This video is a segment of “Silence of the Bees,” a remarkable documentary mini-series that premiered on PBS in October 2007, when the apiculture community was just beginning to suspect the devastating effects that Colony Collapse Disorder would have on honeybee populations.

As the video explains, and as beekeepers know by their own observations, bees are “just this magnificent little engineered thing, just perfect for all the things they can do”:

An architectural marvel, the honeybee’s design is an elegant fusion of form and function. A proboscis for ferreting out nectar stored deep in a flower’s folds. And powerful mandibles for eating, feeding young, and manipulating wax.

Photo: Bee on lavendar via Flickr

Two compound eyes are comprised of 6,900 lenses and covered with sensory hairs for detecting wind speed. Three additional eyes, called ocelli, receive light signals for orientation.

Four wings clasp together with tiny hooks and beat up to 230 times a second.

For defense, a double-edged, serrated sting, which she can use only once — at the cost of her own life.

Hind legs are broadened into special baskets for carrying heavy cargo of pollen to the hive. Feathery hairs coat the body and build up a static charge as the bee flies. When the bee lands on a flower, pollen literally jumps on to her body.

Nature’s award-winning Silence of the Bees was narrated by American actor F. Murray Abraham, winner of the 1985 Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus. It was produced by filmmaker Doug Schultz — and if you’re interested in what went on “behind the scenes” in making the documentary, you can read an interview with Doug Schultz at the PBS program website.

Silence of the Bees is available on DVD (packaged together with an equally interesting documentary, Parrots in the Land of Oz). You can get it direct from PBS online or from Amazon.com in the United States and from Amazon.ca in Canada.

To find out something about how honeybees view the world, the researchers “set them up to make a decision about whether an unfamiliar scent portended good or bad things.”

First, the bees were trained to connect one odour with a sweet reward and another with the bitter taste of quinine. The bees learned the difference between the odours and became more likely to extend their mouthparts to the odour predicting sugar than the one predicting quinine.

Next, the Institute of Neuroscience researchers divided the bees into two groups. One group was shaken violently for one minute to simulate an assault on the hive by a predator such as a honey badger. The other group was left undisturbed. Those bees were then presented with the familiar odours and some new ones created from mixes of the two.

Agitated bees were less likely than the controls to extend their mouthparts to the odour predicting quinine and similar novel odours, they found. In other words, the agitated bees behaved as if they had an increased expectation of a bitter taste, the researchers said, demonstrating a type of pessimistic judgement of the world known as a ‘cognitive bias.’

While it may be too soon to claim that honeybees experience “emotions” the way that we humans do, this seems not to be as big a stretch as once we might have imagined!

“What we have shown is that when a honeybee is subjected to a manipulation of its state that in humans would induce a feeling of anxiety, the bees show a similar suite of changes in physiology, cognition and behaviour to those we would measure in an anxious human,” said Dr Geraldine Wright, one of the study’s authors. “In terms of what we are able to measure, a shaken honeybees is no less ‘anxious’ than a lonely dog or a rat in a barren cage.”

For more information, see also:

Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases
Melissa Bateson, Suzanne Desire, Sarah E. Gartside, Geraldine A. Wright
Current Biology – 2 June 2011 (Vol. 21, Issue 12, pp. 1070-1073)

For stressed bees, the glass is half empty
Newcastle University: Biomedicine: News – 3 June 2011

Photo:  Baukette aus Bienen by Maja Dumat on Flickr

Here’s the story, straight from Dr. Sutherland:

The problem that we face in California and in the world really is that there are many plant pathogens infecting our crops and many times we apply chemical fungicides to combat that. In our lab we hope to teach honey bees to respond to plant pathogens in the field so that we may detect those plant pathogens and reduce the fungicide applications. Insects in general and honey bees included are excellent vapor sensors and have excellent chemo sensors on their antennas so they’re able to detect organic molecules in the air at the low parts per billion. Bees can be taught to associate an odor with a reward through classical conditioning. First, we restrain the honey bees after collection, we restrain the honey bees inside a harness of sorts such that their heads and antenna are protruding then we expose the bees to the smell of an infected grape leaf or grape berry and we feed the bees at the same. So, in time, the bees learn to associate this odor with the sugar reward. So, the next step is actual detection in the field and this is accomplished through some prototype equipment that’s been designed by my collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The bees that have been trained are placed inside and when they encounter the smell within the box, they respond and this information is relayed to a computer and we were able to see that indeed we have detected the pathogen in the field. The ultimate goal here is to be able to detect plant pathogens in the field earlier than you can do with your eye so that we have an early warning system and we can better plan fungicide applications to be more efficient in time and space.

