Synopsis : Honey bees compete with native bees. How many hives are too many, resulting in damage to native bee populations? Probably fewer than you think.
Introduction
Several years ago I visited Montréal to speak at an international symposium. It was a big conference with a very busy programme but I still managed to sneak away and see the city. We had a week or so of stunning Indian summer weather so I walked almost everywhere; along the banks of the St Lawrence and Prairies Rivers, through the Botanic Gardens and the Mount Royal 1 Park.
Montréal Olympic stadium from the Botanic Gardens
If you’ve not been I can recommend it.
However, I didn’t see a single honey bee.
I wasn’t specifically looking for honey bees, but beekeepers tend to notice these things.
In retrospect that wasn’t too surprising. At that time there were just a couple of hundred hives within the city, which covers an area of 430 km2 .
I did see monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) in the gardens, stocking up on nectar before starting their migration back to Central Mexico.
Monarch butterfly, Montréal Botanic Gardens
This was early October. Had there been lots of honey bees in Montréal I’d have expected to see them on the same asters, competing for the nectar with the butterflies, piling in the stores before the coming winter.
Synopsis : Bentleys, beewash, robotic hives and why most initiatives are trying to save the wrong bees. Something for everyone for World Bee Day tomorrow.
Introduction
The Bentley Continental GTC convertible is a fantastic example of a luxury car. Gorgeous inside, with split leather upholstery, a 46-speaker Hi-Fi system and the very finest wooden veneer finished with unobtainium trim. Stunning outside, with a gloss carbon fibre body kit and lashings of ‘racetrack attitude’ 1.
And the performance!
The 6 litre, 650 bhp engine delivers 900 Nm of torque, giving a 0-60 mph time of just 3.6 seconds and a top speed in excess of 200 mph.
Of course, all that performance comes at a cost … the fuel consumption is at best ~20 mpg and the CO2 emissions exceed 300 g/km 2.
Those last two figures are unlikely to trouble most purchasers, but – as the world races towards exceeding the 1.5°C threshold by 2027 – they do contribute to climate change.
Brrrm brrrm!
Fortunately, Bentley are doing their bit to reduce the carbon footprint (of manufacture 3 ); the Crewe factory site has been certified carbon neutral since 2019 and they’ve created a ‘green wall’ containing 2600 plants to filter out toxins and dust, which also produces 40 kg of oxygen a year 4.
Synopsis : What makes people want to start beekeeping? Is it to Save the bees, or because they just like honey? Is their persistence and long-term success influenced by their initial motivation to keep bees. Do they keep beekeeping for the same reasons they start beekeeping?
Introduction
Hundreds of potential new beekeepers, spread across the country, are now enrolled on ’Beekeeping for beginners’ or ’Start beekeeping’ events. In the next few weeks they will take weekly or weekend theory courses.
Life cycle, swarming, the hive, Varroa, foulbroods, candles, honey … the whole nine yards 1.
They will read and re-read every page in the Thorne’s catalogue until they can recite it verbatim.
If they’re sensible they will not ’splash the cash’ until they can discriminate between what they actually need, what they might want (but not need), and what will be a total waste of money2.
With luck, and a responsible beekeeping association, they will be appointed a mentor to provide help, advice, reassurance, cups of tea, a starter nucleus of bees, cake, commiserations and/or antihistamines 3.
It’s an exciting time. There’s a lot to learn 4 and so every reason to be a little apprehensive.
And, if they’re not, perhaps they should be?
In April they should get to see inside a hive.
Will they experience the same heady combination of wonder and bewilderment that I still sometimes feel when lifting a crownboard?
For some it will be a truly life-changing experience 🙂
For others it will confirm that they should have never taken the course in the first place 🙁
But for most it will be something in between.
I’ve often wondered whether the reaction during these early apiary sessions, and the subsequent beekeeping progress, is related to their original motivation to keep bees.
In the beginning
I don’t remember why I was interested in beekeeping. Other than my grandmother, there was no history of beekeeping in my family, and I don’t think my gran kept bees for many years.
I have a faint memory of a couple of lovely WBC hives on a patch of grass overlooking the valley, but never discussed them with her or did anything other than watch the bees going in and out.
When I signed up for a ’Start beekeeping’ course I knew less than nothing about beekeeping or beehives. I didn’t know about removable frames, or supers, or anything about plants or nectar or forage 5.
In fact, I didn’t have a Scooby Doo what was actually inside a beehive, other than a heck of a lot of bees.
However, I was interested in bees.
