Plain Talk: Wax Moths and Honey Bees (193)

Episode 193 – Plain Talk: Wax Moths and Honey Bees

Jim Tew: Listeners, I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes about wax moths. I guess when I say wax moths, I really mean the larval stage, the stage that beekeepers know so well, causing damage, confusion, and mess in our hive. I want to look at it from a different perspective. Even though all those things are true, bees and wax moths have been coexisting for millions of years, millions of years. This is not a new relationship.

That's the avenue I want to look at. Not so much the beekeeper concerns, but how bees and wax moths lead their lives. Now when I say wax moths, as I said, the larvae primarily, but you've got to have the wax moth adults to lay the eggs and procreate the species. I don't have all of the answers, but I certainly have a lot of questions. Can we talk about this for a few minutes? I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I try to talk about something about bees.

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 got to get my mind right. I've got to get my mind right. It started several segments ago with an undersized swarm that I had that seemed to be having a wax moth issue. Of course it was, because it moved into frames that were mostly wax moths already, and then it began to try to take back the colony from the wax moths. Easier said than done. I talked about that.

I should have looked up the episode number, but it was just a week or so ago. It was not directly related, but it set me to thinking, listeners, about wax moths. When you're the kind of beekeeper I am, long in the tooth, short on energy, it becomes easier and less demanding to think than it does to get up, go out, put on a suit, light a smoker, pick up boxes, do all the work that goes with it. Thinking, I was thinking again about this wax moth thing after I saw that hive struggling with it. I asked you, I asked others. I talked about it, I thought about it. Why in the world did that beehive, did that swarm move into that wax moth-infested box? It was just looking for a hard uphill path, but it did. The wax moths were doing what they should have been doing.

The thing that set me to thinking, and reading, and discussing, and wondering is that this is so often the case, listeners, not a new scheme that the bees are dealing with. I found a similar concept, and I talked about it and thought about it and gave presentations on it, robbing, until I just had everybody's eyes glazing over. I really convinced myself that robbing is a really normal event. It's not at all like it is in the bee books where it's something that's beekeeper inspired. It's a normal, common, practical event.

When looked at from one view, wax moths, when looked at from one view, have been doing this literally with the bees for millions and millions of years. It would appear 30 to 40 million years ago. Is that the best we could come up with, a 10-million-year gap? That was the estimate that bees, as we know them, evolved 30 to 40 million years ago. Yes, I can't conceive of that time.

That probably only a few years later, wax moths began to evolve to essentially parasitize our beehives. The thing that had me wondering, thinking, was that's a really limited way to go. That's not a diverse. Even ants that have had a relationship with bees before ants were here first. Even ants don't specialize in eating beehives only. Most ants go after a whole list of diversified dietary items, but no, wax moths go after beehives.

Secondarily, and on the junior varsity team, they will also invade some bumblebee nests. They'll go for some solitary bees. They go for stingless bees. In a secondary way in the tropics, if they're starving to death, they'll try to make a quick living on hornets, if they can find them. You better know, first and foremost, that the primary food source for wax moths are honey bee combs.

There it is, honey bees and wax moths have been dancing this dance for an incredibly long time. It's kind of punch, counterpunch, I said in one of the articles that I wrote for the bee magazines. As I looked at this, this is just you and me talking now, so you don't see any literature citations, you don't see any peer-reviewed papers. This is just me talking to you. Everything I'm telling you is a guess and an untested hypothesis, but it does look to me like that the bees gave up many millions of years ago. The bees gave up trying to actually keep the wax moths out, if they ever did actually try to keep the wax moths out.

They seem to have had taken the philosophy that we will deal with them when we see what they're going to do inside our hive with what our resources are and with the time of the year and the energy that the bee nest has. Basically, rather than coming up with some kind of, "You will never get in here," they were more practically directed toward, "We will deal with them once they're here."

I'm talking to you about this with most of my brain. The other part of my brain was saying, "Jim, that's exactly the same protocol that the USDA ARS took with Africanized bees back in the mid '80s. You can't keep them out. We tried. Scientists tried. We had these plans, nothing worked. Those bees just came roaring right through Central America and to North America and to Texas. The philosophy, the management scheme quickly became to deal with them where they are. You will not be able to keep them out.

Isn't that interesting that the bees developed that philosophy with wax moths, apparently untold eons ago? In ways that I cannot comprehend, through apparent genetic mutation and selection pressure rewards for those mutations that might have been seen in a positive light survivally, the wax moths fine-tuned themselves over inconceivable lengths of time to really be streamlined.

When you look at a wax moth now, they are a remarkably calm moth. Not like the butterflies I see flitting on flowers here and there, but they are calm and sedate until you touch them. Then they don't fly. For the most part, they run. It is really unique. I'm not finished with this, but I want to let our sponsor have some time to tell us about some really good beekeeping equipment that's available to us.

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Jim: What set me to thinking about how well suited they are was I, when I've had that small colony open, there was a wax moth running around on other frames. The evil, devious one of me that lives in here with me too, said, "Good, that moth just screwed up." In reality, the moth hadn't screwed up. Nothing happened. The bees didn't do anything to the moth. The moth, the adult moth ran around and just kept going about its business, and the bees kept going about their business. There was no hue and cry. There was no alarm that went out. There was no massive stinging response.

