Episode 42 of the podcast is live! This week, I go through chapter 8 of Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seeley. This chapter is all about how a swarm flies to its new home. Which bees lead the way? How many of the 10K+ bees in a swarm know the way to the chosen nest site? How long does it take for the swarm to reach and enter their new home? These questions and more will be answered! Listen over on Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Homestead Updates
Worried about Agnes not being 100% but made peace with her likely just being an old lady who is happy being with her flock and doing her own thing. Then she went on an adventure to the neighbour’s house!
Pepperjack, the rooster, continues to be a huge jerk. Things have improved somewhat. Once I tell him off, he’ll back down for a few days now. Sometimes, though, he goes for me out of the blue and I am getting annoyed by all the bruises I have on my legs! It will be an interesting look for when I start wearing dresses again.
We have a family of crows that lives nearby. I think they sometimes nest in our fir trees but it’s hard to say as they’re not here all the time. They do consider it their territory, though, which means they chase the hawks away. Recently, their ruckus let me know that something was wrong with my chickens and I went out to find them all extremely freaked out. I think a hawk had made a play for one of them. I had to herd them back home but I was missing one. I finally found her hiding under our boat!
Things are starting to bloom here; the forsythia, daffodils, and I finally saw a dandelion in flower! I still think we’re a little ways away from the nectar flow, though.
I’ve been able to spend a few hours here and there out in the garden, doing some clean up. It feels good!
My planning for ducks continues. I’ve decided to build their house myself and buy a premade run. Looking into materials now.
Hive Updates
My neighbour swung by to do a second oxalic acid vaporization treatment. I didn’t get a big mite fall from the first (good sign!) and saw none after the second so I am feeling pretty good about that.
I was started to worry this colony was behind because I’ve seen other local beekeepers talking about how much brood they have. Well, I am pleased to say my girls have babies to tend to now! A week ago, I saw 1 full frame of capped brood, and 4-5 partial frames in various stages (most capped, though). Made me so happy to see!
They have lots of honey left to get through and I’ve left the feeder on since we are still getting some cold nights, and we have a cold front coming in next week. Once the night temperatures are consistently above 50F, I’ll be putting syrup out.
Some local keepers have been talking about doing splits and queen rearing already but it feels too early for me. I have seen that some folk do have a good amount of drone comb, which is the sign to look for when you’re considering anything that requires new queens. If you remember, Thomas Seeley consistently observes a peak in drone production right before swarming. I do have swarm traps out without a chemical lure, although I might add a few drops of that soon, but I won’t be looking to split or create nucs until I am confident my colony is ready and that there are enough drones locally for mating flights.
*
Chapter 8: Steering the Flying Swarm
Much time I marveled at the fruitless skill
With which thou trackest out thy dwelling-cave,
Winging thy way with seeming careless will
From mount to plain, o’er lake and winding wave.
-Thomas Smibert, The Wild Earth-Bee, 1851
This chapter opens with a reminder about honeybee foragers: that they can fly 10+ kilometers (6+ miles) from the hive in search of food.
Honeybees (as well as bumblebees) navigate much like sailors; with a compass! For the bees, this is the sun. As we have seen with their waggle dances, the sun is a key reference point for them to indicate direction. Honeybees also memorize landmarks in order to zero in on their discovered forage.
This ability of bees to roam so far from home without becoming lost has long been a source of fascination and study for biologists and naturalists. But interest in how a honey bee swarm flies so cohesively has been mostly overlooked.
This is surprising if we consider that the swarm can travel several miles, crossing all manner of landscapes, and then zero in on one small knothole on the tree, which opens into the cavity that will be their new home.
How is this incredible, oriented group flight possible? How is it accomplished? This chapter answers those questions.
Swarm Chasers
Seeley tells us about a discovery of his first mentor, Roger ‘Doc’ Morse. Morse and one of his students, Alphonse Aritabile, had discovered that a swarm of honey bees continuously monitor the presence of the queen substance pheromone within the swarm.
Fun Fact! A major component of this pheromone is secreted by the mandibular glands located in the queen’s head. Its scientific name is (E)-9-oxo-deconoic acid, or 9-ODA, and it is a 10-carbon fatty acid.
If the bees of the swarm continue to smell this pheromone, they will continue their flight onwards but, should it fade and disappear (because the queen has stopped to rest), they will cease their forward flight, seek out their queen via her scent, and then cluster back around her wherever she has come to rest.
