Plain Talk: Washboarding Bees (188)

Episode 188 – Plain Talk: Washboarding Bees

Jim Tew: Beekeepers, I'm back in my bee yard doing what I so often do, thinking and watching bees and wondering. Interestingly, I was boldly set to tell you that strangely, my bees had not been washboarding this year. Had not been what? Washboarding. Had not seen it this year. I thought I'd come back and give you a lecture about why they do that, when they do it, and then wonder why my bees are not doing it, and I was surprised to see that I've got a colony obviously dramatically washboarding.

Let's talk about that for a while. Hi, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura where I talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping, the who's and why's.

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 honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: I've seen washboarding all through the years. I'm comfortable saying it's a very seasonal thing. It's in the basic bee books, it always gets a mention here and there. Through the years, a lot of-- Well, not a lot, but several scientists have taken a stab at it. The USDA did some work apparently 25 years ago and said that nothing was happening, that there was nothing being laid down by the bees doing this. I just couldn't believe that. I don't doubt the USDA, but I don't understand why the bees would do this behavior. What is this behavior, listeners?

The bees strangely line up, in really classic cases, in remarkably straight lines, like somewhat at a concert. The lines are fairly straight, and they do a rhythmic rocking on their two center legs and their rear legs. They're using four legs to stand on. Then the front two legs, they're doing this odd scraping mechanism, almost like they're gently touching it. It's a peculiar, really rapid-fire procedure. Listeners, in my life, there's going to always be something, lawnmowers or whatever. The kids on my neighboring acre are playing in their pool. Can we just justify that as being a natural sound of kids playing in their pool in the summer?

Maybe you can't hear it, but if you can, that's what it is. It's not someone killing chickens, the way it might sound to you on this production. These bees then are doing this rocking motion. They're using their front legs. They're going very fast. I didn't buy the camera just for that purpose, but I bought a video camera. It was something better than a low-level camera, but it wasn't a production camera. I jacked it up all the way to its magnification, and I added a lens to it, and I could just get a decent shot of those bees. They're doing something with their mouth parts, with their mandibles.

It's all a very fast motion, with their mandibles working. There's a stropping procedure with their tongues as they strop something. Then there's that action with the legs and the rocking motion. Then they're all doing that in these lines of bees like there's some line dancing going on. In my observation, in my hives, they start doing this motion pretty much right now. Right now is the second week in July. The bees are usually matted out front. I've talked about it. I've written about it. I've had other writers and reviewers castigate me. I've had others support me.

I'm just guessing. I don't know why they're doing it. I spend a lot of time looking at it. They're doing something. One hypothesis is the bees are bored. There's nothing else to do. I just can't buy that. Bees are not going to expend that energy and that instinctual organizational skill just because they're bored. Other beekeepers and other researchers have thought that they're laying down some kind of pheromone scent for the entrance. The USDA, some years ago, said that they couldn't find any trace of any material being laid down. Others have said that it is a process of propolizing the entrance because it only happens around entrances. More about that later.

Other researchers have said that they're laying down propolis there, or propolis, whichever pronunciation you may want to use, but I don't see a supply stream. If they're laying down propolis, then I've never read or heard that bees eat propolis in order to have this propolis-nectar mixture in their crop. Where's the supply chain? There's no bucket bees running in with loads of propolis to restore. I don't see any food exchange going on or food transfer, trophallaxis. If they're doing this work, do they just do it until their crop is empty? Is it even necessary that their crop be full? I don't know.

I've got a video. I've got an old video on my YouTube channel of bees doing this dance. All you have to do is type in this washboard dance, and beekeepers have videotaped it since they made cameras. It's not hard to find it. You can look at mine if you want to, but it's no big deal, it's like everybody else's. It's a peculiar behavior. They do it primarily when they're clustered out front, as I've already said. I just don't know why they're doing it. They'll stop doing it fairly quickly, I don't know, sometime over in August. You see, I've not been enough of a scientist to really put down a mark when I see it, and mark it when I see it stop.

