Colony Confinement (161)

Episode 161 – Colony Confinement

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Jim Tew: Honey Bee Obscura listeners, I'm here with Becky Masterman, and we're going to talk about something beekeeping. Becky, give me an idea of where you think we want to go for the next 20 minutes or so.

Becky Masterman: I think this is going to be challenging, but it's something that you brought up the other day about how we have confined our honeybees in a number of artificial ways and what does that mean to them. Let's kind of dig into that.

Jim: I remember that, and I'm still curious about it. Hi, I'm Jim Tew.

Becky: I'm Becky Masterman from  Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Jim: We're both coming to you on Honey Bee Obscura, where today apparently we're going to talk about the psychological effects on bees of confining them against their will.

Introduction: Welcome to  Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the  Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Becky, if that's my idea, then the reason it started is that I feel the bees' anxiety when I look at a package of bees and they're just bonkers inside that cage. They're running around, and if you look closely, you can see a bee dutifully carrying a little bit of package detritus looking anywhere, anywhere for the entrance, "it must be here somewhere." It agitates me, and the thought that I was having when I was trying to talk to you several days ago is we routinely confine bees for a host of reasons. Then we seem to automatically assume that once the bees are released, all is forgiven, all is forgotten. I just wonder if that's the case.

Becky: That's interesting. I think that we have to look at honeybees as why they're so easy to manage. The very question we're talking about is the answer, because we can confine them if we need to. We can close them up. We can move them across the country. We can close them up. We can move them a few miles. We can close them up and potentially have them closed up if there's a pesticide spray nearby. We can close and open them up, but I think that you're right, that there's definitely, I think what you're talking about is stress on the bees, and there's definite stress when you're doing any of those maneuvers with your bees, so it's important, for the bees, to think about that.

Jim: I too feel the stress. On the nights that I'm going to be moving bees early the next morning to pollination, and I'd go out at midnight, one o'clock, close them up. I never would sleep soundly because I know those bees are going to be up at dawn the next morning ready to go, and did I have the hive closed up enough? This whole thing stresses me too in a way to do it. I never am comfortable until those packages, for instance, are released. I just hate that hum that they're doing.

It's like letting me know they're still here, and it's, "We are in the dark and we're overheated a little bit. We want to be out. We want to fly, and you're holding us," and it's raining, and it rains and it rains, and you just keep waiting, but you missed them down, like you've said, at other times and you keep them going, but I don't know what the effect is. Is there actual long-term, short-term damage done to an individual bee or to a bee nest when they're confined? I know we have to put all kind of parameters on amount of heat, amount of food, amount of water, but go ahead and tell me where you're thinking. Is this an okay thing that we routinely do?

Becky: I think that the parameters, that's where we really need to focus on because when I'm thinking about a package in Minnesota, it's really easy for us to keep them in a cool place where they just naturally cluster and they're actually very peaceful. If you have that ability before you're hiving your packages, if the temperature allows for them to be cool enough, then I don't think there's a lot of stress on that cluster. Once the temperature increases, then that's when you've got that activity and that's when I think it's easy to see the stress in the bees.

I think that that's one of the important factors, is that as much as you can control to make sure that they are not overheating, have access to food, and as cool as you can keep the temperatures, I think that's really critical, then the stress is going to be minimal, but when you're putting them on a truck and moving them, for example, into the almonds, the beekeepers and the truck drivers, they all know that they need to make sure that they keep the temperature down. If they don't, they know that one of those impacts on the bees could actually be a queen issue in the end because she did get too hot. It is all about the details, I guess, when it comes to confining bees.

Jim: It's not a natural bee thing, is it? I mean, this is not something the bees taught us. This is something that beekeepers taught themselves, probably after killing significant numbers of bees all down through the annals of beekeeping. Because we've learned how to do this, but it's not a bee thing. It's not a natural bee thing at all, to be confined, to be moved around. That's a human beekeeper thing.

Becky: We have to separate out being confined and being moved around, because if you're in a northern climate and it's winter and it's minus 10 Fahrenheit for two weeks in a row, you're confined for quite a long time. That's an extreme example, but if it's raining for days on end, they're going to be self-confined into the hive. They're not going to fly out and try to forage in the rain.

I think that even though it's a human thing to pack them up and transport them across the country or a couple of miles or 10 miles, it's something that the bees have shown us that they can withstand, or even if you think about it, the bees that are being overwintered in buildings right now, there are a lot of good data that are showing that that is actually, it's increasing winter success, survival. It's probably a lot less stressful than keeping the bees and not transporting them to one location, but keeping them in a different site to winter.