With a background and education in biology and employment as a biologist 6 I was always fascinated by living things. I’d read Konrad Lorenz and some other books on animal behaviour, I knew a bit about communication in higher animals and I’d heard – and probably been taught the rudiments of – the waggle dance.
I also had a sweet tooth and a long history of starting things enthusiastically and then – over time – moving on to something else. There’s nothing wrong with this approach to life/hobbies/jobs 7 though it can get rather expensive if those interests are sports cars or yachts.
As it turns out … it can also get quite expensive if your interests are bees 🙁
Save the bees, save humanity
I started keeping bees well over a decade ago 8. This was a long time before the marketing departments and rent-a-hive greenwashers had realised that there was serious money in honey bees.
Not in beefarming per se but in using honey bees as a sort of environmental imprimatur. If a product states it is bee friendly, or has ’Save the bees’ stamped on it, sales will increase.
Or it will sell at a higher price … or both.
Assuming the (inevitable) illustration used to decorate the product is recognisable, it will probably be a honey bee.
Define ‘recognisable’
Equally inevitably, this constant reinforcement means that the public 9 start to believe that honey bees are threatened and that their numbers are declining.
The reality of course is that honey bee numbers are actually increasing (globally, though not necessarily in all countries), and have been for at least the last 50 years. That doesn’t mean they’re not threatened 10 … but they’re hardly in imminent danger of disappearing.
But at least some decide that the best way to ‘Save the bees’ would be to start beekeeping.
That wasn’t what made me want to start, but I know it’s motivation for some.
Responsible beekeeping associations should stress the potential impact competition from honey bees may have on wild pollinators … those who take up beekeeping to ’Save the bees’ may be doing precisely the opposite.
And those who start and then abandon their bees, leaving hives containing Varroa-ridden colonies to re-infest the neighbourhood, are definitely not Saving the bees … or humanity.
Self sufficiency
Beekeeping often appeals to people who want to be at least vaguely self-sufficient … in much the same way as keeping chickens or growing carrots does. Subconsciously, this may well have been the driver that encouraged me to sign up for a winter course on keeping bees.
I’d always wanted to keep chickens and had already failed spectacularly at growing carrots 11.
My attempts at allotment self-sufficiency had been marred by copious amounts of ground elder, a prolonged drought and frequent overseas travel. Surely beekeeping would be less time-consuming?
I’m beginning to realise it isn’t 😉
But the great thing about beekeeping is that – with a bit of effort – you can do better than achieve self-sufficiency.
I’ve been self-sufficient in honey since my first summer. Unless you eat vast amounts of the stuff it would be difficult not to be.
But the great thing about honey is that it’s a highly valued 12 product, with a long shelf-life.
Not unlike gold … liquid gold.
Honey
And, like gold, other people value it.
Gifts for dinner parties, thank-yous for the loan of a log splitter, even payment for odd jobs. I’ve used honey for all these things in the last couple of months.
A surplus of honey also opens up a wonderful world of barter and exchange. A jar of honey for some fresh eggs, or to help reduce the glut of runner beans or carrots, is both enriching and saves me the grief of digging and watering an allotment.
Not only is this a compelling reason to start beekeeping, it also means you get to meet like-minded people who are actually good at keeping chickens or growing carrots, and they are almost always interesting to chat with.
Profit
Are you mad?
I’m sure many amateur beekeepers think they make (at least some) money from their bees, and some probably do.
Have they factored in the outgoings as well as the income? The cost of their time, the petrol for the van, the ongoing costs of frames and foundation and Apivar?
The losses, the bad years, the bad back?
Winter losses
Over my (relatively short) beekeeping career only about one year in four provides a real bonanza of honey. In the years you don’t run out of supers and honey buckets, you still have the same effort and outgoings. Or possibly more of both.
Even taking these things into account, I’m sure it’s possible to make some money … but would it be enough to live on?
I’ve discussed my back-of-an-envelope attempt at determining the economics of amateur beekeeping. I don’t claim it’s close to accurate, but it does give an idea of just how little ‘profit’ might be made per hive in a poor year, or conversely, how many hives you’d have to run to make more than the state pension.
I’m sure there are a few 14 individuals who take a ’Start beekeeping’ course with the dream of making a good living from bee farming.
I suspect rather few achieve their ambition 🙁
And one of the reasons it’s unlikely to be achieved is that beekeeping – at least beekeeping well – is difficult. It might seem easy in principle, or in a book (or from a website 😉 ), or during a ‘Start beekeeping’ course, but in practice it can seem like an intractable combination of art, science and witchcraft.
Why I keep bees now
Which explains at least part of my ongoing fascination with bees and beekeeping.
