Plain Talk: Things Not Seen (208)

Episode 208 – Plain Talk: Things Not Seen

Jim Tew: Hello, Honey Bee Obscura podcast listeners. Jim here. Time and time again, I've-- What can I say, boasted about all my years of keeping bees, and what I've seen, what I've done, what a neat guy I am. You must just be completely amazed at my experiences and abilities. Dash that thought, the older you get, the more you keep bees, the longer you deal with them, in this case, specifically bees, the more you realize you never knew or you were outright wrong.

I've got a short list, and that list will grow in the future as I think of other things. I've got a short list of things after all my years of beekeeping that I've never seen or experienced in beekeeping. Others have. I don't know why they were chosen, and I wasn't. I want to spend a few minutes talking with you about these oddities. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you here at Honey Bee Obscura about once a week, where I talk about some aspect of just plain talk 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: This topic today has been conversational bullet points here and bullet points there throughout innumerable other segments. This is the first time that I've just made a list. I don't know how many of them I can cover in the time I'm allocated here. This is the first time that I've actually made a list of things I wish I could see while I'm still here in beekeeping. For a repeat appearance, I can't remember when Kim and I did it, but I was talking to Kim and we specifically talked about my frustration with never having seen queens and drones mate. Yes, they do it in the air, they're flying some speed. This is a dramatic thing. Feet and feet in the air. How would I be expected to see it?

Short of somebody else's video, I never have seen that. It's really frustrating to have a casual conversation, in many cases, as I recall, it was a stranger to me. Wasn't even a beekeeper. I wasn't expecting the story, so I didn't write it to memory flawlessly, but it went a lot like this. Yes, I have a question for you about this bee thing. I was in my garden pulling weeds last week, and all of a sudden what appeared to be two honeybees just fell to the ground and they were connected together. They didn't look exactly like honeybees. They were both too big, but in a way they did look like honeybees. They tussled for a while and they finally broke apart. One of them, the larger one, sat there for a minute and then managed to clumsily fly away. The other one stayed there, seemingly dead. Were they fighting or what were they doing?

Listeners, why did that person get to experience a queen and a drone mating and then dropping to the ground? All kinds of other questions. Indeed, why did the queen and the drone actually drop to the ground? That was a defect in the system of mating that day. I have to hear all the time about people having these novel experiences of what they've done and seen that I just have never had the chance to see. As close as I came, my son-in-law bought a drone, the flying machine, not the honeybee male. Right off the bat, I improvised a light cage and put a virgin queen in it, obviously during the summer. Amazingly, I happened to know where one was running around inside the colony.

I confined that queen on a string beneath that drone. Let's call it a flying machine because calling it a drone causes confusion. Beneath that flying machine and then up, up, up, it did go. Listeners, it was barely 15 feet off the ground before boom, there came what appeared to be a fighter jet plane just zipping by that cage back, forth. Then as it gained altitude, five, 10, I don't know, up to 15 drones were buzzing that cage, bombing it just like a dogfight in some World War II movie. It was really educationally, biologically fulfilling. It wasn't the real deal. It was a caged queen, and it was tricked drones into responding to that odor feel that I lifted up above it. Maybe that's as close as I'm going to get is mocking it up as it were.

I keep hoping, maybe sometime, I always look, I got to stop talking listeners, but 100 years ago, I was at a meeting with Dewey Caron in Jackson, Mississippi, and the day was over. We were sitting around a pool at the hotel. Floating in the water was a drone. Now, we're all bee people. I pointed out, "That's unusual. There's a dead drone." Then about the time I noticed that drone, there's another one floating and another. As it worked out, there were drones everywhere in that pool that were what? Had either drowned or had died in a drone congregation area somewhere above that hotel and their dying bodies were dropping into the pool.