Jim: Well, that is interesting. I haven't heard that, but I'm glad to hear it, very much so. In a sense, closing bees up is something that we do to move them from one location to another. It's always, as we said in the details, I've often wondered, in the old days when bees were loaded up on an open trailer and hauled, and you'd see that nice load of bees, all loaded up and netted down. I'd see those two big diesel stacks coming up on both sides of that tractor. You think they're going to be in a diesel plume of exhaust as long as they're on the back of that truck, but I don't know of anyone who ever said that that was harmful to the bees, so I always put that out as an undocumented note.

We move them now many times inside enclosed box semi-trailers. When those bees were hauled outside, I always worried that they were being exposed over the long haul, just like a farmer sitting on a tractor with an exhaust stack right above his head there, putting out exhaust. Okay. I've hammered this package thing over and over again. I've hammered closing bees up. I guess I can give you some specific examples. I used to vacuum bees, and I made a fundamental mistake.

I vacuumed bees for some of my research that I was working on, because I needed to know the parameters of the cluster during the winter, so I would bring them in. It's a long story, I won't go into it here, but I vacuumed bees to the point that I went crazy doing it. I can tell you for a fact, if you put five pounds of bees into a large box that you've confined them in a stunningly short time, they will die, hammer dead. I had to learn through bitter exposure. If anyone using those vacuum devices until you decide to release those bees, you need to keep the vacuum running to keep the airflow going over them, because they would overheat almost immediately inside that device.

Becky: They do do also confining bees into actual cages, the cube cages. I'm sure you've seen them, Jim, and where the bees are fed their pollen and a sugar syrup and they are kept in a specific community and temperature. Those bees are able to live so that researchers can ask questions about them. It is, again, all in the details. If you are in doubt as far as what you're doing, then make sure you're able to check on them frequently. Even if you're moving any bees from one place to another, like you said, when you were vacuuming them, they've got soft abdomens, and just a little bit of moisture and respiration and sweating can really turn them into a soon to die kind of mess.

Jim: Mush.

Becky: Mush. That's a good word. That's the scientific word for it.

Jim: Yes. I don't want to get too technical there, but we need to say it out there. I want to ask you about queens, but let's take a short break and hear from our sponsor before we talk about the queens.

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Jim: When it comes to buying queens, they come in a cage. I mean, if a queen can't be caged, she's not going to make it. She probably, in many instances, spent the summer in a cage. If you buy a fall season queen, she was probably banked, produced in the spring and held over. Surely someone, Becky, has looked, has evaluated, compared to what's the effect on long-term confinement on a queen?

Becky: That's interesting because it's one of those things where if you're operating in a yard where you're used to banking queens, you know that you pull her out of the bank and put her into a hive, keep her confined again for a few days, release her, give her a few more days, and boom, she's going to start laying eggs.

While there are definitely studies out there that are looking at the health of queens, it's really only been a recent issue that we've started asking the questions. Because I think that when I started keeping bees, and I'm sure when you were at Ohio State, there were things that we didn't worry about because the bees were just so healthy, but now that queens aren't living as long, now we can maybe ask more questions about the stress of some of these practices.

I just remember a time, well, for me, it was the early mid '90s when we did a lot of things and it didn't matter. Queens lived more than one year easily. It's not until recently where we're dialing down even on the transportation issue if that's stressful to bees. Well, nobody cared about it until we started losing so many bees, and nobody was really worried about it. Same thing with queens, we weren't worried about queens because they were doing pretty darn well until additional viruses and stress factors were identified.

That went down the road. [laughs]

Jim: I'm really sorry you said all that because you took me down memory lane. I don't want to live in the past. I really fight not living in the past, but I want you and the listeners to know when you've lived in the past, it's hard to ignore it. It's there. I mean, I was there for it.

Becky: It was the golden days.

Jim: I used to routinely-- I was told, and I told people that queens live three to five years, and we routinely had queens live three and then five years, you need to be replacing that queen after five years. She's really used up on them. That's just not the case anymore. What happened? What happened?

Becky: It's interesting, because I think it's important for all the beekeepers out there to understand, especially the ones who are just getting into the industry, to know that things used to be different. Honestly, I want us all to have those high expectations where we have problems because our queens live too long.

We have problems because our colonies always winter and we have too many bees, and that's not the case now. I think that it's interesting that we are asking these questions now because of the fact that we've got this honeybee health crisis. Because we have this crisis, some of the questions that we're asking are not questions that we had to ask 30 years ago.

Jim: That's very well put. I don't know how to answer. I don't even know how to guess at it, but it's just not the same. Bees, we're off the subject now of confinement, but I'll try to get back on it.

Becky: Let's confine more bees. [laughs]

Jim: We didn't have 40% winter kills, and I'm sure that's mite related, virus related, and queens lived at least three years. There were swarms every year. At my lab, we would have a swarm list with all these local beekeepers, and we'd have 50 or 60 swarm calls. It was just, every year it was so annoying, to be fair, "I tried to call you, and you didn't answer, so I called the next guy on the list, and he got a 10-pound swarm and you missed it." We had to deal with all of that. Well, during the Varroa years, that dried up to nothing, two or three swarms a year and when you knew knew the colonies that they came from over in our bee yards.