See also:
Can bees be trained to prevent plant disease? (Smart
and
Bees can be trained to detect plant diseases by Jeannette E. Warnert at UCANR.org

Researchers at the University of Haifa-Oranim have learned that bees are attracted to nectar with microscopic amounts of caffeine or nicotine. Is this evolution’s way of getting bees addicted to certain plants that contain those substances?

Flowers produce nectar, a sweet substance composed of mostly sugars, as a way of attracting pollinators to the plant. But some species of plants produce nectar that contains very tiny amounts of substances known to be toxic. The garden perennial Nicotiana, also known as “flowering tobacco,” for example, has tiny amounts of nicotine in its nectar, and caffeine is present in small concentrations in the nectar of citrus flowers, especially grapefruit flowers.

The research team at the Department of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Science Education of the University of Haifa-Oranim, headed by Professor Ido Izhaki, have discovered that bees actively prefer the “addictive” nectar over “clean” nectar.

While it’s difficult to know for sure whether the addictive substances in nectar evolved as a way to make pollination more efficient, they say, the study does suggest that “the plants that survived natural selection are those that developed ‘correct’ levels of these addictive substances, enabling them to attract and not repel bees, thereby giving them a significant advantage over other plants.” Whether the bees actually become addicted to nicotine and caffeine, however, is still a matter for future study.

Now, bee researchers have learned special “heater bees” act like a “living radiator” to carefully control the brood temperatures to determine what role the mature bees will fill in the colony — and those empty cells aren’t a problem but a necessary part of how the heater bees function.

According to Dr Jurgen Tautz, head of the bee group at Würzburg University in Germany and author of The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism, “By carefully regulating the temperature of each pupae, they change the way it develops and the likelihood of the role it will fulfil when it emerges as an adult.”

Developing bees that are kept at 34°C in their sealed cells will grow up to be housekeeping bees, the ones who clean the hive and feed the brood. Just one degree higher in temperature, and the bees will grow up to be foragers, going out into the fields to find nectar and pollen to bring back to the hive. And it is the “heater bees” who fine-tune the temperature for the developing brood, and effectively decide what roles will be filled by each, making sure that enough bees will be available to fill each important job in the colony.

“By creeping into empty cells, one heater bee can transmit heat to 70 pupae around them. It is a central heating system for the colony,” Dr Tautz told the UK Telegraph, in a recent article, Honey bees secret world of heat revealed. “Now we know that these empty cells are important, then bee keepers can try to avoid selecting for queens that don’t leave these cells empty. It can help to ensure that colonies can regulate their temperature properly and have the right mix of individuals.”

However, as a cartoon introduction to a complex subject, designed for very young children (and a very short video — just over 1 minute long), it’s cute and engaging.

Animation like this could be a good way to answer some of the many questions that kids have for beekeepers, and create interest in beekeeping at an early age. I wonder if a beekeeping association could launch a project to create something similar … but a cartoon that more accurately represents the honeybees of the real world?

via YouTube.com.

What other honeybee-related educational materials for younger students have you come across on the Internet?

The topics are similar to another documentary The Vanishing of the Bees.

It was released in the UK in October 2009 and is scheduled for US and international theatrical release in March, April and May. At this point the film is being screened at smaller venues in the states and the next showing is in New York in February. 

The trailer for the film is available on youtube and you can sign up for mailing list updates on their website and follow release dates near you.

There’s a great explanation — with annotated photographs — of exactly what we’re seeing in this video as the bees try to fight off both Varroa mites and the very similar-looking but relatively benign-to-bees braula coeca (bee louse) on Brndušic’s website at brnda.com.

Varroa mites (Varroa destructor, Acari: Varroidae) are a serious problem for beekeepers, survival of hives with high mite populations being poor. The literature shows that entomopathogenic fungi (EF) have good potential as biocontrols for the mites. However, preliminary results showed that only a few strains of the many EF species (Beauveria bassiana, Metarhizium anisopliae, Hirsutella thompsonii or Lecanicillium sp.) tested could grow at 350C, this being a common temperature in the brood area of hives where the mites reproduce. Extensive screening led to selection of a thermo-tolerant sub-set of EF that could grow and sporulate in hives. Further in-vitro testing gave a smaller sub-set (five isolates) that killed mites on bees and brood, with minimal effect on immature or mature bees. Various potential spore-carrying materials were tested. An idea was that EF spores added to foundation beeswax might get into the brood cells. However, non-polar anti-fungal materials associated with the wax (and propolis) make this approach unlikely to work, since these compounds diffuse into waxes and oils. Inoculum should probably be introduced as dry spores or spores in aqueous (non-polar) carriers. Small scale (not-replicated) tests of the most promising EF were made in two mite-infested “mini-hives”. These contained two frames of brood and approximately 500 bees each. They were maintained in an incubator while the brood developed, sugar water being provided to the bees through the top. A screen over the bottom retained the bees, provided ventilation, and allowed dislodged mites to drop onto a sticky board for counting. A mix of spores from the five promising EF isolates was sprayed on the frames and bees in one mini-hive, autoclaved (dead) EF preparation being sprayed into the other. Mite drop from both hives increased markedly following inoculation. Some mites from the EF-treated hive were infected with M. anisopliae, two morphologically distinct isolates being recovered. These EF are presumably hive tolerant and pathogenic to mites. Survival of adults and bee emergence from brood cells was similar in the two hives, the EF not having any dramatically detrimental effect. Although these limited mini-hive tests gave some information, replicated, longer term testing of the isolates under field conditions is needed to determine if these EF isolates can control Varroa in hives. Entomopathogenic fungal strains appropriate for use in these tests are available from MicroBiologicals’s culture collection.