I suppose that it is that philosophy that we will deal with it when it's a problem. If you run that moth down and sting it to death, so what? There's others right here. There's others everywhere. It'll just be more. It's always this relationship. That moth holds its wings tent-like. I've got a picture that I'll try to post on the page that goes with this segment of this streamlined-- They look like a submarine. When I look at those wax moths, I think, "They look like a submarine."

They can glide through the colony. Their antennae are pinned against their body. They're streamlined. They make no effort to fly, other than just a very short, just inches. Otherwise, they dash here and there. They're really well-suited. They spent a lot of evolutionary time duplicating the bees' pheromonal systems in some cases. These behaviors are really well-suited for this completely non-related, non-hymenopterous insect, this lepidopterous insect coexisting inside the hive.

I began to marvel more and more that this was a well-suited situation, that it was punch-counterpunch, that I will develop artificial pheromones, and I will develop ways to live inside your colony, and I will string this wax silk everywhere that will tangle you up and allow me, the wax moth, time to get away. It looks like I'm winning. In the counterpunch discussion I've been having with you, the bees are saying, "No, we're going to use propolis. We will seal this hive immensely. We will develop hygienic protocols, and we will do whatever it takes to keep the hive nest clean. We will stay on top of this thing all the time."

The bees have not given up. They actually are doing their own thing as much as they can. It's an arms race, isn't it? It's an arms race between wax moths and honey bees. While the honey bees are putting propolis everywhere, the wax moths are developing the mouthparts to chew through it. While the honey bees are trying to track down using hygienic behavior and pull these moths out, then the moths are developing ways to forestall that and trap the bees in their own frass and hold things up.

It just seems to keep going on and on in this regard. I have got pictures, you've seen it too, of honey bees trying to pull that silk mass out of the colony that they were trying to clean up. It just seems to be a major amount of work that they're going through. The silken cocoons, once the bees have cut it out, chewed it out, gone through all that work to tear down the comb and to get all that residue out of there, and you'd ask yourself, "Why would they do that? They'd get stuck. They'd get caught. They'd get snagged by those fine silk cocoons, and it really locks them up."

More about that later when I mention [unintelligible 00:14:31] but I'm trying to keep a train of thought going here in this way. The wax moths are seemingly really good at pulling this thing off. The honey bees are always fighting back, trying to clean things up. The honey bees will tear it down, cut it back down to the midrib, do whatever it takes to get it out because there is the potential for bacterial growth in that frass and silken residue.

If they're really using that hygienic behavior nicely, they're cleaning all that up all the time to stay ahead of the wax moth population, to build up a population of bees as much as they can, as healthy as they can. Swarm, so that this swarm can take off and take the colony's genetic content and duplicate it in another nest site somewhere else. Then the wax moths will be on duty just as soon as they can using techniques unknown to me and flying, at this point, significant distances. They will basically be at that new nest site about the time that the honey bees are getting set up, so the battle goes on and on and on.

One of the thoughts that I dealt with is, is this really a horrible thing? Because you see, if the balance is set, if the colonies are in tune, the bee colonies, and they have everything lined up, then they are being successful. They will make enough honey to meet their own needs. I'm just talking about the natural scheme of things. I'm not talking about our beekeeper scheme of things. They'll make enough honey to meet their needs. They will swarm two, three, five times as much as possible. They are doing what they need to do.

The wax moth is always testing them. If one of those strains of honey bees, that something isn't right, they're not resistant enough to common bee diseases. I won't even go into Varroa because we did that to bees. We introduced Varroa. Let's use American foulbrood, a disease that bees are well adapted to, and that without antibiotics, they would have a resistance to it.

Let's use that as an analogy. Then the bees are able to resist American foulbrood. They're doing a good job. The wax moth is the barometric test. Are you strong enough to survive? Do you have your biological ducks in a row, so that you are a viable contributor to the honey bee gene pool? The thought that I'm trying to have, and I just have trouble putting into words, is that the wax moths are always stressing the honey bee genome to be certain that only the strongest are allowed to hang on in that pool. It gets so complicated, listeners, because the bees are then stressing themselves. They're robbing each other.

The world that I paint is a very survivalistic world with wax moths testing the honey bees, with bees testing themselves and robbing from the weaker, so that what remains is the cream of the genetic crop of bees. I've only used those two examples. They've got to have hygienic behavior, they test each other, the wax moth tests them. If they are the ones that are able to hang on, then they deserve the gold medal for survival at that point. It is not an easy path out there.

The look that I wanted to have in this discussion about wax moths is not the common thing. "Oh, my stars, we've got to use paradichlorobenzene. You've got to expose them to light and air." Those are the traditional beekeeper issues that we've come up with probably in the last 200 to 300 years of the millions of years of the wax moth-honey bee relationship. We're Johnny-come-lately here.

That's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the natural scheme of things, have some idea of why wax moths chose this narrow, protected, dark, humid world inside the beehive. Why didn't they go out and pollinate plants or something? Why did wax moth take--? I don't know. I don't know if they developed the ability to digest wax. I don't know. I can't conceive of the time.

Overall, this is an old, well-established relationship that's probably not going away. It seems to be steady state. If you can help me fine-tune my thoughts, if you can add to it, I would like to know your thoughts outside of the beekeeper-wax moth relationship, as is so often the case with robbing, with wax moths, with the American foulbrood. It's a complex world. I've enjoyed thinking about it. Hey, until we can talk next week, that's enough. Send me your thoughts if you have any, but that's enough for now. I'll talk to you next week. This is Jim telling you bye.

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