Green Group discussion

65% of New Hampshire beehives did NOT survive this past winter. There were 1,004 in October and in April only 350.

Some possible reasons:

1. Most beekeepers don't know why.
2. Varroa mites.
3. Weakness.
4. Nosema, a widespread fungal disease.
5. Inexperienced beekeepers lost more hives than experienced ones.

I would suspect you could also throw in whatever substances were administered to the plants that were good for the plants [possibly] but not good for the bees.

With the current state of affairs it must be very hard for the new beekeepers. For something that use to run on autopilot, you can now lose a hive with no warning.

Yes, I would add pesticides, but the article did not mention them. The list came from a poll taken by the beekeepers themselves.

A new take on honeybees as pollinators - we don't need them.
In the last 500 years honeybees were exported all over the world. They weren't the natural pollinators for most areas in the first place. Sarah Bergmann goes on to say that bats, butterflies, moths, flies, midges and more are the original pollinators.

The only problem I see here is that the bats, butterflies, and months are also on the way out. Anything you can easily see seems to be slipping away. Anything flying fly size or smaller seems to be surviving. I wonder if there any plants they don't care to pollinate.

She says we need to devote a higher percentage of land to be used as undeveloped corridors. Unfortunately too many people believe that unused land is being wasted, that it is worthless until it is developed into something suitable for turning an immediate cash profit. Kind of like seeing a full glass as being empty.

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017...

I know a developer who believes undeveloped land is a blight. How do you fight that? For him, it's all about the cash.

Land development is a complete cradle to grave belief system right up there with organized religion that is supported by the government because developed land always has a bigger tax value. It crosses all nationalities, philosophies, ages, in short it is a universal belief system.

People First is based on the idea that there are no immediate consequences of actions for anything done to the natural world. People will do all they can to prevent land from going back to it's original state. Even though the publicity is getting bigger for preserving the land, the amount of land set aside for not being developed is becoming an increasingly smaller percentage of the land being developed and redeveloped.

Here is an interesting collection of articles that does a good job of illustrating the compromises involved in trying to do anything.

http://www.1millionwomen.com.au/blog/
http://www.1millionwomen.com.au/blog/...

Actor Morgan Freeman has converted his ranch into a honeybee sanctuary:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019...

One thing that you seldom hear about is that the pollinator bees have been inbred for a long time. In a good environment it might not matter. In a negative environment it probably makes matters worse.

Here is an article about honeybees and inbreeding:

https://entomologytoday.org/2015/04/3...

If you have not heard of the FlowHive, as I had not, you might want to look at this author blog post. Only if you like honey, though.

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

Bees can make a wave and surf on it if they fall into water.

https://gizmodo.com/i-have-to-tell-yo...

Good reasons not to buy bee pollen.
The bees use it as food that they need to eat and collecting it can shorten the bees lives.

https://www.therawtarian.com/communit...

An African wild bee is able to have workers turn into the mothers of queens, without a drone involved.

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-gene-ho...

"The existence of Cape bees with these characters has been known for over a hundred years, but it is only recently, using modern genomic tools, that we have been able to understand the actual gene that gives rise to virgin birth....

The ability to produce daughters asexually, known as "thelytokous parthenogenesis", is restricted to a single subspecies inhabiting the Cape region of South Africa, the Cape honey bee or Apis mellifera capensis.

Several other traits distinguish the Cape honey bee from other honey bee subspecies. In particular, the ovaries of worker bees are larger and more readily activated and they are able to produce queen pheromones, allowing them to assert reproductive dominance in a colony.

These traits also lead to a propensity for social parasitism, a behaviour where Cape bee workers invade foreign colonies, reproduce and persuade the host colony workers to feed their larvae. Every year in South Africa, 10,000 colonies of commercial beehives die because of the social parasite behaviour in Cape honey bees."

Here is a really nice article explaining the life cycles of bumblebees, social bees, solitary bees and honeybees.

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-female-...

For those who aren't sure, the several species of bumblebee can be told apart by the colours of their abdomen - the furry back end of their bodies.

An Australian wild bee is nesting in polystyrene.

https://phys.org/news/2019-12-native-...

A study found the bees preferred to use this material rather than natural. However, the offspring survival needs to be studied.

Australian wild bees are being studied more, to find what habitats they specifically need, given the destruction of the bushfire summer.

https://phys.org/news/2019-01-tiny-ca...

One bee only nested in small holes in Banksia bushes.

Still wondering if the Asian giant hornets now detected in the US Pacific Northwest are a danger to already stressed honeybees?

An Expert Explains What We Really Need to Understand About Those 'Murder Hornets'

Murder Hornets? Help!