During their flight, it is clear that monitoring the presence of their queen is of primary importance.
Morse and Aritabile sought to test whether 9-ODA is the primary indicator of a queen’s presence. To do this, they set up artificial swarms with caged queens. When each swarm had discovered their chosen nest site and were ready to fly, they painted 5 worker bees with 9-ODA. All of the swarms with these painted workers flew off and never returned.
Swarms that were put in identical circumstances, with a caged queen but had no workers painted with 9-ODA, did take flight. However, they flew about 50 meters (150 feet) before returning to their caged queen and clustering around her.
The study was a success: 9-ODA is, indeed, critical to a swarm in flight believing that their queen is with them.
“To this day, I feel sadness for the orphaned swarms produced in this otherwise superb experiment.” Pg. 177 (Me too, Seeley! My hope is that these queenless bees eventually drifted to other colonies and were welcomed due to their full stomachs full of honey/sugar syrup.)
One result of this experiment was Morse’s interest in how a swarm conducts their flight. In 1997, he invited Kirk Visscher (a graduate student at the time) and Seeley to help him look into this issue.
First, they decided to watch a swarm fly from start to finish, and so they went to Appledore Island where they felt confident they could control the swarm’s flight path.
They located a relatively straightforward path that would allow them to run beneath a swarm as it flew. This involved scoping out the terrain before positioning a eleven thousand bee swarm and the nest box that serve as the swarm’s new home.
The track they located was roughly 350 meters (1150 feet) in length, and they used flagged stakes to mark every 30 meters (100 feet) along it. They could determine the flight speed of the swarm by noting when the center of the swarm cloud passed each of these markers.
It did not take long for a scout from the swarm to locate the provided nest box, and soon it was being advertised enthusiastically at the swarm cluster. Each bee that danced was marked with blue paint and they then noted the percentage of marked bees seen at the nest box at intervals of 5 minutes.
In all, they painted 143 scout bees and found an average of 29% of scouts at the box had a blue dot. This allowed them to estimate that approximately 495 bees had visited the nest box (143 = 0.29 x 495). This means that less than 5% of the 11 thousand bees in the swarm were aware of their destination before the flight to it.
As for flight speed, they saw that the swarm hung over their intermediary resting spot (where they had gone after leaving the parent hive) for about 30 seconds before moving slowly toward the nest box.
The first 30 meters (100ft) was flown at less than 1 kilometer per hour (0.5mph) but soon the swarm picked up to its top speed of 8km/hr (5mph) after 150 meters (500ft).
Most remarkably, about 90 meters from the nest site, the swarm began to gradually decrease its speed until coming to a halt less than 5 meters (15ft) from the nest box.
Within 2 minutes of arrival, the scout bees alighted by the nest site entrance in increasing numbers; 5 after 20 seconds, up to 100 after 90 seconds. These scout bees all released their Nasonov gland pheromone to show the other bees the way home.
Within 3 minutes from the swarm’s arrival, the bees were landing and covering the front of the nest box. They then began to march en masse through the entrance, “creating a whirlpool of bees that wheeled slowly around the entrance hole”. Pg.179
6 minutes later, the queen entered the nest, and before 10 minutes had gone by, nearly all the bees had gone inside.
Seeley credits this time to his love of swarm chasing but notes that he did not return to these observations as a scientist until 25 years later, in the summer of 2004.
He was joined in this study by Madelaine Beekman, a behavioral biologist from the Netherlands. Beekman was fascinated by the mystery of swarm flight guidance; an interest that grew during her post-doctoral studies in England, where she worked with Francis Ratnick, a noted bee expert.
Beekman and Seeley’s first step was to consider how to improve the set up used in the Appledore Island study. They wished to have greater control over the swarm’s flight in order to record it in detail.
They decided on setting up swarms to fly across the meadow beside Seeley’s laboratory at the Liddell Field Station, just off the Cornell campus. At the center of this 65 acre expanse of grass was a large ash tree, which they used to hang the nest box intended for the swarms to find and select as their new home.
Although there were surely natural nest sites in the area that could attract scout bees, Seeley had already learned how to remove bees that danced for ‘rogue’ sites, and so would continue to use this method to ensure that their nest box was the winner of the scout bees’ debate.