I got to stop. I've come close over and over again. I've nearly seen this mysterious behavior ongoing. I don't know really anyone who has seen a natural mating behavior due to the elusiveness and the speed and the height of it. I have looked at, I want to say thousands, I'll say hundreds, of pictures of swarms in every format. The old hard copy prints, the 35 millimeter slides using a hand lens magnifier. In the digital age, I have really got down and scrutinized because I have said, and I have been told, so I said it to you, that the queen in a swarm is generally on the outside of the swarm.

Now, I'll bet you, at least one of you listeners are going to write me and tell me you did this. Here's me admitting that I envy you for having done this. I saw the queen on the outside of the swarm and I just picked her off and put her in a cage. I have looked in pictures, I look on every swarm I have. In all my years, I have never one time seen a queen running around on the outside of a swarm cluster. I diligently try. I take it on as a where's Waldo experience, when you get a good picture of a swarm, to really scrutinize it under high magnification and Photoshop to see if she's there. Unintentionally, the camera caught her, but she was lost in the morass.

Number two, I have never seen anything like that. I suppose the reason for it would be that when the swarm breaks up, she needs to go. If she's inside, she's in the infrastructure of the swarm. I don't know. Listeners, what do you think? If it is true that a queen is generally on the outside of the cluster, why is she there and not inside this swarm cluster, where you think she would be more protected? We'll think about this for a few minutes. While we do that, let's hear from our sponsor.

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Jim: I need to confess that I have never seen a bee louse, a Braula coeca. "Oh, Jim, you've never seen one?" I have those things in my hair. People tell me these bizarre stories that they see these things all the time. The annoying thing, listeners, is that I can find the tunnels in Capped Honey. I know they're in the colony, but I never see them in the litter, I've never seen something that looked like a crumpled up small windless fly. It doesn't look like a varroa mite at all. It's of comparable size, I suppose, but it doesn't look like varroa with that oval look that varroa has. Nothing like that at all. These things are apparently only pest because of the tunneling that they do that allows combed honey to weep. If you're a honey judge and somebody's got combed honey entered and it's leaking, you downgrade them for that because that's going to be, in theory, offensive to customers. You watch for those Braula coeca or the bee louse tunnels so you can mark down for something. Generally, it's a perfect entry anyway. You've just got to really get picky to find anything to downgrade somebody for, or otherwise everybody gets first place. I've never seen it. Barton Smith, a co-graduate student I was with in Dewey Curran's lab, all those years ago, back in the late '70s, early '80s, actually worked with Braula and he routinely had sources and had seen them. I know you can do it. I incorrectly thought that the Varroa days would be the end of the Braula coeca days.

I thought that all the chemicals and things we put in our beehives early on would just blow everything out of the water, a bit like a broad spectrum antibiotic effects on us. I dutifully looked at all that litter and dead mites and whatever to see the occasional Braula. No. No. Never there, not at all. I don't know. I guess I'll keep looking. I know that I'm expecting a call or a comment from some of you that these things all the time and that you got to close one eye and stand with the sun over your shoulder or some trick that you've got, but it's lost on me. I've never seen anything quite like that either.

I routinely see pictures of wide-eyed, one-eye color drones. People are snapping photos and sending them. Dr. Walter Rothenbuhler here at Ohio State would cross and backbreed and instrumentally inseminate. He could generate drones with wide eyes, but just as far as one occurring in the wild, I've never seen it. Only one time I did see this. Do I have a photo of this thing? Did I have even have a-- Were mobile phones even a thing then? I don't know. Maybe I snapped a picture of it, but I did see once a half-drone, half-worker. It had the head of a drone and the body of a worker, but just wide-eyed drones are those drones that just stand out like beacons inside the colony.

I never saw anything like that at all. I'll keep looking. Why do I care? It's just a visual expression of genetics at work or incomplete genetics at work, depending on how you look at it, what you think about it. I'll keep watching. I've got photos, but I'm living vicariously. It's somebody else's pictures. They either produce those drones or they mysteriously found them on their own, and then that was the end of that. I just read, and I've heard others say it before, this is a smaller point, but it's tedious for me, that guard bees direct traffic coming and going from the colony as well as guarding.