For the French language version of this material, see the NBDAA website:
Lutte intégrée contre les parasites – agents de lutte biologique compatibles contre le varroa chez les abeilles domestiques

For further information, please contact:
David Boyle, PhD
902-896-2498
dboyle@nsac.ca

“We began by asking whether bees can learn to ‘count’ the number of landmarks that they encounter on the way to a food source,“ said Professor Mandyam Srinivasan of the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI), who led the research conducted with a colleague from Sweden, Marie Dacke.

“Individually marked bees were trained to receive a reward of sugar solution after they had flown past a specific number of regularly spaced yellow stripes during their flight through a narrow tunnel.

“Depending upon the experiment, this number was one, two, three or four.

“After training, the bees were individually tested by removing the food reward, and observing their searching behaviour in the tunnel to determine which landmark they had associated most strongly with the reward during the training.”

When the research team random introduced random objects that were outside the bees’ range of experience, the bees’ ability to count to four did not appear to be hampered.

“Bees trained in this way are able to count novel objects, which they have never previously encountered,” Professor Srinivasan said.

“Our findings provide evidence that bees are capable of counting objects on the way to a food source.

“In all probability, this counting is performed sequentially, and required the ability to maintain a running tally of the number of events, incrementing the tally by one each time an event occurs.”

The research paper”Evidence for counting in insects” by Marie Dacke and Mandyam Srinivasan, was published in the journal Animal Cognition: Volume 11, Number 4: October, 2008.

Abstract:

Here we investigate the counting ability in honeybees by training them to receive a food reward after they have passed a specific number of landmarks. The distance to the food reward is varied frequently and randomly, whilst keeping the number of intervening landmarks constant. Thus, the bees cannot identify the food reward in terms of its distance from the hive.

We find that bees can count up to four objects, when they are encountered sequentially during flight. Furthermore, bees trained in this way are able count novel objects, which they have never previously encountered, thus demonstrating that they are capable of object-independent counting.

A further experiment reveals that the counting ability that the bees display in our experiments is primarily sequential in nature. It appears that bees can navigate to food sources by maintaining a running count of prominent landmarks that are passed en route, provided this number does not exceed four.

New Research will Help Honeybee Breeders out of a Sticky Situation

Prince George, BC — Canadians may have noticed that there were decidedly fewer bees buzzing about their gardens and parks this past summer.

In the past year alone, nearly 36 percent of all Canada’s honeybees died over winter, more than twice the normal mortality rate of 15 percent. The trend in BC is no less severe, with select geographic areas such as Vancouver Island and the Peace River District suffering far greater losses.

According to Paul van Westendorp, BC’s Provincial Apiculturist, these numbers are simply not sustainable for breeders, and pose serious environmental and economic risks, not to mention threatening the Province’s food supply.

“Reduced honey production is only the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “When we look at what bees do in the larger context of agriculture, which is most notable in terms of crop pollination, we are talking about a value of $200 to 300 million a year in BC alone.”

So why are the number of bees dropping at such an alarming rate? It seems that the mites and bacteria, which have plagued them for years, are becoming increasingly resistant to traditional treatments such miticides and antibiotics. The bees are unable to defend themselves, and those without natural genetic resistance inevitably die.

But a new Genome BC research project will soon put advanced genomics tools into the hands of bee breeders, enabling them select only the strongest, most resistant bees for breeding programs.

Dr. Leonard Foster is leading a one-of-a-kind research project entitled Apis mellifera Proteomics of Innate Resistance, announced at the BC Bee Breeders Association annual conference on October 24, 2008.

Dr. Foster (UBC) and his fellow investigators Dr. Stephen Pernal (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada) and Dr. Katherine Baylis (UBC) will develop a set of tools to identify disease resistance in natural bee populations.

The researchers will use the bee genome to identify molecular markers of resistance to both mite and bacterial infections by doing proteomic analysis of different bee populations.

“By understanding the traits that make bees naturally resistant to pathogens the long-term hope is that beekeepers will no longer need to use miticides, fungicides, and antibiotics to control them,” says Foster. “We will be able to improve the efficiency of bee breeding by using protein markers to map desirable traits in bee families through generations.”

