John was a 1950 graduate of Medina Senior High School, after which he attended Ohio Wesleyan University, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. Upon graduation, John moved to Texas where he served his country as a pilot in the United States Air Force, achieving the rank of Captain. In 1957, he completed his military service and moved back to Medina, Ohio with his young family. He became the fourth generation of the family business, The A.I. Root Company. John spent the last twenty years of his career at the Root Company serving as President & Chairman of the Board, officially retiring in 2008.

John was a true servant to his community. Most notably he cherished his time serving on the Medina City Council (1962-1976), the Medina General Hospital Board of Directors (1971-2008), the Board of Directors for Ohio Farmer’s Insurance & Westfield Group (1986-2004), the National Candle Association Board of Directors (1989-2010), and the Medina Municipal Airport Advisory Commission (1989-2004).

During his time at the The A.I. Root Company, John was the Executive Publisher of Bee Culture Magazine. He was President of the Honey Industry Council of America from 1962-1963 and 1976-1977, President of the Ohio Agricultural Council from 1973-1974, President and Chairman of the Board for the Eastern Apicultural Society of North America, Inc. in 1978 and Chairman of the Board from 1983-1984, as well as Key Advisory Commission of the Agricultural Technical Institute for nine years (1984-1993). There are numerous other organizations that John has served in over the years.

Early in his life, John garnered a deep love for aviation. This passion persisted through his entire life as a private pilot. During his “free time” John could be found at Medina Municipal Airport piloting his airplanes. A loving and kind man, John will be deeply missed by his family and friends.

John is survived by his beloved wife of 30 years, Elisabeth (Grotte) Root; children, Alan (Esther Morera) Root, Nanette (Harold) Waite, Brad (Kathryn) Root; grandchildren Meredith (David) Gilpin, Christopher (Ashley) Waite, Crystal (Jeremy) Doyle, Alex (Abby Araujo) Root, Kyle (Morgan Moritz) Root, Andrew Root, Emilie Root; great-grandchildren, Claire, Abigail, Evan, Samuel, Hank, Josiah, Owen, Oliver, Elijah, Amelia; siblings, Elizabeth Judkins, Stuart (Diana) Root. He was preceded in death by his parents, Alan and Emilie Root.

While honey bee workers are all the same size, that’s not true for bumblebees. Scientists aren’t sure what’s behind the wide variety in bumble body sizes, but a new UC Riverside project aims to find out.

Certain crops, like greenhouse tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and blueberries, rely on bumblebees for a style of pollination that only bumblebees can perform. Among growers, the preference can be for bigger-bodied bumblebees because they’re thought to be more efficient pollinators.

Enabled by a $750,000 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the research team will investigate factors suspected of influencing bumblebee biology and body size, including climate change, wildfires, and the presence of nearby honey bee colonies.

In many cases, individual animals are born smaller when their habitat has less nutrition available. The researchers want to know if this is also true for bees. “One idea is that honey bees are taking more food resources, resulting in smaller bumbles. This is part of what we will be testing,” said UCR entomologist and project lead Hollis Woodard.

To test this, the researchers will collect bumblebee size data over the next four years from places both with and without honeybees nearby. “It’s hard to find anywhere in the lower 48 without either managed or feral honey bees. For this reason, we’re headed to Alaska for part of the study,” Woodard said.

Fire may also play a role in bumblebee development. Some research has shown that bumblebees are born bigger, and in higher numbers, during the years following a wildfire. Since wildfires are common in California, the research team will also be collecting data from places throughout the state with different types of fire histories.

“Fires are good in some ways for bees,” Woodard said. “As the land recovers from the burn, a lot of flowers appear, offering food.”

In addition to the mystery of what influences the bees’ body size, it’s also unclear what role size plays in a bumble colony. While all bumblebee workers perform the same functions, variation in size could allow the hive as a whole to collect pollen from a wider variety of flowers.

Though bigger bees can collect more pollen, they might not be right for every plant species. For some flowers, especially those that are trumpet-shaped, smaller bumblebees are better pollinators.

“There are theories that bumblebee sizes are just random, or that it’s just generally good to have variation,” Woodard said. ‘Right now, we don’t yet know exactly what this variation in size does for colonies.”

In addition to benefitting crop growers, the team’s findings could ultimately benefit the bees themselves. “Any insights we gain into factors affecting the bumblebees could help us better understand how to bolster their dwindling populations,” Woodard said. “Helping them in turn helps ensure the health of wildflowers, as well as our food supply.”

Source: ucr.edu

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Beekeeping is an Example

NEWS PROVIDED BY

CGTN (Chinese Global Television Network)

BEIJING /PRNewswire/ — Liu Jinliang, a second-generation beekeeper in Miyun District, the northeastern suburb of Beijing, practices multi-box beekeeping. He is China’s first beekeeper to successfully utilize the technique, introduced by the district government in 2016.

It took the young bee farmer five years to fully implement the new technique, and now it is helping his family and local beekeepers live a “sweet” life.

Spurred on by Liu and the local government, around 30 percent of bee farmers in Miyun have now adopted the new technique, greatly boosting the output and quality of their honey. Over 360 low-income farmers in Miyun have shaken off poverty since joining the beekeeping project.

“Through my example, I can motivate people around me. And those people can empower other people around them as well. In this way, we can achieve common prosperity,” Liu told CGTN.

The beekeeping industry in Miyun generated around 130 million yuan ($18.91 million) in revenue in 2020, an increase of 19.3 percent over 2019. Encouraged by what has been achieved in Miyun, more and more bee farmers across China have turned to the multi-box beekeeping technique to raise their honey output while improving quality.

Chinese President Xi Jinping once quoted an ancient Chinese proverb, “The key to running a country is to first enrich the people,” to explain why the country is striving for common prosperity. Liu’s story gives a glimpse of China’s exploration of the paths to achieve that goal.

People-centered philosophy

The saying, which comes from Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, a monumental history book of ancient China compiled about 2,000 years ago, sets forth the traditional Chinese philosophy of governance: the common people are considered the foundation of a country, and only when the people prosper can the country prosper.

This is a classic piece of Chinese wisdom, and it has become part of the governance philosophy of the Chinese government in modern times.

When quoting the saying at a gathering to mark China’s poverty alleviation accomplishments and honor model poverty fighters, President Xi pledged the country would adhere to the people-centered development philosophy and unswervingly follow the path of common prosperity.

“We have always remained committed to standing on the side of the people and consistently stressed that eradicating poverty, improving people’s lives, and achieving common prosperity represent the essential requirements of socialism,” said Xi.

Behind Liu’s success is the Miyun district government. It has helped local beekeepers learn advanced apiculture techniques and provided them with high-quality queen bees at no charge.

To better help beekeepers, the district government has also provided financial aid to support about 30 projects in the sector, with an investment of about 100 million yuan, to help make commercial beekeeping standardized and industrialized.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-06-05/Why-does-China-stick-to-the-path-of-common-prosperity–1kob98IUhB6/index.html

https://youtu.be/Lom4HnpR2xI

Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lom4HnpR2xI

SOURCE CGTN

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: CGTN: Why does China stick to the path of common prosperity? (prnewswire.com)

Researchers shed more light on how insects pollinated the very first flower. (KarinD/Adobe)

The Botanic Gardens of Sydney has published a paper with researchers from Macquarie University and Western Sydney University, shedding more light on one of the earliest origin stories about the birds and the bees.

A large dataset examining what pollinators are relied on by 1,160 species of different flowering plant families has been examined to determine the long relationship insects have had with some of the earliest flowers.

By examining a state-of-the-art ‘evolutionary tree’, researchers believe that insects have pollinated angiosperms, or flowering plants, over most of the plant’s 140-million-year evolution.

The findings of the botanical science study were published in the journal New Phytologist on Tuesday.

Macquarie University PhD student Ruby E. Stephens was the lead author of the paper. She explained the evolutionary tree showed when certain plant families evolved, which helped to advance the understanding of plant history.

“This is a significant discovery, revealing a key aspect of the origin of almost all plants on Earth today,” Stephens said.

“By running different models, we can map backwards from what pollinates a plant in the present, to what might have pollinated the ancestor of that plant in the past.”

A total of 90% of today’s flowering plants are pollinated by insects and the colour, scent, and even sexual mimicry of these many flowers have evolved to attract insects.

However, a number of other flowers do not depend on insects and instead rely on vertebrate animals, wind or even water to transport pollen.

According to researchers, until this study it was not clear which form of flower pollination came first.

The authors further believe that the first flower was also likely to be insect-pollinated.

“Plants are the lifeblood of our planet, and our study highlights the importance of insects to plant reproduction throughout Earth’s history,” Stephens said.

Dr Hervé Sauquet from the Botanic Gardens’ plant discovery and evolution team noted that in addition to insect pollinators, the research uncovered how other forms of pollination changed over time.

Wind pollination, for example, was more likely to evolve in open habitats towards the poles. Meanwhile, locations such as closed rainforests near the equator were where animal pollination was more likely to take place.

