The Hive Society

Life is sometimes about waiting. Usually we spend our days making something happen, working hard at our jobs, balancing family and career while keeping up with all the daily tasks. It is in these daily tasks that the nobility of life can be experienced, but it is a challenge to embrace the dirt, crying children and work stress. I’m interested in bees because of what they represent and do. They are individuals who form a collective and have subsumed their ability to reproduce for the sake of a better chance of something greater then themselves surviving…their genes. Looking at the hive is looking at ourselves. Both Homo Sapiens and Apis Mellifera are social animals unable to survive without the collective and during each part of our lives different things are expected of us. Bees build the hive, feed and protect the brood, and gather nectar. Humans basically perform the same function building a family, protecting and feeding the kids and bringing home the paycheck. Both engage in a symbolic exchange that is predicated upon finding a resource and converting it into nourishment.

Does the bee understand that it is part of a collective? At what level does it understand that it is part of a hive? How self aware is the bee? How intelligent is the hive mind? It is quite amazing to think about the complex behaviors that this collective engages in? The hive collects resources and stores for use in later. Individual bees communicate the location and quality of nectar resources and when in the form of a swarm practice a kind of collective decision making process to determine the location of a new home. The hive also redeploys workers to various jobs like repair and brood rearing when it becomes necessary. They also perform self sacrifice in order to save the collective. In many ways they are a human society in miniature, for a hive of bees is the size of a small city or large town. Some people have argued that the hive should be considered as an individual animal. If that is correct them we could look at our town, city or polis as a type of consciousness also. Both are, according to Bruno Latour and other actor/network theorists, actants…forces that interacts with the world forming strategies to survive and reproduce. When I look into a hive, I’m looking the same type of organization as the society that I live in with the same kinds of division of labor, the same issues of survival that the humanity struggles with everyday. A bee does not struggle to see the consciousness of the collective, but I struggle to see the consciousness of this thing called humanity. When I look into a hive, I can catch a glimpse of the shared consciousness of both.

Mite Wars II

There is really nothing like natural selection when it comes to solving problems. I just read a post from Bush Farms about using smaller sized comb to combat the varroa destructor and tracheal mites. His solution is to use smaller cell frames. This is an easily tested hypothesis that I’m going to pay close attention to. The idea is that smaller cells prevent the mites from getting out of hand in the hive. Sounds logical but we are going to have to use Karl Popper to prove if this is the case. Bush also has a great site with lots of other information about beekeeping. I would love to see a paper proving the hypothesis. If it is the case that smaller cells are the answer then we can abandon the whole chemical arms race. That would be good for the environment and good for us.

Bush also offers some excellent advice to beginning beekeepers. Obviously he is a master beekeeper. I know that he posts a lot on beemaster.com and he can be contacted at bees@bushfarms.com.

Mite Wars

One of the most interesting threats to bees and beekeeping in general is the dreaded Varroa destructor. The origin of this species is under dispute. Wikipedia has an interesting article that highlights the difficulty of finding out how this parasite got so well established.

Varroa destructor was until recently thought to be a closely related mite species called Varroa jacobsoni. Both species parasitize the Asian honey bee, Apis cerana. The mite species originally described as V. jacobsoni by Oudemans in 1904 is part of the same species complex, but not the same species that made the jump to Apis mellifera. That jump probably first took place in the Philippines in the early 1960’s. Only after Apis mellifera were imported to the Philippines, it came into close contact with Apis cerana. Varroa as a parasite of Apis cerana, also became a parasite of Apis mellifera. Up until 2000, scientists did not positively identify Varroa destructor as a separate species. In 2005, we know that the only varroa mites that can reproduce in colonies of Apis mellifera (Western honeybee) are the Korea and Japan/Thailand genotypes of Varroa destructor. Varroa jacobsoni is a fairly benign parasite of Apis cerana. This late identification in 2000 by Anderson and Trueman led to some confusion and mislabeling in the scientific literature.

The mite is with us. However, like all paracites it does not want to kill its host, but rather use it as an energy source for its own reproductive cycle. The best parasites exist in a balance with the host and sometimes even make it stronger. Varroa destructor is clearly decimating beekeeping, but some beekeepers are using specialized breeding programs to create bees that can co-exist with the mite or at least keep it undercontrol. One of the nucs that Michael and I are buying comes from Kirk Webster at Champlain Valley Bees & Queens. Mr. Webster is so popular that he does not even need a website and his queens and breeding program are very popular. Mike and I just got notification that we will be picking up an eight frame nuc for $150. He told me on the phone that his hives have been chemical free for several years and is selecting for hardiness and hygiene. Helping along natural selection with special breeding programs is our only hope of avoiding a chemical treatments that will eventually be toxic to bees and humans.