New episode of the podcast is up! Listen on Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week, I cover chapters 3 and 4, which chronicle the history of the honey bee and humanity's interaction and management of them. Lots of new information for me!
Homestead news:
New beds! Tomatoes, zinnias, and beets from neighbour
Moved 3 sisters bed for more sun; I see sprouts!
Mowing: time consuming but great calorie burner
Behind on building chicken tractors because I am limiting my time in stores
Agatha doing really well outside! She has finished her antibiotics and is now on just one dose of pain meds a day
Spent a few days building supers and nucs. First time I bought things unassembled and they weren’t well made. I had to modify all the connections myself. I’ll either pay more for assembled next time or make them all myself.
Hive news:
Mite test: undetectable levels on all hives. Yah!
Inspections: signs of swarm prep, back-filling, condensing brood space, when to remove feeders, nectar flow, etc.
Both nucs now made and in place, plus one bonus nuc/hive!
One nuc already has capped queen cells!
‘The Lives of Bees’ by Thomas Seeley, Chapters 3-4
Chapters 3 and 4 reviews and examines the history of humans and our relationship to honey bees.
Quick recap of Chapters 1 & 2:
Study of wild honey bee colonies in the Arnot Forest
Do these colonies have varroa? Yes
Is varroa decimating these colonies? No.
Why?
Looked at studies on colony density/proximity in wild areas
Conclusion: wild colonies are widely spaced apart
Chapter 3: Leaving the Wild
The ancestry of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) extends back to the Oligocene times; 30 million years ago. We know this thanks to the discovery of fossils, such as those found in Roth, Germany, in the 1800s. Excavators found a honey bee (Apis henhawsi) perfectly preserved in profile. This bee was clearly carrying pollen, which indicates it was a worker bee, which in turn indicates it was part of a larger hive. This likely means that even so many years ago, the honey bee operated as a colony with queen, workers, drones, and honeycomb.
Rock paintings depicting humans harvesting honey/raiding hives have been found in numerous countries, including France, Spain, and Africa. In Eastern Spain, rock paintings dating back to about 8000 years ago depicts figures using ladders or vines to harvest honey using baskets or buckets to collect the combs in.
The advanced age of these fossils means that honey bees have always been part of our natural world since modern humans (homo sapiens) evolved some 300,000 years ago in Africa. Early man were hunter-gatherers, and there is evidence that honey was something these societies actively sort out. This makes sense when you consider that, not only is honey delicious, but it is also energy rich, containing approximately 1450 calories per pound.
There are societies today that still rely on honey as an important food sorce, such as the Hazda of Northern Tanzania. During the rainy season, honey is a key source of calories. A Hazda man will spend approximately 5 hours a day searching for honey, and averages a daily haul of 3lbs/ 1.5kg. Similarly, the Efe people of the Itari Forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo also hunt for honey during their rainy season, and also consume bee brood as a crucial source of protein. Men and women will search daily and return with an average of 6.6lbs/3kgs of honey and brood per day.
This kind of honey hunting likely had a minor impact on wild colonies:
Pg. 62. “Only when honey hunting began to be superseded by hive beekeeping - this is, when people began keeping colonies in man-made structures - did the impact of humans on honey bees begin its rise to the sky-high level that exists today.” T.Seeley.
The origin of hive beekeeping was likely 10,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. The earliest known evidence of hive beekeeping is a stone bas-relief painting from the sun temple of the pharaoh Nyuserre, circa 2400 BCE (approximately 4500 years ago). This painting depicts men taking honey from stacked hives and storing them in containers. Heiroglyphs above this image show the Egyptian word nft (‘to create a draft’), which indicates the use of some kind of smoker!
In 2007, archeologists found 30 intact hives (plus 100-200 hive remains) in the Jordan Valley of Northern Israel while excavating ruins of the Iron Age city of Tel Rehov. Dated as circa 970-840 BCE, these hives are approximately 3000 years old. Each hive was made of an unfired clay cylinder with a length of 32 inches/80cm, an outer diameter of 16in/40cm, and an entrance of 1.3-1.6inc.3-4cm. This is worth noting because these measurements match those of hives still used today in the Middle East. Both these ancient and modern hives are stacked horizontally and parallel in 3 rows about 1 meter/3 feet apart and 3 tiers high.
Thomas Seeley then goes on to detail the methods used by ancient Middle Eastern Beekeepers, referencing the book ‘The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting’, 1999, by Eva Crane.
To summarize:
Keeper worked at back of the hive (to avoid guard bees at entrance)
Used smoke
Sliced out the honeycomb
Left brood behind
Monitored brood during swarming season
Cut out queen cells or moved to a split
Very similar to current methods in many ways!