“Pollination from vertebrate animals like birds, bats, small mammals, even lizards, has evolved and reverted numerous times throughout history,” Sauquet said.

“Wind pollination has also evolved many times, but it is harder to reverse — once plants go pollination by wind, they rarely go back.”

Washington University biology expert Professor Susanne Renner said the findings confirmed insects pollinated angiosperms for most of this plant lineage’s history.

“This underscores the need for the conservation of insects — their role as pollinators is essential for the continued existence of plants,” she said.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Insects have a lot to do with ancestral flower power, study finds (themandarin.com.au)

Two pending endangered species listings for pollinators can have major impacts on the almond industry as many almond growers have added pollinator forage such as blooming cover crops, hedgerows and floral strips to add value to their operation. Josette Lewis, Almond Board of California chief scientific officer, said 2023 will be a decisive year for the endangered listing of the monarch butterfly and native bees in California, which leads to questions for growers. However, work is underway to protect producers if this happens and Lewis took some time to answer those questions.

Q – What is the status of the monarch butterfly being listed as an endangered species?

Lewis – A couple of years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made the decision that monarch butterflies were warranted as an endangered species, but they had other priorities at the time. So, while it was not going to be listed, they are required by law to revisit that decision by the end of this calendar year.

Q – If they do get listed as endangered, what does that mean for an almond grower? 

Lewis – It means a couple of things:

The first is that a lot of almond growers have stepped up and added pollinator forage, flower resources and habitat to their farms and land around their farms. We’ve seen a great response in terms of the number of growers who have registered as Bee Friendly Farms, who are putting in flowering cover crops, and working with organizations like Monarch Joint Venture to specifically put in monarch habitat around their ranches. Several handlers are working with growers on pollinator habitat too, as it has value to some almond buyers.

For those growers who have stepped up, we want to make sure that they are protected if the monarch is listed as an endangered species. So, if they accidentally harm the caterpillars or the butterflies themselves, we want to make sure that they are not breaking the law because they’ve done such a good job of adding that forage into their operation.

The other issue, on an industry level, is that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – who has to approve every crop production product our industry can use – was also mandated by law to increase their review of the potential negative impacts of pesticides on endangered species.

We know that if the monarch is listed, some of the products we use when they come up for re-registration, or any new products that are developed and need to be registered, will have extra scrutiny for their potential impact and could involve more restrictions on the use of those products.

Q – So it sounds like this could be a legal concern for growers and a bigger concern of more regulation on certain products if the monarch gets listed as endangered. What is ABC doing to address these two concerns? 

Lewis – We’ve been working with the Almond Alliance of California, other California agricultural interest groups, and some conservation groups who have been valuable partners of the California almond industry to negotiate a conservation agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that would protect growers who have monarch habitat if they accidentally harm any of those monarch butterflies or larvae.

The way those agreements work is that we have to show that there’s a net benefit to the pollinators. Things like adding flowers and habitat for monarch butterflies, and in exchange for doing those good things, in this agreement you’re then protected if you accidentally harm monarchs.

Also, as part of those negotiations, we are including the kind of practices that reduce risks of crop protection products and try to demonstrate that we can use those safely and still have a net benefit to monarch butterflies.

Q – “Net benefit” seems like the important term in this conversation. ABC grower-funded research has already been completed in this realm and showed pollinator gains from increased habitat outweighs the risk. Can you explain that?  

Lewis – That’s right. ABC funded research with a native bee expert at UC Davis, which was published last year, showed that when farmers add floral strips – such as wildflower strips, part of a hedge row or just wildflowers near the outside the orchard – the added food for native bees helps protect those bees from the impacts of pesticide exposure. So, there is a net benefit to those native bees.

This research provides good, peer-reviewed and science-based evidence that shows these kinds of activities we have seen many growers in our industry do have a net benefit.

Q – ABC and partners are already addressing these concerns, which is good because more and more growers and handlers are utilizing this practice, right?

Lewis – A lot of growers have been looking at cover crop and adding that into their orchard management. This year in particular, I heard a grower who planted cover crops talk about how the water didn’t stay standing in their orchards back in early spring when we had so much rain, rather that the water infiltrated and drained much more quickly.

There are agronomic benefits from the practice that are worth considering, in addition to benefits to pollinators. And adding more permanent habitat outside the orchard is another area where a number of our handlers in the industry have seen a market value. Buyers want to know that they have a supply chain of almonds that allows biodiversity and a healthy ecosystem on the farm. Some handlers have really leaned in with their growers and are encouraging those kinds of practices, and that’s added certain value to both growers and handlers.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Pending Endangered Listings: What Growers Need to Know (almonds.com)

Todd Harmer

Without bees, there is no food, so keeping hives healthy is of utmost importance. That job is becoming more difficult thanks to an outbreak of disease and the effects of climate change.

That’s where special apiary inspectors come in, who check on the health of keepers’ bees to help prevent the spread of honeybee diseases and pests.

Marie Cairns, a bee keeper who runs a small apiary in the Cowichan Valley, had her hives checked on Friday by Tara Galpin, an apiary inspector for South Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands.

“First of all, it was all about the pollination, but then the more you learn about bees the more fascinating they are,” Cairns said.

Cairns has been bee keeping in the valley for nine years. She got her inspection for free, as any bee keeper can, so she can sell some of her hive.

“You have bees and you want your own bees to stay healthy, so you want their bees to be healthy because they fly and bring back disease if you don’t or mites or anything else,” she said.

Galpin is looking for a few different diseases and pests. One that comes up often is the varroa mite, a parasitic mite that feeds on honey bees and causes a disease called varroosis.

“They feed out the fat body of the bee, so it’s like if we had the size of a rat on our human body feeding on our liver,” Galpin explained.

Unfortunately, Cairns’ bees had too many mites. “My first time failing,” she said.

But this experienced bee keeper is unfazed, and will work with the inspector to apply the appropriate treatment.

Galpin says unpredictable spring weather due to climate change—that have been cooler and damper—is helping to spread fungal disease and doesn’t allow bees to forage for food when they need it most.

Keeping bees in good shape is important, as along with other native pollinators they play a key role in sustaining B.C.’s food system, and contribute an estimated $250 million to the province’s economy.

The inspector says losses this year in bee colonies is between 30 to 40 per cent—climate change and the spread of disease keeping the pressure on bees and their keepers.

“More than anything, we need diversity of plants for our bees to forage from and diversity in our food landscapes,” she said.

Importing bees plays a major role in maintaining the bee population across Canada, and combined with the work of inspectors like Galpin, they’re ensuring bees keep food on our table.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Disease and climate change put pressure on bees and their keepers: apiary inspector | CTV News

• Associated Press

Beekeepers from Best Bees inspect two hives on the roof of the Warren Rudman U.S. Court House

CONCORD, N.H. — While judges, lawyers and support staff at the federal courthouse in Concord, New Hampshire, keep the American justice system buzzing, thousands of humble honeybees on the building’s roof are playing their part in a more important task — feeding the world.

The Warren Rudman U.S. Court House, in Concord, N.H. The roof of the building hosts two bee hives, a part of a national effort to increase the population of pollinators.

The Warren B. Rudman courthouse is one of several federal facilities around the country participating in the General Services Administration’s Pollinator Initiative, a government program aimed at assessing and promoting the health of bees and other pollinators, which are critical to life on Earth.

“Anybody who eats food, needs bees,” said Noah Wilson-Rich, co-founder, CEO and chief scientific officer of the Boston-based Best Bees company, which contracts with the government to take care of the honeybee hives at the New Hampshire courthouse and at some other federal buildings.

Bees help pollinate the fruits and vegetables that sustain humans, he said. They pollinate hay and alfalfa, which feed cattle that provide the meat we eat. And they promote the health of plants that, through photosynthesis, give us clean air to breathe.

Yet the busy insects that contribute an estimated $25 billion to the U.S. economy annually are under threat from diseases, agricultural chemicals and habitat loss that kill about half of all honeybee hives annually. Without human intervention, including beekeepers creating new hives, the world could experience a bee extinction that would lead to global hunger and economic collapse, Wilson-Rich said.

The pollinator program is part of the federal government’s commitment to promoting sustainability, which includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting climate resilient infrastructure, said David Johnson, the General Services Administration’s sustainability program manager for New England.

The GSA’s program started last year with hives at 11 sites.

Some of those sites are no longer in the program. Hives placed at the National Archives building in Waltham, Massachusetts, last year did not survive the winter.

Since then, other sites were added. Two hives, each home to thousands of bees, were placed on the roof of the Rudman building in March.

The program is collecting data to find out whether the honeybees, which can fly 3 to 5 miles from the roof in their quest for pollen, can help the health of not just the plants on the roof, but also of the flora in the entire area, Johnson said.

“Honeybees are actually very opportunistic,” he said. “They will feed on a lot of different types of plants.”

The program can help identify the plants and landscapes beneficial to pollinators and help the government make more informed decisions about what trees and flowers to plant on building grounds.