There is always something more to learn.
I’ve written before that there is rarely, if ever, a trip to the apiary that does not result in me learning something new. Or learning that my current understanding of some aspect of beekeeping is inadequate, and that there is therefore more to know.
Which, of course, is half the trick about learning … if you realise what you don’t know, you’ll be alert for an opportunity to fill the gap(s) in your knowledge.
And part of the reason there’s so much to learn is that every season is different.
Moving to higher ground …
The weather varies; cold springs, hard winters, wet summers … all change the times that nectars and pollens are available, so influencing colony development.
Or the farmers get less subsidy for cattle feed and more for biofuel, so they abandon growing field beans and start growing more oil seed rape.
Our colonies respond by swarming earlier, or later, or (typically) at the time we’re least expecting.
Keeping bees means I am more in tune with the rhythm of the seasons.
I’m more aware of the arrival and departure of migrant birds, the flowering of trees or when the mackerel shoals appear in the loch. Most of this is subconscious, assisted by a little bit of note taking in my hive records:
April 10 : Colony #21 Q #7 : Gorse and late willow pollen, 5+ frames BIAS 15, first cuckoo of the season
All of which is actually rather nice. You become acutely aware of the environment around you. This provides an invaluable ‘grounding’ if your weekly existence usually involves shuttling between an air conditioned office and an air conditioned car 16.
Zen and the science of honey bees
I’ve worked on the biology of honey bee viruses for over a decade. The ability to mix ‘work and (p)leisure’ has been great. I’m certain that being a beekeeper has enabled me to write more successful funding applications 17.
My beekeeping has certainly helped my scientific interactions with other beekeepers … the many individuals and associations I’ve scrounged samples from, or who have acted as ‘guinea pigs’ for my PhD student’s projects.
One of the good things about the science of honey bees is that there are some excellent communicators on the subject. Thomas Seeley and Mark Winston are well worth reading, and if you have a subscription to American Bee Journal you can also read Jamie Ellis, Randy Oliver and Wyatt Mangum.
And there are many others.
An understanding of the biology or behaviour of bees can help you understand the science.
Lakes, for example … bees don’t like flying long distances over expanses of water. In fact, if they try to they often crash land in the water and perish. I’ve discussed optic flow and distance measurement by bees in a previous post. The mirror-like lake provides insufficient visual clues crossing their retinas, causing them to fly closer (and closer) to the surface to help estimate speed and distance … and take an early bath.
On a more practical level, the need for regular samples of larvae and pupae for research prompted me to investigate, and eventually build, a bee shed (or three).
Laden foragers returning …
These have been a revelation for many aspects of beekeeping, and are particularly useful in areas with unpredictable weather, or for beekeepers who only have limited time each week for their bees.
My most recently completed shed has still to accommodate any hives, but will be used for queen rearing in the, er, ’changeable’ climate I now enjoy on the west coast of Scotland.
I didn’t even know that queen rearing was a ‘thing’ when I started beekeeping, but it now brings me more enjoyment than many other aspects of the hobby.
Everyone is interested in bees
Finally, and this might be a byproduct of the ‘Save the bees, save humanity’ marketing hype you see in the supermarket or read in the newspaper, lots of non-beekeepers are interested in bees.
When I used to live in a small village and sell honey ‘from the door’ it would sometimes involve a 45 minute conversation to sell a half pound jar.
My honey sales were earning me less than the national minimum wage 🙁
“Where are your hives? What sort of nectar do they collect? Do they fly far? Is it true that honey is antibacterial? Have you a recipe for thin syrup? 18 Why are honey bees threatened?“
Which brings me almost full circle to the start of this rambling discourse …
And, of course, the other question beekeepers are regularly asked is “Do you get stung a lot?”
You can play it cool and discuss the rigorous selection criteria you’ve used to produce the benign, laid back, mellow colonies of bees in your hives.
Or you can lay it on thick and make it sound akin to alligator wrestling … in a veil.
You think this croc is feisty? … You should see my Buckfasts
You’ll need to judge the customer to work out which is more likely to generate additional sales.
I now cannot imagine not keeping bees, even though I’m not entirely sure why I started in the first place. They are an integral part of my life, though they are by no means my only pastime/hobby/obsession.
The rhythm of the seasons means that my beekeeping is ever-changing; colony expansion in the spring, queen rearing, the honey harvest, talks, feeding them up for winter, DIY projects, more talks, jarring honey and then starting all over again.
If it was the same thing, week in, week out, I’d have probably given up years ago and kept chickens instead.