Their chosen flight path, between where they mounted the swarms and the nest box on the ash tree, was a total of 270 meters (886 feet) in length. They divided the flight path into 30 meter (98ft) segments in order to calculate flight speed.
For this experiment, Seeley and Beekman set up a ‘launch pad’; a 20 x 20 meter (66 x 66 foot) closely mowed area of grass, gridded with stakes set 4 meters apart, and in which they had placed a 6 meter tall pole with 1 meter markings. They intended that this launch pad would provide accurate measurements of the dimensions of the swarm cloud as it took flight.
Each swarm was positioned at the center of the launch pad, and its length and width could be measured at takeoff thanks to the grid acting as a reference. They also took photos of each swarm from the side for later analysis of the movement patterns seen.
They used 3 swarms in total, each containing about 11,500 bees (median size of a natural swarm).
Once in the air, the swarms moved as a cloud of bees some 10 meters (33ft) long, 8 meters (26ft) wide, and 3 meters (10ft) tall. They flew about 2 meters (6ft) above the ground, which was just over the observers’ heads.
Using these dimensions, Seeley and Beekman were able to calculate how far away each bee was spaced from each other. On average, the bees were positioned 27cm (10 inches) apart, which gives a density of about 50 bees per cubic meters (or 1.4 bees per cubic foot). Despite this closeness, rarely did the bees collide while in the air.
As had been seen with the study on Appledore Island, each swarm initially moved slowly before gradually accelerating to a top speed (6km/hr or 4mph) before slowing down until coming to a smooth stop just before the nest box.
They also witnessed the same behaviour of entry: the scouts landing first and guiding the others in by releasing their Nasonov gland pheromone.
As before, the whole swarm had moved in to their new home within 10 minutes of arrival. The whole process from launch, to flight, to landing and entry took less than 15 minutes!
Leaders and Followers
Part of what makes a swarm’s flight so fascinating is the knowledge that only a small percentage of the bees know the travel route and destination
As mentioned previously, less than 5% of the swarm that Seeley, Visscher, and Morse studied on Appledore Island had actually visited the nest box before flying to it to take up residence.
This finding was confirmed during Seeley and Susannah Buhrman’s study (mentioned in a previous chapter) that involved labeling bees and determining which nest site each scout advertised. During this study, they found just 1.5-1.7% of the bees in a swarm performed dances for their chosen site.
Furthermore, Seeley and Visscher’s study on how scout bees transmit nest site quality in their dance (see chapter 6) found that 50% of scouts from a high quality site will dance for it.
Combining these two figures gives an estimate of 3-4% of bees in a swarm that have actually been to the chosen nest site and can therefore navigate to it. This means that some 400 individual bees lead the swarm of 10 thousand plus bees to their new home.
How does this system of leaders and followers work? There are three hypotheses.
The first suggests that information is shared via a chemical signal. As a result of their study on queen-sensing within a swarm by monitoring the 9-ODA she releases, Al Aritabile, Roger Mose, and Rolf Boch proposed the idea that scout bees guide the swarm using the pheromone produced in their Nasonov glands.
The other two hypotheses posit that vision, not scent, is the primary form of information transfer.
One hypothesis, called the ‘subtle guide hypothesis’, suggests that scout bees do not actively signal to the swarm but merely fly in the direction they know, while the swarm simply follows their lead by sight. This was proposed in 2005 by a team of biologists from Princeton University in the USA, and the universities of Leeds and Bristol in England. These scientists made computer simulations of airborne swarms, and demonstrated that if each bee in a swarm attempts to avoid collisions by turning away from bees within a certain close range, while also being attracted to and aligned with bees outside of this collision distance, then whether they flew towards the leading scout bees or away, the swarm would still be steered towards its new home.
This is an intriguing premise as it does not need many informed leaders (less than 5%) for the disparate swarm to be guided safely home.
The other vision based hypothesis is called the ‘streaker bee’ hypothesis, and was suggested by Martin Lindauer in 1955. Lindauer observed that, with every swarm he had watched, several hundred bees would always fly swiftly to the front of the swarm cloud, and always in the direction of the chosen nest site. These ‘guiding bees’ would eventually fall back to the border of the slowly moving swarm cloud before once more flying rapidly to the front of it. Thus, this ‘streaker bee’ hypothesis proposes that these high speed flights are directional signals, guiding the swarm to continue in the right direction.
