The Lives of Bees
Page 8
July 2004
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10
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August 2004
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5
7
September 2004
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October 2004
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summer in 2003 and in 2004—on 4 September 2003 and on 29 August
2004—I found that all three were in excellent condition; each had a
strong population of bees, several frames of brood, and several frames of
honey. None contained bees with deformed wings or showed signs of any
other disease.
In mid- October 2004, I moved colony 2 from the forest to my labora-
tory at Cornell so that I could rear queens from it the following spring. I
left colonies 1 and 3 in the forest, intending to continue monitoring their
Varroa mite loads indefinitely. Colony 2 survived the winter of 2004–2005
at my laboratory in excellent health. Sadly, however, the two colonies that
I left behind in the forest were discovered and destroyed by a black bear
( Ursus americanus) sometime between my last colony check in mid- October
2004 and my next colony check in mid- April 2005. I knew that it was a
bear that had killed both colonies because I found calling cards left by a
bear at both sites: claw marks in the bark of the supporting trees, hive
boxes lying overturned beneath the trees, and frames of combs scattered
about where the bear had feasted on brood and honey.
We will see in chapter 10 that bears have difficulty finding wild colonies
that live inconspicuously in natural cavities high in trees. It is clear, though,
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Bees in the Forest, Still 55
Fig. 2.15. A bear- proof bait hive suspended from a tree limb in the Arnot Forest.
Installed by David T. Peck (shown), a PhD student studying the bees’ mechanisms
of behavioral resistance to the mite Varroa destructor.
that at least one bear in the Arnot Forest had learned that a squat wooden
box mounted in a tree sometimes contains honey bees and that when it
does, it offers a sumptuous feast of honey and bee brood. Now when my
students and I trap swarms in the Arnot Forest, we suspend our bait hives
from tree limbs (Fig. 2.15), making sure that each bait hive hangs far be-
yond the reach of any black bear.
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56 Chapter 2
By the end of the summer of 2004, it was clear that the Arnot Forest
was well populated with wild colonies of honey bees, that these colonies
were infested with Varroa mites, and that somehow these colonies were not
dying from their mite infestations. It remained a profound mystery, though,
how these wild colonies were surviving without ever being treated with
miticides. What was most puzzling was that the populations of Varroa mites
in these wild colonies had not grown to dangerously high levels in August
and September as they would do in late summer in my managed colonies
if the colonies were not treated with a potent miticide, such as formic acid,
oxalic acid, or some blend of essential oils. How exactly were these wild
colonies keeping their mite populations under control? And, more broadly,
how does the general biology of these wild colonies—nest structure, sea-
sonal rhythms of growth and reproduction, food collection, defense mech-
anisms, life history, and still more—differ from what we see in colonies
managed by beekeepers?
In chapters 5 to 10, we will review what my colleagues and I, and doz-
ens of other biologists, have learned so far about the answers to these
questions. What comes next, in chapters 3 and 4, however, is a review of
the history of the relationship between honey bees and humans. It is a his-
tory that extends back into the mists of prehistory—even to times before
our ancestors were humans. We will see how, over the last 10,000 or so
years, Apis mellifera became a semidomesticated species whose members
now often live as managed colonies located in agro- ecosystems, suburban
landscapes, and other artificial environments. These managed colonies are
the ones that we humans interact with most frequently and most easily. It
is not surprising, therefore, that until recently we have known rather little
about the natural lives of our most important pollinator.
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3
LEAVING THE WILD
Each time I cut a dripping square of wild
honeycomb and eat it, wax and all,
I marvel at its perfection, which no processing
could possibly improve.
—Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, 1962
The honey bee, Apis mellifera, has been extolled as “humanity’s greatest
friend among the insects,” for its contributions to our agriculture and to
our understanding of animal behavior. This bee should also be celebrated
as humanity’s oldest friend among the insects. After all, the pleasure we
experience when eating honey was surely shared by our early ancestors,
probably even those who were not humans. Most of the history of our as-
sociation with this familiar bee can never be known, but we do know that
the ancestry of honey bees—all the bees in the genus Apis—extends back
to Oligocene times, some 30 million years before the present. The evi-
dence of the honey bee’s ancient origin comes from fossils unearthed in
the 1800s from the fine- grained lignite of Rott, Germany, which provides
paleontologists with some of the most exquisitely detailed of all insect
fossils. These include a lovely fossil honey bee flawlessly preserved in pro-
file (Fig. 3.1). This specimen and one more found in these paper- thin coal
shales are described as members of the species Apis henshawi. Both fossils
are worker bees, as indicated by the pollen press seen clearly on the hind
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58 Chapter 3
leg of one of the two specimens. That they are workers tells us that they
are social bees and so were once members of a colony with a queen, work-
ers, and drones. All social bees living today store honey in their nests as
strategic energy reserves, so it is highly likely that the nests of these fossil
honey bees also contained honeycombs. If so, then their nests were bo-
nanza food sources for our distant primate ancestors, who surely found
honey marvelously delicious, just as we and all our great ape relatives—
chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—do today.