Bumblebees have been found to bite plants to stimulate them into blooming early. As bumblebees can tolerate cold better than honeybees, they come out earlier in the year and at higher latitudes.
If they come out and no plants are blooming, because climate warming has stopped hibernation early in spring, they've got to get some flowers to appear.

This could be the saving of a honeybee hive, (not mentioned) because if they come out early, the bumblebees will have already caused flowers.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/genius-be...

The original report:

https://science.sciencemag.org/conten...

A new study finds only well fed larvae get to be good queens. Royal jelly alone doesn't do it - they need a lot of food.

https://phys.org/news/2020-05-royal-j...

"The United Nations warns that 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators—in particular bees and butterflies—risk global extinction.

In Malaysia, green activists founded the "My Bee Savior Association" to help stem the decline.

When the group is tipped off about nests in areas such as under roofs and near trees, their volunteers try to carefully remove the bees and take them to new sites.

One of Ooi's recent cases was in the car park of an apartment building in Kuala Lumpur, whose managers had reported a suspected nest."

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-malaysi...

More about the honey bee species whose workers can reproduce by cloning.
The queens can do this too. With different results.

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-south-a...

More information: Benjamin P. Oldroyd et al, Adaptive, caste-specific changes to recombination rates in a thelytokous honeybee population, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.0729
Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Recommending a book: fiction about a beekeeper and her young apprentices. This is an adult read.
The Music of Bees

Imported strains of bees are threatening the genetic Irish native stock.

https://www.rte.ie/news/politics/2022...

"The threat of extinction facing the Irish honey bee will adversely affect biodiversity in Ireland unless Government introduces a ban on non-native bees, the Seanad has heard.

Legislation which would halt the importation of non-native bees is currently making its way through the Oireachtas.

Dozens of beekeepers demonstrated outside Leinster House today urging politicians to support the Irish Honey Bee Bill.

Aoife Nic Giolla Coda of the Native Irish Honey Bee Society said the numbers of non-native bees imported here trebled between 2019 and 2020 alone.

"If that trend continues year-on-year this honey bee will become extinct," she said.
...

"taking legal advice around the compatibility of the bill with EU single market rules.

If the bill is to make it into law the Government must demonstrate that it would not be possible to protect the biodiversity and ecosystems without such a trade restriction.

That seems like quite a challenge but there is optimism among politicians and beekeepers alike this evening.

They believe the bee described as docile, productive and capable of surviving a bad summer will soon have the protection of the law to aid its long-term survival."

In the US there are 3 basic bee groups. The original native bees, which are tied to particular types of native plants. These bees do not pollinate everything, only particular plants. Lose those bees and those plants lose their main pollinators. Many of these bee species are solitary bees raising small families.

The next group are the commercial honey bees in the hives. These are invasive bee species. They stay in their controlled hives. Most of them will pollinate just about anything. That is their commercial value. These bees were imported to the states from foreign countries ever since the 17th century.

The third group are the honey bee populations that have sprung up over the past couple of hundred years from bees that escaped commercial hives, they live in the wild.

The honey bees, both in commercial hives and living in the wild are disease carriers which spread those diseases everywhere they go. Unfortunately both groups are giving diseases to the original native bee species.

Because of commercial constraints we are stuck with the commercial honey bee hives. The bees in the commercial hives theoretically could be maintained in healthy conditions with diseases being treated in the hives, but this has not happened. Keeping the bees in the hives healthy is not happening. There are multiple sources of illnesses and many are unknown.

The bee hives are the ultimate example of zero social distancing. This means each individual bee has to be medically treated to not only keep the commercial hive healthy but also the indigenous bee populations. On top of everything else, it could be that the physical location of the hive is extremely important to the survival of the bees.

"For instance, some managed bee populations have been found to naturally survive Varroa mite infestation, a major pest of honey bee colonies (Locke, 2016). However, when removed from their native environment, these bee populations became as sensitive to Varroa as non-resistant local populations, suggesting that the mechanism of mite resistance is dependent on genotype-environment interactions..." This could be pointing directly to diet and exposure to contaminants as the source of bee problems.

There is talk of controlling the wild honey bee populations. I guess they could be captured and put into hives or they could be eradicated by any means possible. There are no descriptions of what people mean by controlling wild honey bee populations. Exterminating wild honey bees would certainly bring objections from everywhere.

There is also talk of putting commercial bee hives on protected natural public land because the bee hive bees can't get enough food in the areas they are stored in between jobs because of the never ending commercial development of the land around them.
The conversion of biodiverse land into monoculture farms also negatively impacts the bees. Putting the commercial bee hives in the undeveloped areas would put all the local wild bees in jeopardy, both the original species and the wild honeybees.

Any "good" that we do is simply putting a band aid over a situation created by our initial, or continual actions. This applies not only to bees, but everything we do. What all of these bee situations show is that human activity is the root cause of most of our problems when it comes to failing to maintain a healthy environment for all life, including ourselves.