Best Bees tests the plant DNA in the honey to get an idea of the plant diversity and health in the area, Wilson-Rich said, and they have found that bees that forage on a more diverse diet seem to have better survival and productivity outcomes.

Other federal facilities with hives include the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services headquarters in Baltimore; the federal courthouse in Hammond, Indiana; the Federal Archives Records Center in Chicago; and the Denver Federal Center.

The federal government isn’t alone in its efforts to save the bees. The hives placed at federal sites are part of a wider network of about 1,000 hives at home gardens, businesses and institutions nationwide that combined can help determine what’s helping the bees, what’s hurting them and why.

The GSA’s Pollinator Initiative is also looking to identify ways to keep the bee population healthy and vibrant and model those lessons at other properties — both government and private sector — said Amber Levofsky, the senior program advisor for the GSA’s Center for Urban Development.

“The goal of this initiative was really aimed at gathering location-based data at facilities to help update directives and policies to help facilities managers to really target pollinator protection and habitat management regionally,” she said.

And there is one other benefit to the government honeybee program that’s already come to fruition: the excess honey that’s produced is donated to area food banks.

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The Stark Reality of Being a Long-Term Beekeeper

By: James E. Tew

Overall, beekeeping is enjoyable – but it’s not always easy
Readers, in several previous articles, I have danced to this tune with you. Yet, for personal reasons, I feel a need to try again. Though many of us feel it, it’s not easy to explain what we feel about our bee efforts. I am an entomologist and I do not have a deep background in human psychological issues. Clearly, I should stick with what I know, but sometimes I just need to write about what I feel. Even so, I struggle to word it for you. My core thought is – Though beekeeping is generally rewarding (After consideration, I have opted to use the word “rewarding” rather than the word “enjoyable.” Cleaning dead-outs is not enjoyable, but as I prepare the fouled equipment for future use, I feel rewarded.), it’s not always easy.

I’ve done this bee thing for a long time
Having a long history in keeping bees is a helpful attribute for any beekeeper. You remember “when” and you acquire a lot of personal bee-related stories. You learn a lot.

Through the years, I have learned that my bee interests will cool a bit during Winter months. So, I adapt to that reality. During those cold, quiet periods, I read about bees, or I write perfunctory articles about understanding more about our craft. I assemble or repair equipment. I plan for the next season. I just try to stay busy in my craft during this down time. While it is a useful time, this quiet period cannot be called true beekeeping. Rather, those times are “preparing for actual beekeeping.” Try as I might, my bee interest drops to a lower ebb during these slack periods. How could it not?

From experience acquired during many previous quiet Winters, I know this bee-related seasonal feeling is coming. I expect it. It’s a normal part of my beekeeping psyche. I also know that when Spring comes around, I will – just like my bees – once again awaken and heat back to a higher level of beekeeping interest. In my earlier years, I don’t recall a mentor telling me that my bee interest would naturally rise and fall – usually based on the passing of annual seasons.

Building a fire
Successful beekeeping is much like building a glowing bonfire. Fuel must be accumulated. Dates are set. A location is selected. All is made ready. The fire is ignited, it starts slowly and, as more fuel is added, it steadily grows until it reaches its capacity. Then, invariably, it begins to ebb. Without more fuel and tending, it will die out and extinguish. Interest in beekeeping is much like building a fire. It waxes and wanes. Unfortunately, for some of us, the fire goes out. The good news is that the fire can be rebuilt.

In the May 2023 issue of this magazine, I broached some of the feelings that I have about beeyards that I have now vacated. That was one of my most recent efforts to write about beekeeping feelings.

Figure 1. Part of my beeyard in better times.

In that piece, I described the upcoming fate of my oldest yard – my home yard – and how I will need to adapt to having new, near neighbors and a new street abutting my beeyard. I covered my feelings about that issue in my writings for that month. All things change, don’t they?

Then came the wind storm
In early April 2023, a significant wind storm, lasting three days, blew through my area. Trees and apiary damage was all about me. My bee equipment was scattered helter-skelter. On two consecutive stormy days, I had a fifty-five-year-old Colorado Spruce come down. These trees abounded my apiary.

Figure 2. It is not easy working these hives.

On one hand, I can’t complain too much. One tree fell away from my beeyard while the other precisely fell in the only place it could to cause the least damage. I still had three colonies that were crushed. The high wind apparently blew the bees away. There were only a few remaining bees in those obliterated colonies. They did not survive. However, the damage could have been worse. On one hand, that’s the good news. On the other hand, I now have a huge tree down in the middle of my home yard and I have bee equipment either destroyed or scattered throughout my yard. (You must know that I will not be giving any tours of my beeyard any time soon.)

What a mess
I confess that I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of clearing this chaos. I suppose I will select equipment that is still usable, or can be made usable, and form a burn pile for the remainder. But it gets even better. In the middle of all this confusion, I must move the living colonies from the area. Here’s why.

The tree removal people

Figure 3. Part of my beeyard challenge.

I had tree removal people come to view the situation. Being professional arborists, I had hoped they would be reasonably comfortable around flying, confused bees. That did not happen! As the tree company representative reviewed the scene – and the bees – from the blue, he asked, “If the bees are a problem, do you mind if we spray them?” Readers, I was truly astounded. I think that I probably gasped. Again, I must write that I was stunned. Within that scenario, I would have even more dead bees and a new category of mess. Now I would also have pesticide contaminated equipment to deal with. After a few seconds, I was able to form sentences and was able to tell this uninformed guy that, “No, I will move these hives to a distant location so his workers could go about their business of tree removal.”

Much like the old late night TV commercials, I now tell you, “But wait, there’s more!” Probably sensing that he had just mightily offended me, he tried to rebound by showing feigned interest in bees. He asked, “There’s a queen in that box and the bees surround her – right?” I felt as though I was having some kind of medical exam. I just wanted this whole encounter to be over. I responded that he was somewhat correct but having NO interest in trying to teach beekeeping, I immediately returned the problem of the downed trees. He gave me a fair price and left to attend to my neighbor’s downed trees.

This was all a new and unfamiliar reality, being a long-term beekeeper. I have never had my apiary so discombobulated. Then in addition, having people so unfamiliar with bees be so intimately associated with my colonies and with my stressed psyche was a new learning experience for this old beekeeper.

I’m still learning
As I have worked to clean and reorganize my apiary site, I have clearly learned that having a large coniferous tree in the very middle of your apiary is not a positive beeyard feature. As a younger man, I would have fired up my chain saw and removed some of the barrier to my bees. I’m not a young man and I am paying a professional company to clear the mess. Let them earn their money has been my feeling. So, I have been trying to work around the big tree as I gather equipment and rearrange bee hives.

I wear high-quality ventilated bee suits. As if to make bad things worse, the needles on the dead tree grab my bee suit and puncture me. At first it was surprising, then it was frustrating, but the stabbing and sticking progressed to being outright annoying. I can hardly move in my apiary without my suit being grabbed by prickly needles that are strong and determined.

But wait, there’s even more!
You recall that I have other issues beyond the downed trees. Remember that I will be having new neighbors located near my beeyard. With this reality in mind, last Spring, I had what I originally thought was a genius idea. I will allow Multiflora Rose, an invasive plant, grow to form an impenetrable barrier between me and my new neighbors. After all, that was the original intent of introducing this obnoxious plant into this country. It was to be a hedgerow plant. Unfortunately, the plant went derelict and is now nearly uncontrollable.

Figure 4. Multiflora Rose in full bloom. Photo credit: Leslie J. Mehroff, University of Connecticut

Multiflora Rose and ventilated bee suits
Being otherwise cut back, this mega-prickly plant now grows at the edges of my beeyard, but in the storm, confusion and destruction, the unwelcome plant has also been upset. Its tentacles reach here and there and, in some cases, snakes through the branches of the downed tree. As bad as it is to have pine needles grabbing my bee suit, Multiflora Rose is profoundly worse.

It is as though the plant is alive. In snake-like fashion, it grabs my suit and dearly holds onto me. I literally rip it off only to have it whip back and grab me again. On two occasions, I had to remove my suit to get the vine detached from my suit. I must wear bee gloves to deal with the thorny plant, not for protection from bees. I can only candidly write that this is not an enjoyable episode in my beekeeping journey.

The stark reality of being a long-term beekeeper
This month, I will be seventy-five years old and I will have been keeping bees for fifty consecutive years. Yet, I am essentially starting over again in my home yard. I’m either impressively dedicated or a very slow learner.

As traumatizing as it has been for me, I have begun to accept the reality that my most personal beeyard was going to change anyway. I was preparing to deal with that reality. Now, part of my tree barrier has vanished. Even more changes are coming.

While trying to make lemonade from lemons within this fallen tree situation, I admit that, in a bizarre way, the trees coming down will assist in additional future fencing that I would be needing anyway. I have already been forced to relocate the remaining colonies to another temporary location. I was going to need to do that task later this Summer anyway.