The Roman writer, Lucius Junius Moderatus Colunella, wrote a book entitled ‘De re rustica’ (On Agriculture), which was a 12 volume work with volume 9 dedicated almost entirely to beekeeping methods of the time. From this book, we know the following things about how the Romans kept honey bees:
3 rows of hives stacked vertically was preferred
Horizontal hives used
Advises the use of cork tree wood for hive construction; ceramic hives too hot in summer, too cold in winter
Colony management included uniting weak colonies, capturing swarms, swarm control methods, etc
Moving hives was common in spring and summer to take advantage of forage
Killing drones was recommended as they were considered “bees born of larger size than the rest”
Insulating hives in winter with stalks and leaves from plants
After the Roman period, beekeeping North of the Mediterranean had 2 distinct trajectories:
Tree beekeeping
Skep beekeeping
1/ Tree Beekeeping
Harvesting honey from colonies in tree cavities
Accessed by tightly fit doors
Practiced across northeastern Europe
Heavily forested regions; many nesting sites available, and good nectar and pollen sources
Some keepers added doors to wild colonies they’d discovered; others prepared nest cavities and hoped to entice in a swarm
Most nests were 5-20 meters/15-60 feet up the tree, with an entrance 4 inches wide and 3ft tall
A chisel was used to excavate a 10-16 gallon chamber
Trees were marked to indicate ownership (usually with the landowner’s symbol)
Cavities checked in early summer for occupancy
Honeycomb harvest in late summer to early autumn
Very important activity in medieval times within Germany, Poland, the Baltic Region, and Russia
Honey was a large source of income at this time
Used very early on to make mead
By 700CE, beeswax was needed in large quantities for Christian institutions (for candles)
Eventually, tree beekeeping was overtaken by hive beekeeping largely due to convenience, although it is still practiced in the South Ural region of Russia today.
Pg. 69. “Honey bee colonies were disturbed only lightly by the practices of tree beekeeping. Tree beekeepers merely provided wild colonies with suitable nest sites and collected a modest fraction of each colony’s honey stores toward the end of summer.”
2/ Skep Beekeeping
Predominant in Northwestern Europe including Western Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, and France
Large trees and forested regions not as plentiful
Large inverted basket = skep
From the Old Norse word skeppa, which dates the use of the skep to around 800CE when the Vikings raided England
Skeps were made of woven plant stems/wicker covered with clay and cow dung; later, coiled straw was used.
Often placed on a large flat stone or wooden stand
Skeps kept under shelter, including shelves built into the walls of houses (called ‘bee boles’); often seen at monasteries
Often called ‘swarm beekeeping’ as it relied on capturing and producing swarms
Each skep colony would be left alone to build up through Spring and early summer
The bees would then be killed so the honey could be harvested
Skeps were kept small to encourage swarming
According to English books from 1500-1800s, skeps were between 2.4-9.5 gallons (9-36 liters), much smaller than modern hives.
Methods to kill the colony for harvest included sulphur and drowning
Non-lethal method of smoking bees into another skep placed over the base of an inverted hive
By the 1800s, opposition to the killing of the bees began to grow
From fixed-comb to movable-comb hives:
In 1848, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth resigned his ministry at age 38, and moved to PA. There, he opened a school for young women, and became a commercial beekeeper. Langstroth practiced glass-jar beekeeping as buyers wanted honey in the comb to prove its ‘purity’. The hives at use at this time were squat, wooden boxes, 6 inches deep and 18 inches square. They contained 12 wooden bars, parallel to each other, spaced 1.4 inches from center to center, and set into rabbets at the front and back of the box. Langstroth would place a lid on top, which contained circular holes in which he could place the glass jars to later be harvested.
In this hive, bees attached their comb to the sides of the box and the lid. This made getting into the hive troublesome, time consuming, and destructive. Langstroth was determined to solve this problem, and started by cutting the rabbaes slightly deeper, which lowered the frames and provided space between their top and the hive cover. This led to the discovery of ‘bee space’!
What is ‘bee space’?
“A structural rule followed by the bees in which corridors 7-9mm (0.28-0.35in) high are left open for passage.” pg.74
In 1853, Langstroth's book outlining his movable frame hive design was published. Entitled ‘Langstroth and the Honey-Bee: A Beekeeper’s Manual’, it detailed his invention and led to better management of hives and therefore a large honey harvest. This invention happened to coincide with the rise of powered machinery that made wood working faster and more affordable, which might explain why this hive design became quite so popular as quickly as it did.
