Plain Talk: Dead and Dying Bees (220)

Episode 220 – Plain Talk: Dead and Dying Bees

Jim Tew: Beekeepers, Jim back. It's that time of the week again. I never miss a chance to tell you that I absolutely love studying and considering and pontificating on honeybee biology, honeybee behavior, not so much the chemical physiology. That's beyond my academic scope, even though I do try as often as I can to understand even that. I've often wondered, specifically, about a topic in beekeeping that gets quickly mentioned and then we move right on, and that's dying in the beehive, or the behavior of dying bees. They fly away from the hive, they drop to the colony entrance, and house bees drag them out. We all know the general story, but what's the back story to all of that?

As much as they can, as much as I can understand, what are the bees thinking? What trigger, what light goes on where all of a sudden, a bee who has devoted her life to the hive, suddenly says, "My time here is up, I got to go, it's been good, I'm out of here," and they begin to stagger toward the entrance. What behavior turns on? I don't know, but I'd like to think about it with you for a while. I'm Jim Tew. I come to you about once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I talk about all things beekeeping.

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: Listeners, let's talk about life first. In fact, honestly, it's not the bee's life, it's my life. There's no reason to go into great detail, but am I the only one who gets a ridiculous number of email messages per day? Just an insane number, as just to make Gmail almost unusable. I've looked at other mail clients, made some changes, cleaned out some mailboxes with the help of my good friend, Jeff Ott, who also runs the Beekeeping TodayPodcast and engineers the audio for this series. Thank you, Jeff. He helped me clean things up. I emptied my mailbox of a number of messages that I'm honestly ashamed to tell you about. They're gone.

I've got some new mail server clients set up. I'm a bold new man, except can't find some messages that I wanted to find. I'd like to take time just to talk to you, to tell you that if you write me, I have every intention of writing you back. Things get in the way. Life gets in the way. I get behind. When you get behind, what happens? You get 68 messages on top of that when I'm meant to return. Now, I've tried to set up a protocol that'll keep those messages separated now. I'd like to say that that's part of the new me. This is where I want to get to. I want to offer you a personal apology for not responding to your email message.

If you have not heard from me, please try me again. Let me see if I can make this new, improved, modern version of my email message system work better. At the risk of offending anyone, I'd like to specifically ask the person who sent me the photograph of your grandfather when he was a child in the front yard of his ancestral home with a string of beehives in the back and equipment that was atypical. I was completely intrigued by that photo. I had every intention of having myself and a friend and yet another friend who are bee-historians see if we could figure out what that equipment was. It's just for the sole sake of being beekeeping sleuths. That message got erased.

If you're the person who sent me that picture of your grandfather as a child with beehives in the background of unknown design, I am so sorry. I can't find that message. I want to see that picture. I want to see if I can offer some ideas. I really enjoy doing that kind of detective work. This is a contorted discussion. It's an apology and it's a promise, all mixed in the same topic area. I'm sorry for not having been better at responding to those of you who are kind enough to write. I love every one of you for doing it. You won't believe how much it means to me just to know that you're out there, and then I'm rude to you by not responding.

Please know that life is a serious undertaking and a lot of things happen in life that cause confusion. To some extent, that's where I am now, but I'm working through it. Stay in touch with me. I'm here. I enjoy talking to you on this system. I enjoy responding to your messages as you write me. That is the life part of my discussion. The death part of this discussion pertains to bees. On one hand, I'm intrigued by the dying response of bees and the way that they use their last mortal bits of energy to do their part to get away from the hive, from the colony, that they have heretofore worked for so diligently, yay, the last what? At least four, maybe seven weeks, maybe as long as three months if they're a winter bee.