Michael Campbell, general manager of Campbell’s Gold Honey Farm and Meadery, keeps honeybees that pollinate valuable blueberry, cranberry, and pumpkin crops in BC’s Lower Mainland. “Recently we’ve been hit by mites that are resistant to most miticides. As a result, we have a very poor over-winter survival rate, which weakens the hive and makes it really hard to produce,” he says.

But Campbell remains optimistic about what Foster’s new research will allow them to accomplish. “What everyone is hoping for with this proteomic approach is that we will know what to look for in a disease-resistant bee, instead of guessing. Essentially, it will reduce our dependence on chemicals – something most bee keepers disdain, but are obliged to employ in order to save their hives.”

“Genome BC is very pleased to support such a critical and unique project,” says Dr. Alan Winter, President and CEO of Genome BC. “Honey bees provide immeasurable value both economically and in terms of our food supply. We look forward to the results that this project will yield, within the next two years.”

For van Westerndorp, those results won’t be a moment too soon. “We are running out of time. Our breeders can’t develop bee stock fast enough to keep up with the rate of disease.”

About this Project

The total investment for this project is $2.8 million. The project is also funded by UBC. It is one of a new suite of projects that is part of Genome BC’s Applied Genomics Innovation Program, designed to deliver results within two to three years. More information about the program can be found at www.genomebc.ca.

Photo credit: aussiegall

See how the centre of the heart is darker, where the brood was laid? Look closely, and you can even see a few capped cells.

This photo was sent in by one of our readers, Leza, who dropped a note in the Bee Talk section this summer when she spotted some honeybees living wild near Burton, New Brunswick, just downriver of Fredericton:

I saw your comment about swarming and want to know if any of you would like to have the swarm that built in my pear tree. I have a beautiful comb and a great tail of bees…. it has been there since June some time. It seems like such a shame to kill them.

We were pretty excited about this, as it is not too common, in this chilly New Brunswick climate, to find honeybees gone feral like that, and certainly they would not have survived very long into the autumn. Fortunately, CBA member Sterling responded, Leza was hooked up with a local beekeeper, and the honeybees were rescued and found a new home before the honey flow ended.

To begin with, it’s almost impossible to choose between the text itself or the remarkable colour photographs that illustrate it. Together, text and photos create the most beautiful bee book you’re likely to see — filled with fresh and fascinating information.

Did you know, for example, that the genetic make-up of a colony will change over time — even if the hive is far away from other bees with which to interbreed? That “heater bees” will hunker down on top of capped brood for as long as 30 minutes? Or that honeybees mark the flowers when they’ve taken the last drop of nectar, so other bees won’t waste time in trying to forage there?

Or that the purpose of those “living chains” of bees — you’ll often see them in a swarm or as you lift out a frame — is still unknown? A full-page close-up photograph shows exactly how the bees cling together, and yes, they do appear to be “holding hands”!

(My own favourite photo in the book shows a bee flying through a narrow tunnel with patterned walls — one of the experiments that help researchers to understand how bees know and communicate the distance and direction of nectar sources, and find their way around.)

In short, The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism is not just another “how to” manual about various methods of beekeeping. It’s a fresh look at the nature of the honey bees themselves.

Based on the latest scientific data The Buzz About Bees overturns the common view of the bee colony as a society of individual insects ruled by a queen to show us “a self-organizing and complex adaptive system based on a network of communication; a fascinating result of evolution — a mammal in several bodies.”

There are a few sample pages shown on Amazon.com, but I think those “sneak peek” pages were poorly chosen for a non-academic audience such as beekeepers and the general public. They really don’t give a fair impression of this book — if anything, they makes it seem dull and could put you off buying and reading it. And that would be a shame. The first chapter is perhaps the most technical for a general audience, but after that the book rolls right along with endless surprising insights into how bees see, forage, communicate, and fulfill their ever-changing roles within the greater organism that is the colony.

And Helga Heilmann’s stunning colour “action” photographs take you inside the bee colony as never before, right up close: You can see the tiny new eggs standing up in their cells — the touching of tongues as a field bee bribes a guard to gain entrance to the hive — the tiny hairs on the body of a queen as she hatches out from her cell — even the plates of beeswax being produced from the wax gland of the worker bee’s body!

Jürgen Tautz has a real knack for bringing science to a general audience, without “talking down” to those of us who never quite made it to high school biology class! It’s an interesting read — dip in, and it’s immediately clear why Apis mellifera is one of the most fascinating and complex creatures on this planet.

The Buzz about Bees: Biology of a Superorganism is one of the very few good honeybee books that you won’t be satisfied just to borrow from the library: you’ll want to have a copy on your own bookshelves, to pick up again and again.