Something has really been downsized. I can't say in any way that that's due to confinement. Indeed, if we couldn't confine the bees to sell packages, replacement packages, replacement queens, I don't know where we would be right now, so instead of complaining about confinement and worrying about it, I guess another way to look at it is to be thankful, as you have said already that the bees are so malleable, that they can allow themselves to be confined.

Becky: I agree, but I also think that because we have this crisis, it is good to ask these questions. It's good to ask, "Okay, if the bees are already stressed, then what do we do to alleviate that stress?" Again, I'll say, I do not have a problem with the bees moving across the country for pollination services.

I know that they're treated like livestock and managed for health and nutrition and to be as free of diseases and parasites as possible, so I'm fine with that, but I do think it's something that every beekeeper should have at the top of their mind that bees are these living animals and we can't just box them up and not give them air, and have them at the right temperature so that they're able to cool the nest or heat the nest if necessary. I think confinement is a great topic because the stress that they might be experiencing is really critical. If your colonies aren't surviving like they used to, if queens aren't surviving as well as they're used to survive, I think it's important that we start looking at everything.

Jim: Well, I can't really add anything to that. I was thinking as you were talking that if I had to tell a beekeeper off the cuff really quickly, your bigger issue is going to be overheating more than overcooling. I have killed a lot more bees overheating them than I have chilling them to death. Of course, the one story I've got,-

Becky: Oh no.

Jim: -and we're really low on time, is I was brand new at Ohio State, and they asked me to take three beehives to Ashland University, which is hardly 50 or 60 miles from here. I put three hives of bees on an open trailer and I stuffed grass in the entrance, and that was all I did. They were frozen closed. Everything was fine. We lashed them down. I drove to the meeting. I unloaded them. Becky, you know how when you pull the grass out, you expect the bees to come roaring up? Well, I snatched the grass out of the first. It was still right around 35 degrees or so. The trip over had been 20, 25, 26 air temperature, chill factor must be just crazy.

When I got to this meeting and pulled the grass out, expecting bees to come roaring out, nothing there. I had my smoker lit. I'm good to go. Pulled the grass out of the second hive. Nothing there. There's a moment just before you have an idea, there's something there, but it's not yet an idea. "There's something wrong here," so you kind of snatch the grass out of the third, but no bees.

I opened the top, and I had killed three beautiful beehives on a day that it was about 22 to 25 degrees, hauling them on an open trailer for no other reason than I closed them up and bounced them around and agitated them. I want to finish this sad, sorry, story telling you that at that moment, I could see the Ohio beekeepers coming out for an outdoor demonstration on evaluating winter/spring colonies, and we had to jump in a hurry to do something.

Becky: Oh boy.

Jim: I would play a game with you and say, what would you have done? You've got 30 seconds to change your topic. We changed our topic to evaluating winter-kill colonies. [crosstalk]

Becky: Winter death, yes. Sorry to talk over you, but colony autopsy--

Jim: I didn't know what else to do. I was talking there, and we were showing them, this colony died in the winter here. I heard a guy say, "Those colonies are not." You can hear the rumblings of experienced beekeepers, but we're not going to acknowledge those questions.

Becky: Oh boy.

Jim: I thought that my concern that day was freezing the bees. Even under those extraordinary cold situations, I managed to overheat the bees because of their own franticness and then have them overheated, soggy, wet, dead, frozen, just a disgusting beekeeper screw-up. That is why, one of the many reasons why I'm always antsy when I confine them because I know how fast they can croak.

Becky: Right. Right. No, I think it's something that you need to be very thoughtful about, and it's definitely not something you do without some guidance from a mentor. Right?

Jim: Yes, I agree. Do it. As you said, be respectful, keep the air flow on them, keep them wet down. You probably are going to overheat them before you're going to chill them [crosstalk] , and just as soon as you can, open them up and be ready for whatever comes your way when you open them up. They may take a damn view of it. Well, I'm going to keep confining bees and packages and queen cages and whatever, but I'll keep wondering was this bee going to need counseling after I release it because she has been kidnapped and confined here for whatever. I don't know how to stop doing it, and I'm not sure that we can ever stop doing it.

Becky: I think data support that flowers go a long way in making bees feel a lot better and relieving their stress.

Jim: Nice flowers when you open them up.

Becky: Nice flowers, yes.

Jim: Well, I enjoyed talking to you.

Becky: Likewise, Jim.

Jim: Again, thank you for your time that you should have been doing something else, I'm sure, but we've slogged through ways to imprison your bees and still profit from it. Thanks a lot.

Becky: Thank you so much, Jim. Happy to be here.

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