Over time, many more inventions have made beekeeping a little easier; honey extractors, frames with foundation, queen excluders, fume boards, bee escapes, etc. These have been particularly important for commercial keepers, allowing them to grow large colonies in spring and summer, prevent swarming, and therefore increase their honey harvest. This desire for more bees to make more honey led to spacious hives. A commercial keeper might build colonies with 5+ boxes that yield a honey harvest of 220lb+ per hive.
Why is all of this history of beekeeping important to know?
Fundamentally, it’s important to note that modern hives are 3-5 times greater in size than wild colonies (detailed in chapter 5).
“When we look back across the 4,500 year history of beekeeping. . .we see clearly that Lorenzo L.Langstroth and the other inventors of modern beekeeping have given beekeepers better hives. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the coming chapters, modern beekeeping has not given the bees better lives.” Pg.78.
Chapter 4: Are Honey Bees Domesticated?
What do we mean by ‘domesticated’?
“Domestication is the process of human selection and breeding of wild species to obtain cultivated variants that thrive in man-made environments and that produce things useful to humans.” Pg.79.
Human-directed selection started about 15,000 years ago when wolves were gradually domesticated as hunting partners, leading to dogs. 10,000 years ago as mankind moved from hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies, domestication expanded to include crops, livestock, pets, even microbes (such as brewer’s yeast).
“As a rule, the process of domestication produces organisms with traits that enable them to thrive in environments managed by humans but cause them to struggle in the wild.” Pg.77
The images of beekeeping on various artifacts indicated that honey bee domestication began as far back as 10,000 years ago.
To understand the origins of beekeeping, Thomas Seeley looks to the potential motives and opportunities:
Honey bee tendency to nest in cavities the size of a water pot or large basket (5.3-10.6 gallons); perhaps swarms found these empty objects and moved in?
Fertile Crescent at onset of agricultural living had bountiful bee forage but few suitable nesting sites, making the creation of hives a necessity
Bees are not consistently aggressive; often docile and reluctant to sting
Bees are especially reluctant to sting when full of honey. We see this in swarms, which fuel up on as much honey as they can carry for the trip to their new nest site. As stinging is fatal to honey bees, and a swarm needs as many bees as possible to succeed in establishing a new home, it’s possible that this is why honey engorged bees are reluctant to sting.
Similarly, humans learned early on that bees exposed to smoke will gorge on honey, leading to a reluctance to sting. This might be a survival strategy that allows bees to flee deep into their nest when smoke is detected, where they can potentially wait out the fire. Support of this theory comes from a field study of Cape honey bees (Apis mellifera capensis) that found that the colonies in fire decimated areas did not flee their nests but retreated deep inside them, where propolis acted as a natural barrier between them and the flames. These bees would gorge on honey when smoke was detected before disappearing deep to the furthest recess of their nest. This response makes more sense than the common belief that bees gorge on honey in preparation to flee the nest as a gravid queen is a clumsy and ineffective flyer, and would likely be unable to leave. Retreat would be the only strong option for her.
As mentioned earlier, we know that ancient Egyptians used smoke when harvesting honey. Is it possible that they learned how honey bees responded to it by observing wild colonies?
When attempting to increase productivity of domestic animals, we can change their genes and/or manipulate their environments. Let’s look at the milking cows: they have been carefully bred to boost milk production, are fed a carefully selected diet, kept confined, calves removed at a young age, and artificial insemination is preferred over natural breeding methods. A Holstein cow, having been so carefully bred for milk production and little else, would not be capable of living alone in the wild. In contrast, honey bees continue to thrive away from human influence. Why is this?
We know that bees do not lack heritable genetic traits so that can’t be the issue. Rather, beekeepers have been unable to take tight control of honey bee reproduction until very recently. Up until the 1800s, beekeepers had no way of controlling bee reproduction and therefore had to rely entirely on natural selection. Langstroth’s movable-frame hives started the slow move to more control as now beekeepers could examine their colonies more closely, including removing swarm cells from their best colonies to those doing poorly.
In 1889, Gilbert M.Doyle’s book, ‘Scientific Queen-Rearing’ was published, and recommended taking virgin queens to locations with colonies where drones had been carefully selected for desirable traits.
In the 1920s, Lloyd R.Watson invented the tools and techniques needed for artificial insemination of queen bees, using micromanipulators. Then in the 1950s, Harry H.Laidlaw refined this technique and equipment so that drone semen could be injected deep into the queen’s oviduct, making artificial insemination more reliable and precise. This made well-controlled breeding possible, although perhaps not especially accessible for many beekeepers.
