The Lives of Bees
Page 36
taking appropriate actions for each colony in which the mite level gets
dangerously high (see suggestion 14, below).
8. Minimize disruptions of nest structure, so the functional organization of each
colony’s nest is maintained. In practice, this means replacing each frame of
comb in its original position and orientation in the hive after removing it
for inspection. It also means refraining from inserting frames of empty
comb between frames filled with brood in order to inhibit colony
swarming.
9. Minimize the moving of colonies. Move colonies as rarely as possible,
because doing so disrupts many aspects of a colony’s functioning, including
brood care, nest thermoregulation, and food collection. Besides the stress
of the move itself, there is the need for the foragers to memorize the new
landmarks around their hive so each bee can find her way home, and the
need for them to learn from scratch the locations of good food sources and
handy water sources.
10. Locate your colonies as far as possible from flowers that are contaminated
with insecticides and fungicides. The greater the separation of colonies from
these sources of harmful chemicals, the less often the foragers from your
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colonies will be exposed to them and will bring them home in the nectar,
pollen, and water they collect.
11. Locate your colonies in places that are surrounded as much as possible by
natural areas: wetlands, forests, abandoned fields, moorlands, and the like. This will help ensure that your colonies have access to diverse sources of pollen and
nectar that are not contaminated with insecticides and fungicides, as well
as good sources of clean water and propolis.
12. When you need additional colonies, acquire them by capturing swarms with
bait hives or by making “splits” from strong colonies and letting them conduct emer-
gency queen rearing and natural queen mating. These two ways of acquiring
additional colonies will provide you with colonies headed by queens that
were reared from larvae chosen by the bees and mated by drones that
competed fiercely for mating success.
13. Minimize pollen trapping and honey harvesting from your colonies. Both
activities consist in robbing resources that the bees have worked hard to
collect for their own needs. Taking these things from a colony will, directly
or indirectly, lower its success as a living system by reducing its survival
or its reproduction, or both.
14. Refrain from treating colonies for Varroa . This will help your bees ac-
quire, through natural selection, resistance to the mites. It is now clear that
this will eventually happen, probably within five years, if you live where
most of the colonies around you are either wild or are being managed by
beekeepers who have agreed to refrain from treating for Varroa and from
importing queens of mite- susceptible stock. The study from Gotland, Swe-
den, described in chapter 10 shows us that at first there will be heavy
colony losses but that a small percentage of the colonies will have natural
resistance to the mites and will survive. I strongly advise, however, that
you adopt this suggestion to stop treating colonies for Varroa only if you
can do so as part of a program of extremely diligent beekeeping. If you
pursue treatment- free beekeeping without paying close attention to the
mite levels in your colonies, then you will create the situation in your api-
ary in which natural selection is likely to favor virulent Varroa mites, not
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Varroa- resistant bees. To help natural selection favor Varroa- resistant bees, you need to monitor the mite levels in all your colonies and kill those
whose mite populations are skyrocketing long before these colonies col-
lapse from heavy infections of viruses spread by the mites.
By preemptively killing your Varroa- susceptible colonies, you accom-
plish two things that are important. First, you eliminate your colonies that
lack Varroa resistance. Second, you prevent the “mite bomb” phenomenon
of mites spreading en masse to your other colonies—and any other colo-
nies in the area—when foragers from neighboring colonies rob honey
from the collapsing colonies and bring home their Varroa mites. If you
don’t perform these preemptive killings, then even the most resistant
colonies in and around your apiary can become overrun with mites and
die, in which case there will be no natural selection for mite resistance
among the colonies in your apiary. If you are unwilling to kill your colonies
with dangerously high mite loads, then you will need to give them a thor-
ough treatment with a miticide and replace their queens with queens of a
mite- resistant stock.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
I hope you have enjoyed this review of what we know about how honey
bees live in nature. We have seen that Apis mellifera remains an untamed
creature and that the step from a beekeeper’s hive to a tree’s hollow re-
mains a short one for these small beings. We have also seen that a honey
bee colony is a marvelously integrated living system that has been shaped
by natural selection to meet the challenges of getting rooted in a carefully
chosen homesite and then surviving and reproducing there for several
years. In looking at how a wild colony builds its nest, acquires its food,
keeps itself warm, rears its young, defends itself from intruders, and passes
on its genes by casting swarms and rearing drones, we have learned that a
colony of honey bees presents us with countless mysteries. How does it
control the type of comb it builds—at first just worker comb but eventu-
ally also drone comb? How does it control the emptying and filling of its
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Darwinian Beekeeping 291
drone- comb cells with honey in relation to the seasons? How does it know
when to switch on its brood rearing in midwinter and then to switch it off
in early autumn? How does it decide when to swarm? And then, when it
decides to do so, how does it control the proportion of bees that leave in
the swarm, the swarm fraction? And why does a colony seal up its nest
cavity with propolis so tightly at the end of summer? Is it so that moisture
will condense on its nest cavity’s walls and thereby provide its members
with drinking water all winter long? These and countless other questions
about the lives of colonies living in the wild remind us that the behavior
and social life of honey bees still holds many secrets.
