Tom Seeley and the Bees in Winter

As I look at my colonies on cold days, they appear to be completely lifeless.  Bees aren't flying in or out and the colony seems without energy.  I understand the bees hopefully are alive inside, but the miracle of what is happening in there is beautifully explained by Tom Seeley in Honeybee Democracy.

As one of the editors of the GBA Newsletter, Spilling the Honey, I just typed verbatim a long explanation from Seeley's book for our readers.  He's so clear in how he explains how the hive functions as an organism that I thought I would share it with those of you who haven't yet read his book:

"A colony of honeybees is, then, far more than an aggregation of individuals, it is a composite being that functions as an integrated whole. Indeed, one can accurately think of a honeybee colony as a single living entity, weighing as much as 5 kilograms (10 pounds) and performing all of the basic physiological processes that support life: ingesting and digesting food, maintaining nutritional balance, circulating resources, exchanging respiratory gases, regulating water content, controlling body temperature, sensing the environment, deciding how to behave, and achieving locomotion. Consider, for example, the control of body (colony) temperature. From late winter to early fall, when the workers are rearing brood, a colony's internal temperature is kept between 34 and 36 C (93 and 96 F) - just below the core body temperature of humans - even as the ambient air temperature ranges from -30 to 50C (-20 to 120F). The colony accomplishes this by adjusting the rate at which it sheds the heat generated by its resting metabolism and, in times of extreme cold, by boosting its metabolism to intensify its heat production. A colony's metabolism is fueled by the honey it has stored in its hive. Other indicators of the high functional integration of a honeybee colony include colonial breathing: limiting the buildup of the respiratory gas CO2, inside the hive by increasing its ventilation when the CO2 level reaches 1 - 2 percent; colonial circulation: keeping the heat-producing bees in the central, brood-nest region of the hive properly fueled with honey carried in from peripheral honey combs; and colonial fever response: mounting a disease-fighting elevation of the nest temperature when a colony suffers a dangerous fungal infection of the brood bees. I suggest, though, that the single best demonstration of the superorganismic nature of a honeybee colony is the ability of a honeybee swarm to function as an intelligent decision-making unit when choosing its new home."

from Seeley, Tom. Honeybee Democracy. pp 26 - 27. 

I've heard Keith Delaplane in numerous talks explain the hive as an organism, but Seeley pulls it altogether in this paragraph.

The next time I look at a winter hive, no activity apparent from the outside, I'm going to think of the bee box as breathing and teeming with internal energy.  This makes me envious of those scientific beekeepers I know who have their hives hooked to their computers and keep records of the changes in temperature inside the hive!

Tom Seeley on Bees and Mites in the Forest

At Young Harris, Dr. Tom Seeley gave a fascinating talk on bees and mites in the forest.

The first part of his talk was about how he finds bee trees in the forest.  He risks life and limb to find these bees with only his dog to rescue him should he fall in the woods or off of a tree!  He learned how to beeline with Edgell's book, The Bee Hunter.

He built a small box for putting a bee in and giving her sugar syrup.  After the bee has recognized the box as a source of food, she returns to her hive and recruits her sisters to come join her at the nectar source.  When a number of bees are feeding at the box, he closes the box up and moves it along the direction of the flight path they take when they leave.  Then he stops and opens the box and keeps on in this manner until he is really close to the bee tree.  Then his job is to look around and find where they are flying to.

He found wild bee trees in the Arnot Forest, owned by Cornell where he works.  He had found 11 colonies in 1978.  In 2002 there were 8 bee trees.  In 2003 he put up bait hives (this is where he climbs trees with no spotter other than his dog) to catch swarms thrown by the eight bee trees.  These bait hives had low mite counts.

He began to theorize about the low mite counts - what was it due to?

• The bee trees were much farther apart than we typically keep hives in apiaries
• This should cut down on drifting (one way to convey diseases between hives)
• This should cut down on robbing
• Hives not contaminated by other hives might develop Varroa mites that were not virulent

With our hive boxes, close together in apiaries, we subject our bees to drifting.  We also have low and large entrances, promoting more robbing.  We don't allow swarming, if we can help it.  More Varroa may be directly due to large brood nests and less swarming. 

