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!

Delaplane on the Hive as a SuperOrganism

The Metro Atlanta Beekeepers meeting drew a large crowd to the Botanical Garden to hear Dr. Keith Delaplane, head of the department of entomology at the University of Georgia speak on the beehive as superorganism.



Keith is such an engaging speaker that he kept everyone's interest as he taught us a lesson on genetics and then helped us all to understand the concept of the superorganism.



He pointed out that the hive survives best with a genetically diverse population. This is supported by the mating of the queen with 15 - 20 drones, thus bringing a complex genetic pool to the hive.

William Morton Wheeler introduced the idea of the hive as a super-organism in 1911. A super-organism is "a complex, coordinated, individualized system of activities directed at acquiring and assimilating resources from the environment, protecting the system and producing other systems."

Dr. Delaplane said that thinking of the hive in this way means that we can imagine the hive as a total functioning body with the ovaries being the queen; the testes being the drones; the body being the workers; the liver being the beeswax; and the uterus being the brood cells.

He emphasized that the comb is the liver of the hive.  This does not mean that the comb processes yucky stuff in the hive, but rather that it absorbs the dirt, the chemicals, the bee footprints, the cocoons, etc.  So if your bees use old comb to raise brood, in essence they are raising the brood in the liver rather than in the uterus.

Note: (in support of those of us using foundationless frames and thus encouraging our bees to build new comb each year): In a tree, bees raise brood in the newest comb (the uterus of the superorganism). The following year, the same bees would use the former brood comb to store honey and again raise the brood in new comb.

When a hive swarms the organism essentially splits itself in half and one half moves at least 500 meters away from the original colony to avoid competition. From that moment on, both halves of the original super-organism are tasked with surviving the winter. This swarm/splitting occurs in early spring because this gives both halves opportunity to recover from the split and to build up resources to survive the winter.

Delaplane pointed out that all the disease resistant traits are recessive genetically. This, he explained, is because for the super-organism to survive, there must be bees whose main best focus is foraging, fanning, nursing, etc. The traits that promote disease resistance such as hygienic behavior can't be dominant or the bees would all be in the hive dragging out varroa infested larvae rather than out foraging for winter.

So if we are thinking of the hive as a super-organism, then beekeepers might change how they operate in the following areas:

• Rethink density in the apiary (in the wild, bees locate 2 hives per acre)

• Cull old combs and give bees opportunity to build new comb for brood raising

• Feed more and better

• Emphasize high drone density

As always, Dr. Delaplane brought his energy and enthusiasm to his talk and I really enjoyed hearing him.

Before I left the meeting, I bought a copy of Cindy Bee and Bill Owens' new book on Honeybee Removal.  I don't think I'll ever do bee removals other than collect swarms, but I wanted to support my friends.