The untold story of the honey bee in the wild by Thomas D. Seeley, Professor of Biology at Cornell University.
Well, not quite untold, but this is a highly informative and entertaining book about the biology of honey bees living wild, primarily in the Arnot Forest, near Ithaca in the Finger Lakes region of New York.
Thomas Seeley conducts simple, elegant experiments to address interesting or important questions about bees. He then presents the studies and the conclusions in an easily understandable form, unencumbered by statistical mumbo-jumbo or extensive caveats and qualifications.
This makes the work very accessible, even for those with no scientific training. You don’t even need extensive knowledge of honey bees; he explains the background to the experiments in sufficient detail that they are comprehensible without lots of prior knowledge.
For this reason, this is an ideal book to introduce a new beekeeper to the biology of bees.
However, for reasons to be covered separately, I think the suggestions it makes on practical beekeeping is very poor advice for the new beekeeper 🙁
A three part story
Essentially the book is in three parts, divided into eleven chapters.
After a general introduction there are three chapters that provide a historical perspective to the bees in the Arnot Forest and, more generally, to beekeeping. Not the practical aspects of beekeeping, but the interaction of humans and bees over tens of thousands of years.
The Beekeepers and the Birdnester by Pieter Bruegel (c. 1568)
Chapters 5 to 10 cover key aspects of the biology of the colony. These are:
the features that influence selection of a nest site
an overview of the annual cycle; spring build up, overwintering etc.
colony reproduction i.e. swarming
thermoregulation of the colony
collection of pollen, nectar and water – the food and stores needed for survival
defence of the colony – from microscopic viruses to (distinctly) macroscopic black bears
The final chapter – Darwinian beekeeping – contains Seeley’s suggestions for changes to beekeeping practice, informed by the observations presented in the six preceding chapters.
I’ll discuss Darwinian beekeeping another time as it deserves a post of its own.
Something for everyone
Each chapter is accompanied by a couple of pages of explanatory notes and there is a 19 page bibliography should the reader want to consult the primary sources.
An interested lay person could spend hours enjoyably reading about the biology of wild-living honey bees without ever consulting the notes or references. These don’t litter the text, making the book very much more accessible to those unused to the sort of cite-every-statement-to-avoid-offending-the-peer-reviewers style of writing that plagues most reviews (Bloggs et al., 1929b).
Alternatively, if you really do want to find out the original source you usually can, by consulting the notes and the references. Inevitably some things are missed, but that’s the nature of an eminently readable tome covering about a million years of Apis mellifera biology, 4500 years of beekeeping and at least 300 years of scientific observations about bees.
One of the great aspects of Seeley’s writing is that things are often presented with reference to some long-lost study which would otherwise have been forgotten.
A couple of weeks ago I discussed the importance of checking hive weights at this time of the year. The rate of stores usage increases significantly as more brood is reared. How do we know this increased rate of stores usage is due to increased brood rearing, rather than just correlating with it?
Seeley presents his data on colony weight changes but does so with reference to Clayton Farrar’s study of brood rearing by colonies lacking pollen in the 1930’s. These used only half as much of their stores because brood rearing needs pollen. Farrar’s study was published in the American Bee Journal in 1936.
There are several examples in the book where modern molecular studies are juxtaposed with some of the great observational science of the first part of the 20th Century. As someone involved daily at the gene-jockey end of science, this historical perspective alone makes the book worth purchasing.
Wild vs. domesticated bees
Throughout the book Seeley focuses on bees living in the wild i.e. without help intervention from beekeepers. His contention is that it is only by studying bees in their natural habitat that we’ll be able to properly understand what they need to survive and thrive when managed.
Seeley has studied bees in the Arnot forest for at least 40 years. He can therefore provide a ‘before and after’ view of the impact of the introduction of Varroa which probably occurred in the early 1990’s. Surprisingly, the overall number and density of colonies living in the forest in the 1970’s is about the same as it is now. This is discussed in several places in the book.
How can wild bees cope with the mites that, uncontrolled, generally destroy a hived colony within a year or two? His explanations of this is the underlying thread running through much of the book and the primary topic of the final chapter.
Are bees domesticated? This topic gets an entire chapter of its own. The genetic changes that species undergo during domestication 1 are not seen in honey bees.
Although perhaps not ‘domesticated’, through environmental manipulation we have significantly changed our relationship with bees. We now determine the size of the colony (or at least the space it has). By moving or manipulating the hive we influence what it produces (e.g. propolis, Royal Jelly, heather honey). We also control whether or not it reproduces. Indeed, most beekeepers try to stop their colonies reproducing (swarming) as it results in the loss of bees, and honey.