In trees, bees coat the inside of the hollow tree with propolis.  With our smooth sided hives, there isn't a need for propolizing the walls.  Propolis may protect the health of the bees in trees.

Since honey bees live differently, Seeley concluded that increasing colony spacing might reduce horizontal disease transmission.  Smaller hives and smaller colonies might result in less honey and more swarming but the pay-off would be better health.  If tall hives are used this will increase winter survival in cold areas.  Perhaps we should leave the inside walls of our hives rough to encourage the use of propolis to coat the hive interior, promoting better colony health.  Finally more drone comb (in the wild bees build 15% of their comb for the raising of drone) might result in better queen mating although might increase the Varroa.

There is more Varroa in crowded colonies because the drift of bees helps spread the mites from colonies that have fast-reproducing mites.  

His take-home messages were:

As beekeepers we help the survival of the Varroa mite by:

• Sustaining susceptible bees by using miticides (stop using miticides!)
• Fostering virulent mites by having apiaries (have colonies in isolation)
• Fostering mites by preventing swarming (let colonies swarm)

There are feral bees and they are good for pollination, good for drone production, and through natural selection, resistance will arise in bees in the wild.

It was a great talk and I loved seeing photos of Seeley and his dog standing next to very tall bee trees.  Wish you were there!

Tom Seeley Speaking at MABA on Wednesday Night

Tom Seeley is coming to town.  (Author, scientist, and probably the world authority on how/why honey bees swarm)  Really he's coming to Georgia to teach at the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute on Friday and Saturday.   He agreed to stop and speak to our bee club on Wednesday night before driving up to Young Harris.

Unfortunately our bee club has this awful policy of just one person hosting the guest speaker for dinner.  I wish we shared the policy of some other clubs such as the Macon County Beekeepers in Franklin, NC.  When I went to speak to that club, they invited any club member who wished to join us to come to the restaurant with the speaker so I got to eat with ten wonderful beekeepers before going to give my talk.

The person who invited Tom Seeley to speak to our club literally said she was going to be selfish and not allow anyone else to join her in having dinner with him.  I have to work right up until fifteen minutes before the meeting, so I wouldn't have been able to eat with him, even if anyone else were invited to go along.  But think how inspiring it would be to new beekeepers to get a chance to sit and have a casual dinner conversation with him!  Oh, well.

We have great speakers at Metro - Juliana Rangel who was Seeley's assistant in the Honey Bee Democracy study, Billy Davis, Keith Delaplane (comes every year) have all spoken to our club, for example.  They each get taken out to dinner by a host before the meeting.  I wish the policy would be changed to include anyone who would like to go and is willing to pay for their own dinner.

I am so excited because I will get to hear him speak on Wednesday night and then he is giving three talks at Young Harris.  Luckily I'm not scheduled to teach in conflict with him so I'll be able to hear him give all three talks.  I'll take notes and share them with all of you.  Young Harris is usually sold out by now but they've increased registration to 150 this year, so there still may be some openings.

But, if you are in Atlanta and would like to hear Tom Seeley talk about bees, the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association meets at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in midtown at 7 PM on Wednesday night.  He will be speaking in Day Hall - it's the first large building you come to after leaving the entry building.  You don't have to be a member to come to the meeting and there's not a charge to attend.  You can either park in the parking garage (there's a fee) or in the neighborhoods across Piedmont Road and walk over.

It's a great beekeeper opportunity!  Join us.

There's a fabulous exhibit at the Garden right now of large creatures made of plants.  Day Hall where Seeley will be speaking is just past the two cobra plant sculptures.

Here, for example, are the fish sculptures that both spew water and spin around, much to my granddaughter's delight:

And here is the monster - we call him the Gruffalo because he looks like the Gruffalo in a book Lark (my three year old granddaughter) likes:

Hope and the Honey Bee

This bee season I have learned something about hope and the honey bee through having two drone laying queens.  The first drone layer was in a hive I purchased as a nuc last year whose queen was obviously not mated well enough to last beyond one year.  The second drone layer was the package I bought from Don Kuchenmeister this year whose queen wasn't mated or was barely mated.  She was never released (she wasn't sending out queen pheromone so the bees weren't interested) and when she was directly released, only laid drones.

In each hive I followed the standard recommendation that I put a frame of brood and eggs into the hive weekly until they successfully requeened themselves.