I've never had any observational skill like that. I just know that they're doing it, and I know they're doing it in plain, visible, viewable light, and I don't know why they're doing it. I had someone respond to my YouTube channel who said that they're laying this down to set up some an electrical field. I don't know why they're doing it. They do it around the entrances, to a greater or lesser extent. The larger the entrance, then the larger the dancing population seems to be. While we think about this, and I've got some other points I want to make, let's take a break and hear from our sponsor while I recollect my thoughts.

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Jim: Here's the rub. I've got a large observation hive. I haven't set it up now in two years. Takes nine deep frames, three on three on three. Big heavy thing, hard to maintain, hard to open, but really, really interesting to watch. Listeners, I can tell you straight up that there were washboarding bees inside that hive on the glass and on the woodenware. I didn't see them on the combs, on the glass, and woodenware. They did not line up the way they do on the hive front, but rather they were here and there. They would do this rocking washboard movement with the front legs moving and the mandibles involved.

They would do it for a while and then they would move on. They may or may not do it somewhere else. I didn't try to track the bees, but I'm really comfortable telling you that the bees were doing this, not just in the sunlight at the hive entrance, they were doing it inside the colony. For different reasons, I wondered how these bees clustered out front deal with the rain. I may or may not go into that, but I don't see how bees can fly in the rain, but I'm getting off the subject. I took a water hose and I gently misted a front that had several thousand washboarding bees and other bees matted out front.

On a hot day, I misted it with this water hose to see how these bees responded to this water. Did they position themselves so that the water runs off? Did they go inside the colony? Did they just get wet? Did they wash off the hive? In fact, they did some of everything. They seemed to give up and go back inside the colony. They seemed to orient themselves. Some seemed to deal with the wetness. Here's what I unexpectedly stumbled into. The bees left the area that they had been washboarding, and when I wet that area, there was an odd, clearly cloudy look remaining on what the bees had just worked on.

I don't know what that means. Of course, I went crazy, wetting all the entrances, and it wasn't hard to see this cloudy look like there had been a previous paint coat there, or something. Everybody has had a guess at it. There's the humorous guesses that the bees are line dancing. There's the guesses that they're setting up some scent field for the bees to find an entrance. I don't know if anybody's ever looked to see if this field that the bees are working on is blacklight sensitive or is sensitive in some other color spectrum. I don't know what's going on here.

I've really enjoyed watching the bees do it, and every time I see bees in this time of the year washboarding, it always drives home the point that there's so much that we just don't know about the bees' private life. I have no idea why they're doing it. If you've never seen washboarding, be looking for it. You may not have thousands. You may just have two or three. You may have thousands. You can have any number of bees. It's a very distinctive behavior, and it may not be happening at this time of the year in your location. I don't know if washboarding occurs in early July the way it does here.

I don't know if that occurs all around the country or if it's just my situation. There's other kinds of bees that I don't know anything about. I've never seen anything written about them. I call them either composting or landscaping bees. When a colony sits on the ground, very near the ground, on the old-fashioned slanted front board landing boards, and they're just a few inches from the ground, bees can't get airborne when they come out to take their cleansing flights. If they're dragging a dead comrade with them, they're trying to get airborne with almost their own body weight.

It's not surprising that bees crash to the ground under that weight. I'm no hero. I keep mine about 20 inches off the ground, and if I keep the grass cut, that seems to be enough for the bees to come out, carrying their fallen comrade, and then with this heavy double load, flying away into the distance. When they can't do that, and those dead bodies accumulate right in front of the hive, especially those, as I've said, that are close to the ground, I've observed bees, and I have pictures of them, I have some video of it, of these composting bees, these landscaping bees that work in that field in the front of the hive.

They'll tug at a blade of grass, just work at it, work at it, try to fly away with it, pull it up, work at it, and you feel so far-- you just want to reach down. It would be such a simple act for me to reach down and pull up that blade of grass, but I let them do it. It's their thing. it's like watching a lion kill an antelope on the Serengeti Plains. It's the natural scheme of things. Then there's other bees rummaging around amongst their dead, corpsed comrades, mulling about. I can't tell if they're composting or what they're trying to do, but it's like they've been assigned a really bad job.