~ Book review by Rebecca Leaman

“With spectacularly beautiful colour photographs and an easy understandable text, The Buzz about Bees tells the story of honeybees in a new perspective. Based on the latest data, notably from his own research group, Jürgen Tautz provides a wonderful insight into the realms of bees…

“The entire range of astonishing bee activities is described. Remarkable action photographs never shown before present bees busy with cell cleaning, caring for the brood, serving in the queen’s court, visiting flowers, receiving nectar, producing honey, comb building, entrance guarding, heating and cooling. Spotlights include bees grooming, swarming, fighting, telephoning, sleeping and communicating by high-toned beeping, scents and dances.”

The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism
Tautz, Jürgen; illus. Helga R. Heilmann; trans. David C. Sandeman
ISBN 978-3-540-78727-3 (hardcover 284pp)
Springer: 2008.

In recent years, honeybees (Apis mellifera) have been strangely disappearing from their hives, and strong colonies have suddenly become weak and died. The precise aetiology underlying the disappearance of the bees remains a mystery. However, during the same period, Nosema ceranae, a microsporidium of the Asian bee Apis cerana, seems to have colonized A. mellifera, and it’s now frequently detected all over the world in both healthy and weak honeybee colonies. For first time, we show that natural N. ceranae infection can cause the sudden collapse of bee colonies, establishing a direct correlation between N. ceranae infection and the death of honeybee colonies under field conditions. Signs of colony weakness were not evident until the queen could no longer replace the loss of the infected bees. The long asymptomatic incubation period can explain the absence of evident symptoms prior to colony collapse. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that healthy colonies near to an infected one can also become infected, and that N. ceranae infection can be controlled with a specific antibiotic, fumagillin. Moreover, the administration of 120 mg of fumagillin has proven to eliminate the infection, but it cannot avoid reinfection after 6 months. We provide Koch’s postulates between N. ceranae infection and a syndrome with a long incubation period involving continuous death of adult bees, non-stop brood rearing by the bees and colony loss in winter or early spring despite the presence of sufficient remaining pollen and honey. PMID: 18647336 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

It’s worth repeating that healthy colonies near to an infected one can also become infected. Treatment with fumagillin can control Nosema ceranae, but it can’t prevent the colony from becoming infected again after 6 months. And of special interest, perhaps, for our beekeepers who have experienced unusual over-wintering losses in recent years: “Signs of colony weakness were not evident until the queen could no longer replace the loss of the infected bees.”

Bees on PBS Nature Documentary

(Originally posted: 1 November 2007)

Silence of the Bees is the first in-depth look at the search to uncover what is killing the honeybee. The filmmakers of Bees take viewers around the world to the sites of fallen hives, to high-tech labs, where scientists race to uncover clues, and even deep inside honeybee colonies. Silence of the Bees is the story of a riveting, ongoing investigation to save honeybees from dying out. The film goes beyond the unsolved mystery to tell the story of the honeybee itself, its invaluable impact on our diets and takes a look at what’s at stake if honeybees disappear. Silence of the Bees explores the complex world of the honeybee in crisis and instills in viewers a sense of urgency to learn ways to help these extraordinary animals.

The honey bee documentary premiered on 28 October 2007. Watch a brief video online to get a taste of the program, and keep an eye on local listings!

This will be on the French language network of the CBC, on the science show called Découverte (Discovery), as part of a segment looking at factors causing the recent losses of honey bees in Canada — Pourquoi y-a-t-il a de moins en moins d’abeilles? as the program asks. Why are there fewer and fewer bees?

Dr. Stephen F. Pernal, Officer in Charge at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada‘s Beaverlodge Research Farm, was interviewed earlier this summer and some of the work at Beaverlodge Farm was filmed for the program.

The bee episode of Découverte airs at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 14, 2008 (check your local listings). The show is also broadcast internationally on channel TV5. To find out the hours of broadcasting in different countries, visit http://www.tv5.org.

This is good, because Central Beekeepers Alliance is on the look-out for clear and colourful photographs for possible use as posters when we set up our display at the FREX in September. So, if any local beekeepers (or friends of honeybees) have your own beekeeping-related photos to share, please leave a comment below or drop us an email to say so.

Meanwhile, enjoy the Honey Bees in Lupines slideshow:

| View | Upload your own

American foulbrood (AFB) is a bacterial disease of honeybee larvae caused by the spore-forming bacterium Paenibacillus larvae. Although AFB and its aetiological agent are described now for more than a century, the general and molecular pathogenesis of this notifiable disease is poorly understood.

The accepted view was that the bacteria germinate preferentially at either end of the gut of honey bee larvae, then make holes in the gut wall and enter the larval organ cavity. The organ cavity was believed to be the primary place where the bacteria grew and multiplied.

What the German research team learned is that the bacteria act to cause ABF infection in a completely different way than originally thought.