If you are a beekeeper, then I hope, too, that this tour of the astonishing
natural history of honey bees has inspired you to consider pursuing bee-
keeping in a way that focuses less on treating a honey bee colony as a honey
factory or a pollination unit and more on admiring it as an amazing form
of life. More than any other insect, the honey bee has the power to capture
our hearts and connect us emotionally with the wonders and mysteries of
nature. We love these beautifully soci
al bees, we want them in our back-
yards, and many of us cannot bear the idea of living without them.
All of us who admire honey bees are seeking ways to improve their lives.
This is of vital importance because, as the human population approaches
8 billion, we need the pollination services provided by honey bees more
than ever before. A recent, and authoritative, study of the crop production
values of different species of bees has concluded that the honey bee pro-
vides nearly half of all crop pollination services worldwide. This means that
Apis mellifera contributes to agriculture almost as much as the hundreds of
other crop- pollinating bee species combined. It also means that the honey
bee deserves special care. One way we can conserve Apis mellifera is to
protect forestlands, for these provide habitat for wild colonies. The per-
sistence of honey bee colonies living in woodlands in the Americas, Africa,
and Europe, despite the spread of the deadly mite Varroa destructor, shows
us that honey bees are remarkably resilient. It also shows us that if we
conserve forests and other wild places, then we can be confident that wild
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colonies of honey bees will thrive and provide an important reservoir of
this species’ genetic diversity.
A second way that we can improve the lives of honey bees is to revise
our treatment of the millions of colonies that live not in the wild but in
our hives. This is the goal of what I have called Darwinian beekeeping and
others have called natural beekeeping, apicentric beekeeping, and bee-
friendly beekeeping. Whatever the name, the aim is the same: to put the
needs of the bees before those of the beekeeper. This happens when a
beekeeper’s manipulations of the bees are done with bee- friendly inten-
tions and in ways that harmonize with the bees’ natural history. Conven-
tional beekeeping, however, continues to develop along a trajectory that
disrupts and endangers the lives of honey bee colonies. Therefore, to truly
help the bees, we must do more than just keep the world healthy for them;
we must also build a new relationship between human beings and honey
bees, one that promotes the health of the millions of managed colonies that
we depend on to produce our food. Darwinian beekeeping, which com-
bines respecting the bees and using them for practical purposes, seems to
me to be a good way for us to be responsible stewards of the honey bee,
Apis mellifera, our greatest friend among the insects.
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Notes
PREFACE
Page vii: The figure of nearly 4,000 books on honey bees published in the United States comes from the annotated bibliography of American books on bees and beekeeping by Mason (2016).
Page viii: The story of Karl von Frisch’s discovery of the meaning of the communication dances
performed by honey bees is best told in the book by Munz (2016).
Page viii: The figure of 40% annual mortality of colonies kept by beekeepers comes from the Bee
Informed Partnership, which receives reports from more than 5,000 beekeepers each year in the
United States of their levels of colony mortality in summer and winter. See, Colony loss 2014–
2015: Preliminary results, Bee Informed Partnership, 13 May 2015, https://beeinformed.org
/results/colony-loss-2014-2015-preliminary-results/ (accessed 17 March 2017).
Page x: The rule “know thy animal in its natural world” is based on the title of the book of Tinbergen (1974).
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
Page 1: The Wendell Berry quotation is from his essay “Preserving Wildness.” See Berry (1987), p. 147.
Page 2: The studies mentioned here that show that it is only the elderly bees (the foragers) within a colony that get most of their sleep at night, and in relatively long bouts, are those of Klein, Olzsowy et al. (2008) and Klein, Stiegler et al. 2014). The study that used sleep- deprivation methods to explore the functions of sleep for honey bees is that of Klein, Klein et al. (2010).
Page 3: The figure of 40% annual mortality of colonies kept by beekeepers comes from the Bee
Informed Partnership, which receives reports from more than 5,000 beekeepers each year in the
United States of their levels of colony mortality in summer and winter. See, Colony loss 2014–
2015: Preliminary results, Bee Informed Partnership, 13 May 2015, https://beeinformed.org
/results/colony-loss-2014-2015-preliminary-results/ (accessed 17 March 2017).
Page 3: The evidence that crowding honey bee colonies fosters the spread of diseases is found in Seeley and Smith (2015). The evidence that housing them in huge hives boosts their honey production but also their vulnerability to parasites is found in Loftus et al. (2016). These matters are discussed in greater detail in chapter 10, “Colony Defense.”