For the first time in more than forty-five years, I will (temporarily) not have any hives at this location. The yard will essentially be wide open. No trees, no bees and heavy construction nearby. I have a rare window to completely restructure my core yard into a “new and improved” location. I plan to electrify my little bee storage barn and install cameras for security and observational purposes. So, is this a disaster or an opportunity?

Yet another reality of beekeeping
Several of my local beekeeping friends have offered to help, but so far, I have politely declined their offer. Why? Because of “feelings.” These are my bees and they are my responsibility. If I can’t do the job, then I shouldn’t take on the job. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I’m on a lifelong apicultural journey and it’s my thing. I should not seek help from others for the occasional distasteful aspects of my journey in order for me to be able to enjoy the positive aspects of my journey. No doubt, I will get back to you if any of this situation changes in even more unexpected ways.

My lifelong good friend once said…
I once had a lifelong professional friend tell me that I only wrote “disaster” articles. It was a passing comment that he made in jest that I have never forgotten. In fact, I do write about stressful beekeeping events because, to me, those are the events, the episodes, that make me grow in my chosen craft. These trying episodes give me unwanted depth and forced understanding. Also, my trying experiences make me compassionate when other beekeepers tell me of their issues and concerns. Therefore, in this article, I choose to use the word, reality rather than disaster.

I will clean this situation up and I will reestablish colonies in my home yard. It will take a lot of work that is not particularly enjoyable and it will require me to take a lot of naps. It’s beekeeping. Overall, I enjoy parts of it immensely.

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

City Bee, Country Bee
By: Jay Evans, USDA Beltsville Bee Lab

In Aesop’s fable, City (Town) Mouse, Country Mouse, a city mouse regales her skeptical country cousin with a rosy view of high density living. Sampling both, the country mouse prefers to stay put, largely because “the country mouse lives in a cozy nest at the bottom of a tree. Her home is small, but it is warm and comfortable.” Plus… no cats!

Beekeepers and bee scientists like to contrast the lives of bees under our care in apiaries (dense cities of colonies) versus those out on their own in trees. Aside from giving general insights into bee biology, these comparisons can predict the risks of managed and feral bees sharing disease while also showing how well ‘city’ and ‘country’ bees deal with various stresses. We have great data for the numbers of managed colonies, but how many country bees are we talking about?

I have discussed before the achingly beautiful (and hard) work by Tom Seeley and students assessing feral bees in a U.S. forest. Borrowing from those and similar studies, we can get a rough estimate of how many country bees there are in hollow trees and other cavities. My Sunday afternoon and small brain can’t grapple with honey bee density in deserts and the vast tundra, but considering four adjoining states (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia) with decent land-use data from the USDA (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/maps-and-state-rankings-of-major-land-uses/), we can estimate ‘suitable’ acreage (fallow fields, pasture and forests) at around 58 million acres total (60% of the available land). Using consensus estimates of 2.5 colonies/square-mile (one colony/square kilometer, 0.004 colonies/acre), one arrives at 233,000 feral honey bee colonies in these four states. According to USDA (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Surveys/Guide_to_NASS_Surveys/Bee_and_Honey/) ,there were 67,500 managed colonies in these states on January 1, 2021, surveying beekeepers with five or more hives. Even doubling this number to account for backyard beekeepers and those who evade surveillance, there are still fewer managed than feral colonies in these regions.

So, free-living bees are likely to be important for their own sake, and for the environment. What’s it like out there? Taking a disease angle, several studies have compared the relative disease loads of managed and feral colonies in the U.S. Amy Geffre and colleagues from San Diego sampled boxed and free-living colonies (three colonies each) seven times over the course of a year to measure virus levels for three common bee viruses (Preliminary analysis shows that feral and managed honey bees in Southern California have similar levels of viral pathogens. 2023. Journal of Apicultural Research, 62:3, 485-487, DOI:10.1080/00218839.2021.2001209). Both colony types were remarkably similar in virus levels, changing with the season but hardly differing from each other.

In Persistent effects of management history on honey bee colony virus abundances (2021. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology 179:107520, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jip.2020.107520), Lewis Bartlett and colleagues found similar patterns between free-living and managed colonies but noted that the style of management might play a role. Namely, colonies maintained in a larger commercial apiary (hundreds of colonies) tended to have the highest levels of most viruses, with feral and low-intensity ‘backyard’ colonies being about the same. As in most field studies, there is abundant variation for viral disease within each category, so these results will need even more sampling to see how viruses and bees fare under different management styles. Nevertheless, they suggest that beekeepers adopting a ‘country bee’ approach by spacing out colonies to reduce urban interactions will be doing their bees a favor.

In the most ambitious study to date, Chauncy Hinshaw and colleagues surveyed 25 colonies each from feral and managed colonies in Pennsylvania (2021. The role of pathogen dynamics and immune gene expression in the survival of feral honey bees. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 8, 594263. https://doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2021.2001209). They surveyed ample bee numbers per collection (75 worker bees), perhaps getting a better sense of average disease loads. Even better, they paired similar city and country colonies from a bunch of regions, which helps account for other factors that might change virus loads. In this study, managed colonies tended to have lower levels of mite-transmitted deformed wing virus, presumably reflecting mite treatments, and roughly similar levels of black queen cell virus and nosema. Perhaps reflecting pathogen exposure, feral colonies had higher levels of several immune response proteins as well. Given the higher number of sampled colonies, these researchers were also able to show how their measurements related to colony fates. As in prior studies, deformed wing virus, presumably alongside mite loads, was a good predictor of a bad colony outcome.

Colonies showing higher levels of two immune genes, once other factors were evened out, were more likely to survive the study period. Arguably, these proteins might be good predictors of genetic components that help bees survive in the face of disease.

More can be done to contrast the lives and successes of city and country bees. These comparisons can help improve bee management by those of us keeping bees in clusters of Langstroth high-rises. It is also fun to think of bees in the ancestral habits they have followed for thousands of years. Country bees almost certainly have more threats now than they did when humans were more scarce, and there has to be some level of contact between city bees and country bees that muddies all of these comparisons, but in many ways the presence of country bees at all is comforting. Left to their own care, they are making country homes work wherever they can, and that is a good lesson for beekeepers.

In full disclosure, the lives of country bees were not on my mind until a recent inquiry from British bee researcher Francis Ratnieks and his graduate student Ollie Visick. In their Laboratory for Apiculture and Social Insects (https://www.sussex.ac.uk/lasi/), they are comparing the lives of free-living honey bees in their native range to their hived cousins. As ecologists, their studies will give insights into how honey bees used to live in the forests and fields of England. I thank them for the prompt (and welcome hot tips from any of you) and look forward to reading their results!

We all know that one of the greater challenges in beekeeping is shepherding bees through our variable northern Winters. But what other weather factors should we consider when we are planning our beehive inspections, splits, mite control or feeding regimens?

In my experiences with beekeeping, I have come to rely on signals from nature and the variable weather patterns in my own surrounding environment rather than reliance on specific calendar dates that follow the same schedule year after year. So in this article, I will relate some of the clues and weather events that signal the appropriate time to take certain actions that have resulted in my success in getting at least one hive through every Winter for the past thirteen years. My greatest result occurred several years ago with nine hives going into Winter and those nine hives successfully surviving through the following Summer. This result allowed me to sell a few nucleus hives (nucs), raise a few more queens and take another step toward being a self-sustaining beekeeper.

As the Year Starts
At the beginning of the year, shortly after Christmas, is when I briefly open hives to add a cane sugar food supplement to the hive. It seems that every so often around the Christmas/New Year’s holidays there is a day or two that gets above 45°F (7°C) that allow for both cleansing flights and the insertion of extra food supplies. There are various ways to supply additional food resources including hard candy boards, sugar patties or granulated sugar over newspaper. I hesitate adding any sugar source earlier than late December. Any form of cane sugar is harder for the bees to digest and if they decide to tap into the additional hard sugar source in the Fall, it can possibly result in a form of dysentery. Dysentery is often the result of bees not being able to leave the hive for cleansing flights and finding it necessary to relieve themselves in the hive. The February and March time frames are when most hives are lost over Winter due to a lack of food resources.

Winter sugar over parchment paper is nearly used up, the remains of a partial pollen patty at lower left of sugar.

Another Winter task is that every other month or so I will also use a bent ½ inch metal bar to clean out any dead bees from the bottom board. Once temperatures only occasionally drop below freezing at night, I will also remove my insulation sleeves that cover all but the bottom and top entrances to the hives. Some of my fellow beekeepers use blanket insulation and also remove them when temps begin to only erratically fall below freezing at night.

My next clue is the budding of maple trees in my yard. In some years, I have seen white pollen brought into hives in very early February; possibly from pussy willow shrubs, but not of sufficient quantity to support the needs of potential new larva. If one does see pollen being brought into the hive, this is a clue that the hive is most likely healthy and the queen has started to lay eggs, although in very small quantities this early in the year. In late March or early April there is one of a dozen maples in my yard that is always first to have the buds pop open. On a warm, sunny day, standing under the tree, it sounds like you are standing in a beehive. I use this as my signal to check the cane sugar supply once again and add a partial pollen patty to each hive.