The disease-causing bacteria colonize the larval midgut and do most of their multiplying there — living from the food ingested by the honey bee larvae — until eventually the gut contains nothing but these pathogens. It is not until this point in the process that the bacteria ‘burst’ out of the gut into the organ cavity, killing the larvae.

“Now that we fully understand the way in which this disease works, we can start to look at ways of preventing the spread of infection” said Professor Genersch.

See also:
• Bees Disease: One Step Closer To A Cure
  ScienceDaily: 4 May 2008
• Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis of the interactions between honeybee larvae and Paenibacillus larvae, the causative agent of American foulbrood of honeybees (Apis mellifera) (abstract).
  Dominique Yue, Marcel Nordhoff, Lothar H Wieler, Elke Genersch
  Institute for Bee Research, Friedrich-Engels-Str. 32, 16540 Hohen Neuendorf, Germany.

Thanks to CBA member Sterling Clark for spotting this item in Catch the Buzz.

Biological Control of Varroa Mite of Honey Bee

NBBA and Maritime MicroBiologicals Inc.

As we know too well, Varroa mites are a real problem for beekeepers. Control options are limited, especially since the mites have become resistant to many chemicals that have been directed against them. Therefore, when reports about fungi that controlled Varroa appeared about eight years ago, they were greeted with great interest.

The idea was that these disease-causing fungi, by targeting the mites but not bees (or beekeepers), could be used as biological control agents. Analogous “biocontrols” have been successful against other agricultural pests, so why not use them against Varroa?

Indeed, some subsequent test results were very encouraging (see e.g. paper by Kanga et al. 2006)… but others were not (see James et al. 2006).

In 2006, the NBBA, with financial support from the Canada/NB EIAA program, initiated a research project with Dr. David Boyle of Maritime MicroBiologicals Inc (MMBI), the goal being to assess and further develop this control option.

Initial lab work identified some fungal isolates that killed mites.

Other work served to identify potential reasons for the contrasting results reported in the cited papers.

Foremost among these was high hive temperature, measurements showing that this sometimes went over 35°C. Of the many candidate fungi tested, most became inactive at temperatures over ca 30°C. A few did however continue to grow at 35°C.

Of these, most were of tropical origin, but interestingly, one temperature-tolerant isolate was from New Brunswick. This one is being used in tests being done now.

Another potential problem concerned anti-fungal activity detected in propolis and beeswax. It is hoped that it will be possible to overcome this problem by using appropriate formulation and application methods.

Additional small scale testing of various candidate biocontrol fungi is continuing at MMBI, but to really know if biocontrol of Varroa works, it will be necessary to do the tests in hives. It is hoped that this will happen during a subsequent phase of this project. This will require planning, which should start soon.

For further information, please contact:
David Boyle, PhD
902-896-2498
dboyle@nsac.ca

See also:
Update on Varroa Mite Research
(November 17, 2008)

Literature cited:

Kanga, H.B, L. Jones, W.A. and C. Gracia. 2006.
Efficacy of strips coated with Metarhizium anisopliae for control of Varroa destructor (Acari:Varroidae) in honey bee colonies in Texas and Florida. Exp. Appl. Acarol 40:249-258

James, R.R., G. Hayes and J. E. Leland. 2006.
Field trials on the microbial control of Varroa with the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae. American Bee Journal. Nov. 2006 issue. Pp. 968-972

Scientists breed varroa ‘resistant’ bees

Auckland, New Zealand, 16 December 2007 — A sustainable and cost-effective tool to control the varroa mite may soon be available to New Zealand beekeepers thanks to the efforts of scientists at the Crown Research Institute, HortResearch.

Scientists at HortResearch have successfully bred honeybees that fight back against varroa — by suppressing mite reproduction.

Since its arrival in New Zealand seven years ago varroa has become the number one enemy of bees and beekeepers across much of the country. Able to reproduce and spread rapidly, the mite lays its eggs inside the brood cells of a beehive, where the mites develop to maturity by feeding on bee larvae.

Uncontrolled, varroa will usually ‘kill’ a bee colony within a year — an expensive loss to beekeepers as well as a major threat to honey producers and New Zealand’s billion dollar fruit export industry, which relies on bees for pollination.

Varroa is currently controlled mostly through the use of chemical miticides — at an annual cost to industry of over $1.5 million. While such treatments are generally effective, their use is not sustainable says HortResearch honeybee scientist Dr Mark Goodwin.

“Overseas, varroa has quickly built up resistance to these miticides, resulting in large hive losses. In addition, while perfectly safe if used correctly, beekeepers and growers would prefer not to have these chemicals in our natural environment.”

With funding from the Sustainable Farming Fund, the National Beekeepers Association, individual beekeepers, and the kiwifruit industry through ZESPRI Limited, Dr Goodwin and his team have been searching for more sustainable ways of keeping varroa in check.