It may be unfair to attribute hope to the honey bee.  After all, they are incredibly efficient creatures.  Every bee has a job to do every day.  When a different need arises, she moves to the next job.  Each job she takes prepares her for the next until she becomes a forager and wears herself out (and dies) in the service of perpetuating the life of the hive as an organism.

For the honey bee, it is inefficient to use the resources of the hive taking care of drone brood once enough drones have been raised by the hive to contribute to the general environmental needs for mating with a queen in the general drone congregation area.

In The Wisdom of the Hive by Tom Seeley, he says that "the pheromones that provide the proximate stimulus for workers to refrain from laying eggs come mainly from the brood, not from the queen."(reviewed in Seeley 1985; see also Willis, Winston, and Slessor 1990).

So giving the hive a frame of brood and eggs brings a pheromone into the hive emitted from the brood that helps the hive know that there is the possibility of a queen or at least the perpetuation of the hive through new workers - even if there is not a current queen or if there is a queen that they don't like.  In both of my drone laying hives, shortly after the first frame of brood and eggs was added to the hive, they began casting out the drone brood, ripping them out of their cells and throwing them in front of the hive for the birds to eat.

Here's what it looked like in my backyard.  And here's what Noah and Julia photographed on a visit about a week after April 16 when I gave the Chastain drone-layer hive a frame of brood and eggs.

Look at all the dead drones in the grass at the front of the hive at Chastain!

At the point of these photos both in my home apiary and at Chastain, each hive had either killed the drone-layer or appeared to be planning to cast her out.  The drone laying hive at my house had chewed off the wings of the drone laying queen in preparation for pushing her out of the hive.  With the frame of brood and eggs, they know a good queen is now possible even though neither hive made a queen cell from the first frame of brood and eggs given to them.

Today at Chastain, there was some capped worker brood from the frame of brood and eggs that I gave them on the 16th.  That brood will probably emerge in three or four days to help the hive, but they did not make a queen cell from those eggs.  I had to transport the frame for 30 minutes.  I put it in a nuc box but didn't really have an appropriate way to keep it warm and probably none of the eggs were good enough when they were finally in the hive about 45 minutes after they were removed from their home hive.

In my hive at home with the third added frame of brood and eggs, they now have four or five queen cells on the frame I most recently added and are probably now home free (assuming the emerging queen survives her mating flight).  The hive at Chastain today got a good frame and I'll give them another next week and the next, if that is what it takes.

Michael Bush says it takes several weeks of weekly addition to make it work.  He is a great fan of adding brood and eggs.  Here's what he says:

"There are few solutions as universal in their application and their success than adding a frame of open brood every week for three weeks. It is a virtual panacea for any queen issues. It gives the bees the pheromones to suppress laying workers. It gives them more workers coming in during a period where there is no laying queen. It does not interfere if there is a virgin queen. It gives them the resources to rear a queen. It is virtually foolproof and does not require finding a queen or seeing eggs. If you have any issue with queenrightness, no brood, worried that there is no queen, this is the simple solution that requires no worrying, no waiting, no hoping. You just give them what they need to resolve the situation. If you have any doubts about the queenrightness of a hive, give them some open brood and sleep well. Repeat once a week for two more weeks if you still aren't sure. By then things will be fine.

If you are afraid of transferring the queen from the queenright hive, because you are not good at finding queens, then shake or brush all the bees off before you give it to them.

If you are concerned about taking eggs from another new package or small colony, keep in mind that bees have little invested in eggs and the queen can lay far more eggs than a small colony can warm, feed and raise. Taking a frame of eggs from a small struggling new hive and swapping it for an empty comb or any drawn comb will have little impact on the donor colony and may save the recipient if they are indeed queenless. If the recipient didn't need a queen it will fill in the gap while the new queen gets mated and not interfere with things."

I've now added brood and eggs several times to these hives - twice to the Chastain hive and three times to my hive at home.

I love thinking that they are hopeful for their future and trust that they will be able to make a functioning queen.

Despite that romantic thought, in fact what probably is happening is that they recognize that there is healthy brood now and they need enough energy to manage the healthy brood well, so to that end they get rid of the energy sucking drone brood that is way more than they need.

But I like the sentimental thinking better.

