individuals can connect with each other, allowing beekeepers to share and obtain meaning through the active process of learning by tackling similar problems and issues. Knowledge sharing between non-commercial and commercial groups allows for the exchange of perspectives which can be critical to figuring out what will work in one’s specific situation.

Dr. Martinus summarizes her work this way: “This research has found extensive direct and indirect interactions between hobbyists and operators, which have enhanced the value of hobbyist activities and have become channels for industry and community appropriation. As firm external knowledge sources, hobbyists did not fit current understandings of how user innovators might support industry. This finding perhaps reflects the low-tech character of beekeeping, which allows hobbyists to engage in non-profit markets alongside commercial ones. Hobbyists were both market competitors forcing operators into niche markets focused on tourist, mono-floral, high-value honey and collaborators involved in adapting global scientific or practical knowledge to the Western Australian context given the commercial focus on small process or technical/mechanical changes to improve productivity. Hobbyist activities were also of wider societal benefit, lifting community science levels, counteracting climate change, and changing industry’s operational context by changing policy and shifting societal images of bees and beekeeping.”

According to Dr. Martinus, the results of her study can be used to strengthen the beekeeping community in a couple ways: First is through “Better support for interactions between hobbyists and industry … for example funding or in-kind support to grow mentoring or internship schemes. These appear critical in the transfer of practice between the groups; it also provides a source of low cost labor for industry, and encourages responsible beekeeping amongst new hobbyist beekeepers as a means to address biosecurity threats.”

The second way her findings can strengthen the beekeeping industry is through “more appropriate policy in local governments – local laws on domestic keeping of animals particularly in urban areas, does often not adequately address beekeeping. This would recognize the importance of hobbyist beekeepers in the community (and bees in the environment). Related to this – the enactment of laws around urban beekeeping is often ad hoc, as local officials often do not understand bee behaviors and may be inclined to take an overly-cautious approach towards bees in urban areas in dispute resolution.”

Despite the huge diversity in practices and motivations among beekeepers, we all are dealing with many of the same issues from how to handle swarms, deal with foraging dearths, diseases, pests, queen issues, honey harvesting, timing of nectar flows, pesticide poisoning, etc. Ultimately, we are all in the same boat. By valuing and capitalizing on our differences rather than judging or denigrating them, we stand to create a stronger, more resilient beekeeping industry. A valuable lesson that is applicable not only to our industry, but many other areas of our lives as well.

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A Conversation with Kim Flottum, Part 2

Retired, Longtime Bee Culture Magazine Editor
By: James E. Tew

Last Month
Bee Culture readers, last month, Kim told us the story of his early years as editor of this magazine. Editor Jerry, the current manager of Bee Culture, stopped the first interview just after Kim introduced Charlie Gibbons, who was the White House beekeeper during the Obama administration years. This article, A Conversation with Kim Flottum (Part 2) picks up at that point…

Kim: When Michelle Obama said she wanted a garden out back, one of the people that worked there said, “If you’re going to have a garden, you got to have bees and I know a beekeeper who works here.”

They went and tapped on Charlie’s shoulder and said, “We need a beehive for the White House organic garden.” The elected people who lived in the White House had a dog and Charlie put the beehive where you would expect it – on the ground. Every time the dog came out, he would go sniff the entrance. I don’t know if the dog ever got stung, but people thought it was probably not a good idea, so they made an eight foot tower to put the beehive on top of by the organic garden. When Charlie went to work bees, he had to climb a stepladder, but that was okay.

I wasn’t the only person that got invited there to work with the bees. Quite a few of the commercial and business beekeepers in the U.S. also got to come and visit and look and talk. That worked well.

Then not long after I started, three, four, five years, I got an article from a guy in England, and it was, How We Stop Swarms in England. The article was very British, very, very British. I liked it. The information was basic, but the presentation and how he used words wasn’t basic at all. I published it and I got to know the author. The author’s name was Peter. You met Peter when you were there.

Jim: I did. Peter Smith.

Kim: Then I got invited to my first National Honey Show in London. I was the speaker. The way the room was set up, all the chairs in the back, empty space right in front of the stage, the stage up above, and the speaker was over here on the right, a screen, standard lecture hall. I was looking at it because I was going to be next. “Where’s the steps? How steep are they? Where’s my talk? Everything’s set up.” Peter was what? Nine feet tall?

Jim: Yes, he was a tall man.

Kim: This big, tall guy (Peter Smith) comes over there and, in British English, he says, “How do you do?” I looked up at him and he says, “You published an article of mine, thank you very much.” Kathy and I got to know Peter. When the meeting was over, he drove us around a little bit of the part of town we were in. Over the years we got invited to his place and to his meeting several times.

At that meeting, Peter introduced me to Jeremy Burbidge who runs Northern Bee Books. Now, I had an international publisher contact. He published books and he published a bee magazine. We put our heads together and it turns out we were a lot more alike than not – in terms of being a publisher and what people thought. We got along really well. I got to spread Bee Culture’s influence pretty much across England and that worked. He got to spread UK beekeeping across the U.S. and that worked well. I got to go over there a bunch of times.

He lives way north in England, but he has a Summer house as far south as you can get and still be in England and not have wet feet. That’s how far south he lives. He lived less than a couple miles from… who was that monk in England?

Interviewer: Brother Adam?

Kim: Yes, Brother Adam – at Buckfast Abbey. You could almost see it (Buckfast Abbey) from his place. He was a little bit west of there, but it was that close.

Anyway, coming back to the U.S., I still was doing a fair amount of traveling and speaking. Almost all of this is because nobody else wanted it. I’m just one of the available ones to do this, so I guess I had nothing else to do.

Jim: You were the president during some dark times in the Ohio State Beekeepers Association with Africanized bees and predaceous mite introductions.

Kim: Thank you. I was. Africanized bees and mite introductions were bad.

Jim: It was a difficult time to be an officer in a bee group.

Kim: I had a good experience with a reporter asking about Africanized bees. The first Africanized bees in the U.S. were still very new when I got a call from a reporter at the New York Times about Africanized Killer Bees in the U.S. I had talked to this reporter before which is why she called me because I’m the only beekeeper she knew. We talked and I tried to calm her down, and I think I did a little bit. The story that came out wasn’t outright panic, but it was, “Oh my God, are we going to die? Are we going to die?” sort of thing.

A while later, she had a story in the New York Times about Charlie Gibbons, the White House’s beekeeper. By the way, this is how I met Charlie. I said, “I got to get ahold of her (the New York Times reporter).” I called her up and she said, “I can’t tell you that it’s the president.” I said, “You owe me a story,” so, she gave me Charlie’s name. That was it, just his name. No address. No phone number. I went to my subscription person, and I said, “Do we, by any chance, have a subscriber living in the Washington, DC, Maryland area, named Charlie Gibbons?”
She looked and she said, “Yes, we do.” I said, “Do we have a phone number?” My subscription person replied, “Yes, we do.” I called him up. He’d taken the day off to go to the doctor. I called up and suddenly I’m talking to the president’s beekeeper. How cool is that? That’s how I met the White House’s beekeeper who I discussed earlier.

Jim: You did that because of the Bee Culture subscription contact?

Kim: Yes.

Jim: The subscription address and phone number?

Kim: Yes. That got me in a lot of doors over the years. That got me in doors for two reasons. People were scared of what I would say in the magazine. I’m glad they didn’t know that I was more scared than they were. I would never say anything, and that procedure worked fairly well.

Secondly, beekeeping events started to wind down, in terms of the industry settling down over Africanized honey bees and Varroa mites. The conflict over the honey board eased but then adulterated honey became a prominent national issue. To this day, that adulterated honey challenge hasn’t gone away at all. I’m glad I’m not in the middle of that honey war because that’s not going to go away.

I saw an ad just this week selling honey for a dollar per pound in a 50-gallon barrel. I need to say it wasn’t U.S. honey. It was foreign honey. That’s what U.S. honey producers are up against right now and that’s not going to get any better with inflation and all the things being what they’re going to be.

All things considered, I got out of this editor position at just about the right time in terms of domestic problems, and in terms of international problems. Personal problems? I never had any. A couple beekeepers, occasionally, would confront me with an issue, but by the time I wound down at Root, I had things where I wanted the magazine to be. I had the staff and I had the resources. I’ve made a lot of contacts over the years. Jim, I bet you I could go get a bee writer in twenty different countries today to write an article.

If there’s something going on in Bulgaria, I know the guy and I can say, I established those contacts, and that meant, when you want to know something, who do you know, then call Kim. That worked well and still works to a large degree.

Jim: You routinely had large meetings in Medina featuring well-known beekeeping authorities.

Kim: Well, yes, we usually had a good crowd. We did an Ohio state meeting there and we had monthly meetings and we had two beeyards, and we had a lot going on in the Medina yard because John Root (the President of the Root Company then) supported it. John Root was the last beekeeping administrator at the Root Company. Everything that I did bees, he was behind 100%. He would say, “Do you need a little more?”

Yes. We had a lot of club members. They were from not just Medina, they were from Northeast Ohio, the whole corner of Ohio. One of them was a guy named Jeff Ott, who lived up in the Cleveland area or someplace. He got to know me. We talked and then a little bit later he asked, do you need any articles on anything here or maybe someplace else? Pretty soon he was writing routinely for me. He had a day job and a situation where he could take a week off and go to Mexico and see what was going on with the bees there. He went to Colorado. He went to Mexico. He did a lot of traveling that I couldn’t or didn’t want to do.

Then he got a job in Colorado. When he moved there, he still wrote for me but that tapered off because his job got busy. A couple years later, about three or four years ago, he came back to visit his family who still lives here. He came into my office, and he said, “This is what I’m doing. How would you like to do a podcast?” I just looked at him and I said, “Well, what’s a podcast?” Because I had no idea. He took the time and the energy and the resources and taught me the basics of producing a podcast. The podcasts are named Beekeeping Today podcast and Honey Bee Obscura.

We figured it out between the two of us. He knew mostly all the things you can’t see it, the microphones and the headsets and the wires. He knew all the electronic stuff, and what was being recorded, how to get it recorded and transcribed and on the web. He knew all of that. It helped that he is an excellent beekeeper. I knew the beekeepers. I wasn’t sure what a microphone was when I started this project. He got me familiar with that. Now, I’m capable electronically. That’s about it. Capable.

Jim: Yes. I agree with you on that.

Kim: Between the two of us put together, he knew how, and I knew who. This project has been a success. I saw this building and growing. The magazine was doing fine. It was time for me to retire from the Root Company.

At the time, I was over 70 and I needed to sit down. I spent a year looking for someone to replace me. I found three people with whom I was comfortable. They were sharp, intelligent, articulate and nonconfrontational. None of them would have caused a problem. Jerry Hayes was selected. I didn’t even get the offer out of my mouth before he said, “Yes, I want it. When can I start?” He’s the Bee Culture editor now.

He just stepped right in. He came in and spent a year with me at the company. I was able to show him about a third of what I know. Looking back, I missed so much stuff when telling him how to get this job done. He’s had to learn the hard way, but now he’s in charge. Once in a while, I’ll offer an article or a piece of advice or something, but now he’s in charge.

Figure 3. An acknowledgment of Kim’s bee industry successes.

Kim: So, I’m still involved in the podcast, but I no longer travel to meetings. I haven’t been on an airplane in three years, and that’s just fine with me. In fact, I won’t even drive to a meeting. I’ll do Zoom if people want. I’ve got probably 200 talks on the computer behind me, and I pick a subject. I’m good to go in most cases.

Now I’m here at home and I’m going through this lung thing that’s causing me a bunch of problems. The medical theory is that it’s going to go away. They’re going to fix it, and I’m going to be back to normal. I’m not a betting man, but here I am – betting.

Jim: [laughs] I’m sure you are.

Kim: No other choice.

Jim: How old a man are you, Kim?

Kim: 76. Time flies.

Jim: Well, that’s not old.

Kim: Okay? Why doesn’t it feel that way?

Jim: Kim, you’ve given a good overview, but you can’t just list everything that happened. How many years did you work for the Root Company?

Kim: I started in 1986 and I quit in 2020. That would be 34 years.

Jim: You did videos, you taught short courses, you developed a pollinator garden. In fact, you had a dynamic pollinator garden layout. You even developed a second magazine.

Figure 2. Jim Tew and Kim Flottum capturing footage for a video session of the Kim & Jim beekeeping video series.

Kim: Yes. You and I, all things considered, have been so far ahead of the electronic distribution of material in this industry than anybody I can think of. We did the Kim and Jim Show, and we did instructional videos. The one thing you’ve done that I haven’t done is initiate a YouTube channel. That’s the only thing I haven’t done. We’ve done everything else. We’ve written stories and we’ve written books. Kathy, my coworker, and wife, went to a bunch of national meetings doing the – what do you call it?

Jim: “Facebook Live.”

Kim: Facebook Live. Right. We went to meetings and talked to all the vendors and two years later, the vendors still came up, when they’d see me and say, “When you did that Facebook video at the Federation meeting, people still talk about that, so you made a splash.” It was because I had good people around me that knew more than I do and good people around me who wanted to help. We accomplished a lot in this industry that I say carefully, maybe now some of the people are beginning to catch up with.

Jim: Yes. You don’t stay ahead if you don’t keep racing. Even so, after a while, the race has to end.

Kim: What else did we do?

Jim: Well Kim, you and I had a car wreck on the way to a bee meeting.

Kim: Yes. We did. Almost a really bad one.

Figure 5. Jim Tew and Kim Flottum at one of many, many bee meetings.

Jim: Yes. We were going to an Ohio Farm Bureau Commodity meeting, as I recall and, at 65 mph, we got broadsided, you and me. Kim, we missed that meeting. (It was not our fault. Chuckles.)

Kim: We’ve had a lot of calamities together, but I clearly remember that one.

Jim: There’s just so many things. You’ve mentioned Kathy several times. She’s been an excellent coworker and a supportive wife for a long time for you. She should certainly be acknowledged in your successes. She was an integral part of the evolution of Bee Culture, too. You mentioned earlier that you started a second magazine, Beekeeping, Your First Three Years.

Kim: Yes, Kathy was fundamental to the magazine and to my career. That second magazine lasted, I want to say, five or six years. It hit during an economic downturn period that I had nothing to do with nor the industry had anything to do with. Unfortunately, it had to be dropped. If you have a copy hidden somewhere, keep it because there aren’t any more.

Jim: It was a useful magazine that was enjoyable to read. Kim, you published a lot of books for the Root Company, and you published books that you authored.

Kim: Yes, I have. If you had told me in 1965, I was going to publish a book – any book, it’d take me 20 minutes to get up off the floor from laughing. I began to see the value of having not a permanent voice, but a voice that had almost all the facts in a book. Not everything, because tomorrow something’s going to change, and next week something else’s going to change. Most of what’s in my book was true ten years ago and twenty years ago, and it’ll be true 20 years from now and that’s what I wanted to produce.

One of the times I was with Dr. Morse, (Dr. Roger Morse, Beekeeping Professor, Cornell University) he had a big office with a big desk. He sat on one side of the desk and there was a bookshelf behind him that went almost to the ceiling. We were sitting chatting and he turned around and said, “You need a new one, ABC.” The current edition, at the time, was like 11 years old. It hadn’t been revised in a while.

John Root and his predecessors, his father and his father’s brother had a schedule where they edited about a third of ABC every three years. They picked the oldest stuff and replaced it and left the rest of it alone. Well, I hadn’t been there three years yet, so Roger said, “Let’s do this.” Do what I asked? “Let’s rewrite this book.” He did 75% of it all new. I did maybe 20%. Then he pulled in a lot of people, and I pulled in some people. Roger did a lot, and we came out with a new ABC, that was a hit and a half, but the cover looked just like the old ones.

A few years later, Shim (Dr. H. Shimanuki, USDA ARS bee scientist) came to me and he said, “Are you ever going to do this book again?” I said, “No, you are.” He said, “I’ll be back in a month with a draft.” He was pretty much on time getting it back to me. I looked at the cover and I said, we are never, ever going to put this traditional cover on ABC again. I had a picture of a beekeeper, standing out by a beehive. This new version was to have that color picture, a shiny cover. That’s the only one ever and probably the only one that will ever have a color cover.