“We’re looking not only at controlling the mite more cheaply, but also at methods that meet the strong environmental and food safety goals of the bee industry and the horticulture industries it supports,” he says.

The idea to breed ‘resistant’ bees came from overseas research which showed that varroa mites emerging from certain hives were unable to reproduce. This is due to a genetic trait in the bees themselves called ‘delayed suppression of mite reproduction’ or SMRD.

While SMRD is not yet fully understood, it appears to either render the mites sterile, or prevent them from developing reproductive capability. In nature the ‘resistance’ levels only reach around 20% because the ‘resistance’ genes are constantly watered down through interbreeding.

Using bees carefully selected from around New Zealand, Dr Goodwin’s team have been interbreeding bees to increase the levels of SMRD within the population.

It’s a tricky business, requiring the careful artificial insemination of queen bees in the lab, says Dr Goodwin.

“With patience we’ve been able to breed bees whose hives render up to 80% of varroa sterile. The problem is that the process is expensive and time-consuming. We could never rely on artificial insemination to supply the amount of bees needed to continuously replenish the resistance genetics of New Zealand’s 300,000 commercial beehives.”

Instead, Dr Goodwin’s team hope that they can establish as self-sustaining population of high-resistance bees by keeping them isolated from non-resistant bees.

“An island was the obvious choice for this experiment and we were lucky that Sir Michael Fay and David Richwhite offered us the opportunity to work on Great Mercury Island, which lies off the coast of the Coromandel Peninsula.

“In fact they’ve done a lot more than just allow us access to the island. They’ve shown a real interest in the project and provided staff, equipment, transport and accommodation for visiting staff as well.”

Dr Goodwin’s team have now transported 50 high-resistance hives to the island, creating an instant population of 500,000 bees.

“Over the next few months those bees will breed and the population will reach around 2.5 million. We’ll be watching with interest to see if isolation allows these hives and their offspring to maintain a high degree of varroa resistance,” says Dr Goodwin.

If the experiment is successful the island, and possibly others like it, could become vital breeding centres for large numbers of highly resistant queens. These could then form the basis of a continuous flow of new genetics to the mainland, helping to maintain high levels of resistance in commercial hives.

See also:

• Scientists breed varroa ‘resistant’ bees (press release)
• HortResearch website:
      Apiculture division
• Breakthrough in Varroa mite battle TVNZ.co.nz story/video

It’s just a shame that Carman didn’t know more about Apis mellifera.

The poet made the common mistake — perpetuated in works from the time of the ancient Greeks right through to Seinfeld’s newly released animated film, Bee Movie — of thinking that the male bee, the drone, “works like a Trojan hero;
Then loafs all winter upon his hoard…”

In actual fact — the premise of Hollywood film plots notwithstanding — the male bee serves no practical purpose in the colony beyond queen-mating. When the weather turns cold, and the drones are no longer needed, they are firmly turned out of the hive so the colony’s food resources can be used to sustain the queen and worker bees through the winter.

A MORE ANCIENT MARINER

The swarthy bee is a buccaneer,
A burly velveted rover,
Who loves the booming wind in his ear
As he sails the seas of clover.

A waif of the goblin pirate crew,
With not a soul to deplore him.
He steers for the open verge of blue
With the filmy world before him.

His flimsy sails abroad on the wind
Are shivered with fairy thunder;
On a line that sings to the light of his wings
He makes for the lands of wonder.

He harries the ports of the Hollyhocks,
And levies on poor Sweetbrier;
He drinks the whitest wine of Phlox,
And the Rose is his desire.

He hangs in the Willows a night and a day;
He rifles the Buckwheat patches;
Then battens his store of pelf galore
Under the tautest hatches.

He woos the Poppy and weds the Peach,
Inveigles Daffodilly,
And then like a tramp abandons each
For the gorgeous Canada Lily.

There’s not a soul in the garden world
But wishes the day were shorter,
When Mariner B. puts out to sea
With the wind in the proper quarter.

Or, so they say! But I have my doubts;
For the flowers are only human,
And the valor and gold of a vagrant bold
Were always dear to woman.

He dares to boast, along the coast,
The beauty of Highland Heather,–
How he and she, with night on the sea,
Lay out on the hills together.

He pilfers from every port of the wind,
From April to golden autumn;
But the thieving ways of his mortal days
Are those his mother taught him.

His morals are mixed, but his will is fixed;
He prospers after his kind,
And follows an instinct, compass-sure,
The philosophers call blind.

And that is why, when he comes to die,
He’ll have an easier sentence
Than some one I know who thinks just so,
And then leaves room for repentance.

He never could box the compass round;
He doesn’t know port from starboard;
But he knows the gates of the Sundown Straits,
Where the choicest goods are harbored.