I've never seen that enough that I could say, "Oh my heavens, there's a guard bee directing traffic. Got the little cross band on and got the little sign there. I don't see anything like that. I just see an absolute chaotic mass at the front of a big colony during the spring and summer. I don't see anybody directing or controlling traffic flow. I guess the question is begged, how would you control the traffic if you were a guard bee? Are you just going to fight every bee that comes along? There's thousands of them. There is that. Must be. I don't know. Others have said it. It's in the book. You see a definitive statement that guard bees are frequently traffic-control operators. I don't see that. Others have seen it. It's in the literature. I just don't bother it, but I'll keep looking for it.

In a way, but not related at all, I have seen other odd things. There was a kind of bee, years ago, that I labeled as a composting bee because these bees would work in the detritus field in front of the colony out on the ground, and they would just work mightily. They were digging and gouging and moving and pulling and fighting. It looked like a punitive job, that they had done something terribly wrong inside the hive. They were relegated out in front of the hive here, and go clean the compost field and get all those dead comrades out of there and fly away with. I've seen those bees working, doing something.

Then as I have done for hours and hours and hours on end, and then bored you for hours and hours and hours on end with what bees are doing at the front of the hive, on the entrance, near the entrance, I wrote about these bees and I conjectured that possibly were they foragers? Were they reclaiming some nutrient or some mineral? Why were they working so hard? Other bees are trying to cut grass. They'll take a blade of grass and just chew, chew, chew, work, fly, pull, apparently trying to keep the grass cut back.

I can't think of another reason why a bee would be attacking a blade of grass right in front of the colony. There are examples there of these bees that do unique jobs that don't make the big list. House clean, feed the brood, defend the colony, forage, produce wax. It's a list that we all know. I would offer up this, there are lesser jobs that we don't really have labels for. Before I get away from this, why did those bees take that job on? What stimulus was there that inspired them to take on the job of cutting grass in front of the colony or tilling the waste products on the ground in front of the hive to what, compost? Or did I just totally miss something? That's probably a better answer out there. I just totally missed something.

Boy, this queen thing is something else. There are just endless stories about queens. I've already mentioned the mating process and me not seeing it. It's a routine comment that workers control when the queens are released. If the queen cuts her capping off and the queen and the bees workers, nurse bees, are not ready for mortal combat or whatever, they'll seal it back up with a little bit of propolis and wax. Make the queen do it all over again.

I've got nothing but questions about that. I have never seen a queen cell resealed. Yet it's not hard to find it in the literature, that she's supposed to emerge tomorrow and there's 10 other queens on the same day. Here these workers are picking and choosing which ones will be allowed to go to the coliseum in the theory in the middle of the hive and fight for their very life. Now I have seen queens fighting. I've seen virgins fighting. It's interesting. That part's interesting.

It's like you're at a ballroom brawl and two people are just going fist to cuffs, busting tables, breaking glasses, fighting, throwing, arguing, and everybody else is just going about their business. When those two queens were fighting to the death, the workers were just completely disinterested. Didn't take a part in the fray. Didn't try to skew the battle one way or the other. They would get run over and hit, knocked asunder, but otherwise they didn't get involved in it. I have never seen a queen cell recapped or a queen prevented from emerging because of the activity of workers.

I had a time, I would say just in a second or two, literally, that I did some work years ago turning queen cells upside down to see if I could control swarming by flipping it upside down, and that had been done before. I didn't know it at the time. It was interesting, and some queens did die, but some didn't, so it was not useful. There they are. Those are some things that I've not seen. I've stopped at this point just to keep from driving you to tears. I hope you have some comments and some thoughts on things that you would like to see that you've never seen. Until we can talk again next week, I'm Jim, telling you thanks for listening.

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