That honey bees have lived for tens of millions of years in Europe, and
probably also the adjacent continents Africa and Asia, means that honey
bees have always been part of our natural world. The fossil record of
the genus Homo shows that modern humans ( Homo sapiens) arose about
300,000 years ago in Africa and that we then spread across Asia and Eu-
rope, all places where honey bees had already been living in the wild for
many millions of years. Indeed, there is a strong possibility that the earliest
modern humans encountered the same species of honey bee that we find<
br />
today in Africa, western Asia, and Europe, Apis mellifera. The oldest known
fossils of this species have been found in copal (fossilized tree resins) from
Africa, and although the ages of these copal fossils are not known precisely,
some of them may be more than a million years old.
For most of our history, our ancestors lived in hunter- gatherer societies.
Recent studies by anthropologists of existing hunter- gatherers indicate
that hunting for honey bee colonies—to feast on their nutritious brood
and delicious honey—has long been an important foraging activity for our
species. Honey is, after all, not just an amazingly delicious food but also
an exceptionally energy- rich food, packing more than 13,000 kilojoules
per kilogram (1,450 calories per pound). In the Hadza of northern Tanza-
nia, a hunter- gatherer society with a rich tradition of honey hunting, both
men and women rank honey as their favorite food. Honey is also a criti-
cally important food for these people because it provides a seasonal com-
plement to game meat as a source of calories. Plentiful rains from Novem-
ber to April produce a time of tall grass and flowering trees, and during
these six months the Hadza have their poorest success in hunting for meat
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Leaving the Wild 59
Fig. 3.1. Specimen of the fossil honey bee Apis henshawi Cockerell.
but their richest success in hunting for honey. During the rainy/honey
season, a Hadza man will spend about five hours a day foraging for honey
and will, on average, bring home approximately 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds)
of honey. Similarly, in another society of African hunter- gatherers, the Efe
of the Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the rainy/
honey season also runs from November to April, and throughout these six
months these people subsist largely on bee brood (eggs, larvae, and pupae)
and honey. Efe men and women work together honey hunting, and each
person, on average, collects more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) of brood
and honey in a day. Some 80 percent of the Efe’s caloric intake during their
rainy season comes from honey alone. Given these and many other ex-
amples of honey hunting as a traditional form of human foraging, there can
be little doubt that honey hunting is as old as humanity itself.
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60 Chapter 3
Perhaps, though, the most compelling evidence that honey was a highly
desirable and important food for our distant ancestors comes from rock
art paintings of humans and other animals found on the walls of caves and
rock shelters in southern France, eastern Spain, and southern Africa. Those
found in the mountains in eastern Spain date from around 8,000 years ago.
A beautiful painting discovered in 1917 in the Cueva de la Araña (cave of
the spider) in the province of Valencia (Fig. 3.2, left) is the first direct re-
cord of ancient honey hunting to be found. It depicts a man who has
climbed huge aerial roots or giant vines (or perhaps ropes) that hang from
a steep cliff and has plunged his right arm into the nest of a honey bee
colony occupying a crevice high on the cliff’s face. With his left hand, he
holds a bag for the honeycombs that he will steal from the bees. Mean-
while, several giant honey bees swirl around him. There is another human
figure climbing up, carrying another collecting bag, but he stands far below
and is probably safe from the bees’ counterattack. A more complex depic-
tion of ancient honey hunting was discovered in 1976 in the Cingle de la
Ermita del Barranc Fondo (belt of the hermit of the canyon bottom), a
deeply eroded riverbed in Spain’s province of Castellón (Fig. 3.2, right).
Here we see a tall ladder running up a cliffside to a nest of honey bees.
There are twelve people standing at the base of the ladder, perhaps waiting
for a share of the honey, and five others climbing up a sophisticated ladder
built of two side ropes connected by rigid rungs. The two highest climbers
and the one fourth from the top have a doubled- up posture, evidently
grasping the ladder’s rungs securely with both hands and feet, but the in-
dividual third from the top has begun falling and has arms and legs flailing
in the air! Likewise, the fifth honey hunter, at the bottom, is either falling
or jumping off the ladder. Both paintings portray the great risk of honey
hunting and (by implication) the powerful attraction of honey eating, for
these Mesolithic people.