Jim: [laughs]

Kim: Dr. Keith Delaplane (bee scientist, the University of Georgia) oversaw the editing of the current ABC, and he got ABC where I wanted it to be. He is a good scientist and a good beekeeper. He has good people working for him. He edited the ABC I wanted. I didn’t want a science textbook and I didn’t want a how-to-stop swarming book. I added a bunch of stuff from people that nobody knows or knew then. I think the last edition of ABC was pretty good.

Jim: Right, that last book was a good publication. It looked good.

Figure 4. The cover of Kim’s popular beekeeping text, The Backyard Beekeeper 4th Edition

Kim: Then among the other books I wrote, was Backyard Beekeeper, modeled after several, but not a lot, like several books already out there. Early this past Summer, I finished the fifth edition of Backyard Beekeeper, that’ll be out in February 2024. Then, there was another one, The Honey Handbook, and that just focused on how to get as much honey out of a bee as you can. The last one I did was, Common Sense Natural Beekeeping, which was taking everything that’s good for the bee and getting rid of everything that wasn’t good for the bee. It turned out to be mostly natural, but not quite common-sense beekeeping.

Jim: I don’t know. There must be one, but I don’t know who else has had five-issue updates of the same beekeeping book. You know, a book that wasn’t like ABC or the Hive and the Honey Bee. That’s impressive, Kim.

Kim: Yes. Now, the Beekeeping Today and Honey Bee Obscura podcast projects have been entertaining for me. We presently have generous sponsors for the productions and Jeff does a great job editing the audio and posting the segments on the web. I’m enjoying working on them.

Jim: Kim, this review has truly been an educational process for me. There’s no practical way to compress all your decades into a couple of simple magazine articles, but we surely tried. I have enjoyed listening to your experiences. Thanks for your time and memories.

Dr. James E. Tew
Emeritus Faculty, Entomology
The Ohio State University
tewbee2@gmail.com

Co-Host, Honey Bee
Obscura Podcast
www.honeybeeobscura.com

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Found in Translation

An Interview with Dr. Hongmei Li-Byarlay
Associate Professor and Project Director for Pollinator Health, Central State University, Ohio
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

Where are you from originally?
*I was born in Tianjin, China, and came to the U.S. to study for my Ph.D. in 2002.

How did you get interested in science?
*When I was a sixth-grader, I talked to my uncle and told him that I want to be a scientist! Maybe because I had read so many books on the weird creatures in the deep ocean and stories of UFOs.

Where did you go to school and what did you study?
*I went to Tianjin Normal University for my Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Education (dual degree). My senior project was on the effects of metal contamination on bacteria in garlic roots. Then, I went to Nan Kai University for my Master’s degree in Zoology. I studied micro-moths in Northern China and discovered four new species.
In 2002, I went to Purdue University in Indiana for my Ph.D. in Entomology and studied genetics and physiology of fruit flies with Dr. Barry Pittendrigh and Larry Murdock. In 2010, I started my postdoc training with Dr. Gene Robinson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying behavioral genetics of honey bees. In 2013, I studied epigenetics and aging of honey bees with Drs. David Tarpy at NCSU and Olav Rueppell at UNC-Greensboro.

How did you start your career after school?
*In 2017, I got an offer from Central State University as a new Assistant Professor of Entomology. CSU had just gained their new status as a 1890 Land Grant Institution with USDA. I was very excited to start my own lab.

Which hot topics are you studying now?
*I am studying 1) the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying the social behavior and ageing of honey bees, such as grooming behavior, aggression and foraging behavior, 2) active breeding efforts for selection of mite-resistant bees by selecting mite-biting stocks and 3) landscape ecology of pollinators and flowers.

Where have you traveled in your studies of bees and what was most memorable?
*I have traveled to China, Germany, Canada, Puerto Rico and many different states in the U.S. The most striking memories were observing and doing experiments with Apis cerana in China, and my trip to Puerto Rico to see and feel the gentle AHBs in reality. I really enjoyed interacting with all the hives there.

What are the biggest challenges facing beekeepers moving forward?
*The desire to find new solutions for mite management is so high, and there are many new ideas. I just hope we all think of new solutions by integrating the sustainability of our hives and our environment.

What gives you hope? What are the best recent discoveries in bee science?
*The government, bee scientists, beekeepers and non-profit organizations are all working together to find the best ways to help our bees, which showed the most love and funding support from the community.
Three of the most interesting discoveries from our lab are:
1)A new publication on Single-cell dissection of aggression in honey bee colonies. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02090-0. We are all so excited to use a new sequencing technology to help us to understand bees in a deeper way.
2)Our lab’s new pub about RNA methylation and discovery of long non-coding RNAs underlying bee aggression https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-023-09411-4
3)We showed that the mandibles (mouthparts) are different between high mite-biting honey bee workers and current commercial colonies. I am also working on a new manuscript to show the striking comparison of mouthparts between two different species of Apis, in hopes this sheds light on mite defenses. https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.638308

Any advice for future scientists?
*Stay curious and ask questions!

What are your hobbies and other interests beyond bees and science?
*I like running, reading with my kids, hiking and camping in national parks, and meditation.

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James E. Tew & Kim Flottum. Photo Credit: Honey Bee Obscura podcast (https://www.honeybeeobscura.com/)

A Conversation with Kim Flottum, Part 1

Retired, Longtime Bee Culture Magazine Editor
By: James E. Tew

We’ve grown old together
Readers, I’ve been friends and have worked with Kim Flottum, former Bee Culture editor for nearly forty years. He began his responsibilities at Bee Culture Magazine in 1986. I was still a kid of 38 when Kim took the job in Medina, Ohio. Over the many ensuing years, for better or worse, Kim accepted more than 300 of my articles. We attended innumerable bee meetings and we produced electronic projects. We put together slide-deck programs and now, with the help of Jeff Ott, Kim and I present podcasts on various topics every week. I could not think of anyone more appropriate for an in-depth conversation. Ours has been a long, long trek. What follows is Kim’s view of that historical pathway.

Kim: I grew up in Central Wisconsin in the 1950’s. I played some high school football and I worked in a grocery store. I had a good childhood with many memories. College became an option so I attended the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire for a while and then I transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison where I studied horticulture and entomology. I landed a contract job working for an entomologist there. After a few years, the funding for that assistant position ran out and I had to find another job. The USDA Agricultural Research Service, Honey Bee Research Lab headed by Dr. Eric Erickson was on the fourth floor of the building where I had been working.
Dr. Erickson and I were talking in the break room one day, and he said, “Do you know anybody that can do this, this, and this?” I said, “Yes – me.” He said, “Well I need somebody that can grow soybeans, and look at pollination, and look at bees and work bees,” and do all this crazy stuff. “Yes, me.” I needed a job, he needed an employee, so I just moved two floors up and I was there for four years. Go figure.

Jim: Were you going to school all this time? Were you taking other classes?

Kim: Yes, I graduated before I finished working for Eric. I worked for Erickson for four years, doing things I would’ve never imagined doing, and at the end of four years I was funded by a grant. I was totally supported by that grant; Eric needed a grad student.

At the end of four years the grant ended, and Dr. Erickson said, “Well folks we’re packing up. We’re moving the lab to Arizona. Been fun working here, bye.” “Well okay.” I moved to Connecticut, where I knew some people, and I got a job working in a greenhouse, and then I got a job working on a farm. I was raising a couple hundred acres of vegetables, and fruit, and the like. I had apple orchards and sweet corn – all sorts of things.

While I was there, I decided to get involved with the Connecticut State Beekeepers Association. Suddenly I was a Connecticut beekeeper, and I went to my first bee meeting. Soon thereafter, the group needed a president, and I took on the job.

Jim: My goodness – that was fast.

Kim: They had taken the Penwalt Chemical Company to court, and they had won the case. Connecticut took the controversial pesticide Penncap-M off the market. Legal fees, for the court case, were $40,000. I was the president of the beekeeping group, and if you know how a business is run, the president ultimately is responsible for the bill unless there’s something set up to protect him. I turned around and there was nobody there to protect me.

For about a year I campaigned across New England, from Maine to Florida, and to Illinois, telling our story. “We got Penncap-M off the market, you can, too. Here’s how you do it. Form a coalition, pay one lawyer.” In less than a year, I raised the $40,000.

When I was the president of Connecticut Beekeepers, the president is also the EAS (Eastern Apiculture Society) delegate. Suddenly I was on the board of EAS, I went to the first EAS meeting and John Root, from Bee Culture, was there. He was on the EAS board, too. I had never even seen the magazine Bee Culture. I didn’t know about The A.I. Root Company. I had never bought a piece of beekeeping equipment in my life.

We got to talking a little bit, and he said, “I’ll send you a copy of our magazine.” He sent me a magazine, and I looked at it. I talked to bee people in Connecticut. As far as they were concerned, this magazine was the cream of the crop in beekeeping literature. The next time I went back to an EAS board meeting, John said, “What’d you think of the magazine?” I said, “I can see some things that I would probably alter a little bit, maybe change, whatever, but it’s got good information and it’s got good people reading it and writing for it.”

He said, “How’d you like to run it?” I said, “Let me think about that.” Three months later I took the job, and I moved to Ohio. Here I am, all these years later.

Jim: That’s a lot of information in a hurry, Kim. Good heavens. I thought that you worked for Erickson for four years.

Kim: I did.

Jim: During that time, you didn’t buy bee equipment or get involved with the equipment?

Kim: I didn’t have to. I was living in an apartment in downtown Madison, Wisconsin and I went to work every day and there were 300 or 400 beehives right in the middle of the city of Madison on a university experimental farm. I had all the bees I wanted, all the equipment I wanted, all the honey I wanted, I had everything I wanted. At the end of the day, I left it all there, and went home.

Jim: How did you learn beekeeping, from Erickson or from the staff there?

Kim: I had a guy named Dave Severson who was a graduate student in honey bee management. He taught me the craft. There was a guy there whose name I can’t remember at the moment, who did nothing his whole life except instrumentally inseminate queens. I learned that technique from him.

Then I had a guy there who could fix anything that could break – absolutely anything that could break. When I broke something, I took it to him, and he showed me how to fix it. Then I had another guy there who knew every plant that bees visited on every continent on earth.

I got to know a lot of the plant stuff on pollination and then we started planting pollinator gardens and we started looking at soil amendments for pollinator gardens and all the things that can affect a pollinator plant. We did that work for four years.

Another big project I accomplished was Penncap-M. It was still killing bees almost everywhere, but nobody had any really good numbers. For an entire Summer I owned a sweetcorn field, and I would be out there at 5:30 in the morning.

I had this specific path; it was a four-acre field, and I had this path walking through the cornfield. Every 40 feet or so, there was a stick in the ground. That was a plant that I looked at. How many bees are on this plant? What time was it? I did that all until the end of pollen shed. I did that for two years. By the end of two years, I could tell you how many bees would be on how many plants at what time of day. That caught a lot of attention. Then Eric had this thing about pollinating soybeans, and he said, “Can bees pollinate soybeans?” I said, “Why wouldn’t they?”

I found out why they would, and again, it was the same thing. It had to do with soil amendments, time of day, variety of soybean and the size of the bee population. We nailed that right down. The paper’s still out there. I’m still cited for that paper, believe it or not. We didn’t solve that problem, but we gave it a lot of ammunition. He said two things. He said, “This isn’t going to get me anywhere with USDA, but it’s been fun.” When I finished that corn experiment, that pretty much proved that spraying – What’s that chemical?

Jim: Penncap-M.

Kim: Yes, that’s it. Spraying Penncap-M at a certain time of day would kill every bee within 20 miles. If you waited three or four hours, it was all gone, and the bees visited and almost none of them died. The first talk I ever gave to a group of growers was how to use Penncap-M. I went in there with bulletproof armor on.

Jim: That was a gutsy move, Kim, though. Those were contentious times. Encapsulation was thought to be a safe way to use methyl parathion, encapsulated. It was driving bees crazy.

Kim: I gave a couple talks and nobody threw anything at me, interestingly. So, I was in Connecticut and participating in EAS, but I had to move to Ohio. I was here at Root, I don’t know, maybe an hour and a half and the Medina Beekeepers Association basically stole me and said, “You get to be on our board of directors.” Mark Bruner, the guy who had been editor before me, had gone to a couple of their meetings. I don’t know if you remember Larry Goltz, who was Bee Culture editor before Bruner.

Jim: I do.

Kim: Then there was Larry Goltz for 10 years before Bruner. For ten years, Larry Goltz edited the magazine.

Jim: How many editors have there been at Bee Culture?

Kim: I must give you a fuzzy answer because A.I. Root was the first one. Then it was A.I. and his son, and they were doing it together and then it was his son and his brother, and they were doing it together. Then they got a couple people who were working on the magazine just day-to-day on stuff and they’re all working together. Who’s the editor? There’s a name there, but there’s five names under it. I can say there’s been several, but many of them have been family.

Kim: Often it was the BC secretary who answered the phone. Often it was the lady who took the photographs and answered the phone. Sometimes it was the advertising manager who took the call. It wasn’t that there was somebody way up here, there was a whole bunch of people right in here. Depending on who it was, some of them would never take a call and some of them would take every call they could get.

Jim: This editorship history is overwhelming. All things considered up to this point, no doubt about it, you’re the longest serving editor.

Kim: Correct.

Jim: We can say that for sure. Then of course, after you, just to mention it in this article, Jerry Hayes is now the editor.

Figure 1. Peter Kim Flottum, former editor of Bee Culture beekeeping magazine and longtime friend.

Kim: All right, when all is said and done in Connecticut and John had hired me, I’d been to Medina to interview, he hired me, and he said, “Go.” We moved to Medina and rented an apartment for a little bit and then bought a house. The first day on the job, all the people at the work company came in and looked at me the way they do with new people. I didn’t know them, they didn’t know me, but it worked out all right.

I was in my chair, I don’t know, maybe a minute and a half, and the phone rang. It was one of the writers for the magazine that I didn’t know because I hadn’t read the magazine yet, who wanted to know when his article was due and thinking fast on my feet, I said, “The same day as last month.” He said, “Okay.” So, I got away with it. [laughter]

It took a while to get used to how the beekeeping industry and the Root Company interacted, and by then the Root Company was phasing way down in beekeeping supplies. They were still making some equipment, but production was headed in one downward direction. I took a look at that, and I took a look at the other manufacturers in the industry. I said, “Okay, I can see my future is not selling equipment from the Root Company. It is selling other people’s equipment to beekeepers.” That was the way I started.

When I moved there, the magazine didn’t have data at the time, the magazine didn’t have a person handling advertising. Somebody would call up and say, “I have an ad for the next month’s issue,” and the person who answered the phone says, “Okay, I’ll give the message to what’s her name and she’ll call you back.” That’s not service with a smile in my opinion. I hired a person to sell advertising due to people who were selling to beekeepers.

That turned out to be a very good choice to make because I got, “Oh, good.” I found a person who didn’t know anything about beekeeping, which was actually good because she had to ask what things were when an advertiser took something for granted. She didn’t know beekeeping specifics so she asked specific questions and it worked out well. We got advertising going and I took a look at the writers and the second big thing I did was do a reader survey.

Kim: We had about 9,000 subscribers at the time, and I picked out a third of them, 3,000. I put together a two-page survey of, “Who are you, how many bees, how long keeping bees, how old are you, where do you live, what do you like, what don’t you like? Reader survey.” I got replies back, and I took about a month to collate it. I found out that we were doing a lot of things that people couldn’t care less about, and we weren’t doing some things that people really wanted to know more about.

Once I gathered all the data and had some ideas of things to leave, things to change and things to get rid of, I summarized it for the writers. I told them, “These are the directions I think we should be going because this is what the readers want. Less here, more there, new here. Get rid of the old there.” The writers began to slowly change. Some, of course, would never change. Richard Taylor, a popular writer at the time, would never change, and I’m really glad he didn’t.

