Right then. A bit of a mixed bag this week. There’s a hornet hunt going on across the Irish Sea, some clever work from California on keeping bees away from sprayed crops, and a Finnish paper that could start a good argument at your next association meeting. Kettle on.
Asian hornets turn up in County Cork
The story that matters most to us comes from Ireland. The Tuam Herald reports that searches are under way around Ringaskiddy in Co Cork for an Asian hornet nest, after a second hornet was caught at the same spot as the first sighting. The National Parks and Wildlife Service has bait stations out and is using transmitters to try and follow the hornets home.
The paper spoke to Frankie de Dobbelaere, a vet and beekeeper from the Dunsany area who keeps native Irish honey bees and sits on the committee of Asian Hornet Group Ireland. Her point is simple. The hornet is established in Europe and, in her words, widespread in the UK, so it was only a matter of time before it tried its luck in Ireland. The worry at this time of year is new queens. If they get away and hibernate, they can start fresh nests next spring. She also says a single nest can get through more than 11kg of insects in a season, which is an awful lot of pollinators, and hornets hovering at the hive can overwhelm a colony. As she put it, “We should not lose a bee which is so well adapted to our environment.”
Why does this matter in South Yorkshire? Because the advice is exactly the same here. Learn what you’re looking for: dark brown or black, about 2 to 3cm long, with an orange tip to the abdomen, an orange face and yellow tips on the legs. If you think you’ve seen one, get a photo and report it. Don’t try to deal with it yourself. Over here that means the Asian Hornet Watch app.
Teaching bees to steer clear of sprayed crops
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have used machine learning to hunt for smells that put honey bees off, the idea being you could keep foragers away from crops while they’re being sprayed. The work, led by Anandasankar Ray and Boris Baer, was published in eLife and written up by Technology Org and Global Agriculture.
They trained a model on compounds already known to attract or repel bees, then let it loose on more than 50 million virtual chemicals. That gave them about 130 likely repellents. After a second round of screening, seven made it into field tests with free-flying colonies, and all seven meant significantly fewer bees landed on treated wax comb than on untreated comb. The team says none of the seven harmed the bees.
Plenty still to prove, mind. Nobody knows yet how these work mixed with an actual insecticide, how long the effect lasts in a real field, or what it’d take to get them approved. I’d still rather see fewer bee-harming sprays on flowering crops in the first place. But anything that keeps foragers out of the line of fire gets a cautious thumbs up from me.
Is your colony really immortal?
Phys.org flagged new research this week that challenges the usual view of a honey bee colony. The paper making that case, “On the life history of the honey bee superorganism” by Hannes Bonhoff and Heikki Helanterä in Finland, appeared in Insectes Sociaux.
A lot of us talk about a colony as if it just carries on forever, swapping queens as it goes. The authors reckon that’s muddled thinking about which colony is the parent and which is the offspring. They describe a colony as a line of mortal superorganisms, each one handing the nest on to the next. In their view swarming isn’t reproduction in itself, because it happens before the new queen is mated. The prime swarm is how the mother colony survives the process, and afterswarms are how it makes more offspring. In an earlier version of the paper they argue that routine requeening ends one superorganism rather than giving the old one a new lease of life.
Will it change what anyone does with a hive tool on a Tuesday afternoon? Probably not. It’s a good one to chew over though, and they do say it has knock-on effects for how we monitor colonies and think about parasites.
Bee silk in the medicine cabinet
Honey bee larvae make silk to build protective structures in the hive, and scientists at CSIRO in Australia have been studying it for over ten years. Working with Adelaide University, they’ve now tested a film made from silk produced in the lab, so no hives raided, as a possible wound dressing. According to the release on EurekAlert, the film was safe and well tolerated, much of it broke down in the wound, and it didn’t get in the way of healing. Dr Anna Antipov of Adelaide University put it plainly: “it does not stop the wound from healing.”
Because the silk protein can be tweaked in the lab, the hope is to build dressings that spot infection or release drugs where they’re needed. An Australian Medical Research Future Fund grant will now pay for work on those smarter dressings. Not much to do with honey, but it’s nice to see something our bees make getting a bit of credit.
Bees as delivery drivers in Kenya
Last one, and it’s a bit different. A team from several Kenyan institutions, including the University of Nairobi and the National Museums of Kenya, used honey bees to carry a beneficial fungus, Trichoderma harzianum, onto watermelon flowers in Kirinyaga County. They published the results in an East African agriculture journal.
Hives were fitted with dispensers loaded with the fungus, so bees picked up spores on the way out. On those farms, fungus levels on bees and flowers were far higher than on control farms where bees worked the crop without any. The authors see it as a less labour-intensive, gentler option than conventional fungicides. They’re careful to say more work is needed on how long it lasts, whether it scales up and whether it pays. Still, I quite like the idea of the bees doing the crop protection instead of getting caught up in it.
That’s the lot for this week. If you’d like to see a colony up close and ask all the daft questions you want, have a look at our beekeeping experience sessions. And if you spot anything that looks like an Asian hornet, photo first, report it, and let the experts do the rest.