Seeley then details a few successful honey bee breeding programs:
1/ American Foulbrood Resistance study
Started in 1934
Goal: breed AFB resistant bees
Started by O.Wallace Park and F.B.Paddock (entomologists at Iowa State College), and Frank C.Pellet (an editor at American Bee Journal)
In 1935, they set up a testing yard of 25 colonies selected for showing some level of resistance to AFB
Tested resistance by inserting comb containing cells filled with AFB scales (dried remains of larvae killed by AFB); colonies either removed these cells, cleaned them, or did nothing.
7 colonies (28%) showed no signs of disease and were considered resistant
1936, they established a semi-isolated apiary where queens and drones from resistant colonies could mate without outside genetic influence (i.e. non-resistant bees)
27 colonies from these carefully mated queens were then tested
9 colonies (33%) showed resistance by the end of the summer
This process of breeding resistant colonies and testing was repeated over 10 years, and the percentage of resistant colonies steadily increased.
After 1944, queens were artificially inseminated to more tightly control the genetics leading to nearly 100% resistant in colonies by the end of the 10 year study
2/ Alfalfa pollen preference study
1960s, William P.Nye and Otto Mckensen (workers at the U.S Dept of Agriculture) started study
In-bred lines of honey bees categorized as high and low collectors of alfalfa pollen
Intent was to see if bees could be bred to prioritize alfalfa pollen
Honey bees mainly visit alfalfa for the nectar, not pollen, which makes them relatively ineffective as alfalfa pollinators
Through careful selection for breeding, they found that bees could be bred for increased and decreased collection of alfalfa pollen
Certain lines collected 68% of their total pollen from alfalfa (the control colony averaged 18% alfalfa pollen)
Largely funded by seed companies
Ultimately, these high collecting lines of honey bees were not used as solitary bee species are more effective and numerous pollinators of alfalfa (aka it wasn’t worth the long term investment)
3/ Hygienic behaviour
Hygienic behaviour is the removal and disposal of diseased brood (larva and pupae)
Different projects over time have focused on breeding hygienic bees to combat tracheal mites, varroa mites, and chalkbrood.
Test by taking brood comb from hive, freezing some cells using liquid nitrogen, and then returning comb to hive
Colonies that remove this comb within 24 hours considered hygienic
This has proven to be an important mechanism in the management of varroa
No distinct breeds of honey bees
Although there are many variations in colour, morphology, and behaviour of honey bees, usually based on geographical location, no distinct breeds have ever developed. This is very different from other animals that have been shaped by their prolonged contact with humanity, such as dogs.
“Why is it that bee breeders, unlike dog breeders and cattle breeders, have changed Apis mellifera so little over the past 10,000 or so years?” Pg.92
We have only had the ability to artificially inseminate and rear queen bees in the last 100 years or so.
“Any changes in the genetics of honey bees created by the work of bee breeders will, over time, be erased.” Pg.93
We can see, then, that honey bee genetics are primarily effected by natural selection, and this is why bees continue to do so well in the wild, and perhaps why they seem so ready to leave our apiaries each Spring!
“The step back to living in the wild is but a short one for the bees housed in our hives.” Pg.93
A semi-domesticated species
Humanity might not have fundamentally altered the genes of honey bees but we have succeeded in effectively manipulating their environment for our benefit. First, we moved them from natural nesting cavities into hives. Then we developed tools and management techniques that allowed us to more effectively manage the survival of each colony, from queen rearing to swarm prevention. Through these methods, we maximized our financial gains, through super sized honey harvest to pollination contracts. No better example of the latter is that of the mass movement of colonies each year to pollinate the California almond groves. Some 1.5 million colonies travel each year for this purpose; that’s more than half of all colonies within the US today!
“A beekeeper can increase the income earned with his or her colonies by manipulating not just where they live but how they live.” Pg.95
All of this is why Thomas Seeley believes that it is more accurate to describe our beloved honey bee as a semi-domesticated species.
“These wild colonies show us that honey bees have not yielded their nature to us, for whenever they live on their own, they still follow a way of life set millions of years ago.” Pg. 98
Why is all this important? My thoughts:
Understanding the species we study and our relationship to it gives us a clearer view of any results of the studies discussed in this book
Can what we learn from wild colonies be applied to managed ones? This lack of true domestication seems to indicate that, yes, wild colonies are a good model system to study when looking at how to better manage our colonies
Understanding our tools and management techniques allows us to learn what to change and/or improve upon.
Being mindful of this ‘wildness’ of our own bees will help us better understand them
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And that's it for this week! Thanks for reading and listening. You can find me on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.
Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay self-isolated! And, as always, hug your hens and then wash your hands. Take care!