The next pollen/nectar flow will not occur until a month later, in late April or early May. If they gather enough pollen from maples and other sources they will not use much of the pollen patty. But if rainy, cold weather precludes much pollen collection they may use most, or all, of the supplied patty and it may even need to be replaced before the dandelion bloom.

Heavy dandelion bloom is the next signal I use to know that Spring flowers and the dandelions are providing the first nectar flow. This is also my signal to do my first deep hive inspection and commence with any splits I may wish to do. Moving frames around, even if exactly replaced before dandelion bloom, can disrupt the hive in such a way that the cluster does not reform to provide the needed warmth for new eggs and larva resulting in the loss of the hive.

Bent metal bar used to clean out bottom board in Winter.

Opening a hive has a different meaning than inspecting a hive. Up to this point, I have only opened the top of hives to add sugar or pollen patties, while inspecting means to quickly examine each frame as it is removed and replaced or substituted if doing a split. The methodology of splits was covered in the April issue so I will not repeat my split techniques here. This is also the time where I will clean off the bottom board and remove excess old or pollen saturated frames.

Once May arrives, the beekeeping season gets into full swing here in SE Michigan. It is a good time to do the first mite check and initiate treatment, if called for. It is suggested that for the first few months of beekeeping the new beekeeper check hives once a week to every ten days. This is also a good recommendation for any new hives or nucs that have been started in order to monitor their progress. These do not have to be deep hive inspections looking at every frame. Often starting an inspection by pulling a frame or two from one side until eggs/larva are spotted is enough to see the hive is functioning well with an adequate queen without ever seeing the queen or looking at every single frame. As your comfort level and knowledge increases, hives may not need to be inspected for a month or more if things look normal with bees coming and going. Bees that are bringing in some pollen is a good sign there is a laying queen and larva to be fed.

Weather Affects Flying Time
Since beginning beekeeping, I find I keep a much closer watch of weather forecasts to determine the best times to work with my hives dependent on weather. As the Summer flowers start blossoming and nectar flows get into full swing, weather is the key factor in how much time bees can be flying and making collections of nectar, water, pollen or propolis. Any new splits or weaker hives can benefit from a feeding of one to one sugar syrup and an initial mite treatment if needed. I like to use a single Hopguard strip in five frame starter nucs just as a precaution. From this point on through the Summer, it is a matter of periodically checking hives to be sure the queen is laying, mite loads do not become excessive and no inherent diseases occur. When all but one or two frames in the top most super are drawn with comb and filled with brood or nectar and honey it is time to add another super. I prefer to keep my bee’s brood chamber in two ten-frame deeps with a queen excluder under any honey supers that are continually added through the Summer. I know of area beekeepers that work with eight frame medium supers and use three supers as their brood chamber with equal success. If I were to start over again, I would most likely choose the eight frame triple supers due to the weight factor of a ten frame deep super when full.

Taking weather into consideration, there are factors that come into play when the bees will be less agitated when doing an inspection. It is generally recommended that inspections be done on days when the outside temperature is above 55°F (13°C). On a warm, sunny day, most of the foragers will be out of the hive. If there is a front moving in or it is rainy out, the bees seem to be able to sense this and will be more agitated. Likewise, cloudy or windy days are not optimal times for inspections. The time of day that works the best seems to be between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., although on nice Summer days that are longer, inspections can stretch into the late afternoon or early evenings.

When opening a hive, listen to the noise of the bees. If it goes from a peaceful hum to a louder roar it may not be the best time for a deep inspection of all frames. I recall helping a new beekeeper several years ago who had a work schedule that allowed for inspections to only occur on weekends. Several months of rainy or windy weather made it quite difficult to inspect during optimal weather which made for a more difficult beekeeping Summer. The hobby beekeeper with other employment challenges may find it difficult to find optimal overlaps between good weather and their free time to inspect hives.

Most of my reading and research indicates that mite checks are recommended about every month to month and half with the most critical time being August through September. This is when the mite population is exploding just as the bee population begins to decrease in preparation for Winter. Mite population control is without question the current most important part of beekeeping to insure hive survival over the coming Winter. When doing splits, I insert drone frames which forces me to get into new hives in less than 24 days for their removal. This assumes drone comb has been drawn, capped and drone brood is present. Mites prefer drone brood due to the slightly longer 24 day period it takes for drones to emerge. Removing drone frames prior to 24 days precludes a mite explosion as drones emerge from cells. When mite counts warrant treatment, I follow with a formic treatment in late June or early July followed by another treatment in late August or early September and finally one or two oxalic acid dribbles in October and late November if needed.

Harvesting Honey
Fully capped frames of honey can be taken any time of the beekeeping Summer/Fall season. I have taken honey from remaining Spring hives where the bees did not survive the Winter. If doing this, it is easiest if the honey frames are warmed and checked for any crystallization. Extracting frames that are partially crystallized can quickly plug up the filtration screens and make it very hard to strain the resultant honey. I have found it much easier to feed any unused overwintered frames back to the bees or use them in new hives or nuc splits. Bees from active hives will soon find frames that are set out some distance away from the apiary and will remove the surplus honey to existing honey supers. I have also had some luck with a partial super of near full frames placed over an inner cover that is on top of the upper most honey super allowing bees to clean out the excess frames of honey. During my first few years of beekeeping I only collected honey once in the Fall. This sometimes resulted in very tall hives as supers were added to give the bees more space.

Three deeps and four full honey supers with a fifth added before Fall honey harvest reached over six feet and resulted in future harvests occurring twice a season.

I have since decided it is easier to make a harvest in late July followed by another in September. Any Fall flow is left for the bees to backfill the brood chamber for their Winter honey supply. If new nucs or hives are made from splits, those new starts may not produce any excess honey for the beekeeper in their first Summer. Taking too much honey from the bees in their first season is also a reason for Winter loss as this may result in Winter starvation.

The amount of nectar the bees collect that can be turned into honey is directly related to weather conditions. Continual rain and thunderstorms during a peak nectar flow can significantly cut down on flying time and wash away available flower nectar. Dearth periods where there is no rain for weeks also effects nectar availability, as the plants are using available ground moisture to sustain leaves and growth rather than producing pollen and nectar for flowers and seeds. Weather that is hotter than normal or nights that are colder than normal also impact the amount of nectar that plants produce. As the beekeeper learns to keep a close eye on weather and forecasts, they can better determine optimal times for inspections and if there will be a larger or smaller honey harvest.

Another aspect to consider is when to start nucs for overwintering. I have found that nucleus hives of four or five frames are best started in May or June but no later than the beginning of July. Four frame nucs started in those months may need a second or even a third story four-frame super added to make space for the increasing number of bees. The earlier the start, the more frames that may need to be added. In the following Spring, five frame nucs can be sold and excess frames used to begin new hives or nucs or simply used to increase ones hive count.

Fall Weather Clues
As Fall weather temperatures get cooler and daylight time gets shorter, the bees will be out foraging less and Fall nectar flows are sometimes questionable. Hives that have had their last honey harvest may benefit from Fall feeding of 2:1 sugar syrup. Any extracted honey supers can be placed over the inner cover and under the outer cover such that only the bees in the hive can clean out the honey supers for storage and reuse the following year. There is less chance of bees storing additional nectar/honey in the extracted honey super if it is placed on a different hive than that from which it was taken.

As the temperatures start to drop below 40°F (4.5°C) at night, it is time to combine hives or restrict hives to smaller spaces. This will also be when the Fall flowers such as golden rod and wild purple asters have passed their peak. If there are several weak hives they can be combined using the newspaper method between supers and pinching the weaker queen. Although, I have had very heavily populated hives come through the Winter in three deeps, I like to confine bees to only one or two ten-frame deeps as Winter approaches. New hives or swarms caught earlier in the Summer are usually best if confined to one ten-frame deep while established hives with a large population of bees may be better if allowed to have two deeps.

As stated earlier, August and September are critical months to keep mite counts under control. A day or two after doing a mite treatment, another test for mites is highly recommended to see if that treatment had an effect. If mite counts are still higher than recommended (3 per 100 in Fall) another treatment may be needed. High mite counts during these months are a strong indicator that the hive may not survive the Winter. As temperatures start to dip below freezing at night, it’s time to winterize the hives. I use a combination of a coroplast sleeve over the sides of the hive as well as Vivaldi style spacers for ventilation over the inner cover.

Coroplast plastic sleeves over hives.

There are other numerous ways to insulate a hive, such as using tarpaper or hive blankets if Winter temperatures can get very cold or are somewhat variable in your area. And this brings us full circle to the beginning of the next year.

As you become more experienced as a beekeeper, noting the changes in nature can lead to more efficient beekeeping dependent on your environments weather conditions rather than on calendar dates. I have found that keeping good notes has helped me improve from year to year. If you are not in a note taking mood, I have included a checkoff page (Download PDF) that can be copied and used as you inspect your hives. This is a slightly modified checklist obtained from a local beekeeper and used with permission from Jim Ford, who works with a Boy Scout troop to obtain various merit badges including beekeeping. Using clues from how weather patterns effect nature in your local environment can lead to a better beekeeping experience.