The last mortal thing they try to do is to crawl away. Are you old enough to remember that old Tarzan movie? It must have been Ron Ely who played the part as Tarzan with Cheetah the Monkey and Jane somewhere. It was an episode about the elephant graveyard. I don't remember the plot or the twist, but I just remember as a child that I was totally intrigued to see this old dying elephant in the deep jungle make such an effort to essentially get to the elephant cemetery. I don't recall any of the plot, nothing about it other than the fact that we spent 30 minutes or so struggling with a dying elephant trying to get to the place where he would die and be with his previous elephant mates.

When I see these bees making this super bee effort to get away, I think of that old TV episode that the last thing they try to do is to leave the hive in as good a shape as they can by removing their mortal remains. I think that's totally intriguing. I was lecturing myself. There's more than one of me in here and all my different selves argue with themselves and debate back and forth. While I was getting all sappy about the nobility of this instinct, another one of me said, "Jim, why is it not so noble that bees find pollen? They find water. They can tell the difference between worker and drone brood and differentiate food resources. Why did you pick out death and dying to be a unique characteristic?"

The other Jim who's in here, too, really couldn't clearly answer that question other than to think, "This is the very last act. This is the last thing they do in this dimension." All the other things I listed they do in a normal life. They go to school. They go to grade school. They go to middle school. High school, college, marry, kids, job, just like humans. They do all that thing. Then we all know what the very last phase is. I think that's why I am intrigued by this last phase, the death phase of bees and their noble effort to keep the hive clean. While I think of ways to brighten this subject some, can we take a break and just give you a break, too, from this rant? Let's hear it from our sponsors.

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Jim: The other simple reason that I ponder this is my modest home and shop layout. When you come out my back door, I walk across the brick patio to what I call the shop. It was going to be a wood shop. It ended up just being a building. I heated it. Before I could fill it full of woodworking tools, my grandkids just loved playing out here. Then at Christmas and whenever, my family would come out here and turn music up too loud and bring out a charcuterie board and have some cheese and whatever. I was the only one who had an interest in this being a wood shop. Listeners, it never happened.

My wood shop is across the way in yet a different building, small, crowded, and cluttered. When I walk out to the shop, a distance of no more than 30 yards, I will frequently see a dead bee laying on the patio paving. I always—yes, just about always—take a break and look at that dead bee laying on the patio about 100 yards from my hives and saying, "Why here? Why now? Were you in full flight? Were you trying to get to a food source, to a water source, or were you trying to get away? You just ran your engines as long as you had power until you had to ditch on the patio here." I can't explain why that bee chose that spot at that time to die. I'm intrigued by that.

The bees get up in the morning, stretch, yawn, hear the cockerel crowing, and decide, "I think I'll go out and do some foraging work." Then while they're out flying, their little heart and their open circulatory system suddenly just sputters to a halt, they crash and burn. Can bees essentially, suddenly, surprisingly, die of old age? Second possibility is that they instinctually knew. Now we can pontificate on how you instinctually know your time is at hand, probably for the rest of the day here. Bees get up in the morning and stretch and yawn and say, "Oh my, this is my last day in this colony. I need to make my preparations to get away."

While I spent a lot of time trying to think, how would that instinct work? What would trigger it? What part of their brain, what part of their physiology makes them know that they selflessly need to get away? This is their day, this is it. Their seven weeks are up. They need to go. That's back where I was a bit ago, arguing with myself. It's just as marvelous that they have the ability to find the nectar source. It's just as marvelous that they have the ability to find the tablespoon of water, or apparently, when there's nothing else out there, the ability to find a single drop of spilled honey and go crazy for robbing.

As I stand there looking at that bee, I just wonder how, why, here? Secondly, as a beekeeper, I wonder if I'm seeing this one, are there dead bees all over my property? Do I have a serious mite issue or a runaway issue? I think that. Since I'm in a confessing mood with you here today, as I finish that short trip to the shop from the house, I look for other bees. Just to get an idea, if you see three more bees on that short trip, you're in serious trouble, or I am. These bees are dying disproportionately. I would estimate that on a reasonable day, when the temperature is of flying activity possibility, that I'll see a dead bee on that short trip walk, maybe one time in every 10 to 12 trips.