I’ll tell you a quick story about Richard Taylor. I went to his house several times because he lived in Ithaca, New York, where Roger Morris lived. Roger Morris, at Cornell, was my scientific stalwart in beekeeping information. He was the scientist that I had on call any time I wanted. I would go see Roger or some such trip, and then I would go to Richard’s.

I went to Richard’s house one day and he said, “You’re just in time. We’re going to go look at a beeyard.” I loaded into his model “T” Jeep, something really old, headed out to the beeyard, went down a highway, went down a dirt road, went down a track in the woods, went down so you could almost see through the trees, and came to the beeyard. It was out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

There were about eight or nine colonies sitting in a semi-circle right in front of us, maybe 20 yards. He said, “Look at that yard.” He said, “I’ve died and gone to heaven.” This is where heaven is and he started to get out of the vehicle and he said, “Oh, look!” One of the colonies was starting to swarm and it was pouring out swarming bees. By the time he got close, the swarm was outside the hive and he did this – “I got the queen.” With his fingers, he pulled her right out of the air. Can you believe it?

Jim: Oh wow. He captured her out of the air?

Kim: I just sat there, and my mouth opened and I said, “How the hell do you do that?” He said, “Not most of the time.” [laughs]

Jim: Oh my.

Jim: As the years have passed, you have grown to look like Richard Taylor more and more.

Kim: Kind of, yes. Anyway, I got two, and then after four or five issues, maybe six issues had been out. I started in March. My first issue was May 1986.

Jim: So, your introductory period was March to May of ‘86.

Kim: By then, people were calling me up, “We’ve got a meeting coming up, would you like to speak?” My first thought was, “What do I speak about? I don’t know anything.” I knew research from the USDA bee lab, I could draw on that. I also had good information from the reader’s survey so I could share that with the people that were listening and that worked pretty well. People liked the reader survey information. Where did they fit in with all the rest of the people that were reading the magazine? Of course, when I was done, I would do a real quick reader survey up there.

“Okay, what do you want more or less of?” I got some really good firsthand information from people sitting right in front of me, that took me into Winter. The first year I went to the American Honey Producers Association because I don’t think I was quite in Ohio yet, Richard Adee knocked on my door. He wanted a piece of this magazine because, he had some – or the American Honey Producers had – I say this carefully – political agendas that they wanted to work with and yes, of course, I was the voice. I was one of the big voices. They had several, maybe a thousand members, something like that. I had several thousand subscribers. Pretty soon I got to know Richard and his son. What’s his name, oh yes, – Bret?

Kim: I went to the Adee’s out in North Dakota a couple times. There’s a lot of bees and beekeepers. I got to know more of the big commercial guys. I was probably overly influenced with commercial beekeeping agendas more than sideliner hobbyists and not long after I was there, the noise on the National Honey Board started, a lot of people wanted it and the people that wanted it were mostly commercial retail and packers.

The people that didn’t want it were most commercial, wholesale bulk, and the way they looked at it, I’m not going to say all of them or any of them, but the way they looked at it was: the way the honey board was set up was to market honey to people, not barrels of honey to other beekeepers. That rift lasted quite a while in the beekeeping world, but they got the Honey Board passed and funded and all those things. The issues moved into the magazine by the new year, I think right around the new year, then the magazine had been taking on some, what do you call it? Some changes in terms of stuff it was made of. The name of the magazine changed from “Gleanings in Bee Culture” to a simpler “Bee Culture.” The magazine paper changed to better quality, color print and photos were added, the total number of pages increased – those sorts of things.

It stepped up to – I say this carefully – it was about the same quality in terms of looking at it and reading it as the American Bee Journal (ABJ) and that turned a page in my book. I’d caught up to the industry leader because when I came, ABJ was top of the heap and data was top of the heap.

Then I started doing some things. I don’t know if it was the second, maybe it was the third year I was there, the Root Company went through a major digital birth. They brought in a company from I don’t know where. Forty people descended on my office one day and when I was done, I had Catch The Buzz and I had email and I had more emails. I had everything digital you could possibly imagine.

We were first by a long shot with Catch The Buzz, and that caught a lot of attention. Every day you’d get an email from Kim Flottum of Bee Culture Magazine telling you something you needed to know to be a better beekeeper. That was a hit. Then it dawned on me after some amount of time, “I bet you, we could sell advertising on that”, and sure enough you could. That increased our income. By the second or third year of Catch The Buzz, our subscriber base was about equal to ABJ’s.

Jim: That’s interesting.

Kim: Then, I was still on the board of EAS when I came from Connecticut. Dr. Dewey Caron was chairman. He had been chairman for 10 years. Dewey was chairman when I left Connecticut. Since I was now located in Ohio, my status as a director from Connecticut ended but he appointed me to stay on for about three years as membership chairman. My job was to use the magazine to encourage people to join EAS, come to the meetings, those sorts of things.

After his 10th year – the EAS board liked Dewey a lot – after ten years, he said, “I think I’m done.” They needed a new chairman, and everybody just looked at me. “You know everybody, you know everything, you go everywhere, we pick you.” Suddenly, I was chairman of The Eastern Apicultural Society.

Jim: Chairman of EAS, a major beekeeping organization. That was impressive growth, Kim.

Kim: I’d been going to EAS meetings probably five or six years. Four or five. Anyway, so I was really familiar with how meetings were set up, how chair people were picked, electing officers. I had two jobs. One of them was to get new members but the other one was to figure out how – EAS was confused. There were a lot of people trying to help run it and not having monumental success. Dewey and I cleaned house and reduced the confusion, more or less. Then, Dewey and Anne Harmon and I put our heads together and we came up with a permanent way to run a meeting, from picking the president two years down the road, to the closing words at the end of the meeting. We made a, what do you call it? A schedule, whatever.

Jim: Kim, do you mean a “template”?

Kim: Yes. A template – that people could use. These templates could vary. Sometimes the meeting location caused a concern, whatever, but it worked out well and EAS really prospered. That’s about when you and I got involved, in ‘95.

Jim: The Year of the Hive, 1995. Wooster, Ohio.

Kim: We had that adventure. I’ll tell you, basically for two years, you and your staff, Sherry Ferrell and Dave Heilman and I lived together in a lot of ways.

Jim: Yes, getting ready for that huge event.

Kim: For me, it was a really good two years. It still is a good two years for me. I enjoyed the meeting, I enjoyed the company, everything. The only thing I wish I had was an air conditioner. [laughs]

Jim: Yes, it was hot, that late Summer. That was the Eastern Apicultural Society meeting in 1995 to Wooster, Ohio. It was Summer and it was hot.

Kim: We got that taken care of. I stayed on as chairman, people moved on. Then other people started listening to what we were saying in the magazine. I was getting people who had not written for the beekeeping industry, government people and industry people in terms of manufacturers. Some of my writers moved up in notch rather than just how to stop a swarm. We got some of that going in there. That got some of the commercial people going in terms of what can we do bigger with the feds, with all of that. Things started to build that way.

At the same time, because of that input and because our circulation was growing and our advertisers were being successful in the magazine, suddenly I was invited to lots of places, lots and lots of places. I was going to little town halls in wherever Michigan and I was going to the capital of the United States. I got to go to the White House a bunch of times.

Jim: Oh wow!

Kim: The White House beekeeper invited me there several times. I didn’t get to visit with the people who lived there but I got to visit with all the people who worked there. The cooks and the gardeners and the people who took care of the organic garden. The DC beekeepers had a couple of meetings right on the White House lawn, and I got to speak there. Can you imagine that? Speaking on the White House lawn.

Jim: No, I cannot imagine that Kim.

Kim: I got to do it. Those sorts of things came. Then I brought Charlie Gibbons, the White House beekeeper, to Medina. Participants were standing out on the sidewalk at the Root Company, with the doors open, to listen to him. The room was packed. It was probably the biggest bee meeting ever in Medina, Ohio. Charlie was happy and I was happy, and it worked out really well. He stuck around until the bees left the White House and then he retired. In addition, he worked at the White House. He was a carpenter.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview in the January 2024 issue of Bee Culture Magazine.

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Found in Translation

An Egg-Level View of Drone Production
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

Honey bee males, or drones, are belittled but key members of the colony. They also form a test case for one of the most fundamental questions in animals and plants. When there is a distinction between males and females, how does that come about? In bees, as in many other species, development into males or females is not black and white. There are proteins (or in cases like our own species, entire chromosomes) that help set the stage for a cascade of events that determines sex. Most of the time, a single trigger, or ‘sex-determining factor’, starts the male and female cascades, and these cascades generally result in physically different males and females. Both that trigger and the resulting cascade differ across the tree of life, and it is hard to point to common sex-determining factors across the insects, let alone the cascades that generate distinct males and females more generally. Thus, it was a really big deal 20 years ago when a research group in Germany led by Martin Beye won the race to find a plausible sex-determining factor for honey bees (M. Beye, M. Hasselmann, M. K. Fondrk, R. E. Page, S.W. Omholt, 2003. The gene csd is the primary signal for sexual development in the honey bee and encodes an SR-type protein Cell 114, 419–429, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(03)00606-8). Just this month, that same group closed the circle by demonstrating the key mechanisms by which this factor kicks off drone versus female production in bees… but first some background.

It is staggering to realize that a European priest, Johann Dzierzon, accurately described the process that leads to male honey bees 180 years ago. He was able to show, experimentally, that queens which had been prevented from mating were exclusively drone layers. Genes were not a thing then, let alone sex-determining genes, but genetics was soon to be a field, and there is evidence that Dzierzon’s insights and experiments helped trigger the appreciation for how genetic variation leads to the diversity we see within species. Dzierzon’s passions included how worker bee body colors reflected both queens and their mates and his careful work likely planted seeds in the mind of fellow priest and apiarist Gregor Mendel, who was starting to conduct the pea breeding experiments that defined his own legacy. A nice recent review by Gene Kritsky builds the case for Mendel’s likely exposure to Dzierzon’s thinking in science circles of the 1850’s and 60’s (Kritsky, G. Bees and Peas: How apiology influenced Gregor Mendel’s research. 2023. American Entomologist, 69, 40-45, doi:10.1093/ae/tmad025). Mendel did not formally acknowledge the assist, and it is unclear whether he would have reached the same conclusions and experiments solo. What is certain is that Dzierzon got pretty much everything correct about honey bee reproduction, marveling at queen nuptial flights and the abilities of queens to take or leave sperm from those flights as they nurtured their developing eggs, “The power of the fertile queen, accordingly, to lay worker or drone eggs at pleasure is rendered very easy of explanation by the fact that the drone eggs require no impregnation, but bring the germ of life with them out of the ovary; whilst otherwise it would be inexplicable and incredible. Thus the queen has it in her power to deposit an egg just as it comes from the ovary, and as the unfecundated mothers lay it; or by the action of the seminal receptacle, past which it must glide, to invest it with a higher degree, a higher potency, of fertility and awaken in it the germ of a more perfect being, namely a queen or a worker bee.”

So, how does recent research close the deal for honey bee sex determination? It was evident that the complementary sex determination (csd) gene identified by Beye and colleagues had a highly variable stretch that shows maybe 20 sequence variants in a given population and 100 overall in the species. If diploid female bees are many hundred-fold more frequent than diploid males (which are generally removed by their sisters during development), a gene with this amount of variation fits the bill as the trigger for sex, but how does it all work? Marianne Otte and colleagues from the Beye lab used several genetic tricks to show that a mismatch for this one gene between two chromosomes is both necessary and sufficient to generate female bees. They used ‘CRISPR’ gene editing of fertilized eggs to nullify sections of that variable region. When this happened, bees that would have developed into females were male. They also inserted a polymorphism into drone-layer queens and those queens then produced viable females. Basically, matches for a tiny region of this one protein were sufficient to bind the protein in ways that changed its effects on the next proteins in the cascade and altered the sex of these bees (see graphic). If one of those amino acids was mismatched between the two gene copies, the resulting poor binding led to a female cascade. That’s a simple mechanism for letting a single gene impact sex determination.

While csd appears to be unique to certain insects with haploid males (bees, wasps, ants in particular), it shows a historical similarity to ‘transformer’ proteins, which are known as key actors in insects with diploid males and females and sex chromosomes (i.e., with sex determination that is more like our own). How the leap was made from traditional sex chromosomes to species with haploid males is another mystery. In a practical sense, researchers are rapidly determining variation at csd across populations at all sizes. There is a cost to colonies when queens are mated to males with matching csd alleles. Even though many such ‘diploid males’ are purged early in development the initial effort to raise them, and patchy brood patterns, can both weigh colonies down. Knowing the exact mechanism by which variation works at this locus allows for accurate screens of breeding stock and larger commercial apiaries to see where adding fresh genes might improve productivity. It’s also really neat to think that every cell of a worker bee (or queen) in your colony carries a tiny genetic difference at one of the thousands of her proteins that defines her life.

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Chemical-Free Yellow Jacket Removal

A Valuable Service Beekeepers Are Uniquely Suited to Perform
By: Ross Conrad

Beekeepers have a tendency to be honey bee centric. Have a swarm hanging from a tree in your yard? We’ll be right over. But call a beekeeper to remove a yellow jacket nest and we’re typically not interested. This leaves the person calling for help in a conundrum: do they call a professional exterminator or save money and pick up a can of toxic pesticide bug spray at the hardware store and attempt to do the job themselves? I would suggest that when we pass up the opportunity to help a member of our community with a yellow jacket problem, we fail to show that we beekeepers are more than a one-trick pony and demonstrate the varied benefits beekeepers can bring to the community. We also forfeit the chance to help prevent the introduction of additional toxic pesticides into the environment, and we give up on a potentially profitable service that can help diversify our income.

As beekeepers, we are already conditioned and equipped to deal with stinging insects. While different in many ways, yellow jackets are surprisingly similar to honey bees. While yellow jackets are carnivorous and will eat insects both dead and alive, they also feed on fruit, nectar and honeydew. Their stingers are barbed like a honey bee’s, but the barbs are so small that they can typically sting repeatedly, and only occasionally does a stinger become lodged and pull free of the wasp’s body. Yellow jacket venom, like most bee and wasp venoms, is primarily dangerous only to those who are hyper-allergic. Thankfully, the protective clothing that protects you from bee stings will also protect you from yellow jackets.

Face of a southern yellow jacket queen (Vespula squamosa)

Yellow jackets are social wasps and participate in cooperative brood care. The yellow jacket queen is larger than the workers and is tasked with doing all the work to build and provision a nest on their own in Spring. Once the first litter of worker wasps reach maturity, they take over the nest building and food gathering duties. Like honey bees, male yellow jackets are haploid and females are diploid allowing female worker yellow jackets to lay eggs that develop into males.

While yellow jackets build nests of hexagon shaped combs similar to honey bees, they construct their nests by chewing naturally occurring wood fibers that when mixed with their saliva becomes a pulpy substance they are able to form into comb. A grey paper envelope surrounds the combs that make up their brood nest. Like honey bees, yellow jackets produce warning pheromones which suggest that smoke can aid in dealing with them.

There are several types of yellow jackets and they are all black with either white or yellow markings. The most common have yellow markings on their face, thorax and abdomens and they make their nests either in the ground or up in trees, under the eaves of roofs, or other above ground structures they deem suitable. The yellow jackets with white markings on their face, thorax and abdomens are often called bald-faced hornets. This is a misnomer since all yellow jackets (whether they have yellow or white markings) are technically wasps identified by the fact that they have narrow waists connecting their thorax to their abdomen.

Of all the stinging insects normally found in North America, the bald-faced hornet’s sting seems to hurt the most. This is perhaps because the bald-faced hornet is larger and therefore has a larger stinger and venom sack. The bald-faced hornet also has a unique defense in that it can squirt or spray venom from the stinger into the eyes of nest intruders causing immediate watering of the eyes and temporary blindness.