This hypothesis also suggests that the bees of the swarm fly in the same way as those in the ‘subtle guide’ hypothesis (avoiding collisions and aligning themselves with other bees) but suggests that the bees of the swarm preferentially align with the streaker bees specifically.
“So the two key differences between the subtle guide and streak bee hypotheses are whether or not the informed bees (leaders) point the way with high-speed flights and whether or not the ignorant bees (followers) favour alignment with fast-flying bees.” Pg.184
Computer simulations have found each hypothesis to be a plausible mechanism of swarm flight guidance. But does that mean they’re true?
Scent Organs Sealed Shut
After examining the flights of swarms across the meadow at the Liddell Field Station, Seeley and his collaborator, Madelaine Beekman, decided to determine whether scout bees led the swarm by using attraction pheromones produced by their Nasonov gland. To do this they decided to seal this scent organ shut so that no pheromone could be released.
The scent organ of a honey bee worker lies on the upper surface of their abdomen at the front edge of the last abdominal segment. It is made up of hundreds of gland cells (the Nasonav gland, named for the Russian scientist who first described it in 1883) whose ducts open onto the membrane that connects the last 2 plates of the upper abdomen.
The secretion from these ducts consists mainly of citral, geraniol, and nerolic acid, and apparently smells quite pleasantly of lemon! (I can’t say I’ve noticed this scent before, honestly. But now I’ll keep a ‘nose’ out!)
This secretion collects on the membrane between the two plates (or ‘tergites’). Due to how these tergites are positioned, usually this area of membrane is concealed. However, a worker bee can consciously expose the membrane (thus releasing the scent) by bending the apical (topmost) segment of her abdomen downward.
It is possible to prevent a bee from exposing this area by carefully painting over the joint between these two plates.
It took Seeley and Beekman a while to find a paint that lasted for longer than a few days but, finally, they succeeded.
To prepare their test swarms, they would immobilize 10-20 bees by placing them in the refrigerator until the bees were in a chill torpor. Then they would put the bees on ice and paint closed their scent organ, before pouring the still immobilized bees into a screened cage with their queen. This was repeated until they had 4000 bees painted. This would be the ‘treatment’ swarm.
They also prepared control swarms to make sure that this process of chilling and painting the bees was not affecting their behaviour. These 4000 ‘control’ bees were handled identically but had their thorax painted instead of their abdomen.
Ultimately, they used 6 swarms; 3 treatment swarms, and 3 control swarms. Both types formed similar clouds when flying and both types flew directly and swiftly to the nest box.
Both types of swarms also flew at speeds seen previously, with a smooth acceleration to top speed, followed by a gradual slow down and easy stop at the nest site.
The key difference was how long it took each type of swarm to move into the nest box. The control swarms took just 9 minutes on average to go inside, whereas the treated swarms took 20 minutes on average. This makes sense when we consider previous observations that showed how the scout bees alight upon the box first and then release their Nasonov gland pheromones to ‘mark’ the entrance of the new home.
The poor scouts sealed with paint tried to expose their scent organs; raising their abdomens and whirring their wings furiously to no avail.
To test that the paint held for all the bees, Seeley and Beekman inspected 250 bees from each swarm shortly after it entered the nest box, and found that less than 1% of them had cracked paint seals.
So what does this tell us? Well, since both types of swarms flew directly and swiftly to their chosen nest site, we can conclude that the leading scout bees do not guide their flying sisters using the Nasonav gland pheromone.
Streams of Streakers
Now, Seeley and Beekman decided to test the ‘streaker bees’ hypothesis.
They had witnessed the same behaviour that had led Lindauer to propose this hypothesis but were not confident that their visual observations were correct, nor did they have any data to support it.
Initially, they decided to use conventional photography to capture a swarm in flight, They used a 35mm camera, colour transparency film with a slow film speed, and a moderately long exposure time (1/30th of a second). Using this to photograph a swarm from the side, under a clear sky, they could get the entire swarm cloud captured within a single photo with the individual bees appearing as small, dark streaks.
These small, dark streaks actually told them quite a lot, such as a bee’s flight speed, flight angle relative to the horizon, as well as her orientation
Incredibly, these photos showed that a small minority of bees do fly through the swarm at the maximum flight speed of 34 km/h (20mph), while the majority fly much more slowly.