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The Plastic Legacy

Are the toxic chemicals in plastic affecting you and your bees?

By: Ross Conrad

Plastic has become ubiquitous in our lives and is clearly responsible for significant advances in fields as varied as medicine, sports, aeronautics, electronics, food packaging, textiles and construction. Agriculture has also come to rely heavily on plastic, and as beekeepers, we have come to depend on plastic for a multitude of beekeeping uses large and small. This includes every part of the hive in addition to queen excluders, smoker bellows, honey packaging, mating nuc boxes, feeders, support pins, hive wrapping and netting, propolis and small hive beetle traps, hive straps, bee helmets and brushes, extracting equipment and more.

Unfortunately, this incredibly useful stuff is also responsible for slowly and quietly inflicting widespread damage that seriously threatens human and environmental health, as well as the economy. This is well documented in a recent report by the Minderoo-Monaco Commission, and the harm includes illness and death resulting from every phase of plastic’s life cycle, and the damage is getting worse (Landrigan et al., 2023).

The report’s lead author, Dr. Phillip J. Landrigan is the director of the Global Public Health Program and Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College. Landrigran, who has spent decades researching the health effects of environmental pollutants, also worked on the first studies that looked into the dangers of lead exposure in children.

During the past couple decades, plastic hive parts and beekeeping equipment have become common and yet we know little about the impacts to bees that the chemicals that leach out of plastic can have on honey bee health.

Production
As the Minderoo-Monaco Commission report outlines, plastic is made from carbon-based polymers that combine many small molecules bonded into a chain or network. Polymers can be natural or synthetic. Natural polymers include rubber, hemp and silk. While synthetic plastics can be manufactured from plant materials, most synthetic polymers are made from fossil fuels and they include polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene (Styrofoam), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and a host of other materials of which over 400 million tons are produced annually and the amount is growing. Single-use plastics account for 35-40% of current plastic production and represent the most rapidly growing segment of the plastic industry.

Various chemicals are then incorporated into these carbon-based polymers to impart certain properties to the plastic being manufactured. Among the properties chemicals impart to plastic are color, flexibility, stability, water repellency, sterility, fire resistance and ultraviolet resistance. Unfortunately, many of these added chemicals are extremely toxic. They include cancer-causing compounds, neurotoxins that disrupt the cells that make up nervous systems, endocrine disruptors such as phthalates that play havoc with the body’s hormones, bisphenols, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (aka PFAS or forever chemicals), as well as brominated and organophosphate flame-retardants. These highly toxic chemicals are integral components of plastic. During production, these chemicals, along with plastic particles, leak into the air, water and soil polluting the landscape and sickening those that get exposed. Many of these chemicals are responsible for the majority of plastics’ harm to human and environment health.

Use
Due to their wide proliferation throughout society, plastic is present in almost everything we use in our daily lives. Consumers are exposed to toxic chemicals as they leach out of plastic; enter the environment, and cause pollution as a result of their normal use. Sometimes exposure occurs from direct contact with the plastic item, and other times it occurs through contact with a substance such as water or food that has been in contact with the plastic. Accidental and unintended exposures also occur such as when an infant sucks on a plastic toy.

Disposal
We have known for a long time that plastic itself does not decompose, and now we learn that some of the toxic compounds used in plastic (such as the PFAS family of chemicals) also fail to biodegrade which means they do not go away (hence the ‘forever chemical’ moniker). As a result, plastics are clogging our landfills, choking our oceans, and fouling our beaches. Additionally, some plastic chemicals undergo chemical transformation and form breakdown products and metabolites, that can be highly toxic and contribute further to the harm plastics create.

Unfortunately, our current patterns of plastic production, use and disposal occur with little attention to sustainable design or safe materials and a near absence of recovery, reuse and recycling. Plastic recycling systems are so inefficient and ineffective that studies have found that less than 10 percent of the plastic humans produce and use actually gets recycled and reused while the other 90 percent gets incinerated, or ends up in a landfill or the environment. Despite rising consumer awareness, government regulation and corporate attention, we are creating more single use plastic waste than ever before. Between 2019 and 2021 the world produced an additional six million metric tons of single use plastic waste, mostly from fossil fuels. The more plastic waste we create the greater the harm to human health, widespread environmental damage, significant economic costs and deep societal injustices.

In-depth research of advanced recycling of plastic (also called chemical recycling, molecular recycling or chemical conversion) in the United States finds this new technology is a lot of hype and not much reality (Denney et al., 2022; Singla & Wardle, 2022). These so-called advanced recycling facilities are themselves generating hazardous waste and causing environmental injustices under the false promise of recycling. Even worse, since the plastic we do manage to produce from “advanced recycling” is much more expensive than virgin plastic, much of the recycling output will likely end up as fuel for incinerators creating even more pollution.

Key report findings
The report points out that while manufacture and use of essential plastics should continue, the reckless increases in plastic production, and especially increases in the manufacture of an ever-increasing array of unnecessary single-use plastic products, needs to be curbed and their use greatly reduced. We also need to eliminate the migration of plastic into the biosphere across its life-cycle by embracing environmentally sound waste management.

Among the Minderoo-Monaco Commission’s findings are:

• Plastic causes disease, impairment and premature mortality at every stage of its life cycle, with the health repercussions disproportionately affecting vulnerable, low-income and minority communities, particularly children.
• Toxic chemicals added to plastic and routinely detected in people are known to increase the risk of miscarriage, obesity, cardiovascular disease and cancers.
• Plastic waste is ubiquitous and our oceans, on which people depend for oxygen, food and livelihoods, are “suffering beyond measure, with micro- and nano-plastics particles contaminating the water and the sea floor and entering the marine food chain.”

The Commission’s science-based recommendations include a global cap on plastic production instituted through a Global Plastics Treaty.

Plastic’s impact on our industry
So, what does the incorporation of plastic into beekeeping mean for our bees? Mostly, we don’t know. No one is looking closely to see how the myriad of plastic related chemicals impact honey bee health. No one appears to be researching the amount of toxins, like the PFAS forever chemicals, that may be leaching out of plastic and into honey from plastic containers, or leaching into beeswax from plastic foundation. What do the effects of these chemical have on honey bee larvae raised in plastic comb? How does the early exposure of queen bees to plastic (from being raised in plastic queen cups, to being shipped in plastic queen cages) impact their health and longevity?

We know from experience that bees do not like plastic. If a sheet of plastic foundation is not coated with enough beeswax, the bees will avoid the foundation, building their comb next to and parallel to the foundation rather than utilizing the hexagon-embossed plastic surface designed to encourage comb building. Are the bees trying to tell us something?

Thankfully, there are many alternatives to plastic available to us beekeepers. From leather smoker bellows, pure beeswax foundation, wooden hive components, glass jars and metal queen excluders, just about every beekeeping tool or hive part made of plastic has a non-plastic alternative available on the market. The only items I can think of that do not have plastic alternatives readily available are small hive beetle traps and large multi-gallon pails for honey. It’s not that these items could not be made from materials other than plastic (think wooden beetle traps or large metal tins for honey packaging like they used to use in the old days), it’s just that no one is currently making them and offering such alternatives for sale, at least not in the U.S.

It appears that long-standing concerns over pesticide chemical contamination of bees and bee hives has distracted beekeepers from plastic chemical contamination issues. I know I have not given the issue much thought in the past. The report from the Minderoo-Monaco Commission represents a wake-up call just as multinational fossil-fuel corporations that produce coal, oil and gas and also manufacture plastics are deliberately pivoting from fossil fuel production to making more plastic. As increased renewable energy production erodes fossil fuel use, the fossil fuel industry is looking to increased plastic manufacturing as one of the ways to help maintain a ready market for their global life-support system destroying products.

Ross Conrad is the Author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic approaches to modern apiculture, and co-author of The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.

References:
Denney, V., Brosche, S., Strakova, J., Karlsson, T., Ochieng, G., Buonsante, V., Bell, L., Carlini, G., Beeler, B. (2022) An Introduction to plastics and toxic chemicals: How plastics harm human health and the environment and poison the circular economy, International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN)
Landrigan, Philip J., et. al. (2023) The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health, Annals of Global Health, 89(1):23 DOI: 10.5334/aogh.4056
Singla, Veena and Tessa Wardle (2022) Recycling Lies: “Chemical Recycling” of Plastic is Just Greenwashing Incineration, Natural Resources Defense Council, https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/chemical-recycling-greenwashing-incineration-ib.pdf

by Shelby Lawson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dissimilarity of brain GRN architecture between soldiers and foragers is greater in high-aggression honeybee colonies. Credit: Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02090-0

Collective behaviors are present across many different animal groups: schools of fish swimming in a swirling pattern together, large flocks of birds migrating through the night, groups of bees coordinating their behavior to defend their hive.