Yellow jackets tend to be more defensive than honey bees especially in late Summer/early Autumn when their food sources are becoming scarce and their nest size is at its maximum. Beekeepers often will see yellow jackets attempting to access honey bee hives at this time of year. While strong colonies are able to resist the advances of yellow jackets effectively, the size of the entrance of a hive can be reduced to help weaker colonies defend themselves. Since late Summer and early Autumn is the time of year when yellow jackets become more noticeable, it is when they are more likely to cause problems for people and elicit complaints from the public who then may look for a local beekeeper to deal with them.

When removing a yellow jacket nest, it is best to do the job at night. Most of the time, just like honey bees, yellow jackets will all have returned to their nest for the evening since they are unable to navigate safe flight activity without the aid of light. As a result, a yellow jacket nest that is disturbed at night will trigger the guard wasps to crawl out of the nest to defend the colony. Like ants, bees and yellow jackets will crawl all over the place, but they will not fly unless there is visible light to guide them. Also like honey bees, yellow jackets are unable to see the color red, so a red light will provide the wasp remover with a critical advantage permitting them enough light to see and work without allowing the yellow jackets enough light to take to the air.

Two-year yellow jacket nest, with a one-gallon (3.8 liter) container for size reference. Collected by Alabama, USA, 2007. Dimensions are approximately 18 inches by 24 inches by 12 inches (46 cm by 61 cm by 30 cm). Source: Wikipedia

For those with patience, a commercially available yellow jacket trap can be deployed. For those who prefer a faster method, an easy way to remove small, above ground nests is to place a bag around the nest and pull the nest away from its anchoring point on whatever structure it is attached to. For larger nests, a hive tool or for really big nests, a spatula can be used to sever the connection between the nest and the structure while holding the bag directly under it so the nest will fall to the bottom of the bag. Since the yellow jackets are restricted to crawling, you will have three to four seconds to quickly close the bag and seal the opening by tying it off if it is plastic, or folding it down if made of paper in order to seal the wasps inside. The bag containing the wasps should then be placed inside another container, such as a garbage can with a lid, since they can potentially chew through the bag during the night.

For ground nesting wasps, the easiest approach is to smother the colony. A large sheet of plywood can be placed on the ground over the entrance area at night when all the wasps are in the nest. For uneven ground, a sheet or blanket with the edges rolled up or folded a bit, can be placed down first to act like a gasket and seal gaps along the ground preventing any wasps from finding a way out from under the plywood. It is a good idea to weigh down the plywood with a rock or cement block to help ensure a good seal with the ground surrounding the colony’s entrance and to prevent a strong breeze from moving the plywood. The plywood should be left in place for at least a couple weeks to ensure all the wasps are dead before removal.

For the entrepreneurially inclined, there are pharmaceutical companies that will pay for wasps gathered in a manner that preserves the integrity of the wasp venom, so they can be used to manufacture allergy medications. One company, Jubilant HollisterStier, will pay $800-$1,000 per pound for yellow jackets, and up to $1,400 per pound for rarer wasps and hornets (and you thought that a three pound package of honey bees for between $125-$200 was expensive!). Rather than remove the yellow jackets at night, this work should take place during the day so that primarily female worker wasps are collected since the males do not have stingers. A bee vacuum that collects the wasps uninjured is the perfect tool for the job, since the wasps must be flash frozen alive in order to preserve the integrity of the venom for pharmaceutical use. Since the frozen insects can be stored for up to 24 months, collections obtained from numerous nests can provide a potentially lucrative sideline. Be sure to contact the company you choose to work with ahead of time since they have specific protocols and instructions for wasp collection, storage, documentation and shipping.

It is unfortunate that yellow jackets are widely considered a nuisance. Without them, we would be overrun with harmful insect pests since to feed their young, the wasps kill large numbers of caterpillars and other insects that harm cultivated and ornamental plants. By including wasp and hornet removal services to their skills, beekeepers can add to the industry’s social value and provide a valuable community service, while developing the potential for additional income streams all at the same time.

Ross Conrad is author of Natural Beekeeping and The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont. He will be speaking for the Western New York Honey Producers, Inc. in an event open to the public on November 18. Check out the calendar for details: https://www.beeculture.com/calendar-of-events/

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The Honey Bee’s Winter Nest

Necessary for Surviving the Big Dearth
By: James E. Tew

But first, these thoughts
Over time, beekeepers change their ways, but bees always stay the same. During the past few years some novel issues, that are new to beekeepers, have been suggested and discussed in the media. Whether or not bees sleep has been addressed and then re-addressed. Apparently, they do. If bees feel pain or have other sentient qualities have been topics of other discussions. These unclear bee qualities are still being explored. Even honey is in the bright light of the popular media. Some postulate that bees are not the only animal able to make a honey-like product. Somewhat like lab-grown protein, a sweet product, having chemistry akin to that of honey, has been blended with nary a bee in sight. Is it honey or not? Topics like this help keep beekeeping interesting and keep bee knowledge evolving.

These are not the bees’ problems
All these current discussion topics are beekeeper related. While we humans gnash and pontificate, the bees plod along in their own world doing their own thing. Their biology is consistently their business and honey bees seemingly worry not one whit about their human counterparts. It appears that the beekeeper/bee relationship is totally one-sided one.

Figure 1. The moment of interaction between two distinct species – humans and bees.

Bees’ complex and mysterious biology
Though topics abound, it seems to me that our most recent significant advances in understanding our bees has been in the areas of bee biology and related pathogenic subjects. While we know much more about our bees today, we still are far from understanding everything.

Preparing for foodless times
In a real way, much of what bees do in the Springtime is in preparation for the next Winter season. To survive Winter’s coldness, bees must find a suitable nest site and construct combs, which are their only nest furnishings. They must gather food and store it. They must maintain a queen presence, maintain worker populations and swarm to procreate their species. They must defend their nest from interlopers and even defend against their own marauding bee neighbors. Without a protected nest site and suitable stocks of food, a honey bee nest will surely die in the Winter season. Bees clearly understand this harsh fact. Their base of operations – the nest – is critical to withstanding the Winter season.

Figure 2. What a honey bee nest looks like without beekeeper involvement. Note the propolis band around the combs.

The natural nest – an absolute necessity
When searching for a home, bee scouts usually look for a surprisingly small cavity – maybe as small as one cubic foot (.023 cubic meter). Finer features of a future home are that it should: be dark, have a defendable entrance, be dry and not have anything else living there such as birds, squirrels or ants. Ideally, it should not be on or at ground level.

When tearing into trees, early beekeepers were confronted with a morass of bees, comb, brood and dripping honey. How could any rational organization be seen in such chaos? As we now partially understand, the bee nest is a highly structured living environment. Understanding that fundamental structure – so much as is currently possible – can help make all of us better beekeepers.

The size of the nest
Feral nest sizes seem to vary significantly. How quickly, if ever, a colony can fill a cavity varies greatly; therefore, some nests are large while others stay relatively small. Reasons for size variations could be genetics, diseases, pests and water. The availability of nectar and pollen resources is critical. Simple, blind luck is also a helpful characteristic to a feral colony.

In fact, as humans have altered the general environment, suitable nesting sites have become much dearer to scouting bees forcing them to accept sites not perfect for their needs. Occasionally, a swarm is forced to build in the open, a fatal decision for most nests within the temperate parts of the U.S.

The nest fixtures
The natural bee nest is plainly furnished with wax combs only. Though bees can diligently modify the nest cavity to a degree, for the most part they must accept the space as it is. Along the top and sides of the nest, surveyor bees will lay out the beginning midrib of combs and other bees will begin to construct comb along those lines. We don’t know how these bees measure the spacing needed when establishing dimensions for future comb. Keenly observant beekeepers long ago discovered that bees require a specific living and working space – or the famous bee space concept. That understanding allowed the subsequent development of artificial domiciles that we have used for more than one-hundred years.

When bees first occupy a new nest cavity, the first matter of business is to construct worker combs. Besides being an area to nurse developing worker bees, worker-sized comb can also be used to store nectar, pollen and occasionally water.

Comb construction
To us, new combs seem to be produced almost mystically. The bees will mass together into a group that we have called a cluster. The cluster is not a rigid structure but is fragile and temporary. As bees hang together in such a cluster, gravitational forces will cause it to hang perpendicular with that influence. In essence, combs are built at right angles with gravity’s pull. Later, within the dark hive, this gravitational orientation becomes important in the dance language communication procedure.

Four pairs of wax glands on the ventral surface of the bees’ abdomen produce snow white wax flakes. Comb constructing bees pass a newly produced wax flake forward to their mouths where the wax is chewed and pulverized. After a short time, the wax particle is molded, using the bees’ trowel-shaped mandibles, into a cylindrical developing cell. It’s a communal effort. Other bees may reshape previous efforts before adding their own contribution of wax to the new cell, but finally a new cell is produced. No single bee actually constructs a single cell.

Experienced beekeepers have seen the completed cells in use near the top of a new frame while lower on the comb, shallower cells will still be under construction. Bees build comb as needed. New wax melts down to canary yellow and is valuable for candles and other wax-produced products. It’s a beautiful product.

The importance of a nectar flow
Inexperienced beekeepers are frequently disappointed that all brood chamber space and super space is not used by the bees during a particular season. Indeed, beekeeper-supplied foundation may even be chewed and mangled by bees, and not building comb on it (though it will probably be successfully used during subsequent seasons).

Bees will only construct comb on the impetus of a nectar flow and a comb space shortage. Simply stated, bees must have construction material (nectar) before they can build. Nectar provides that building material, but an unusual building material it is for it can also be stored as honey rather than restructured into wax. Bees will not use stored honey to construct significant amounts of new comb. The experienced beekeeper will provide previously drawn comb for the bees to store the honey crop rather than requiring bees to rebuild comb each year.

Comb is costly for the bees to build. It has been found that bees must metabolize about seven to eight pounds of honey to produce one pound of wax. But with that one pound of building material, bees can build 35,000 cells in which they can store 22 pounds of honey. Consequently, their approximate net gain after consuming eight pounds of honey is 14 pounds of stored honey plus reusable comb.

It takes about 10,000 bees, over a three-day period to produce one pound of wax. That one pound will be made up of about 500,000 scales. Comb construction for the bee hive is clearly an investment. Inexplicably, cappings and other wax particles are not reused to any degree but are allowed to drop to the bottom board where they either accumulate or are discarded in front of the colony. New wax is soft and pliable and will break easily, but as the comb ages, it becomes reinforced with cocoons and propolis. Whereas new comb is snow white, old comb is nearly jet black.

Figure 3. New and old comb comparison.

Types of comb cells within the beehive
Worker comb is, by far, the most abundant comb size within the colony. As mentioned previously, worker sized comb (about five cells per inch) can be used by bees to house developing worker bees or to store honey and pollen. Larger cells, about four per inch, are used to produce drone larvae or to store honey and pollen.

Distorted cells or cells of intermediate size can occur that are used by bees to splice comb cells together. In other words, worker comb will be filled with patches of drone comb with small amounts of transitional comb wherever needed in order to make a piece of solid comb. Some cells may either be drastically modified or built purposefully for raising queens. As you would expect, this type of comb cell, though distinctive is not very common within the combs. A precursor to queen cells are queen cups which are simply queen cells that are not in use. Worker cells, drone cells, queen cells and transitional make up the types of comb cells within the colony.

Figure 4. Common burr combs on top of frames. This is a common sight for beekeepers. Note bee space separating frames.

Brace comb, burr comb or ladder comb
Bees will frequently build brace comb between frames, above or below frames, or on the bottom board – especially after a colony has been recently moved. Anywhere bee space is violated, additional comb may be built that is a nuisance to beekeepers in commercially manufactured hives. Normally, in managed hives, it is scraped off and melted as high-quality wax. Within wild nests, it remains in place and helps give rigidity to the overall nest.

Bee space
The concept of bee space has been mentioned several times. Within both wild and managed hives, bee spacing must be respected. Bee space is generally considered to be anything between ¼” and ⅜”. Space less than ¼” will be filled with propolis while anything greater than ⅜” will have either comb or brace comb built within the space depending on its size. In our beekeeping literature, the Reverend L.L. Langstroth is generally given credit for conceptualizing the notion of bee space.

Propolis – the colony’s caulking compound
Propolis is little known outside of the inner circles of beekeeping. Produced from resinous materials collected from the buds of trees or from resins from softwoods, propolis is used to caulk the hive tight. Though stringy and sticky when fresh, propolis dries hard and brittle. It is soluble in alcohol and has a pleasant weedy odor.

Since there is no real difference between the two, both wild and managed bees produce propolis. Caucasian bees are renowned for collecting copious amounts of propolis and will occasionally nearly close an entire colony entrance if left to their own schemes.

Propolis is the material that causes the hive to crack sharply when opened. Propolis was the primary demon that relegated so many hive designs to beekeeping’s junk heap. If colonies are not opened for several years, propolis will make the hive very nearly impenetrable. Propolis, along with pollen, darken white wax over a period of just a few years. Additionally, in addition to being used to polish cells, propolis is added to the wax that covers cappings; therefore, giving them a different appearance than honey cappings.

Propolis is bacterially active and will restrict bacterial growth. Probably due to this antimicrobial characteristic, propolis is used to entomb anything the bees can’t move – such as a dead mouse or a small tree twig.

There it is – the dark nest
Inside this dark maze of twisted, bee-spaced combs the bees live in hot, humid darkness during warm months and cold darkness during Winter months. Through the beekeeping years, innovative beekeepers have learned how to take the bees’ penchant for building natural comb and have enticed them to build comb within wooden frames – mainly for our human convenience. It’s too difficult to remove cross-combed frames for honey removal, disease inspection or colony manipulations.

Inside the warm, dark nest
Inside the warm, dark nest, bees probably communicate by pheromone perception (crudely described as a type of odor), touch and other sensory perceptions such as gravitational sensitivity and electro-magnetism.

The nest is incredibly crowded. Bees are literally shoulder to shoulder. Yet, all these characteristics vanish when the beekeeper removes the outer cover from the hive. All becomes visible and the normal way of the colony, with the application of smoke to mask the effective communicative odors, is disrupted.

Within the undisturbed dark hive, everything has a unique odor: workers, the queen, drones, nectar, wax moths, brood, pollen, the hunger of larvae, danger, whether larvae are in the correct cell – everything seems to have an odor cue (or some other kind of indicator) within the dark hive. As beekeepers, we crudely use smoke to mask this elegant chemical communication.

Temperature must be regulated to about 95°F in the brood nest, nectar must be enzymatically reduced and excess water removed to form honey, brood must be fed freshly collected pollen and this hive-city must be defended from intruders and pests.

This society must be kept in balance. In a full-strength colony, there are about 60,000 reproductively sterile workers, one fertile queen and about 400-600 drones. Developing brood must be produced in anticipation of upcoming nectar flows or Winter seasons. All these individuals come together to form the super-organism – the bee nest. Even under ideal conditions, individual bees are incapable of supporting themselves for more than a few weeks. The total bee nest is the animal – not the individual bee. Such is life in the bee’s nest – so much as we can understand.

Dr. James E. Tew
Emeritus Faculty, Entomology
The Ohio State University
tewbee2@gmail.com

Co-Host, Honey Bee Obscura Podcast
www.honeybeeobscura.com

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Found in Translation

Dog v. Machine: Identifying the Foul in Foulbrood
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

American foulbrood has been a consistent, if fortunately rare, curse of beekeepers for centuries. The bacterial agent behind AFB, Paenibacillus larvae, is widespread in managed colonies and yet only rarely triggers symptoms in the form of decayed and highly contagious infected brood. Catching those symptomatic cases early remains a critical goal of bee health management. Many U.S. states benefit from a cadre of bee inspectors who work with beekeepers to identify and act upon AFB infections (e.g., the Apiary Inspectors of America, https://apiaryinspectors.org/). Our own USDA Bee Disease Diagnostics Service, led by Samuel Abban (https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-barc/beltsville-agricultural-research-center/bee-research-laboratory/docs/bee-disease-diagnosis-service/), works collaboratively with these inspectors and individual beekeepers to pounce on suspected AFB cases before their damaging shadow increases. While the visual and culturing tools for confirming AFB infections are robust, and that smell is hard to forget, there remains a huge need to rapidly screen apiaries for early signs of infection. The frontiers for this screening are marked by an unlikely pairing of furred partners and incredibly complex machines, and it is worthwhile to see which of these tools will be the most helpful for inspectors and beekeepers.