"We don't need you in the colony, so go out front and clean up the front yard," is almost what it appears to be. Then occasionally, some of these landscape composting bees will try to pick up one of their comrades and fly away, and they can get a few inches away. The only thought that I can have clearly is how admirable it is that these bees work so tirelessly, so hopelessly, in keeping that colony just as clean as they possibly can. I can only assume that it's a hygienic activity where the bees are trying to remove this dead and decaying attractiveness for what? Pathogenic activity or for bringing in other insects, flies, beetles, other degraders?

Does this keep competition away from the hive? I don't know, but there is a group of specialized bees that does this landscape composting work. I don't know how they're chosen. I don't know why they're inspired to do it. I can't tell when they're done or when they're finished. They just seem to give it their best effort. Maybe it's just the concept of a lot of bees doing a little bit over a long period of time, and they end up accomplishing unusual things. Maybe one bee, as is the case of the hive, building a comb or whatever, building a cell, no one bee does it, but based on the large numbers of these bees, doing a little bit, then a lot gets done.

Maybe that's what composting, landscaping bees are doing. At that point, I don't know either. There's all these bees that have these unique jobs. I've talked about water collecting. I can't get off on that again, but there's the water collectors. They must be nectar-collecting bees who came back with thin nectar, and the nurse bees needed water for cooling down the brood nest, so they unloaded the thin nectar before they unloaded the thick nectar. I don't know, but there's water collecting bees, and they just continue to make me marvel at how bees can do this.

I've seen bees find, literally, honestly, two tablespoons of water from a leaking water hose, and yet a bee found it, and I stood there and looked at that bee. I photographed her, of course, and I wondered, did she do that by sight? Do bees have an olfactory sense for water that lets them find that minuscule bit of water? Could this get to be any more questionable for Jim, me? Yes, it can, because within 30 minutes, I was absolutely astounded to see two bees there.

Then a whole different set of questions arose. Did those two bees find that tiny water source independently, or did one of those bees go back and recruit other bees, and then those bees be given information precise enough that they could go out and find that same tiny water source? I don't know. I told you a bit ago, the kids next door are splashing in their pool. It's one of those inflatable pools. It's not huge, but it's not small. It's bigger than the tiny kid wading pool, so there's several thousand gallons of water in it. My bees are going to find that water.

It's hot as blazes now. It's early July, and I was just cringing when I saw that the grandmother had given them that pool, but they put a top on it, and that was straight from heaven because my bees would find that water. Any bees, any insects would find that water on these dry seasons. It was just a gift from heaven that that pool came with a cover and that my neighbors routinely use it, or otherwise I would have had bees over there. I marvel at the water-collecting bees. I marvel at the bees that are clearly collecting salts, trace elements, maybe minerals.

I don't know what they're getting, but there's that entire group of bees, too, that are out collecting water in the strangest places. I almost am afraid to say it, but some of the places by our standards can be nothing short of despicable. There were hundreds of bees at a cattle feedlot manure runoff basin picking up that runoff water, and I'm thinking, "Oh my God, these bees are not using this for hive cooling, I don't think. I think these bees are picking up this water because it has salts and minerals in it with what the cows have been fed." I don't know that.

I didn't research it. I don't plan to research it, but I am telling you that it's sometimes disconcerting that bees will find unfit water sources. Others have conjectured that they're finding those unfit water sources because they have odor and taste, and that crystal clear water is tasteless and odorless and much more difficult to find, but then how did they find the two tablespoons that I talked about earlier? Then I'm mystified about the whole concept of water collectors. When I sit out here around the beehive pontificating, wondering, trying to do and think, why would I do this? I don't know. It just keeps my mind occupied, gives me something to do, and I love the smells.

Except for the sound of the trucks backing up and the airplanes flying over and the screaming kids in the backyard and the lawnmowers everywhere, it is the typical summer sounds and smells in my bee yard. I sit here and I think about these things. Why do bees washboard? How do bees go about this landscape business? What are bees doing when they collect water? Why do bees do what they do? Why do beekeepers care so much about them? I always enjoy talking with you. If you have any idea specifically on this washboarding thing, what do you think they're doing?

Think out of the box. What should be done? What should be looked at that has not been looked at? See if you can come up with a hypothesis. Until we talk again next week, I'm Jim, telling you bye.

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