He never could see the Rule of Three,
But he knows a rule of thumb
Better than Euclid’s, better than yours,
Or the teacher’s yet to come.

He knows the smell of the hydromel
As if two and two were five;
And hides it away for a year and a day
In his own hexagonal hive.

Out in the day, hap-hazard, alone,
Booms the old vagrant hummer,
With only his whim to pilot him
Through the splendid vast of summer.

He steers and steers on the slant of the gale,
Like the fiend or Vanderdecken;
And there’s never an unknown course to sail
But his crazy log can reckon.

He drones along with his rough sea-song
And the throat of a salty tar,
This devil-may-care, till he makes his lair
By the light of a yellow star.

He looks like a gentleman, lives like a lord,
And works like a Trojan hero;
Then loafs all winter upon his hoard,
With the mercury at zero.

– Bliss Carman

This story gives new meaning to the expression “busy as a bee.” New research shows that queen bees ensure they remain in charge of the hive by sleeping with as many male bees as possible. Well, it worked for Catherine the Great!

2007-10-22 As It Happens (MP3 audio fle)

In this entertaining audio podcast, Christina Grozinger, Assistant Professor of Entomology at North Carolina State University, tells of studying the differences in pheremones of queens who mated with many males, as opposed to those who mated with only one. (There seems to be a higher quality of pheremones in the multiple-mated queens, so the worker bees are more attracted to a multiple-mated queen and may be less likely to try to replace her.) Along the way, she gives a basic “birds and bees” chat explaining how honeybees mate and the role of the queen bee within the colony.

Research shows that when worker bees are half-sisters, rather than sisters, the colony is healthier. If the bees are challenged with a disease, for example, they’re more likely to be able to fight off that disease if the queen bee has mated with many different males and therefore there is more genetic diversity in the colony.

See also:

CBC Podcasts – Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.)
Alternate sources: 2007-10-22 As It Happens CBC media feed / direct mp3 file

Christina M. Grozinger: Research Interests

The life cycle of a honey bee is presented as an example of complete metamorphosis, the development of an insect from egg to larva, then pupa, then adult. Moths, butterflies and wasps also develop with complete metamorphosis. Some aspects of beekeeping are also discussed.

Metamorphosis is one of a series of science videos from Hila Science Camp, Ontario, Canada. Preview versions of these videos are made available for viewing online through Google Video and Youtube without charge, or for purchase as a higher quality download at http://hilaroad.com/video/.

A single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.

Specifically referenced is the work of Thomas Seeley, on a small island off the coast of Maine, on how the honeybee colony picks a new home when swarming. (This starts on page two, part way down, if you want to skip the ant-related stuff).

See
Swarm Behavior | Swarm Theory by Peter Miller
National Geographic, July 2007

Now one British student, Susana Soares, is looking into how bees’ exceptional sniffing abilities might help humans in other ways. The possibilities might include training bees to detect a pregnancy or diagnose a disease condition, simply through the scent of a person’s breath.

Bees have a phenomenal odour perception. They can be trained within minutes using Pavlov’s reflex to target a specific odour and their range of detection includes pheromones, toxins and disease diagnosis.

Soares is a second year student at the Royal College of Art, ” the world’s only wholly postgraduate university institution of art and design – fine art, applied art, design, communications and humanities.” Her interest is in the benefits to be derived from integrating human science and design with elements of the natural world.

See also:
Active Monitoring, Conditioning of Bees to Find Chemicals and Devices

It seems that the queen bee is not, after all, the absolute ruler of the hive.

“Major colony activities are initiated by the cumulative group actions of the colony’s older workers, not by the queen’s individual decision,” Pierce’s research shows. It is the older workers that signal to the queen and to the rest of the colony that it’s time to swarm. Inside the swarm cluster itself, workers make the “piping” noise that we normally associate with queens in competition with each other, telling the queen to fly.

“Researchers have never reported worker piping being done on the queen before, so some of what we found was exciting,” Pierce said. “It was generally surprising to see the level of interaction that the older bees have with the queen. This doesn’t normally happen in the hive.”

But this doesn’t mean that there’s a group of experienced bees who control the actions of the hive. Because bees have such short life spans and tiny brains, they aren’t capable of “managing the colony the way a human village might be managed by a council of elders.” Instead, it appears that the dynamics of the group itself — complex social interactions, environmental pressures or group dynamics — are “in some still-unknown way” the driving force behind all the complex group activities that honeybees undertake.

See also:
UNC Charlotte Undergraduate Publishes Significant Finding on Honeybee Societies: Older worker bees– not queen – inititate action, make decisions 11 June 2007

Martha Teichner provides an in-depth look at the fascinating life of the bee, who travel thousands of miles and visit millions of flowers in order to produce honey.

Holley Bishop, the author of Robbing the Bees, is one of the beekeepers who talk about their favourite insects on this excellent program.