Starting with the more charismatic tools, trained dogs are sporadically used to help inspectors pin down cases of AFB. The state of Maryland has two such trained dogs, led by Chief Apiary Inspector Cybil Preston (https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/detective-dog-sniffs-out-devastating-honeybee-disease/). These companions certainly have the sensitivity to identify signals given off by diseased brood, but how accurate are dogs with the critical early-stage cases of AFB? A study by Neroli Thomson and colleagues in New Zealand aimed to push the limits of training and detection by dog detectives (Thomson, N.; Taylor, M.; Gifford, P.; Sainsbury, J.; Cross, S. (2023) Recognition of an Odour Pattern from Paenibacillus larvae Spore Samples by Trained Detection Dogs. Animals: 13, 154. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13010154). Two out of three trained dogs did great, consistently and quickly responding to AFB cues placed in one spot within a twirling carousel of dog dishes (Figure). These dogs were trained using purified spores, so would presumably do great even with empty boxes containing post-AFB scale. Their sensitivity in the indoor arena was at the level of spores found in a fraction of a single infected bee. What needs to be tested is the ability of these dogs to ignore the many other smells coming from a beehive, not to mention the environmental distractions (from stinging bees to nervous beekeepers) they would experience when truly on the job.

Since it is hard to interview a dog to find out the cues they use to detect AFB, I decided to explore the most recent work involving chemical sniffers that separate AFB smells from the large and shifting bouquet that is a beehive. Jessica Bikraun from the University of Western Australia devoted her PhD thesis to this question and already has one peer-reviewed paper showing the power of a machine detective approach (Bikaun, J.M.; Bates, T.; Bollen, M.; Flematti, G.R.; Melonek, J.; Praveen, P.; Grassl, J. (2022) Volatile biomarkers for non-invasive detection of American foulbrood, a threat to honey bee pollination services. Science of The Total Environment, 845, 157123, doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157123). Using readily available Solid phase microextraction (SPME) ‘wands’ as noses, she and colleagues collected air samples wafting from infected larvae in a lab-rearing setup and from larvae embedded in living colonies. Larvae sampled in the lab released 102 identifiable chemicals in the air around them. Of these, 17 were found only in larvae infected with the AFB bacterium, others were common to all bees (they also tested bees with sacbrood and bees that had been killed by freezing, along with healthy controls). How do smells in the pristine lab setting compare to those in actual colonies? The SPME technique, while inexpensive and widely available, is compromised somewhat by the greediness of the SPME noses. If there are overwhelming smells coming from a hive, those molecules might edge out rare diagnostic signals. Field trials identified 116 volatile chemicals from beehives, 17 of which were tied to disease. In the end, only four molecules (2,5-dimethylpyrazine, acetamide, isobutyramide, and methyl 3-methyl-2-oxopentanoate) were indicative of AFB both in lab-cultured bees and in-hive air samples. These four chemicals might form the basis for an accurate and simple test. They are also themselves interesting for possible insights into the disease itself. 2,5-dimethylpyrazine is tagged an agent used by bacteria for inhibiting the growth of other microbes, something P. larvae does exceedingly well. While the research was focused on cues that machines can identify, the team also found candidates for smells that hygienic bees pick up on when scanning for diseased brood. Lactones, for example, are natural compounds found in fruits and elsewhere that are often used as components for food additives. In the airspace of beehives, lactones increased substantially with almost any form of brood stress, from AFB to sacbrood and freeze-killed brood, and the authors suggest these compounds might be another trigger for hygienic responses by nest bees. Sujin Lee and colleagues used a lab-based assay to identify and reconfirm volatile chemicals emitted by larvae suffering from AFB (Lee, S.; Lim, S.; Choi, Y.-S.; Lee, M.-l.; Kwon, H.W. (2022) Volatile disease markers of American foulbrood-infected larvae in Apis mellifera. Journal of Insect Physiology, 122, 104040, doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinsphys.2020.104040. They then purchased those same chemicals to test for responsiveness by worker bees. Bees reacted to several of the candidates but the authors feel that propionic acid, valeric acid, and 2-nonanone were the cleanest signals of AFB infection. Younger bees reacted more strongly to these smells than did foragers, arguably reflecting the tendency of these younger bees (middle-aged actually) to act as hygienic helpers in the colony.

Both dog noses and artificial noses were shown to be capable of identifying even low levels of AFB in field colonies. The SPME chemical nose seems to have more promise as a consistent service (inspectors could readily collect smells from hives with a SPME wand and then send that wand to an analytical lab) but it would not give the in-the-moment diagnostic provided by dogs and good inspectors. For now, those live inspectors are earning their kibble by advising beekeepers when a problem is likely.

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The Quiet Evolution of Apiary Mowing

A Necessary Aspect of Apiary Management
By: James E. Tew

My First Real Job
When I was a young teenager, a friend and I would push our mowers around the community and offer to cut grass. We generally earned somewhere between $1.75-2.50 per yard total. We had to split the earnings. The mowers were not self-propelled. Consequently, as young entrepreneurs, we never had a body weight problem.

We developed a regular customer list and at our peak, we were cutting about twenty lawns per week. General expectations were that we cut in straight lines and tips were not offered. When we were thirsty, we drank water from faucets plumbed from the house. Dad provided the mower and the gas, but I was allowed to keep my earnings. Of course, he got his lawn cut for free.

To this day, I cut grass in bullet-straight lines, and I only mow when the lawn absolutely needs it. Now, throughout every Summer month, I marvel at the equipment that professional mowing services have and I compare all that modern equipment to the absolute minimal equipment that my friend and I used all those years ago. Times change, don’t they?

Before Gasoline Mowers
Before gasoline mowers became widely available, lawns were cut using various manual methods and tools. The common methods used for lawn maintenance before gasoline mowers were scythes, sickles, weed slings, grazing animals, manual push mowers and scissors. None of these options were feasible without manual labor. Even grazing animals required fence installation. The invention of gasoline-powered mowers modernized lawn care and made it much more efficient and accessible for homeowners, landscapers and even beekeepers.

Figure 1. A Kansas beeyard in 1920. Note beekeeper in the lower left of the photo who is wearing a vintage Alexander veil and gauntlet gloves.

What Did this Mean for Apiaries?
It means that our apiaries, decades ago were weedier, and more unkempt by today’s standards. I cannot find information indicating that grazing animals were common methods for foliage management in pre-mower days. No doubt, cows, horses and sheep would occasionally knock over hives or scratch against them.

In the past, all apiary grass and weeds were cut manually requiring hot labor commitments. I’m old enough to remember life before string trimmers and herbicides. Everything was weedier then.

Figure 2. In 1922, in this Iowa beeyard, all grass was cut using manual methods. Gasoline mowers, of the day, were heavy and uncommon.

To Add to the Laborious Task
In years past, just as the present, protective bee gear was commonly worn when cutting and pruning near bee hives. Wearing protective equipment was just as clumsy now as it was years ago. The requirement to wear protective clothing has always made apiary weed control a hot, tiring job. Thankfully, modern protective equipment is better ventilated and more comfortable, but it is still hot work.

No-Mow May
Due to my early years of incessantly cutting grass, as a senior citizen, I am now a reluctant lawn mower. To the chagrin of my neighbors whose lawns are always neatly manicured, I only mow when I must. In this way, I avoid needless mowing sessions and my bees have access to the clover and dandelions in my lawn.

When I first heard of the concept, I readily embraced the notion of a “No-Mow May” in which we just give our lawns a month off from trimming. I quickly found out that a mow-less May lead me directly into a hellish June, with tall grass that frequently required raking after cutting. I had to go back to the lawn maintenance drawing board.

String Trimmers in the Apiary
I don’t remember the first time I used a string trimmer. With my mowing history that I touted before, that memory void seems strange to me. But I do know that a string trimmer became a necessary component of the equipment that always went with me to an outyard. String trimmers are now a common, if unexciting, beeyard management tool. What’s their story?

A Short History of String Trimmers
The history of string trimmers, also known as weed whackers, weed eaters or line trimmers, dates to the early 1970s. The concept of using a rotating nylon string to trim grass and weeds emerged as an alternative to traditional lawn mowers and manual cutting tools.

The concept of a rotating nylon line for cutting vegetation was developed in the late 1960s by George Ballas, a Houston-based entrepreneur. He got the idea while watching the revolving brushes at a car wash (I find this interesting. The common safety razor was envisioned after a visionary watched a woodworker use a common hand plane. The flail honey comb uncapper was conceptualized as another visionary watched the conveyor belt perform at a grocery store checkout. Shouldn’t we all be more observant?). In 1971, he received a patent for his invention, which consisted of a fishing reel with fishing line attached to the spool. Ballas’ invention was the foundation for the modern string trimmer.

In 1972, George Ballas partnered with Jim Goad, an engineer, to refine the design and create the first commercial string trimmer. They established the Weed Eater company and introduced the first gas-powered, handheld string trimmer to the market. This model quickly gained popularity due to its effectiveness in trimming grass and weeds in hard-to-reach areas.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, electric string trimmers began to appear on the market. These models were lighter and quieter than their gas-powered counterparts, making them more appealing to homeowners with smaller yards.

Bees and Trimmers
No matter how useful power mowers and trimmers may be, on some mowing days, the bees seem to despise them. Most experienced beekeepers have seen this defensive behavior. In fact, common management recommendations warn the beekeeper to expect this attack. It is thought that the odors and vibrations from the mowers and trimmers agitate the bees.

In my own experience gained when trimming around hives, it seems that the bee response is greatest during Summer months when a nectar dearth has ended and the colonies are at full populations.

I have never used a battery-powered trimmer, but I am sure some of you have. I ask if you have noticed less of a response when using battery-powered mowers and trimmers? Does their quietness and lack of fumes have a more lenient effect on the colonies?

Beekeepers and Trimmers
At this moment, I have two, hand-held string trimmers. I have one modified with a cutting blade for heavy or tough growth. Brambles, such as multiflora rose, are a challenge for either type of cutting head.

Even though I frequently use them, I increasingly have issues with string trimmers. The evolving issue is that the older I become, my trimming sessions grow shorter and shorter. My shoulders ache. I get noise warnings from my Apple watch. I get hotter and hotter in the protective gear that I must wear. I simply can’t do the job the way I once could.

Figure 3. An apiary with uncontrolled grass growth.

Consequently, I have grown to dread the task more and more. All the while, the grass and weeds have continued to grow. Out of necessity, I developed a tolerant attitude of tall grasses and weeds in my apiary. I put my hives on firm hive stands that were twenty inches from the ground and I kept the entrance free of tall weeds. Even then, the grass and weeds in my beeyard continued to grow. My bees seemed unphased by the tall grass in the yards, but increasingly, it became apparent that this approach could not last. Why?

Two reasons that altered my laissez-faire system of yard maintenance evolved. The first reason was you, the reader of Bee Culture articles. Photos and videos that I captured in my apiary looked terrible. For instance, while I wanted to write about a new swarm that I just acquired, my photo of the new bee hive was marred by tall grass and the appearance of a generally unmanaged area. (If you have back issues of Bee Culture, you can readily see these photos.) I grew afraid that you, the reader, would not understand the bigger picture.

Figure 4. A manicured yard that uses herbicides, grazing animals and electric fencing to keeps foliage at bay. C. Parton Photo

Secondly, the tall weeds made it difficult for me walk while carrying a super of honey or other related bee equipment. Briars tugged at my suit. Tall grass made me stumble as I walked. Grass grew in and around my unused equipment. As with the No-Mow May scenario that I discussed earlier, I had to return to the drawing board. I was physically unable to trim my entire beeyard with a string trimmer and it was too much to ask of my 1972 Snapper push mower to systematically mow this tall grass.

A Heavy Duty, Walk-Behind Trimmer
I would occasionally see advertisements for various models of walk-behind trimmers. I asked around my circle of beekeeping friends, but no one had experience with these machines. I checked online. Yes, wheel kits were available for my string trimmers. In theory, I could modify my handheld trimmers to be mobile. Again, I asked around my circle of beekeeping friends, but no one had experience with these wheel kits either. All the while, the grass continued to grow. Would a trimmer on wheels allow me to work longer and more consistently?

Figure 5. A walk-behind Cord Trimmer.

In mid-July, with apiary grass higher than my knees, I broke. This situation in my apiary was unacceptable and was never going to get better. I went to an equipment dealer to buy a wheel kit. They did not have one, but they did have a single walk-behind trimmer on the showroom floor. It was $400. I bought it on the spot. It uses four .175” spiral cutting cords and cuts a twenty-two-inch swatch. It cuts at five heights – from 1.5” to 3.5”. I set it to the highest setting. The machine fairly easily chewed through the tall weeds leaving me with a somewhat rough-looking finished job, but the weeds were readily cut down.

The nose on the machine does a reasonably good job of getting beneath my hive stands – not perfect – but reasonably good. The cords are not cost free and they do wear out, but the machine aggressively took out tall weeds. It worked.

The major drawback is that I must still push the machine through tall grass. That requires old fashioned perspiration, but it’s still easier than using a handheld string unit. Please know that I am not selling these units. I’m only looking for a yard maintenance remedy.

For beekeepers younger than or more physically fit than I am, a typical string trimmer would get the job done. As I have written in previous articles, I’m at a stage of my beekeeping where I try to put wheels on everything. String trimmers were no exception. I should also say that while the bees didn’t go crazy, I still needed to wear light protective gear when using the machine.

Figure 6. Weed whacking beneath hives.

Hot and Clumsy
This past July 2023 was the hottest July every recorded. Yet the grass kept growing. To keep the grass under control, grass-cutting beekeepers are hot, and clumsy, and are surrounded by irate bees. Can it get any worse? Yes, it can, at the same time, we are also using power mowing equipment. Occasionally, accidents happen. This is a beekeeper’s recent story.

Figure 7. Accidents happen quickly. Attacking bees can be distracting. Many of us have a story.

I got home from work and my wife wanted to cut the grass but she’d never used that particular riding mower. I changed out of my work boots into my Crocs and pulled the mower out of the garage for her. I decided to make a couple passes by my bee hives so my wife wouldn’t get stung.

My bees have never bothered me before. On the first pass, I had hundreds of bees come after me. They were stinging me so much that I was fearful I might have an allergic reaction. I quickly decided to jump off the riding mower and make a run for the house. My foot got caught in the pulley and belt on the mower deck. My croc stayed lodged in the mower belt while I ran into the house. When I got inside and got all the bees off me, I realized how badly my foot was hurt.

I went to the Emergency Room where they said it had broken my toe and cut a tendon. It almost cut my toe off. I had 12 stitches and had to wear a Draco shoe that keeps the weight on my heel and off my toe until my broken toe can heal.

Mowing is Not Beekeeping
Every apiary mowing situation is different but presently, we have an abundance of diversified mowing devices. That selection of devices does not mean that mowing is not hot, demanding work. Don’t go crazy cutting grass and weeds, but when you do mow, I would suggest wearing heavy shoes and a ventilated bee suit with a veil that opens to allow for water sips. Have a lit smoker at the ready. Mowing is not beekeeping. Pace yourself.

Thank you.
I appreciate you reading and sending any comments that you may have. Your time is valuable. I know that.

Dr. James E. Tew
Emeritus Faculty, Entomology
The Ohio State University
tewbee2@gmail.com

Co-Host, Honey Bee
Obscura Podcast
www.honeybeeobscura.com

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Beekeeping

A Doorway to Nature
By: Ross Conrad

It has been suggested that a spiritual crisis is at the center of the long emergency we collectively face. This crisis manifests itself as a disconnect from the natural world and is considered by many to be one of the primary forces driving the growing degradation of environmental health. When we see ourselves as separate from the natural world, we view nature through the lens of how valuable it is to us personally, either economically or for its beauty. This is the typical Western approach to the notion of pristine wilderness. When we place such values on the natural world and its “resources” viewing it simply as a means to gain financial wealth or other material benefits, it can reinforce our separation from it.