These fast flying bees were also more likely to be horizontal in orientation, which indicates a straight and level flight.
These streaker bees tended to position themselves in the top of the swarm cloud, which makes sense when we consider that this positioning offers better visibility to the follower bees, especially when positioned against the background of a bright sky.
Computer Vision Algorithms for Tracking Bees
The aforementioned photographic study was illuminating and provided support for the ‘streaker bee’ hypothesis but it was not conclusive, and it didn’t address the key difference between the streaker bee hypothesis and that of the subtle guide hypothesis.
The key to which hypothesis is correct rests on whether or not the rapid flying bees of the swarm point mainly forward toward their intended goal.
The subtle guide hypothesis predicts that these bees will not be heading mainly in the correct direction because it posits that the informed bees do no signal travel direction with high speed flight.
The streaker bee hypothesis, in contrast, does predict that these bees will be heading mainly in the correct direction because it posits that these speedy bees are the informed bees directing their sisters via their fast flight.
To determine which hypothesis is correct, one would need to be able to track individual bees within a swarm, and measure their position, flight direction, and flight speed. In 2006, this became possible, and demonstrated that the high speed flying bees in a swarm are, indeed, flying directly to the new nest site.
Two individuals were instrumental in developing the tools that allowed this tracking of individual bees within a flying swarm; Keven Passino, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University, and his brilliant graduate student, Kevin Schultz.
Seeley had first met Kevin Passino in 2002, when he was visiting OSU to guest lecture. Upon meeting, Seeley immediately felt that a collaboration would benefit them both. He saw in Passino an engineer who was often inspired by biological systems. This fusion of engineering and biology is called ‘biomimicry’ and was, at the time, considered a hot approach among control engineers, (It is also, incidentally, what my husband specializes in, with a focus on reptile and amphibian locomotion.) The two men were eager to some day collaborate on a honeybee project.
After Seeley and Beekman had published the results of their photographic analysis of honeybee swarms in flight, Kevin Passino realized that the next step was to record a flying swarm using a high-definition video camera. He felt that point-tracking algorithms, invented by engineers working on computer vision, would allow them to track individual bees within the swarm, while also enabling them to determine their position within the cloud, their flight speed, and their direction.
And so Passino, Seeley, and Visscher headed to Appledore Island in the summer of 2006 to do just that!
The goal was to record a swarm as it flew over the camera at two points along the flight path: 15 meters (50ft) from its intermediary resting site, when the swarm would be flying more slowly, and again at 60 meters (200ft) when it would be at, or near, top speed.
They set up the swarm by the old Coast Guard building at the island’s center, and a nest box was placed on the eastern shore 250 meters (820ft) away.
The camera used had a wide-angle lens to enable it to include most of the swarm cloud’s width (but not its length). It also had a high shutter speed (one ten thousandth of a second!) so that it could capture each bee as a blob, as opposed to a long streak (as the photographic study had captured).
Their greatest challenge came from the winds on the island. In fact, it is so blustery there that a wind turbine was built in 2007 to harness some of that natural energy. High winds dramatically affect a swarm’s flight path as the bees are buffeted about and face increasing resistance. It would be difficult, maybe even impossible, to get a swarm to fly directly over the placed markers in these conditions.
Thankfully, on June 29th and July 2nd, they experienced calm, little-to-no wind days, and twice captured a swarm flying over the 15 and 60 meter markers.
Once they had these two recordings, they handed them over to graduate student, Kevin Schultz, who over a period of 2 years created a computer algorithm that semiautomated the data-gathering process.
Basically, this algorithm enabled the tracking of a single bee from frame to frame, using a pairing protocol that relied on orientation and the shape of the bee itself. The technical description is long and confusing but that’s the gist of it! Any errors in translation are my own.
Crucially, the size of the blob (the bee) indicates the height of the bee above the camera, which allows one to distinguish between bees at the top and bottom of the swarm (as well as the space between). This, in turn, enables three-dimensional reconstruction of the individual bee’s flight within the swarm. (Seeley is very excited about this!)
Aside from the sheer impressive accomplishment of this algorithm, one key fact emerged: the fast-flying streaker bees were indeed flying in the direction of the chosen nest site! In fact, analysis showed that the fastest bees were flying directly home, while the slowest ones were headed in the opposite direction.
The fast bees were also positioned primarily in the top portion of the swarm cloud, confirming Seeley and Beekman’s suspicions based on previous observations.