Pages 5–6: For a fuller description of the characteristics of the dark European honey bee, see Ruttner (1987) and Ruttner et al. (1990).
Page 5: The archaeological studies that have found the chemical fingerprint of pure beeswax in organic residues preserved on fragments of pottery vessels from sites in Germany and Austria that date to 5200–5500 bce are reported in Roffet- Salque et al. (2015).
Page 5–6: See Han et al. (2012) and Wallberg et al. (2014) for detailed information, based on genetic analyses, about the evolutionary and demographic history of Apis mellifera since it split off from the other members of the genus Apis, evidently in western Asia.
Page 7: The best source of detailed information about tree beekeeping in medieval Russia is Galton Seeley.indb 293
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294 Notes to Chapter 2
(1971). Additional information about tree beekeeping in the South Ural area of Bashkortostan is
found in Ilyasov et al. (2015).
Pages 7: The spread of the honey bee in North America following its introduction in the 1600s is described in Kritsky (1991). The report on how New Englanders find where “bees hive in the
woods” is that of Dudley (1720). The quotation of William Clark about honey bees living west of
the Mississippi River in 1804 is from Moulton (2002).
Pages 7–9: A detailed review of the introduction of subspecies of Apis mellifera to North America is provided by Sheppard (1989). Also, Schiff et al. (1994) report an analysis of the mitochondrial DNA in bees in collected from 692 wild colonies in the southern United States (from North Carolina to Arizona) before the arrival of Africanized bees; it reveals that most of the wild colonies living in these southern states had mitochondrial DNA haplotypes representing European subspecies: 61.6%
had the haplotype common in A. m. carnica and A. m. ligustica, 36.7% had the haplotype common in A. m. mellifera, and 1.7% had the haplotype common in A. m. lamarckii.
Page 9: The Africanization of the wild honey bees in southern Texas between 1991 and 2013 is beautifully documented through genetic analyses reported in Pinto et al. (2004, 2005) and Rangel, Giresi, et al. (2016).
Pages 10–11: For a full description of the whole- genome sequencing analysis of the ancestry of the wild colonies of honey bees living in the countryside around Ithaca, New York, see Mikheyev et al.
(2015).
Page 14: The rapid evolution of gentle behavior in the Africanized honey bees following their
introduction to Puerto Rico in 1994 is described in Rivera- Marchand et al. (2012) and analyzed
genetically in Avalos et al. (2017). See Zuk et al. (2006) to learn more about the adaptive
disappearance
in less than five years of the calling song of male field crickets on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The genetics underlying this rapid evolution in the male crickets’ behavior is described by Tinghitella (2008).
Page 14: For more examples of rapid evolution in the physiological and behavioral traits of animals in natural populations, see Able and Belthoff (1998) on changes over 40 years in migratory behavior of house finches ( Haemorhous mexicanus) in eastern North America; and Campbell- Stanton et al.
(2017) on a striking, genetically based change over the winter of 2013–2014 in the low- temperature tolerance in lizards living in southern Texas. See also Grant and Grant (2014) for a detailed look at evolutionary changes over 40 years in beak size and shape in finch populations on an island in the Galapagos archipelago.
CHAPTER 2. BEES IN THE FOREST, STILL
Page 17: The Mark Twain quotation is the substance of his cable to the Associated Press in response to the news item that he had died. It was printed in the 2 June 1897 issue of the New York Journal newspaper.
Page 17: The geological history of the Finger Lakes region is described in von Engeln (1961), and the climate of Ithaca is documented in Dethier and Pack (1963).
Pages 18–21: The social and environmental histories of Ithaca and the surrounding lands are described by Kammen (1985) and Allmon et al. (2017). Smith, Marks et al. (1993) and Thompson et al. (2013) report studies of the return to a predominantly forested landscape around Ithaca, in particular, and the northeastern United States in general.
Pages 25: My studies of the nest- site preferences of honey bees are reported in Seeley and Morse (1978a).
Pages 26–28: The history of the Arnot Forest is described in Hamilton and Fischer (1970) and Odell et al. (1980).
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Notes to Chapter 3 295
Page 28: The fascinating craft of bee hunting is described in detail in Seeley (2016). See also Edgell (1949).
Pages 31–33: The results of the bee hunting in the Arnot Forest in 1978 are reported in Visscher and Seeley (1982).
Pages 33–34: The study of the wild colonies in Oswego, New York, is reported in Morse et al. (1990).
Pages 34–35: The exceptional study of the wild colonies in the Welder Wildlife Refuge in southern Texas is reported in Pinto et al. (2004).
Pages 36: The study of wild colonies living in trees lining rural roads in northern Poland is reported by Oleksa et al. (2013). The information about the density of managed colonies in the same region of Poland comes from Semkiw and Skubida (2010).