Research indicates that people who have a strong emotional and spiritual connection to nature are more likely to behave positively towards the environment, wildlife and habitats. This suggests that nurturing a greater connection to the natural world among the general population may be critical in addressing our spiritual crisis and helping to reverse the current environmental emergency. There are many ways this nurturing of our connection can manifest including hiking and camping, fishing and hunting, farming and gardening, or bird watching.

For the readers of Bee Culture, beekeeping likely provides one of our primary windows into the natural world. Through beekeeping, we enter the fascinating world of the honey bee; from the waggle dance and the intricacies of swarm behavior, to honey bee biology and the production, use, and unique characteristics of the products of the hive. Our fascination with bees stems from our personal connection to them and our deep understanding of them and their ways. It has been claimed that the honey bee and beekeeping is the most studied and written about topic in the world, second only to us humans. The truth of course, is that all living creatures are absolutely fascinating: we just tend to be clueless to most of the wonder, beauty and amazing intricacies and relationships involved in the lives of the plants, animals and insects that surround us and that we may come into contact with. We simply don’t interact with them enough to understand them and their ways, as well as we do the honey bee, and this can result in their being under-appreciated.

The world of beekeeping acts as a doorway through which we are able to then connect with the wider natural world of all the pests, diseases, plants and weather patterns that impact our bees; for better or worse.

The truth is that we are not separate from nature and the earth. Our bodies are literally made of the same minerals of the earth; we live our lives on the earth surrounded by the natural world; and when we die our body goes back to the earth and eventually gets recycled by the natural world. What we do to the natural world, we do to ourselves. We may not die when a rare pollinator dies out and becomes extinct, but surely a small part of something within us dies, something sacred and precious.

A host of studies have pointed to the fact that the stronger our personal connection to the natural world, the greater our concern for the environment (Whitburn et al., 2019; Mackay and Smidtt, 2019). There is also strong evidence of a positive relationship between a person’s connection to the natural world and one’s personal health, wellbeing and happiness (Capaldi et al., 2014; Barragan-Jason et al., 2023). When individuals are exposed to natural environments, such as mountain tops, coastlines, meadows and forests, the exposure results in stress reduction and assists in mental recovery following intense cognitive activities. It has even been found that a hospital window view onto a garden-like scene can be influential in reducing patients’ postoperative recovery periods and analgesic requirements.

Beekeeping provides a doorway through which individuals can develop a strong spiritual connection to the natural world, especially those living in urban or suburban environments.

Embedded in diverse cultures around the world is the idea that people consciously and unconsciously seek connections with the natural world. The theory that this is a result of evolutionary history where humans have lived in intimate contact with nature was initially put forward by Harvard biologist and two-time Pulitzer prize-winner, E.O. Wilson, in the Biophilia hypothesis (Wilson, 1984). We humans appear to be innately attracted to other living organisms. Evidence suggests that this is particularly evident when life becomes difficult and stressful. How many of us can deny the relaxing effect of a quiet moment by a lake, the soothing effect of sitting by a river, the rejuvenation of a hike through a forest, a stress reducing stroll by the seaside, the calming effect of simply cuddling with a pet dog or cat, or spending time with the honey bee colonies in our apiaries. Simply put, we need contact with nature and the importance of our ability to connect with the natural world has only grown due to our increasingly urban, digital-screen and social media lifestyles that often serve to disconnect us from nature which in turn, may contribute to health and wellbeing problems.

One meta-analysis suggests positive short- and long-term health outcomes with improved self-esteem and mood with exposure to green environments. Proximity to water generated some of the greatest changes and the mentally ill experience the greatest self-esteem improvements (Barton and Pretty, 2010). Other researchers examining the link between finding meaning in life and our relationship to the natural world suggest numerous benefits that arise from a personal connection to the natural world. Not only does nature help us find meaning in life, it can enhance our appreciation for life, and how engaging in nature-based activities (such as beekeeping) “provides an avenue for many people to build meaningful lives” (Passmore and Krouse, 2023).

The idea that contact with nature benefits our mental and physical health appears to be strongly supported by the statistics. According to one researcher, “Animals have always played a prominent part in human life. Today, more people go to zoos each year than to all professional sporting events. A total of 56% of U.S. households own pets. Animals comprise more than 90% of the characters used in language acquisition and counting in children’s preschool books. Numerous studies establish that household animals are considered family members; we talk to them as if they were human, we carry their photographs, we share our bedrooms with them” (Frumkin, 2001).

Beekeepers have their own version of this in what is referred to as the “telling of the bees.” A tradition where it is believed that when the beekeeper dies, someone has to go tell the bees and perhaps hang a piece of black cloth on the hive to place it in mourning or else the colony would die out or abandon the hive. There appears to be many versions of this. Others tell the bees about important events in their lives particularly regarding a death in the family. Considering how easy it is for a beekeeper to put off caring for their bees with our busy lives, this tradition practically served as a way to keep the hives in the thoughts of those that survive a deceased beekeeper, so that they will hopefully prioritize finding a new custodian to take over responsibility for their care in a timely manner.

As a deep personal connection to the natural world, beekeeping has the potential to provide numerous benefits to its participants. Beekeeping encourages one to get exercise along with fresh air and sunshine, and there is significant evidence that suggests that even the occasional bee sting can help fortify the body’s immune system allowing it to more effectively deal with various ailments (provided of course that the person is not hyper allergic to honey bee venom). Beyond all this, we now know that beekeeping can also help establish a spiritual connection to the earth and all the life forms with which we share this planet; a connection that may be critical in our ability to effectively deal with our current reliance on damaging green-house gas emitting technologies that are slowly turning our lives and society upside down.

Many people are suggesting that the weather extremes we have been experiencing around the country and the world is the problem, when really the problem at its base level is the malevolent actions of individual people. Nurturing a greater connection to the natural world in greater numbers of people, such as through activities like beekeeping, might just hold part of the salvation for this world. Something to consider as you go about the business of caring for your bees this Autumn and are tucking your colonies in for the long Winter ahead.

Just the same as a month before,—
The house and the trees,
The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,—
Nothing changed but the hives of bees.

Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.

Trembling, I listened: the Summer sun
Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!

An excerpt from the poem Telling the Bees by John Greenleaf Whittier.
Read the full poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45491/telling-the-bees

Ross Conrad is the author of Natural Beekeeping, Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition, and coauthor of The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.

References:
Barragan-Jason, G., Loreau, M., de Mazancourt, C., Singer, M.C., Parmesan, C. (2023) Psychological and physical connections with nature improve both human well-being and nature conservation: A systematic review of meta-analyses, Biological Conservation, Volume 277:109842
Barton J, Pretty J. (2010) What is the best dose of nature and green exercise for improving mental health? A multi-study analysis. Environmental Science & Technology, 44(10):3947-55. doi: 10.1021/es903183r. PMID: 20337470.
Capaldi, C.A., Dopko, R.L., Zelenski, J.M. (2014) The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness: a meta-analysis, Frontiers in Psychology, Volume 5
Howard Frumkin, (2001) Beyond Toxicity: Human health and the natural environment, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 20(3):234-240, ISSN 0749-3797, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(00)00317-2
Mackay, C.M.L. and Schmitt, M.T. (2019) Do people who feel connected to nature do more to protect it? A meta-analysis, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 65:101323
Passmore, Holli-Anne and Krouse, Ashley, N. (2023) The Beyond-Human Natural World: Providing Meaning and Making Meaning, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(12):6170
Whitburn, J., Linklater, W., Abrahamse, W. (2019) Meta-Analysis of human connection to nature and proenvironmental behavior, Conservation Biology, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13381
Wilson, E. O. (1984) Biophilia: the Human Bond with Other Species.: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Found in Translation

Mite Drop!
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

Varroa mites remain the primary source of honey bee colony losses for beekeepers managing from one to 10,000 colonies. Scientists like us and ardent beekeepers are always on the hunt for new ways to reduce varroa damage to bees and their colonies. One intriguing strategy is to make mites simply fall off their adult bee hosts. Short of changing the electric charge of host or parasite, this repellency can come from 1) making hosts less grippy, 2) somehow clogging the incredibly strong tarsi (feet with ‘toes’ and a spongy, oily, arolia) of mites or 3) affecting mite behavior by making them less likely to find safe spots and hang on to their bees for dear life. Dislodged mites are far more vulnerable to hygienic worker bees and might also simply keep falling down to a hostless, hungry and hopefully, short life. This is probably a central reason that female varroa mites spend very little time wandering the combs of beehives unless they are moments away from entering the brood cell of a developing bee. While on adult bees, mites have much incentive to stay right there, whatever their host is doing to drop them.

How do mites adhere to their bees so strongly? When mites are actively feeding on bees they are extremely hard to dislodge, since they are partly under the hardened plates of the bee itself and are gripping with a combination of ‘teeth’ and tarsi. Even while taking a break from feeding, mites know to find safe spots on the bee to attach, favoring locations on the abdomen or thorax that are both hairy and away from swinging legs and biting bee mandibles. How can one make them quit their bees given so many hiding places?

Caroline Vilarem and colleagues in France recently described an ambitious attempt to document the abilities of mites to hang onto surfaces when exposed to organic acids (Vilarem, C.; Piou, V.; Blanchard, S.; Vogelweith, F.; Vétillard, A. Lose Your Grip: Challenging Varroa destructor Host Attachment with Tartaric, Lactic, Formic, and Citric Acids, Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 9085. https://doi.org/10.3390/app13169085). These scientists deployed one of the coolest low-tech tools to measure how well mites grip onto a surface. While their ‘Rotavar’ sounds both complex and expensive, it is actually a ‘motor-driven rotating toothpick’. Yes, you can do this at home, with a slow (three or so revolutions per minute) motor and a supply of toothpicks. The authors add to that an extremely careful experimental design and complex statistics to show the different abilities of mites to hang onto sticks and bees coated with acetic, citric, lactic, formic and tartaric acids. The results hint at new modes and new candidates for mite control, with the usual caveat that converting a controlled lab assay to field colonies will be challenging.

Schematic diagram of the experimental design and measured parameters. Grip on wood (Rotavar): This method relies on direct contact between Varroa’s arolia and the organic acids. The Rotavar set-up is a motor-driven rotating toothpick used to assess V. destructor’s grip. Grip on bees: the host attachment experiment applies acids to the backs of honey bees to remove mites. T0 represents the administration time for treatments; T + 1 h 30, 24 h, 48 h, or 72 h stand for the time post administration used to make measurements. Figure from https://doi.org/10.3390/app13169085

Some highlights: First, acidity itself does not seem to be the solution. Most notably, even high doses of acetic acid had little impact on the abilities of mites to grab toothpicks and this candidate was quickly discarded. So, what can we glean from the differences between the tested acids? Tartaric acid worked great at dislodging mites from spinning toothpicks but was surprisingly poor at dislodging mites from bees. Prior work suggests that the mode of action for tartaric acid is, at least in part, toxicity towards mites. It is possible that the levels of tartaric acid needed to coat bees with a toxic dose are higher than they are on a relatively smooth and barren toothpick. Toothpicks also attract watery compounds (hydrophilic) while bees are coated with oils and are hence more water-repellent (hydrophobic). Maybe the availability of tartaric acid on toothpicks is higher than it would be on oilier bee bodies. Formic acid also worked much better on the wood surface than on bees, an intriguing insight for a well-used and effective mite control. Formic acid is also known to be directly toxic to mites and their cells, and the authors make clear that both direct toxicity and grippiness are clear and perhaps synergistic targets for mite control. The widely used miticide oxalic acid also wins by being directly toxic to mites at levels that are relatively safe for bees, demonstrating that there are many possible ways to turn organic acids into effective treatments.

Lactic acid came out as the best candidate in the study group for divorcing mites from their bees. This acid worked well at dislodging mites from both toothpicks and bees. Lactic acid does not appear to be highly toxic to mites and instead seems to act by changing the mechanics of hanging on. This is a nice lead for exploring acids with similar qualities for their abilities to both grease the ‘Rotavar’ and make bees a more slippery host. In another intriguing result from this nice study, mites that simply walked across paper holding lactic acid were then less good in future grip tests. What is it about lactic acid that burns, cleans or otherwise insults the complex and surprisingly ‘soft’ tarsi of mites?

If this topic has gripped you, consider reading up on the field thanks to a recent open-access paper on stickiness by graduate student Luc van den Boogaart and colleagues in the Netherlands (van den Boogaart, L.M.; Langowski, J.K.A.; Amador, G.J. Studying Stickiness: Methods, Trade-Offs, and Perspectives in Measuring Reversible Biological Adhesion and Friction. Biomimetics 2022, 7, 134; https://www.mdpi.com/2313-7673/7/3/134). For those of us who have stored ‘Freshman Physics’ in a remote hard drive, they give a clear review of how these forces work across organisms; in their words ‘from ticks to tree frogs’. Maybe their figures and insights will inspire a beekeeper or scientist to dream up a safe, effective route to dislodge mites from bees and prevent them from climbing back on. Pulling in people with a knowledge of physics, or just really good imaginations and the ability to build and deploy Rotavars (imagine how entertaining those can be, a la squirrel spinners… https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nBKb_z4_tGY), can only help in the hunt for new mite controls and healthier bees.

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My Apiary Ecosystem

Honey bees are only a part of it.
By: James E. Tew

There’s always going to be something
In my hives or in my life, there is always going to be something – some issue or some problem. I literally just finished a phone call with one of my adult daughters. She had just eliminated a harmless Wolf Spider (Tigrosa annexa) because it frightened her young son (my nine-year old grandson). A few weeks ago, she had a problem with ants in her kitchen, but now they are gone. Now, she has Springtails (Collembola) in one of her bath showers. She complained to me that she feels that her home is under constant attack. I tried to tell her that there is always going to be something going awry. Always. Chill out. I don’t think she listened to me, but I listened to her.

Since I have spent my adult life studying honey bees, she assumed that I was also an information resource for Springtails. Readers, I don’t know anything about these small flea-sized arthropods, but unintentionally, my daughter set me to thinking and exploring. What do I know about Springtails? In all my beekeeping years, I have never asked or thought about the presence of Collembola in bee hives.

Figure 1. Springtails are about the size of a flea and seemingly cause no harm to bees or beekeeping.

Springtails are common in organic materials that are being degraded. On a whim, I keyed in a web search on Springtails (Collembola) in bee hives. I immediately got hits. All the citations that I found were from observant beekeepers. Having not found any information from academic or regulatory sources, I went to an AI open-source app and was given the following, undocumented information.

Collembola, commonly known as Springtails, are small arthropods that belong to the class Collembola. They are found in a wide range of habitats, including soil, leaf litter and decaying organic matter. While they are not typically associated with bee hives, it is possible for Springtails to be present in bee hives under certain conditions.

Springtails are detritivores, meaning they feed on decaying organic matter and microorganisms. In a bee hive, there may be small amounts of organic debris, such as pollen, beeswax and other residue, which could provide a food source for Springtails. However, the presence of Springtails in a bee hive is usually considered incidental and not a significant problem for honey bees.

I had no idea
I had no idea that these small animals could occasionally be found in hives, but my conversation with my daughter came at a time that I had been pondering this very concept. What is routinely in my bee hives and in my apiary other than honey bees? I have never found a comprehensive listing of the lifeforms that I could expect to find there.

Figure 2. Fire ants and my honey bees. Do the ants help or hurt my bees? Ants, of many species, are common in my beeyard.

My apiary is essentially a distinct ecosystem. My apiary is where I keep my bees, but I have long since realized that many other species find that an apiary is home for them, too. These “unknowns” can apparently fall into three broad categories: harmful, beneficial or neutral.

The Big List
Early in our beekeeping journeys, we are exposed to what I have named the “Big List.” Some of the common entries on this list are raccoons, skunks, ants, wax moths, small hive beetles, birds, toads and mice. It is not my intent to discuss these common hive intruders here. Yet, in the hours and hours that I have either sat by my colonies or pawed through them, I routinely see other species and wonder what they’re up to as they bum around my hives. Usually, their presence remains a mystery.

