Right then. It’s been a busy week for bee science, and for once a lot of it has come from close to home. One study in particular made me sit up, mostly because it’s about us beekeepers and the bees we keep, and it doesn’t make for entirely comfortable reading. There’s also a bit of Nordic theory that questions how we manage colonies, and some slow-motion footage of a bee sting that I’d quite like to unsee.
Honeybees are elbowing wild pollinators off the flowers
Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University have been watching what happens when honeybees and wild pollinators turn up at the same flowers. The work was led by PhD student Victoria Buckle, with Dr Tom Ings as senior author, and it’s been published in Ecological Entomology. They spent 93 hours over two years at five sites in and around Cambridge, all within 300 metres of known honeybee colonies, watching bramble and ivy.
Every time one insect pushed another off a flower or stopped it landing, they logged it. Where there were more honeybees, there were fewer of everything else, and more squabbles. On bramble, doubling the number of honeybees went with a 14% drop in bumblebees. On ivy, more honeybees meant fewer solitary bees and hoverflies. Other pollinators steered clear of honeybees in 28% of encounters on bramble and 36% on ivy, and in at least one in five of the honeybees’ wins they actually chased or shoved the other insect away. Hardly any of the rough stuff was started by anything other than a honeybee.
There’s a twist, though. The ivy bee, a solitary bee first recorded in Britain in 2001, was the only species that stood its ground. It chased honeybees off and won contests against them more often. Buckle says, as far as she knows, nobody has recorded that before.
Why should a beekeeper care? Because the release also points out that registered beekeepers in the UK have gone from 19,000 in 2010 to 47,000 last year. That’s a lot more hives sharing the same hedgerows. The researchers also found warmer days meant more competition, and they suggest climate change could make it worse. To be fair to them, they’re not having a go at us. As Buckle put it, “The aim of our study was not to discourage beekeeping.” Their point is that in places packed with hives, especially towns and cities, we need to think about how honeybees and wild bees can get along. I can’t argue with that. It’s a decent nudge to think about how many colonies a patch of forage can really carry.
Is a colony really one big animal?
This one’s more philosophical, but it’s got teeth. Hannes Bonhoff from Lund University in Sweden and Heikki Helanterä from the University of Oulu in Finland have published a paper in Insectes Sociaux arguing that the queen and her colony should be treated as a single organism. That’s the superorganism idea, which isn’t new, but they’ve applied it to the colony’s whole life cycle. SciTechDaily has a good write-up.
In their view a colony grows up through stages, a bit like an animal does, gets old and eventually dies after several years. Swarming is how it reproduces. The old queen heads off with roughly half the bees, and the new queen inherits a home that’s already built, stocked with food and staffed with experienced workers. They see that as a kind of parental care.
Here’s where it gets awkward for the likes of me. Most of us spend a good chunk of the season stopping swarms and replacing queens to keep colonies productive. Bonhoff reckons “such interventions fundamentally conflict with the natural reproductive strategy” of the bees. The researchers also say thinking this way could change how we approach varroa, though they’re clear it doesn’t hand us a better treatment. They call it a framework, and I don’t think anyone’s about to stop swarm control on the strength of it. Still, it’s worth chewing over on a wet evening.
The stinger that keeps going after the bee’s gone
Anyone who’s been stung knows the sting keeps hurting after the bee’s buzzed off. Now we know a bit more about why. A team from Macquarie University and the University of New South Wales in Australia, led by Dr Fiorella Ramirez-Esquivel, filmed bees stinging a clear gel that behaves like human skin. Their paper is in PNAS, and the press release explains it well.
The stinger is only about 2mm long but it’s got its own venom sac, pumping chamber, muscles and nerves. Two sharp lancets slide back and forth, a bit like a reciprocating saw, working it deeper. Each lancet has a little valve inside the chamber. On the downstroke the valve opens out like a parachute and pushes venom along. On the upstroke it folds away so venom doesn’t slosh back. Because the two work in opposite directions, the flow keeps coming. “The unique geometry of the valves is the key,” said Ramirez-Esquivel. They even scanned the parts and built a scaled-up 3D-printed model to check the idea worked.
For those of us who get stung for a living, the practical bit is simple enough. The stinger carries on pumping on its own, so the sooner it’s out, the better.
That’s me for this week. If all this has made you curious about what goes on inside a hive, you’re very welcome to come up to the apiary at Staincross and see for yourself. I’ll do my best not to get stung while you’re watching.