These behaviors are commonly seen in social insects where as many as thousands of individuals work together, often with distinct roles. In honey bees, the role a bee plays in the colony changes as they age. Younger bees perform duties inside the hive, such as nursing and wax building, while older bees transition to roles outside of the hive, either foraging for food (foragers) or defending the colony (soldiers).

What determines whether older bees become foragers or soldiers is unknown, but a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution explores the genetic mechanisms underlying the collective behavior of colony defense, and how these mechanisms relate to the colony’s overall aggression.

“Honey bees do not have a size-based division of labor, like you might see in termites or ants,” said Ian Traniello, former graduate student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, now an associate research scholar at Princeton University and first author on the study.

“If you ask anyone off the street to guess which ant is a soldier versus a forager, they probably will guess it right 100% of the time, because the soldiers are huge. Honey bees instead have an age-based division of labor, where older bees tend to be foragers or soldiers, both of which are dangerous and potentially lethal roles.”

A genome-wide association study conducted previously on a sub-species of honey bee in Puerto Rico that had evolved to be less aggressive in recent years, revealed strong associations between variation in the sequence of some genes and the level of overall colony aggression. Researchers called these “colony aggression genes.”

In the current study, researchers compared the expression and regulation of genes in the brains of soldiers and foragers, and across colonies that varied in aggressiveness. Researchers measured colony aggressiveness by counting the number of stings on suede patches placed outside the hives after a disturbance.

They identified soldiers as the bees that attacked the patches and foragers as the bees that returned to the hive with pollen. The researchers then used single-cell transcriptomics and gene regulatory network analysis to compare the brains of forager and soldier bees, from low and high aggression colonies.

The researchers found that, although there were thousands of genes in the brain that differed in their expression between soldiers and foragers, none of them were part of the colony aggression gene list. However, when they created models of brain gene regulatory networks, which control when and where specific genes are expressed, the researchers found that the structure of these networks differed between soldiers and foragers—and the differences were bigger when the soldiers and foragers came from a more aggressive colony.

“What we think is happening is that the regulation of genes associated with collective behavior affects the mechanisms that underlie division of labor,” Traniello explained. “So, colonies can become more or less aggressive by influencing the aggression level of the individuals within that colony. Basically, a forager may be more or less likely to transition to a soldier-like state if the environment calls for it.”

The findings highlight the importance of gene regulation to our understanding of the relationship between genes and behavior.

“While a few studies have found potential heritable differences between soldiers and foragers, this study demonstrates that older honey bees may have the potential to take on either role,” said Gene Robinson (GNDP), IGB Director and author on the paper. “In colonies that are more aggressive, likely due to increased danger in the environment, older bees may just be more predisposed to become soldiers to help defend the colony.”

Plans for future directions include developing functional tests to explore the role of the gene networks identified in the study, and to identify spatially where they are being expressed in the brain. Traniello says that he looks forward to exploring these new questions.

“We have extraordinary technologies to probe genes and behavior at an unprecedented scale, both with single-cell and, now, spatial transcriptomics,” Traniello said.

“These give us new means for understanding old questions, like the relationship from individual to collective, or the relationship between genotype to phenotype. It’s exciting to be able to take these tools and apply them in naturalistic contexts, and I hope this work inspires others to do the same.”

More information: Ian M. Traniello et al, Single-cell dissection of aggression in honeybee colonies, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02090-0

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02090-0

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking an important step to determine whether the herbicide dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate (DCPA) can continue to be used safely in light of significant health risks identified. The Agency is releasing and requesting public comment on an Occupational and Residential Exposure (ORE) assessment on pesticide products containing DCPA, showing risks to workers and others exposed to the pesticide, with the most serious of risks to the fetuses of pregnant individuals. Additionally, EPA is releasing a companion document summarizing EPA’s ongoing review of DCPA, the health risks the Agency has identified, and potential next steps for the Agency. Given the potential for serious, permanent, and irreversible health risks, EPA is considering whether feasible mitigation measures exist that would address these potential risks or whether canceling the registration of all products containing DCPA is necessary. Given the potential that cancellation of this pesticide could take several years to complete, EPA is releasing this assessment in order to provide the public with timely information about its risks.

Background on DCPA

DCPA is an herbicide registered to control weeds in both agricultural and non-agricultural settings. Agricultural crops include cole crops (e.g., broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage), onions, and other vegetables. Non-agricultural uses include non-residential turf and ornamentals.

DCPA is currently undergoing registration review, a process that requires re-evaluation of registered pesticides every 15 years to ensure that as the ability to assess risk evolves and as policies and practices change, pesticides continue to meet the statutory standard of causing no unreasonable adverse effects on human health or the environment.

The data EPA examined showed that the dose that caused adverse effects in the fetuses of pregnant rats exposed to DCPA was very low, and these effects were observed at a dose lower than the dose that affected the pregnant rats themselves. Significant thyroid hormone changes were observed in the fetuses in a 2022 study that EPA had ordered the registrant for DCPA to conduct in 2013. In general, changes in fetal thyroid hormones are linked to low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ, and impaired motor skills observed later in life. These thyroid hormone effects are harmful to the fetuses of individuals of child-bearing age that could be exposed to DCPA. The differences in the doses affecting the pregnant rats and their fetuses, extrapolated to humans, mean that a pregnant individual could be exposed to DCPA without experiencing adverse health effects to their own body, while the fetus being carried could experience permanent and significant lifelong adverse effects.

In 2013, the Agency issued a Data Call-In to the pesticide registrant, AMVAC, requiring it to submit more than 20 studies to support the existing registrations of DCPA. Between 2013 and 2021, numerous studies submitted by AMVAC were deemed insufficient by the Agency, and some studies, including the thyroid toxicity test, had not been submitted. In April 2022, EPA issued a Notice of Intent to Suspend (NOITS) for the DCPA technical-grade (high-concentration) product based on the registrant’s failure to submit the complete set of required data, leaving large uncertainties in risk estimates, including data on DCPA’s thyroid toxicity. In August 2022, after the issuance of the NOITS, the Agency received the thyroid toxicity data that showed the significant changes in the fetal thyroid effects discussed above.

Occupational and Residential Exposure Assessment and Companion Document

The Agency found that based on the currently allowed uses of DCPA, there is potential for some people to be exposed to DCPA at levels approaching those that, based on the rat thyroid toxicity test, are expected to result in adverse effects in humans. For the most common uses of DCPA, there are risks of concern for workers applying and supporting applications of DCPA, using typical equipment at the maximum application rate, even when personal protective equipment and engineering controls are used. There are specific concerns for the fetuses of pregnant individuals who apply DCPA. Based on current labels, some pregnant individuals could be subjected to exposures from 10 to 1,500 times greater than what is considered safe.

Furthermore, risks to fetuses of individuals entering areas where DCPA has already been applied (post-application workers involved in tasks such as transplanting, weeding, and harvesting) are of concern. In addition, living near areas treated with DCPA could also put the fetuses of pregnant individuals at risk. While DCPA does not appear to be widely used on turf, based on the current label directions that allow such use, there are also potential risks of concern for individuals using turf golf courses and athletic fields long after DCPA is applied. The labels currently specify that entry into treated fields must be restricted for 12 hours after application. However, for many crops and tasks, levels of DCPA in the previously treated fields remain of concern for 30 days or more.

In addition to the ORE assessment, EPA is releasing a companion document that summarizes the Agency’s findings from the thyroid toxicity data received in response to a DCPA Generic Data Call-in and explains the regulatory approach the Agency is considering to address the risks identified in the ORE assessment, in line with the Agency’s commitment to sound science and protecting human health. EPA is also publishing relevant supporting documents, including an analysis of the benefits associated with the use of DCPA. Given the breadth and severity of the potential risks identified by the Agency, the Agency’s current efforts are to determine whether effective and feasible mitigation strategies exist to fully address these risks, and barring any new information provided by public comments, the Agency is considering whether cancelation of all uses and registrations for products containing DCPA is necessary.

EPA will carefully consider public input when addressing these risks. The Agency is committed to transparency as it moves forward with regulatory action on DCPA and will keep the public advised of prospective actions in the registration review process for DCPA.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: https://www.epa.gov/pesticides/epa-releases-risk-assessment-showing-significant-risks-human-health-herbicide-dcpa

Eric Hedin

A week ago, my wife came in and announced, “There’s a scary-looking bees’ nest in the lilac bush!” Wasps routinely try to build nests around our house, so I was prepared for the worst when I went out to investigate. What I found was a basketball-sized cluster of honey bees — a “swarm.” There was no nest, only a living ball of thousands of bees hanging from a branch.

I’ve never done any beekeeping, but fortunately, we have some friends who do. We had no idea, but apparently a swarm of bees in May on an easily accessible branch is something to get excited about! Soon, our beekeeper friends rolled up in their pickup truck. One pulled on jacket and bee-proof bonnet, set a large container (a portable hive box) on top of a stepladder underneath the swarm, took hold of the branch, and shook it. The swarm of bees, all festooned together, fell in a clump into the box. Or, rather, most of them did. Hundreds of them draped over the sides, which our undaunted friend scooped into the box (with gloved hands), while hundreds more buzzed around. The couple who came kept reassuring us, “They’re not going to sting because they’re focused on staying with the queen.” I learned that the queen bee’s presence is of utmost importance for the thousands of others.