Flies
Of course, there are numerous species of flies in and around my hives and colonies. We’ve all seen them. In fact, the classic book, Honey Bee Pests, Predators, & Diseases (Morse, Roger A. & Kim Flottum. Honey Bee pests, Predators, & Diseases. A.I.Root Company, Medina, Ohio. 44691. 718 pp. Chpt 8. P 143-162.) has a designated chapter on various fly species and their effects on bee colonies. Essentially, flies and their associated larvae are degraders and generally, do not have a harmful effect on healthy bees.

Figure 3. Common Green Bottle Fly (Blow Fly), probably Lucilia sericata, parked on the front of one of my active hives.

But, I can’t help but notice the occasional Green Bottle Fly nosing around my active hives. They are very flighty and will not allow a close camera shot before taking quick flight. Why are they there? I never see them get inside the hive.

Figure 4. Black Soldier Fly larvae, H. illucens larvae, on honey bee frame. (Scott Razee photo)

But there are unique encounters between various Dipterous species and honey bees that are rare. Anthony (Auth, C. Anthony, Hauser, M. & Hopkins, B.K. A scientific note on a black soldier fly (Stratiomyidae: Hermetia illucens) infestation within a western honey bee (Apis mellifera) colony. Apidologie 52, 576–579 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-021-00844-y) published a scientific note on a Black Soldier Fly (Stratiomyidae: Hermetia illucens) infestation within a western honey bee (Apis mellifera) colony. In the article abstract, Anthony, et al. reported:

Black soldier Fly larvae (Hermetia illucens) were discovered in a weak honey bee colony in Hailey, Idaho. The larvae were localized to the brood area and caused the affected comb to putrefy. Further communication with the beekeeper revealed that the colony recently returned from California and that the larvae likely originated there as well. In California, H. illucens are common and exist sympatrically with honey bees, yet there have been very few reports of damage. We therefore believe H. illucens are unlikely to cause damage to healthy colonies or significantly impact the apiculture industry. This report is the first published observation of H. illucens in Idaho and shows conclusively for the first time that H. illucens associates with honey bee colonies in North America.

Figure 5. Adult Black Soldier Fly (Utah State University Extension)

There are distinct Diptera species that either are outright harmful to bees or other flies that are considered to be minor pests. Examples of damaging species are Phorid Flies (Zombie Flies) while a lesser pest is the bee louse (Braula caeca). These pests are documented elsewhere in the beekeeping literature. I will not cover them here.

Earwigs

Figure 6. Adult European earwigs on the inner cover of my hive.

How bad can earwigs be? In Alabama, earwigs are commonly found in honey bee colonies in significant numbers. No doubt they are found in other states. I have noted that earwigs were not a common hive resident in Ohio, but that all changed a few years ago. I now have earwigs in my office, in my home and in my bee hives.

I don’t know that they do anything within the hive. I faintly remember one Russian paper, that reported that earwigs could be alternate hosts for the bacteria causing European Foulbrood. Other than that one point, I have never heard complaints about them.

Of course, they are a pain when extracting and must be caught in the filter when processing honey. Straining bees and bee parts from honey is bad enough, but earwigs in the honey filter are unsightly. I don’t know of anything that you can do about them. In fact, I’m not sure anything should be done about them.

Roaches
As an entomologist, I respect roaches. They are the consummate survivor. Obnoxious that they are to humans, one must respect their persistence. Many, many developmental years ago, roaches “learned” to fold their wings over their bodies so they could exploit more niches, than say, a broad-winged insect like a dragonfly (dragonflies will also occasionally prey on honey bees). By storing their folded wings over their bodies, cockroaches could, more easily, get under your refrigerator or inside your bee hives. They have been a challenge for me everywhere I have kept bees.

Like so many other insect visitors/invaders, roaches are drawn to both the sweet food supply as well as the protein supplies – and then there are all the decaying larvae and adult bees to munch on. The question is begged, “Why would roaches NOT be in our hives and stored equipment?”

In the beekeeping literature, it is often written that the damage roaches do is minimal, but I want to loudly say that the appearance of just a single roach in your honey house can dissuade even the staunchest customer who is considering buying your honey. And then there is the excreta to consider. In fact, one of my most serious concerns of both cockroaches and earwigs is the excrement that they leave behind.

Figure 7. Unfortunately, a cockroach is not an uncommon hive visitor.

It is also commonly written that cockroaches are primarily found in weakened or otherwise ailing colonies. Yes, that is surely true, but I will loudly say that great numbers of roaches happily live on the inner cover of populous colonies. When the outer cover is removed, in a flash, they scamper down into the bees.

In my opinion, there is little to be done to control a roach infestation. Protecting the customer and protecting the purity of the honey product is about all that can be done. Yet, I cannot conclusively say that a modest roach infestation is absolutely harmful to the bees. Maybe future studies will continue to add information to this colony co-habitant.

Honey Bee Cousins

Figure 8. A yellowjacket lunching on one of my dead honey bees.

Yellowjackets
Though yellowjackets are on my “Big List” and are common pests in the beeyard, I have included them here. In my yards, these brightly colored insects could almost be a traditional resident of my apiary. Yellowjackets get included on my “mystery” list due to technicalities.

Yellowjackets (probably Vespula maculifrons) readily see their honey bee cousins as a potential food supply. On occasion, these wasps may have a nest in my apiary, but much more likely is that these hymenopterous insects are simply foraging within my apiary.

Experienced beekeepers have commonly seen yellowjackets mulling around the detritus at the hive entrance, but they will also enter a weakened colony and take honey, pollen, brood and adults depending on their own colony needs.

As such, yellowjackets get an entry on the common list of bee colony pests, but they do not seem to be the effective cause of the colony’s decline but are more commonly responding to a colony that has been weakened by other factors. Yellowjackets can be numerous when robbing behavior is rampant.

Figure 9. Bumblebees can frequently be seen attempting to enter a honey bee colony. This can be disastrous for the bumblebee with deadly results.

Bumblebees
I frequently see bumblebees trying to enter a bee colony. How suicidal is that? Only on a few occasions have I stumbled onto a bumble nest in unused honey bee equipment, but they are frequently in my apiary surely searching for food.

In fact, bumblebees may not necessarily be attracted to my honey bee colonies specifically, but they may be drawn to certain characteristics or resources associated with honey bee colonies. I can come up with a few reasons that may explain why bumblebees are sometimes found near my honey bee colonies:

1. Floral resources: Honey bee colonies are known to forage on a wide variety of flowering plants to collect nectar and pollen. Bumblebees, like honey bees, are also generalist foragers and seek out similar floral resources.
2. Odor cues: Honey bee colonies emit a combination of pheromones and odors that can be detected by other bees, including bumblebees. These chemical signals may serve as attractants, potentially drawing bumblebees to the entrance of the honey bee colony.
3. Nesting opportunities: While honey bees typically nest in enclosed structures such as beehives or tree cavities, bumblebees often create nests in the ground or other protected locations. However, bumblebees may occasionally take advantage of abandoned honey bee hives or other suitable cavities near a honey bee colony, which could lead to their presence in the area.

Figure 10. The apiary ecosystem can become complicated. This mantis is eating a yellowjacket that it caught while sitting atop one of my hives.

It’s important to note that interactions between bumblebees and honey bees can vary depending on the specific circumstances and the behavior of individual bees. While they may coexist peacefully in some cases, competition for limited resources, like nectar or nesting sites, can also occur.

My core point for this article
The apiary is an active place, but not only for honey bees. Many other common and not-so-common insects and animals hang around the beeyard foraging for food or shelter. You and I take a staunch view of these unwanted visitors. But truthfully, we do not know a lot about the complex interaction between all these other species and our honey bees.

For instance, Caron (Caron, Dewey. In Honey Bee Pest, Predators, and Diseases cited elsewhere in this article.), listed more than fifteen different beetle species that could be found in beehives – usually in the bottom board litter. Most beetle species had no ill effect on our bees, but I can’t help but wonder if some of those species could be beneficial to our honey bees. Currently, no one seems to know.

In this article, I have only tinkered with a few of the species that we can see with our unaided eyes. I made no effort to review the macroscopic visitors. Examples are: protozoans, fungi and nematodes. They’re all there, too. Readers, I sense that I’m describing a bee hive supermarket or maybe a big box store for insects.

Not wanting to run amok here, but it appears to me that the apiary is a significant food and shelter resource for a lot of other insects and animals. As beekeepers, we laud the effectiveness of the workers’ defensive stinger, but this protective device does not seem to be very effective against spiders, earwigs, birds or a fungus particle. I’m guessing that out of simple necessity, bees coexist with many of these interlopers. Hive visitors come in differing sizes and represent many diverse species.

Despite everything the bees and their keepers can do, the apiary will seemingly continue to be an attractive site for non-bee species. In this article, I’m trying to ask, “From a diversified ecological position, is this necessarily a bad thing?” Consider how many other species are being subsidized and nurtured by resources from our apiaries. Could it be said that our bee hives are “community centers” for a host of non-apis species? I think so. Blame my daughter. She started this.

Thank you for reading and thinking.

Dr. James E. Tew
Emeritus Faculty, Entomology
The Ohio State University
tewbee2@gmail.com

Co-Host, Honey Bee
Obscura Podcast
www.honeybeeobscura.com

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Pure Honey?

Probably Not So Much
By: Ross Conrad

Most widely known as components of Teflon coated cookware and firefighting foams, PFAS are extremely persistent in the environment. Researchers don’t really have a very good handle on how long it takes for them to actually break down, if they ever do, which is why they are sometimes referred to as forever chemicals.

PFAS Everywhere
Due to their unique properties, these chemicals are used in an extremely wide range of commercial, industrial and consumer products, including adhesives, building and construction materials, cleaning products, paints, varnishes and inks, cosmetics and personal care, dry cleaning, flea and tick products, electronics, explosives and ammunitions, the oil and gas industries, and the medical industry, among others (Gaines, 2021). A huge number of PFAS chemicals have been produced and distributed through the global supply chain, with over 9,000 PFAS related chemicals recorded dating back to before 1950 according to the Environmental Protection Agency Master list of PFAS substances (EPA).

High Level of Toxicity
Peer reviewed studies have connected exposure to certain PFAS chemicals to a host of human health problems including reproductive effects such as decreased fertility or increased high blood pressure in pregnant women, developmental effects or delays in children, increased risk of some cancers, suppression of the body’s immune system and interference with the body’s natural hormones, along with increased cholesterol levels and/or risk of obesity (EPA, 2023). Some of these chemicals are so toxic that in 2022, EPA released a lifetime drinking water health advisory for four PFAS substances – not in the amounts of parts per million, or parts per billion, but in the fractions of parts per trillion range (U.S. Gov., 2022).

Health effects associated with exposure to PFAS are difficult to nail down for many reasons. Although there are thousands of PFAS with potentially varying effects and toxicity levels, most studies have focused on a limited number of better known PFAS compounds. Meanwhile, people can be exposed to PFAS in different ways and at different stages of their life, and the types and uses of PFAS change over time. All of this makes it challenging to track and assess how exposure to these chemicals occurs and how they will affect human health.

Honey Bee Exposure
In the June issue of Bee Culture, I note that PFAS used in plastic manufacturing (most notably in high density and low density polyethylene – HDPE & LDPE) has the potential to leach out of plastic hive components and impact bees and honey. Well, it turns out there is yet another avenue for PFAS to potentially make its way into our hives: pesticides (Lasee et al., 2022).

PFAS chemicals are being found in a wide variety of pesticides. Sometimes, the PFAS is the active ingredient or added as an adjuvant, or so called “inert” ingredient included in the pesticide formulation to enhance the effectiveness of the active ingredient. Other times, the levels of PFAS found in a particular pesticide is so small it is likely a result of the chemical leaching out of plastic packaging and into the pesticide or its components prior or during manufacture. Since pesticides are applied to our food crops, researchers are documenting PFAS chemical build up (bioaccumulation) in fish, animals and people.

Officials in the state of Maine found that more than 1,400 pesticides contain active ingredients that meet the state’s definition of PFAS (EWG, 2023). Researchers have also documented the migration of toxic pesticides from the surrounding environment into honey bee colonies.

The common presence of PFAS in pesticides, potentially including those many beekeepers place in their hives, is concerning not just from a human perspective but also from the bee’s. A small but growing body of research reveals the potential for adverse impacts of PFAS exposure in honey bee colonies. One researcher found that a honey bee’s oral exposure to PFOS resulted in a 72-hour oral median lethal dose (LD50) of 0.40 mg per bee (Wilkins, 2001). Meanwhile, a correlation between the bioaccumulation of fluorinated pesticides in honey bees, along with other types of pesticides, and mass mortality events of honey bee colonies has been documented (Martinello et al., 2019). Another study found that not only do PFAS have the potential to adversely impact honey bees, they can migrate into honey, the primary source of carbohydrate and energy for honey bees and one of the primary hive products produced by beekeepers (Sonter et al., 2021). Given the well-established fact that pesticides are commonly found in honey samples, it should come as no surprise if further testing uncovers widespread PFAS contamination in honey sold for human consumption.

States Taking the Lead
PFAS contamination presents a mostly unexamined problem for farmers all across the country. Prior to the recent revelation of PFAS contamination of pesticides, farmland has historically been contaminated with PFAS through the spreading of waste water treatment plant sewage sludge as an agricultural fertilizer. Another acknowledged source of contamination is the leaching of PFAS chemicals off military bases onto nearby farms and water supplies.

As part of the effort to get a handle on this situation, Maine has become the first state to enact a comprehensive ban on pesticides that include intentionally added PFAS, as well as pesticides contaminated with PFAS. The ban is currently set to take effect in 2030.

A second state to move to ban PFAS is Minnesota. Scientist’s understanding and ability to detect PFAS in the environment has evolved greatly since the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) and the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) began investigating them back in 2002. Laboratories at that time had only identified two PFAS and extremely low concentrations were undetectable given the existing technology at that time. Today, we are able to measure extremely small amounts (parts per trillion) of several PFAS. As noted before, studies have linked long-term exposure to PFAS in this range to negative outcomes especially for the most vulnerable members of our population: children, the elderly, pregnant women and those with compromised immune systems.

The writing is on the wall when it comes to PFAS compounds. One of the world’s primary PFAS manufacturing companies, 3M, has agreed to pay more than $10 billion to settle lawsuits claiming it knowingly used “forever chemicals” in its products despite being aware of risks to human health. Additionally, 3M says it’s phasing out two common compounds – PFOS and PFOA – and has announced that they will discontinue all types of the chemicals by 2026. Unfortunately, history has shown that companies usually only phase out a toxic compound when they have a replacement ready for market. Typically, the replacement is just as harmful as the compound it replaces, but it takes decades to accumulate the data showing harm and require the replacement chemical to also be withdrawn. Of course by then, yet another toxic replacement is found.

Regularly rotating old comb out of hives is one way beekeepers can reduce toxic chemical loads on bee colonies. The color of the comb is not a reliable indication of the age of the comb, since combs that are only used by the bees or food storage take much longer than brood combs to darken.

Varroa Treatments
The commonly used beekeeping pesticide Amitraz (sold as Apivar) was not found to contain any fluorinated chemicals that would meet the state of Maine’s definition of PFAS. However, Fluvalinate, the active ingredient in Apistan does meet the state’s definition.

I spoke with pesticide toxicologist, Pam Bryer of the Maine Board of Pesticide Control who pointed out that the PFAS problem could easily have been avoided if all chemicals were treated like pesticides which are regularly tested for their persistence in the environment. According to Bryer, “for most of the PFAS out there, there is almost no data.” Bryer assured me that unlike PFOS and PFOA which are long chain fluorinated compounds, fluvalinate is not nearly as toxic since it contains a short chain fluorinated methyl group. She did express concern, however what can happen should the fluorinated methyl group in fluvalinate combine with other chemicals potentially forming more toxic compounds or potent green-house gases.

