Right then. It’s been a quieter week for bee news than some, but there’s one story in particular that’s worth reading twice. A pair of biologists reckon most of us have been thinking about our colonies the wrong way round. There’s also a clever bit of work on keeping bees away from sprayed crops, another nudge about the Asian hornet, and something you’d never guess bee larvae could be useful for.
Is a colony one long life, or lots of short ones?
Two researchers, Dr Hannes Bonhoff at Lund University and Dr Heikki Helanterä at the University of Oulu, have published a review paper in the journal Insectes Sociaux looking at what it really means to call a honey bee colony a superorganism. Sci.News has a good write-up of it.
The old view, going back to E.O. Wilson in 1971, was that a colony could in theory go on forever, because when a new queen takes over she stays in the same nest. Bonhoff and Helanterä disagree. A new queen means a new set of genes, so as far as they’re concerned it’s a new superorganism. What we call “the colony” in a hive is really a family line of related superorganisms, one after another, sharing the same box.
They take a fresh look at swarming too. Because the swarm leaves before the new queen has mated, they argue nothing new has been born yet. The prime swarm is the old colony with its old queen, upping sticks to survive. Afterswarms, with their virgin queens, are how one colony manages more than one offspring in a season. They even suggest new names for the castes, with drones as “sperm bees” and workers as “somatic bees”, which I can’t see catching on at the local association meeting.
The bit that’ll make beekeepers sit up is about requeening. In their words, “Requeening does not rejuvenate a colony but kills it.” They also point out that modern beekeeping tends to aim at keeping a colony young and healthy indefinitely, which sits awkwardly with how bees naturally reproduce and cope with parasites like varroa.
I don’t think anyone’s going to stop requeening a bad-tempered colony on the strength of a review paper. But it’s a useful way of looking at things. When you swap a queen, especially for an unrelated one, you’re starting something new in that box, and it’s worth keeping that in mind.
A spray bees will steer clear of
Over at the University of California, Riverside, Anandasankar Ray and Boris Baer have used machine learning to hunt for smells that honey bees don’t like. The work was published in eLife in September, and Global Agriculture has a clear summary (it was also picked up by Technology Org).
They screened more than 50 million virtual compounds, narrowed it down to around 130 likely repellents, then checked bee behaviour in the lab. Seven of the best were tested on freely foraging colonies in the field. Fewer bees landed on wax comb treated with any of the seven than on untreated comb, and none of them harmed the bees.
The idea is that one day a repellent could be mixed into an insecticide, so the same spray deals with the pest and keeps bees off the crop while the residue is at its most toxic. It’s early days, mind. The field tests were on honeycomb, not crops, and there’s no data yet on how long the effect lasts under real spraying or how it’d work mixed in with an actual insecticide. Still, anything that keeps foragers out of harm’s way gets a cautious thumbs up from me.
Asian hornet: Ireland on alert
The Tuam Herald spoke to Frankie de Dobbelaere, a beekeeper in County Meath who sits on the committee of the Asian Hornet Group Ireland. A second Asian hornet has been caught at the site of the first sighting near Ringaskiddy in County Cork, and the National Parks and Wildlife Service has been using bait stations and tracking transmitters to try and find a nest. At the time of writing, no nest had been confirmed.
She makes the point that this is a critical time of year, because new queens are emerging now and could overwinter and start colonies next spring. She’s seen them first-hand in the Netherlands and doesn’t mince her words about the damage. “One nest can consume easily 11 kilos and more of insects during a season,” she told the paper.
Her advice applies just as well over here. Get a clear photo if you can, report it, and don’t try to deal with it yourself. Look for a dark brown or black hornet, about 2 to 3cm long, with an orange face, an orange tip to the abdomen and yellow ends to its legs. In Great Britain you can report sightings through the Asian Hornet Watch app.
Bee silk for healing wounds
One for the “who knew?” pile. Honey bee larvae naturally produce silk proteins, and scientists at CSIRO and Adelaide University in Australia have been making a bioengineered version of it into a thin film for wound dressings. SciTechDaily reports that the film was safe, well tolerated and mostly broke down inside the wound.
It’s early-stage work, and the next step is “smart” dressings that could help prevent infection. Nothing to do with your hives directly, but it’s nice to see bees turning up somewhere other than the honey aisle.
That’s your lot for this week. If all this talk of superorganisms has got you curious, come and see the bees for yourself at the apiary here in Staincross. I’ll happily bore you about queens for as long as you’ll let me.