While examining the peaks in flight speeds within the swarm, Seeley noted that the peaks are higher at the front section of the swarm cloud, indicating that the fastest bees are not just positioned at the upper portion of the swarm but also at the front.
Analysis also indicated that bees tended to increase their speed as they moved from the rear of the swarm cloud to the front. Seeley posits that this is likely due to the ‘ignorant’ bees speeding up in order to follow the ‘leader’ bees. As more individual bees pick up their speed, more bees around them are influenced to do the same, causing a chain reaction that could explain the smooth acceleration to top speed witnessed in the swarm.
All of this made Seeley, Passino, and Schultz conclude that it is the streaker bees, not the subtle guides, that provide flight guidance to the airborne swarm. You can read their paper on the subject by visiting this website.
Seeley states that he would like to test this theory further by somehow preventing the streaker bees from moving so fast, in order to see what effect this has on the swarm. So far, he has not found a method that slows the bees without completely stopping them from flying or acting otherwise normally.
Madelaine Beekman and two students, Tanya Lathy and Michael Duncan, did try a different approach to test the streaker bee hypothesis. They managed to direct fast flying forager bees through an airborne swarm, entering from the side of the swarm cloud. If the streaker bee hypothesis holds true, the forager bees would create conflicting directional information, thereby disrupting the swarm’s flight path. And that’s exactly what happened!
They tested 6 swarms, all attempting to fly 100 meters (330ft) to a nest box while forager bees were flying quickly back and forth across their path. Of the 6 swarms, only 1 reached the nest box intact, although it was knocked off course temporarily. The other 5 swarms either broke apart or were led far off course.
Beekman and the two students also flew 4 control swarms, which were identical to the test swarms in all ways, but without the forager interruption. All of these swarms flew directly and cohesively to the nest box.
This clever experiment further supports the streaker bee hypothesis.
Assembling the Flight Navigators
Seeley points out how many questions about honeybee swarms in flight are left unanswered: how does the swarm trigger the slow down witnessed before arriving at the nest? How do the leader bees move through the swarm; do they stop in the air and allow the cloud of bees to overtake them, or do they drop low and underneath where they can’t be seen and circle to the back? How does the swarm know they have enough leader bees to take them safely home?
What is particularly striking to Seeley is the way almost all the scout bees at the chosen site will abandon it to return to the swarm cluster. The number of scout bees at a site grows and grows, and then suddenly plummets as all abandon it and return to the swarm cluster. Throughout his studies, he has seen this so many times that he now knows it indicates that a decision has been made and the swarm is soon to take flight.
What makes all the scout bees return before takeoff? Is it simply that they visit the swarm as usual and pick up on flight readying behaviour? Or is there yet some unknown signal that lets them know they must return to the swarm for departure?
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the bees possess some secret gadgetry for ensuring that a swarm about to take flight is well stocked with the informed bees who can pilot it safely to its new home.” Pg.197.
*
And that’s it for this chapter! Next up is Chapter 9 (Swarm as Cognitive Entity), and then all we have left to cover is Chapter 10 and the Epilogue. Huzzah!
Recommendation corner!
If you follow my personal Instagram (@britikitty), you will have seen that I’ve been using tarot cards to help me focus and ground myself. I have been relearning the tarot system of the major and minor arcanas (and their meanings) but find that they primarily help me do a sort of journal-based meditation that I’ve been finding very beneficial. Of course, being me, I really wanted a bee-themed tarot, of which there is only one (this seems shocking to me!). Sadly, The Journey of the Sacred Bee Tarot is currently sold out (but the second printing is happening this summer!) so imagine my delight when I found that the creator of this deck is currently funding a Sacred Bee Oracle deck via Kickstarter. I immediately pledged so I can get my eager hands on a deck, and I highly recommend checking out her page (which is still live as of time of recording). Oracle decks do not follow the traditional tarot card system. Instead, they rely heavily on symbolism and imagery to offer up a focal point. Some people use them with tarot cards to get another look at a reading, and others use them simply to meditate on. However you choose to use them, they are a beautiful, uplifting tool. I’m really excited about this project! I thought my follow beekeepers and bee-appreciators might like it too.
The creator of this deck also donates a token of the proceeds (for both projects) to The Bee Conservancy! So you're getting something beautiful and helping to support our precious pollinators!