Better Safe Than Sorry
In my mind, the safest treatments available to beekeepers today are those that utilize organic acids. By definition, the acids are not toxic, though they are corrosive. All of the organic acids (formic, oxalic and hop beta) that are approved for use to control varroa mites become neutralized over time and leave behind no harmful residue from the acid. Unfortunately, we now know that PFAS have the potential to make their way into such otherwise relatively safe products and contaminate our colonies despite our best efforts.

Beekeepers don’t have to wait for regulatory action and should consider increasing their reliance on natural and organic approaches, or when possible, treatment-free management techniques to control mites. As beekeepers, we can reduce or even eliminate toxic chemical use in our hives starting today by incorporating organic practices into our hive management. One way is to regularly rotate old combs out of hives and allow colonies to build new comb so the level of residue buildup in wax remains relatively low. Another approach discussed in my book, Natural Beekeeping, includes the use of screened bottom boards, culling capped drone brood, forcing a brood break in the hive, and propagating strains of bees that show some resistance to mites and diseases. A trial that ran between 2016-2019 found that combining all five of these physical and biological treatment-free management approaches can control mite-related hive mortality and ensure survivability on par with commercially available pesticide treatments (Conrad, 2021).

Recently, researchers Robyn Underwood, Margarita López-Uribe and their team from Penn State and Virginia Tech published a study on organic beekeeping in which they “… found that the organic management system-which uses organic-approved chemicals for mite control-supports healthy and productive colonies, and can be incorporated as a sustainable approach for stationary honey-producing beekeeping operations.” (Underwood et al., 2023).

As Rachel Carson noted over 60 years ago: “The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea with dangerous and even lethal, materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life, but in living tissues is, for the most part, irreversible.” (Carson, 1962). Given that we now have effective low toxic and non-toxic alternatives to dangerous chemicals, why continue to play Russian roulette with pesticides?

Ross Conrad is author of Natural Beekeeping, Revised and Expanded 2nd edition, and co-author of The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.

References:
Carson, Rachel (1962) Silent Spring, The Riverside Press Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston pg 6
Conrad, Ross (2021) Comparison of a commercial Varroa mite honey bee treatment with treatment-free Varroa management techniques, Bee Culture September: pp 41-45
Environmental Protection Agency, Comptox Chemicals Dashboard: Master List of PFAS Substances (Version 2). Accessed June 26, 2023. https://comptox.epa.gov/dashboard/chemical_lists/pfasmaster
Environmental Protection Agency (2023) Our current understanding of the human health and environmental risks of PFAS, accessed June 21, 2023 https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas
Environmental Working Group (EWG), Maine data unveils troubling trend: 55 PFAS-related chemicals in over 1400 pesticides, accessed June 13, 2023 – https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2023/06/maine-data-unveils-troubling-trend-55-pfas-related-chemicals
Gaines, Linda G.T. (2001) Historical and current usage of per- and polyfluoralkyl substances (PFAS): A literature review, American Journal of Industrial Medicine, 66:353-378
Lasee, S. et. al. (2022) Targeted analysis and total oxidizable precursor assay of several insecticides for PFAS, Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters, 3:100067
Martinello, M. et. al. (2019) A survey from 2015 to 2019 to investigate the occurance of pesticide residues in dead honey bees and other matrices related to honey bee mortality incidents in Italy, Diversity, 12(1):15
McCarthy, C., Kappleman, W. & DiGuiseppi, W. (2017) Ecological Considerations of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS). Curr Pollution Rep 3, 289–301
Steven Lasee, Kaylin McDermett, Naveen Kumar, Jennifer Guelfo, Paxton Payton, Zhao Yang, Todd A. Anderson, (2022) Targeted analysis and Total Oxidizable Precursor assay of several insecticides for PFAS, Journal of Hazardous Materials Letters, Vol. 3.
Sonter, C., Rader R., Stevenson, G., Stavert, J., Wilson, S.C. (2021) Biological and behavioural responses of European honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) exposure, Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management, 17(2)
United States Government (2022) Lifetime Drinking Water Health Advisories for Four Perfluoroalkyl Substances [FRL 9855-01-OW], Federal Register 87:118 pp 36848-36849
Underwood, R.M., Lawrence, B.L., Turley, N.E., Cambron-Kopco, L.D., Kietzman, P.M., Traver, B.E., López-Uribe, M.M. (2023) A longitudinal experiment demonstrates that honey bee colonies managed organically are as healthy and productive as those managed conventionally, Scientific Reports, 13:6072 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-32824-w
Wilkins, P. (2001) “Perfluorooctanesulfonate, potassium salt (PFOS): An acute contact toxicity study with the honey bee. Study number HT5601.”

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Found in Translation

Sweet and Sour Honey
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

There are many ways that honey bees improve our diets but honey consumption was an early reason to wrangle this species. The taste for honey persists today around the world, sustaining sideliners, families and large corporations in many parts of the world. It is also widely known to soothe and improve relations with neighbors, in-laws and bosses. With any high-value product, there is a risk of inadvertent or purposeful false advertising.

One honey quality trait that is easy to control is water content. Small-scale beekeepers routinely put their honey crops and relationships at risk by bottling honey that hasn’t been fully processed by bees to a net water percentage under 19%. Watery honey both feels weird and is prone to unintended fermentation. Choosing properly capped frames goes a long way to eliminating this problem. If you live in a humid place like Maryland, there is also some risk that open honey will dehumidify some of the local air, pushing water content back above dangerous levels. Truly dry honey can be achieved by technique and awareness, but if you are curious and want to directly assess the water content of your crop, Hanna Bäckmo gives a nice review of the styles and costs of refractometers used by beekeepers in this magazine (https://www.beeculture.com/refractometer/). Certainly, steady honey producers would benefit from investing in, and calibrating, these things.

A bit out of reach for most of us, but essential for the industry, are lab-based assays aimed at confirming honey purity. The methods used for this continue to improve, putting clumsy or sneaky honey producers on notice. Notably, honey yields can be stretched by a variety of refined or expelled sugars. This might be inadvertent, when syrup fed by beekeepers in the Fall for Winter survival lingers, capped until Spring. There is no easy answer to this, certainly not from me, but step one is to get bees through Winter safely, and then assess any remaining capped stores to see if these stores are bona fide honey or syrup that bees dried down but didn’t gobble up as it came in. Ask a beekeeper near you for help.

Photo by Meggyn Pomerleau on Unsplash

More insidiously, producers or packers might outright add less expensive fillers to their honey, increasing yields but losing some of the magic of honey. The technology used to detect such adulteration is improving, and several techniques are now used by regulators, producers and packers to make sure honey is pure. The International Honey Commission described forensic methods for honey purity nearly 30 years ago and updated these methods in 2009 (https://www.bee-hexagon.net/english/network/publications-by-the-ihc/). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, keeping honest folks honest across the industry, regularly tests new methods against imported and domestic honey to identify so-called ‘economically motivated adulteration’. Using a well-established technique, Stable Carbon Isotope Ratio Analysis (SCIRA), the FDA recently screened bulk and bottled honey samples from eight countries whose honey is imported into the U.S. (https://www.fda.gov/food/economically-motivated-adulteration-food-fraud/fy2122-sample-collection-and-analysis-imported-honey-economically-motivated-adulteration). This test distinguishes ‘C4’ plant sources (largely grasses and grains) from ‘C3’ sources (all the plants with prettier, bee-visited, nectar-rich flowers). The test simply asks if the unexpected C4-sugars, often from corn syrup or sugar cane, are over-represented in honey. There is some tolerance of these C4 sugars due to bee management or assay imprecision but that level is quite low, maybe 7% by volume. Each country in the FDA screen had at least one suspicious honey batch, but the overall frequency of such batches was 10%, a level roughly similar to a much larger recent study in Europe and indicative that honey, by and large, is as advertised.

There are several newer techniques in play now for the high-stakes race between regulators and those who might diminish the reputation of honey. Dilpreet Singh Brar and colleagues in A comprehensive review on unethical honey: Validation by emerging techniques (Food Control 2023, 145, 109482, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodcont.2022.109482) describe nearly 50 ways to test your clover. Within the alphabet soup of available methods, they reveal six chromatographic platforms (basically methods to separate parts of a whole by size, electric charge or affinity to some sort of ‘bait’) with increasing sophistication. These machines should put fear in anyone whose honey is not perfectly sound.

As a geneticist, I am fascinated with so-called environmental DNA (eDNA) screens, whereby a complex soup is scrutinized for the genomes of the diverse organisms floating in it. Many will remember the application of eDNA screens worldwide to identify levels and variants of the SARS-Cov-2 virus in city and town wastewater systems (poor interns!; https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/tracking-sars-cov-2-variants-wastewater). This same methodology is now widely used to confirm the botanical sources of honey, the genotypes of the bees collecting that honey and the myriad of other organisms from the hive environment. Practically, this method also precisely identifies any honey contaminant with a biological source, from corn syrup to diverse flower sources mixed in accidentally in coveted monofloral honeys. It is also a sensitive assay for honey bee disease agents.

For the past 20 years, genetic analyses of honey from hives have been used to confirm the presence of the bacterium responsible for American Foulbrood, Paenibacillus larvae. Federico Lauro and colleagues in Rapid detection of Paenibacillus larvae from honey and hive samples with a novel nested PCR protocol (International Journal of Food Microbiology 2003, 81, 195-201, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-1605(02)00257-X) showed the value of this technique for keeping track of non-symptomatic P. larvae populations. More broadly, Leigh Boardman and others have confirmed that this technique can provide a snapshot of the whole range of microbes found in colonies (Boardman, L., P. Marcelino, J. A., Valentin, R. E., Boncristiani, H., Standley, J. M., & Ellis, J. D. Novel eDNA approaches to monitor Western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) microbial and arthropod communities. Environmental DNA. 2023; https://doi.org/10.1002/edn3.419). Here, colony-collected honey is analogous to the worker-bee samples now used in many disease surveys. Honey collections have the added value of pointing out long-ago arrivals, providing a sort of fossil record for the plants and other organisms a colony might have come into contact with during the past year. The genetic methods behind these screens are astoundingly sensitive (remember, viruses floating alone in tons of sewer sludge) and honey or hive-based screens have promise for anything from virus outbreaks to the detection of newly invasive mites and other pests. It is incredibly hard to pass through an environment without shedding a little DNA, and a little goes a long way for these sensitive methods.

Economically motivated adulteration is detectable with some effort and that’s a good thing for all of us. Honey screening, especially with the twist of identifying genetic signals from hive organisms, is also becoming a nice tool for scientists keen on monitoring disease, plant sources and the genes of the bees that did all the work.

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Found in Translation

Gut Microbes Help Bees Survive the Season
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

It will surprise most Bee Culture readers that microbes come in flavors that can be good, bad or indifferent to the health of their honey bee hosts. As we approach Fall, it is tempting to focus on the microbes on the good side and try to find out how to feed them for bee health prior to Winter. As someone who studies honey bee disease, I can’t help but focus on the good microbes that might interfere with agents of harm lurking in our beehives.

Kirk Anderson and colleagues in the USDA’s Tucson Carl Hayden Bee Research Laboratory have been exploring the impacts of gut microbes on bee health for a decade now. In past work, they showed how these microbes are beneficial in the guts of bees but generally ‘don’t’ help in the processing of pollen stored as bee bread. They have also shown how queens and workers differ greatly in the microbes they harbor and the impacts of bee contact on moving microbes around (see Anderson’s ‘Google Scholar’ profile for lists of his papers on these topics; https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JiEFFkIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao).

They have also explored how bees suffer mortality when the delicate microbial balance is upset. Recently, they have investigated honey bee overwintering, testing for the right mixes of nutrition and temperature that improve the odds of colony survival (hint: cold is good, to a certain degree). In a paper this past year, they describe how the gut microbes of bees react before and during Winter, building the case that microbes are critical for overwintering success (Anderson, K.E.; Maes, P. Social microbiota and social gland gene expression of worker honey bees by age and climate. Scientific Reports 2022, 12, 10690, doi:10.1038/s41598-022-14442-0).

They also show that the overwintering environment can favor certain microbes that are less helpful for bee health. Specifically, bee colonies overwintered in a warm environment started with the typical population of gut bacteria but that population broke bad in the end, notably thanks to overgrowth (these were NOT found in bees) as well as several types which ARE known to decrease bee health. Just what it is about warmer Winter environments that favors an odd, and apparently harmful, bacterial group is not known, and solving this will be key in future work aimed at prepping bees for current or future Winter climates.

More generally, disease agents are opportunists; taking advantage of their victims when something else is out of whack. These opportunities can arise from stressors in the environment, poor genetics or inadequate nutrition. Opportunities might also arise when populations of good bacteria are somehow absent. There are a myriad of ways that such ‘good’ microbes could help bees in the face of disease, from providing a physical layer on the gut wall that frustrates pathogens, to improving nutrient transfer or stimulating bee immunity.

Finally, gut microbes might directly attack the bad actors. Studies showing increased honey bee disease following heavy antibiotic treatments provide ample evidence for the roles of natural bee bacteria. In one such study, led by Jiang Hong Li and my USDA colleague Judy Chen (Li, J.H.; Evans, J.D.; Li, W.F.; Zhao, Y.Z.; DeGrandi-Hoffman, G.; Huang, S.K.; Li, Z.G.; Hamilton, M.; Chen, Y.P. New evidence showing that the destruction of gut bacteria by antibiotic treatment could increase the honey bee’s vulnerability to Nosema infection. PloS one 2017, 12, e0187505, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0187505). Gut microbes were shown to help bees resist nosema disease. A cleansing of gut bacteria by an intensive antibiotic regime resulted in shorter lifespans overall, and increased the impacts of nosema exposure on longevity.

Sean Leonard and colleagues, in the University of Texas laboratory of Nancy Moran, showed that a human assist can further sharpen the impacts of natural gut microbes on bee parasites. Specifically, they engineered (in the laboratory) a common ‘good’ bacterium of bees so that it targeted challenges as distinct as Varroa mites and Deformed wing virus (Leonard, S.P.; Powell, J.E.; Perutka, J.; Geng, P.; Heckmann, L.C.; Horak, R.D.; Davies, B.W.; Ellington, A.D.; Barrick, J.E.; Moran, N.A. Engineered symbionts activate honey bee immunity and limit pathogens. Science 2020, 367, 573-576, doi:10.1126/science.aax9039).

Nosema. Credit: Qiang Huang

Work this year based on the same strategy (led by Qiang Huang from Jiangxi University, working in Moran’s lab) showed resident bacteria could be altered to successfully target nosema disease (Huang, Q.; Lariviere, P.J.; Powell, J.E.; Moran, N.A. Engineered gut symbiont inhibits microsporidian parasite and improves honey bee survival. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2023, 120, e2220922120, doi:10.1073/pnas.2220922120). Bees with the engineered bacteria both lived significantly longer and had far fewer nosema spores to pass on to their nestmates. Interestingly, bees fed the gut bacterium alone, and the bacterium with a nonspecific (not targeting nosema), modification also showed signs of reducing disease impacts, supporting the evidence that the bacterium itself is also a friend to bees.

Short of this high-tech solution, are there ways that beekeepers can help nurture the natural gut bacteria found in their beehives? If you supplement your bees, a recent paper by Elijah Powell and others in Moran’s group suggests that pollen-based supplements tend to lead to a more balanced ‘core’ set of bacteria in the bee gut, possibly decreasing the threats from at least one bacterial pathogen of adult bees (Powell JE, Lau P, Rangel J, Arnott R, De Jong T, Moran NA (2023) The microbiome and gene expression of honey bee workers are affected by a diet containing pollen substitutes. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0286070. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0286070). I know there are many colony supplements available and I don’t claim this makes a pollen-based supplement better for bees overall than supplements with a different protein source (nor, of course, does this represent any formal endorsement of one type of bee feed over another). Still, it is interesting to contemplate how particular supplements affect not just bees but the hitchhiking microbes that have adapted to life in their guts.

One thing is clear from these diverse studies. While many of us focus on the microbes whose effects are damaging to bee colonies, most hive microbes are neutral or even beneficial to their bee hosts in Summer and Winter. Bees have been harnessing this power for millennia, and we would do well to help them sustain the right mix of gut partners.