Young Harris Beekeeping Institute Registration Opens on March 4

The annual Young Harris Beekeeping Institute will take place May 9 - 11 2013 at Young Harris College in Young Harris, Georgia.  Registration opens on March 4 (TOMORROW) and it fills up fast. This year in addition to the usual teaching crew (which includes me!), guest lecturers will be Dr. Tom Seeley, Dr. Dave Tarpy and Michael Young from Ireland.

Don't delay in registering - it fills up quickly.  I do understand that this year 175 people will be able to register (25 more than in past years).

At Young Harris, in addition to learning a lot, you can take the Certified Beekeeper exam, or sit for the Journeyman or Master Beekeeper exam.  I think there are several people working on Master Craftsman beekeeper this year as well.  Even if you are not trying for certification, there's lots to learn at Young Harris.

Talks will be given on queen rearing, bees and mites in the forest, queen's effects on her colony, decision making in the bee colony, national bee loss, cooking with honey, and many other great topics. I'm talking about low tech beekeeping, although this year my talk is going to focus on foundationless beekeeping, with some other low tech items thrown in for fun.

I find Young Harris to be valuable every time I go and I expect this year will be especially great.  I am so looking forward to hearing Dr. Seeley who will speak at MABA on Wednesday night before going to Young Harris for the rest of the week.

Sign up - for a great time and lots to learn.

Snippets of Follow-up on this Bee Year's Bumpy Start

My mentor and friend, Penny, suggested in a note that I write to Tom Seeley and ask him why a swarm hived into what looks like a good situation, would abscond.  So I sent this email to him on his Cornell contact site:


Hi Dr. Seeley,

I am so thrilled that you are speaking to my bee club, MABA, on Wednesday in May before I again get to learn from you at Young Harris.  I am writing because I hope you can address my swarm question in your talk, if possible.  

For the third time in my beekeeping experience, we hived a swarm in what looked like great conditions for their happiness and the swarm absconded.  The swarm, as we jokingly measure them, was a 3 cat swarm (the size of three cats).  Here's a link to a slideshow showing the installation:
http://beekeeperlinda.blogspot.com/2013/02/swarm-for-chastain-conservancy.html  The swarm went into a 3 medium box hive with drawn comb and about 2 empty frames;  there was a rapid feeder on top with honey in it; there was an entrance reducer in place.  The hive is in the center of the Chastain Park, Atlanta's largest public park, in the middle of a golf course.  

Three days later, the swarm was gone.  All that was left was a handful of bees who were probably out foraging when the others left.  They were hived on a cloudy, cold day.  Any thoughts about why swarms abscond under what looks like ideal conditions for happiness?

Thanks in advance and I would be glad either to get an email from you or to hear about this in your talk at Metro. 

Looking forward to meeting you,
Linda Tillman

Also Penny suggested that I send samples from the dead-outs to the bee lab at Beltsville, MD.  It's too cold in Atlanta for today (and I have grandchildren at my house all day) and for the next few days to revisit the hives who were bereft of bees.  However, when I get there again, I now have the link to the bee lab.  They analyze dead bees (if they are not decayed) and brood comb with or without brood to see if they can determine what the cause of death might have been.  Surprisingly it is a FREE service.

I remember last year in Asheville when the man from the bee lab in North Carolina that analyzes wax for Mary Ann Frazer was one of the speakers.  I believe the lowest cost for analyzing the wax was $250.  So I am shocked to find out that the Beltsville lab is glad to provide this service for free.  There are also directions on the site about how to manage the samples (the bees must be put in alcohol, but the alcohol must be drained before shipping since it isn't allowed by the shippers).  Comb can be wrapped in a paper towel.

And then just to warm my heart and make me feel less despondent, there's a wonderful article by James Tew in the newest Bee Culture about his bee losses.  (That link will take you to Bee Culture's extremely useful web page but the magazine itself is not available online unless you have an online subscription.)  Tew holds an annual symposium at Auburn.  I missed it this year but want to go next year.    He acknowledges how hard it is to look at and own the fact that winter losses happen, even to him.  He relates beekeeping to the myth of Sisyphus.  Sisyphus' punishment is to roll a stone up a steep hill.  Every time he gets to the top, the stone rolls back down again, and again, and again.  Tew likens his beekeeping to the penance of Sisyphus and I can certainly get into that boat.  But he says, "For me it is not a penalty.  I want to continue rolling that rock up that hill."  Me, too.