Thanks for the Bees

Our friends extended thanks for the bees, then went home, while we went inside for a belated supper. The next day, I saw a smaller swarm around a branch in the same lilac bush. Here’s the interesting thing. Our friends said that they didn’t think they had captured the queen since the bees were acting agitated, so they came right back over to recover the remaining small swarm. When they added it to the hive with the bulk of the bees, all of them settled down right away. The queen had come home.

Here was a fascinating example of a finely tuned aspect of living organisms that was surely worth further investigation. A trip to the university library and online research quickly yielded multiple sources of information about honey bees from specialists of all types. As I’ve read up on bee behavior and their life cycles, a striking picture appears of ingenious design in living systems.

Natural Engineering

A recent research article reported on the use of x-ray microscopy to provide three-dimensional, time-resolved details on how bees manufacture their iconic honeycomb structure. Several observations from the authors are worth mentioning:¹

Honeycomb is one of nature’s best engineered structures.

Engineers recognize design, and never has good human-level engineering come about by anything other than intelligent design.

Honeycomb is a structure that has both fascinated and inspired humans for millennia, including serving as inspiration for many engineering structures. It is a multifunctional structure that acts as a store for food, a nursery for developing honey bee brood, and a physical structure upon which honey bees live. It is constructed of wax produced by bees in specialized glands in their abdomen. Wax is an expensive commodity and so comb construction can be quite costly for a honey bee colony. Honeycomb is constructed in such a way to minimize wax consumption.

Honeycomb construction is optimized to serve multiple purposes for the bee colony, subject to the constraint of material and labor costs. Sounds like the bees are a responsible engineering firm.

The ability of bees to “know” how to manufacture the structurally optimal hexagonal-packed honeycomb is even more amazing when one considers that the worker bees constructing it hatched less than three weeks earlier.

While not a perfect analogy, a colony of bees may be compared to a multicellular living organism. Each member of the colony seems to know what to do at each stage of its life for the good of the whole “organism.” An isolated bee will soon die, even if supplied with nutrients, suggesting that it is designed to function as part of the whole.

Arranged by a Designer

We could say that the whole honey bee colony is greater than just the sum of its individual members. This state of affairs usually arises when the individual components of a complex system are specifically arranged by a designer to accomplish a predetermined purpose. Consider any complex electrical or mechanical device. All of the components of my laptop would make a fascinating pile if laid out on a table; but they’re even more fascinating when assembled and functioning together as a whole, according to their designed purpose.

A professor of entomology at Iowa State University, studying the behavior of honey bee colonies, writes:

Each bee appears to specialize, for a time at least, on a particular job. Thinking about this, you may decide that a single bee is somewhat like a single cell of your own body. The work force in charge of a particular job, such as feeding larvae, would then correspond to one of your tissues. And if you follow this analogy further, you may conclude that a colony of honey bees is like an organism — a superorganism.²

Aspects of an organism that manifest in a honey bee colony include caring for developing larvae, securing and processing nutrients (similar to metabolism), tending the queen (whose presence coordinates the behavior of the entire colony), guarding the hive and patrolling for intruders (similar to an immune system), temperature regulation (fanning their wings to cool the hive, clustering and vibrating their wings to heat the cluster of bees), growth of the whole colony in terms of the number of individual bees, reproduction of the “organism” (resulting in the phenomenon of the honey bee swarm), coordination of activities mediated by a variety of communication channels, and a sense of purpose.

Observers of complex, functional systems, whether nonliving or alive, rationally conclude that, “If something works, it’s not happening by accident.”³

Beyond Mere Survival

The honey bee colony “works” and accomplishes a purpose beyond mere survival. It diligently stockpiles nectar which its workers convert to honey in amounts exceeding its needs.⁴ Honey’s unique ingredients give it value as a food source for humans that has been recognized for millennia.

The high total sugar concentration [primarily fructose and glucose, with a smaller amount of sucrose] in honey is beneficial in that most yeasts cannot ferment in it. Also, together with one other constituent (glucose oxidase), it gives the honey antimicrobial properties, and it can be stored safe from spoilage…⁵

Beyond the direct production of honey for our use, the role of honeybees as pollinators is of critical importance in agriculture:

Bees and other pollinators play a critical role in our food production system. More than 100 U.S. grown crops rely on pollinators. The added revenue to crop production from pollinators is valued at $18 billion.⁶

Continuing to ponder bee behavior, comments made by Professor Richard Trump of Iowa State University are instructive:

If a honey bee, with her microbrain, knows what she is doing, this is cause for wonder. If she does not know — if she is fully programmed by those sub-microchips of DNA that come to her as a legacy from her ancestors — this is even greater cause for wonder. It is incredible.⁷

Here are a couple of examples that may cause us to wonder how bees know how to do what they do. Researchers have found that bees possess an internal organic timer, which in conjunction with an awareness of the rotation of the Earth, allows them to efficiently time their foraging activities to arrive at flowers when pollen sources are at their peak.

The famous “waggle dance” that a scout bee performs back at the hive after discovering a food source communicates to other bees (by touching, since the inside of the hive is dark) both the distance and the direction of the food in relation to the current position of the sun. Bee keepers have found that if they reorient the honeycomb on which the bee is dancing, the undaunted bee will adapt its dance so that it still correctly communicates the proper direction to the food source.⁸ Sometimes the dancing scout bee will continue its dance for more than an hour, and over this time, the position of the sun has changed. In response, the bee will compensate for the sun’s movement across the sky by gradually adjusting the angle of its dance.

How Many Lines of Code?

If humans tried to duplicate the capabilities of honey bees by building and programming mini-robots that could fly, how many lines of code would have to be written and executed to make an artificial bee? We can also ask what the likelihood is of all this coded information arising from unguided natural processes. Someone committed to the evolutionary paradigm might answer that any genomic changes that offered a survival advantage would’ve been locked in by the ratchet-like mechanism of natural selection until primitive bee ancestors evolved into the complex, coordinated colonies of honey bees seen today.

Systems engineer Steve Laufmann, co-author of the recent book Your Designed Body, addresses the engineering hurdles facing any proposed evolutionary explanation:

…when evolutionary biologists hypothesize about small and apparently straightforward changes to a species during its evolutionary history, the biologists tend to skip both the thorny engineering details of what’s necessary to make the system work, and the bigger picture of how any system change has to be integrated with all the other systems it interacts with. The result is that biologists tend to massively underestimate the complexities involved.

And here’s the rub: if they’ve massively underestimated those complexities, then they’ve massively underestimated the challenge for any gradual, materialistic evolutionary process to build up these systems a little bit at a time while maintaining coherence and function. 

1. 324-325

The difficulties outlined by Laufmann are in the context of the human body, but they apply equally well to the complexities of a colony of honey bees. Bee keepers are all too aware of the precarious balance between life and death throughout a single year for a colony of bees. Engineers know that making changes to a delicately balanced complex functional system, even small ones, have a way of upsetting the balance — not towards better function but towards failure and collapse.

Honey bees offer us a glimpse of a remarkable living system involving interdependent, communally cooperative behavior. In some ways, they outshine the best in conscious human attempts to build a thriving society.  Perhaps we can learn a thing or two from the humble bee.

Notes

1. Rahul Franklin, Sridhar Niverty, Brock A. Harpur, Nikhilesh Chawla, “Unraveling the Mechanisms of the Apis mellifera Honeycomb Construction by 4D X-ray Microscopy,” Advanced Materials, Vol. 34, Issue 42, Oct. 20, 2022.
2. Richard F. Trump, Bees and Their Keepers, (Iowa State University Press, Ames, IA, 1987).
3. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/12/caltech-finds-amazing-role-for-noncoding-dna/
4. How do bees make honey? From the hive to the pot | Live Science(accessed 5/28/2023).
5. Diana Sammataro and Alphonse Avitabile, Beekeeper’s Handbook, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998).
6. 25.2020 (usda.gov).
7. Trump, Bees and Their Keepers, p. 78.
8. Trump, Bees and Their Keepers, pp. 80-1.

ERIC HEDIN

Eric R. Hedin earned his doctorate in experimental plasma physics from the University of Washington, and conducted post-doctoral research at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He has taught physics and astronomy at Taylor University and Ball State University in Indiana, and at Biola University in Southern California. At Ball State, his research interests focused on computational nano-electronics and higher-dimensional physics. His BSU course, The Boundaries of Science, attracted national media attention. Dr. Hedin’s recent book, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See, highlights scientific evidence pointing to design.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Natural Engineering in Honey Bee Lifestyle | Evolution News

This chart shows the estimated share of bee keepers’ colonies lost in the United States from 2016-17 to 2022-23.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: Chart: U.S. Honeybees Suffer Second Deadliest Season on Record | Statista