I got to go stop this now, listeners, but I can't help but wonder, what about all the bees out there in the grass that I can't see? How about all those dead bees? Bees have this inclination. Some of the literature calls it self-isolation. Of course, the whole purpose is to keep the hive clean, to keep it bacteria and viral-free, to reduce the risk of disease transmission. I shouldn't, but I have to do it again. I have to say, what is that mechanism? What does it feel like for that little bee, or does it feel anything? Is it just a switch and they're supraesophageal ganglion or whatever? I don't know where this switch would be that clips on and tells them to go.

Now the way they do it is different too. I suppose, since I am guessing and just roaming all over here, that the way they choose to end their life depends on the physical stamina that they have left. If they have enough horsepower and enough fuel consumption, they will fly to my patio. If they have misjudged or if their demise came on quickly, sometimes they just fall off the landing board 18 inches down to the ground, and then they crawl away. Then you'll see bees sitting motionless on a blade of grass, forlorn, hopeless, no future, the end at hand, and there's nothing I can do about it. It's just their time.

Some bees fly far away, and I can clearly tell you that some bees don't get far away at all. Now I'm off the subject. I'll do this and I'll get quickly back on the subject. On those occasions when I've had twisted wing bees present, varroa viral infection, they never had a chance. They were born doomed in life. I don't know how to tell this and make you believe it, but those bees in numbers of tens and tens, because the colony was crashing, was probably 25 feet away. That means that they spent every bit of their life's energy they had dropping out of the hive, dropping 18 inches to the ground, and then crawling 25 feet away. 20 feet, some more. There were, one here, one there, two over here.

Here's two piled up together. When I looked around the yard, the apiary, I didn't see these other collection points for these dying bees. Jim, the beekeeper, stood there and thought, "What are these bees doing? Is there some elephant graveyard location here where they're all trying to get to a spot? Was it sunlight? Was it some UV light that I can't see? Is there magnetic radiation?" I don't know. I don't know. It did take time to marvel that these bees who never had a chance, who only did one thing in life, leave the hive, did it so well.

Those bees outside that are dying, those that do have their wings and have had their life, and they have the frayed, torn wings, and the hair has gone off the thorax, and they look like that they've seen better days, that's an old Chevrolet. Yes, they've seen better days. You're sympathetic and you're respectful, but you think, "It's just your time. Good job. Well done." There's those bees. They'll sit sluggishly, they'll do whatever. Inside the hive, if a bee dies, then these house cleaner bees, these bees that are on corpse removal duty, the undertaker bees, what is with them? That job is as bad as collecting sap to become propolis.

That must be a thankless job because I've watched bees drag a comrade dead, completely of no assistance whatsoever, try to drag that comrade of their equal body weight to the hive entrance, and then on many occasions, try to fly away with their own weight and do what they could do with that to get it away from the colony. One thing that we clearly can appreciate is the colony goes to great extremes to keep itself clean. These undertaker bees may try to groom these dead bees initially. They may try to do whatever they can.

Sometimes the bees drop and accumulate under the cluster, so someone's got to get them out or you, the beekeeper, will scrape the bottom board next spring. Other times, these bees crawl toward the entrance and die there, and other bees come in, walk around them, walk over them. No funeral service, no nothing. They're just in the way. As the house cleaning bees have time, then they'll drag them out and drop them somewhere else. Try to fly away. I've got to stop. My time is up. I think I've made my point.

There's a certain artistic respect that I have for these dead and dying bees as they use their last mortal bits of energy to leave the hives the best place they can leave it. There it is. If you got any comments, I promise I will make a superhuman effort to address them. If you have any thoughts or if you can see where I've stepped on myself, you can point that out, too. Until next week, I'm Jim saying bye.

[00:21:42] [END OF AUDIO]