Each bee population, in a colony, hive, or family situation, wild, natural, or commercial, is a canary in a coal mine scenario where there is no social distancing. Even the solitary bees go to locations and flowers that every other bee has visited.

Bees Gone Wild
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...

Are honey bees native to North America?
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-b....

Will Putting Honey Bees on Public Lands Threaten Native Bees?
https://e360.yale.edu/features/will-p...

Pitting Wild Bees Against Managed Honey Bees in Their Native Range, a Losing Strategy for the Conservation of Honey Bee Biodiversity
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/...

Thank you.

Honey bees and wasps build similar nests, but bees use wax while wasps chew rotten wood to make paper. Bees build horizontal cells while wasps build vertical ones. The study tells us that bees build vertically and wasps horizontally, with the entry to the cell facing downward. To me that means a vertical cell. I don't know if the technique is being described as it happens, or the cell structure.

How to overcome the issue of fitting a large brood cell for queens in among small cells for workers? Seems both species independently came to the same methods.

https://phys.org/news/2023-07-bees-wa...

"Looking across 10 species, the researchers found that as the scale of the building problem increased (the size difference between worker and reproductive cells), workers began incorporating non-hexagonal cells. These irregular cells were mostly 5- and 7-sided, but they were consistently built in pairs, with the 5-sided cell built on the worker-side, followed by a 7-sided cell on the reproductive side.

This pattern was seen in all the honey bee and wasp species that had a cell-size difference to overcome. For a group of insects renowned for their hexagonal cells, this alone was interesting, as it showed that they all rely on the same non-hexagonal configurations."

More information: Smith ML, Honey bees and social wasps reach convergent architectural solutions to nest-building problems, PLoS Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002211. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/ … journal.pbio.3002211

Journal information: PLoS Biology

Provided by Auburn University College of Sciences and Mathematics

The wasp and hornet nests are horizontal layers with the cells vertically aligned, the opening is at the bottom of the cell facing down. Small wasp nests are usually just a single horizontal layer. Bigger nests of hornets are usually roundish in shape with multiple horizontal layers, one underneath another which is covered by an outside layer which is roundish in shape.

Honey bee nests in commercial hives take advantage of the horizontal arrangement of cells, stacked up on top of each other, in row after row, which builds a series of vertically aligned plates (honeycombs) with space between each plate, with the cell openings all facing the same direction so there is a front, with cell openings and a backside with the back of the horizontally aligned cells sealed up.

In the wild they build inside of whatever structure they can find, with the cells horizontally aligned. A common place in the woods would be inside hollowed out trees.

Individual worker bees and wasps building nests for two different size bodies, using 3 different size cells, 5,6,and 7 sided cells, all solve the same problem of keeping the overall design balanced the same way. That seems to me that as the cells are built, the bees or wasps must be able to sense the shape of the overall pattern by the way the individual cells fit together as they build them in place. Perhaps the design itself has built in instructions for the finished design which are visible before the build is completed.

St. Gobnait is the Irish woman who is the patron saint of beekeepers.

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2024/02...

The native Irish honey bee is at risk due to crossbreeding with imported strains.

https://www.rte.ie/news/environment/2...

""Scientific evidence shows that local honey bees are better for beekeeping," she said.

"Our recent publication shows that Irish honey bees are different physically and genetically from other European dark honey bees.

"Evidence also points to some Irish honey bees as being varroa resistant, and able to survive other diseases, not needing the chemical treatment for parasites that are normally required now for beekeeping," she said.

"They are different also in that they can survive winter here and do not require supplementary feeding.

"They have small nests and don't lay eggs when there is little forage therefore, they are not as competitive to other wild pollinators as imported bees are.

"Overall, Irish beekeepers are better buying and managing honey bees sourced locally."

Prof McCormack said given the global loss of biodiversity and climate change, it is unthinkable that Ireland would allow this dark bee to become extinct or severely impacted."

Another risk to bees in Ireland.

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/...

"The National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) has confirmed a recent sighting and capture of an Asian hornet in the Cork area marking a "biosecurity alert for Ireland".

In a statement, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage said the Asian hornet poses a "significant threat to biodiversity in Ireland as even a single nest can devastate honeybee populations", but the discovery does not pose a significant public health risk.

"The sighting has triggered a Government-led response with the establishment of a new taskforce," the statement said.

NPWS Director of International and EU Affairs Áinle Ní Bhríain described the species as "a particularly aggressive one".

"This is quite a significant risk to our own local biodiversity. This is an insect predator and if it gets into, for example, a beehive, it can decimate the content of the beehive so it quite a serious threat to our native pollinators and to our honeybee hive sector," she told RTÉ's News at One."