Throughout the book comparisons are made between the choices ‘wild’ bees make and the choices made for them by beekeepers. For example, the thermal conductivity of the hives used by beekeepers compared with a nest in a tree trunk.
Untold?
Not really.
The strapline on the front of the book indicates that this is the untold story of the honey bee in the wild.
In reality it’s not.
More accurately it’s a very readable compendium of studies published by Seeley and others over the last century or so.
But that’s hardly going to make copies of this £25 book fly off the shelves, so ‘untold’ it is.
In fact, several aspects of the biology of the wild-living honey bee will be familiar to readers of this site. I’ve covered studies by Seeley in discussion of bait hives, drifting, robbing, polyandry and mites in swarms. A quick search turns up ~25 posts in which he gets a mention.
In addition, anyone who is fortunate enough to have already read Honeybee Democracy will be familiar with many bits in the chapter that cover nest site selection. Similarly, the bee lining methods used to locate nests in the Arnot forest have been described in exhaustive detail in his previous book Following the Wild Bees.
Don’t let this put you off.
Honeybee Democracy takes ~250 pages to describe in exhaustive (but still entertaining) detail how swarms choose new nest sites. This topic, together with all sorts of fascinating stuff on comb building and propolis, takes just part of the 40 page ‘Nest’ chapter of The Lives of Bees.
Bee·lining box, in cutaway view to show construction detail.
Similarly, the mechanics of bee lining don’t really get described in the new book, but the wild-living nests discovered using this method feature throughout.
Recommended?
Absolutely. It’s an excellent book.
But be aware that, in addition to a comprehensive account of how bees live in the wild, there’s an agenda here as well.
The sleeve notes (does anyone really read these?) include the words ” … and how wild honey bees may hold the key to reversing the alarming die-off of the planet’s managed honey bee population”.
Global beehive numbers 1968 – 2018
What alarming die off?
The graph above is of the global total of beehive numbers over the last 50 years or so. During this period the number has increased by ~1.7 times.
Of course, there are more beekeepers over the last 50 years (and the global population has more than doubled). This increased number of beekeepers are having to work harder to maintain (and increase) the stocks they manage.
It is therefore both inaccurate and an oversimplification to claim that there’s an alarming die-off in honey bee colonies.
Perhaps the sleeve notes are just to help boost sales?
Something a bit spicy to entice the browser to think that the book they are holding contains the ‘untold’ secrets to ‘saving the bees’?
Save the bees … save humanity
It’s not the first time ‘Save the bees … save humanity’ has been used as a marketing ploy 3. Here’s a graphic I regularly use to introduce my talks on rational Varroa control.
Save the bees …
Pity the image is of a wasp 🙂
Again, don’t let these minor errors in the sleeve blurb put you off.
Whatever the relevance to practical beekeeping (or reversing the “alarming die-off”), the first ten chapters provide the best overview of the lives of wild-living honey bees written by an acknowledged master of science communication.
I read a lot of stuff about honey bees, for work and pleasure.
The Lives of Bees had a wealth of information I was unaware of.
Buy it, or borrow it from your library … you won’t be disappointed.
I’ve used this poster in talks a couple of times to make a distinction between colony collapse disorder (CCD) in the US and colony losses due to disease in the UK.
Save the bees …
It’s a rather striking poster … although it carries the website address www.nrdc.com (which appears to belong to the National Realty and Development Corp.), the logo and the subject are much more likely to be associated with the Natural Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org). Whatever … the message is clear, without bees there will be pollination shortages for many important and valuable fruit and vegetable crops. The term CCD, a still incompletely understood phenomenon where hives are abandoned by workers, was first used in 2006 in the USA and similar types of colony losses have been reported in a number of European countries, though not in the UK. Prior to 2006 there were a range of other names given to apparently similar phenomena – spring dwindle, May disease, fall dwindle disease [PDF] etc.
The ‘Save humanity’ statement possibly refers to the the apocryphal quote attributed to Albert Einstein “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live” … though it’s highly unlikely Einstein ever actually said this. It’s also a rather questionable statement. Certainly honey bees provide important pollination services, but so do many other insects (and not just insects). There are certain crops for which honey bees are important – such as almonds – at least on the scale they grow them in California. However, on a visit-by-visit basis, honey bees can be relatively poor pollinators. For examples, solitary bees such as Osmiasp. are much more efficient pollinators of apples. The inefficiency of honey bees is more than compensated though by their numbers and our ability to move hives to crops that need pollinating.
So, if honey bees are so important, why does the picture above show a wasp? 😉