For the first time this year, however, I am not spending lots of money on bees.  Last year I spent a lot (close to $1000) getting my hives up and running.  This year I have not ordered any equipment except for two medium cypress nuc boxes that I bought optimistically thinking I would be splitting all of these hives (HA, HA).  And I bought those from Rossman at GBA so I didn't have to pay for shipping.  And I ordered one package of bees from Don Kuchenmeister to populate my hive at Chastain since we use it for teaching.  I'll be getting them on St. Paddy's Day.  Does that give them the luck of the Irish to succeed?  I certainly hope so.

Tom Seeley Webinar about Swarm Decision Making

Robo on Beemaster posted this link to a webinar by Tom Seeley.  I had a hard time getting the sound and the slides to work at the same time, but when I did, it is well worth watching.

Seeley is a great speaker and a very good teacher.

This picture is from the Cornell University web site.

Seeley and the Secret Life of Bees

This morning's email contained a forward from my son-in-law, Jeff, from the Smithsonian Magazine.  I love the article about Thomas Seeley and his work on Honeybee Democracy.

Here it is, and I invite you all to read it.

Why Do I Keep Bees?

I get asked that a lot.  Last Saturday the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers taught a short course and I'm sure I was asked that question at least three times.  On Thursday night I gave a talk on Keeping Bees the Simple Way at the Forsyth County beekeepers meeting, and I started the talk by telling my usual answer to that question:

I keep bees because I wanted to keep chickens.  I read up on what one must do in Atlanta to keep  chickens - how they had to be housed a certain distance from your neighbor's house, what you needed to do to leave them for a while to go out of town, what to do with the waste they create.  But my children who live here said they would not be chicken-sitters when I went out of town; I couldn't quite meet the regs when it came to distance from my neighbors, and I didn't want to deal with chicken ****.

I was driving one Saturday morning, listening to the Walter Reeves show on the radio and he had a beekeeper for a guest.  She was talking about the joys of beekeeping and announced that there were three upcoming short courses in the Atlanta area.  My ears perked up and I listened to her every word!  The first course was on a weekend I couldn't go and in a place way south of Atlanta.  The second course was on another weekend when I already had commitments and was also in a location pretty far away.  The third course was offered by the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers at the Chattahoochee Nature Center on the only Saturday I was available.

I pulled over to the side of the road, called the number she had given for registration, and signed up.  Bees are legal all over the state of Georgia; they don't need bee-sitters when you go out of town; and bees take care of their own tiny, tiny bodily waste products.

I went to the course; fell in love; came home and ordered bees and equipment.  And that's the story.

That's why I started keeping bees but not why I keep bees.

I think I need to change the answer to that frequently asked question.

I keep bees because bees are fascinating in so many ways.  Among them:

• Bees live in a society that runs democratically and well.  With the help of a thoughtful, careful beekeeper, they can thrive in a man made hive box.  
• Working the bees requires moving slowly, something I rarely do in the rest of my life, and feels zen-like in the slow motion of inspecting the hive - the bees bring me serenity and peace
• Working the bees requires respect for the bees and the hive to work the bees well
• I love the miracle of the reproduction of the hive - 
• they can make a new queen if they need to; 
• they create males if they need them (and get rid of them in the fall when they don't need them!); 
• the hive itself reproduces the community as a whole in the process of swarming
• Honey is the only food consumed by humans that is created by insects and it is such a delectable miracle!
• The taste of honey varies with the flowers from which the bees gather the nectar, creating a wine-tasting like experience when tasting various honeys
• Bees are soft furry creatures and when they walk on my hands, I am intrigued by their tiny bodies
• Bees use their bodies in so many ways - 
• they create wax for the honey comb from their abdomen; 
• they pass nectar from bee to bee with their proboscis, 
• they use their wings (among other things) for 
• hive ventilation, 
• drying the nectar to create honey, 
• flying to flowers and back to the hive, 
• they communicate with each other in the pitch dark of the hive through dancing and sharing

Richard Taylor has written about how the bee yard is a place of quiet reflection and I resonnate with his thoughts about that every time I open a bee hive and spend time with the bees.