FROM HONEY HUNTING TO HIVE BEEKEEPING
Until several thousand years ago, every honey bee colony lived in the wild,
and probably only a tiny percentage of these colonies were ever plundered
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5 cm
8 cm
Fig. 3.2. Left: Mesolithic rock painting from the Cueva de la Araña, in Bicorp,
Valencia, Spain, showing honey gathering from a wild colony of honey bees.
Right: Another Mesolithic rock painting, from Barranc Fondo, Castellón, Spain,
showing honey gathering from a wild colony.
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62 Chapter 3
by honey hunters. It seems likely, therefore, that early humans had only a
small impact on honey bees; perhaps their principal effect was to bolster
natural selection favoring colonies that chose cryptic nest sites and de-
fended themselves fearsomely. Only when honey hunting began to be su-
perseded by hive beekeeping—that is, when people began keeping colo-
nies in man- made structures—did the impact of humans on honey bees
begin its rise to the sky- high level that exists today in many parts of the
world. The origin of hive beekeeping probably occurred shortly after, or
along with, the invention of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of the
Middle East some 10,000 years ago. This was when some of our ancestors
became small- scale farmers and started to manipulate the lives of plants
and animals, including honey bees, to make them more productive for
human purposes.
The earliest known evidence of hive beekeeping is the stone bas- relief
carving shown in Figure 3.3, which dates to 2400 bce, or nearly 4,500
years ago, when honey and dates were the chief sweetening materials in
Egyptian cookery and beekeeping was an important Egyptian industry.
This sculpture is now displayed in the Neues Museum in Berlin, but it was
originally part of the pharaoh Nyuserre’s temple to the sun god Re at Abū
Jirāb, a site about 16 kilometers (10 miles) south of Cairo. On the left side
of the panel, we see a beekeeper kneeling by a stack of nine horizontal
hives, whose tapered shape suggests they were made of fired pottery. The
three hieroglyphs above this beekeeper are the letters for the Egyptian
word nft (to create a draft), so evidently the man is using the time- honored
method of using smoke—the smoker (missing) is between him and the
hives—to pacify bees and drive them off their honeycombs. In the center
and on the right, we see other men handling honey in a production line
that ends
with one individual, perhaps an official, affixing a seal on a vessel
to safeguard its precious contents.
Further direct evidence of hive beekeeping in antiquity was discovered
in 2007 by archaeologists who found 30 intact hives, along with the re-
mains of another 100–200 hives, while excavating the ruins of the Iron Age
city of Tel Rehov, located in the Jordan Valley in northern Israel. Radio-
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Leaving the Wild 63
Fig. 3.3. Oldest evidence of beekeeping, from the sun temple of the pharaoh
Nyuserre, which was constructed nearly 4,500 years ago. On the far left, a kneel-
ing man puffs smoke toward a stack of nine horizontal hives. In the middle, two
standing men pour honey from smaller pots into larger vessels, the taller vessel
being steadied by a kneeling man. On the right, a kneeling man ties a seal on a
container filled with honey; on a shelf above him are two similar containers that
also have been sealed shut.
carbon dating of spilled grain found near the hives indicates that this apiary
dates to 970–840 bce, hence to nearly 3,000 years ago. Each hive is an
unfired clay cylinder whose length (ca. 80 centimeters/32 inches), outside
diameter (ca. 40 centimeters/16 inches), and entrance opening (diameter
3–4 centimeters/1.3–1.6 inches) matches those of the traditional hives
used in the Middle East today. What is perhaps most remarkable about this
find is that these ancient cylindrical hives, the oldest yet found, are stacked
horizontally and parallel—like logs in a woodpile—to form three rows
about 1 meter (ca. 3 feet) apart, each one three tiers high. This shows that
this nearly 3,000- year- old apiary was organized in the same way as those
of traditional beekeepers in the Middle East today (Fig. 3.4).
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64 Chapter 3
Eva Crane, in her monumental work The World History of Beekeeping and
Honey Hunting (1999), describes the methods of the ancient Middle East-
ern beekeepers, assuming that their ways of working with the bees match
those of traditional beekeepers in Egypt today:
1. The beekeeper usual y worked at the back of the stack of hives, to
avoid being stung by the guard bees poised at each hive’s entrance.
2. After opening one of the hives from the back, he smoked the bees