For Good of the Colony, Sick Honey Bee Brood Sounds the Alarm By Kaira Wagoner, Ph.D.

Tags

bee biology, biology, honey bee biology, honey bee brood, sick bees

Pollinator health is a top priority these days, and everyone seems to be asking, “What can be done to save the bees?” Since most of the current challenges to pollinator health can be attributed to humans, there are several things we can do, from restoring pollinator habitat by planting pollinator-friendly natives to curbing our use of harmful pesticides.

This work is both ecologically and economically important, as honey bees are the most agriculturally important pollinator worldwide, contributing over $15 billion to annual crop yields in the United States alone. But honey bees have flourished on Earth for over 100 million years, so perhaps it is also worth asking, “What can honey bees do to help themselves?”

As social insects, closely related honey bees live in crowded colonies with frequent physical contact, a recipe for the rapid spread of parasites and pathogens. As a result, honey bees have evolved some fascinating social immune mechanisms, which help mitigate the spread of disease between sisters in a bustling colony. One such immune mechanism is “hygienic behavior,” the ability of adult bees to detect and remove unhealthy brood from the colony. By sacrificing a few unhealthy young, the overall health of the colony, and thus the probability of colony survival, is improved.

Read the fill article here: For Good of the Colony, Sick Honey Bee Brood Sounds the Alarm — Entomology Today

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Beek Reads: Nobody Wants to be the Queen by Q Gardens

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honey bee behavior, honey bee queen, honey bee roles, political

“What role would you want in the hive?” we asked, the eight of us sitting in the circle of benches surrounded by Q Gardens’ newly green herbs and late spring blooms. The answers differed, but on one thing, we agreed: No one wants to be the queen.

The life of a drone sounds idyllic, if short-lived. Lay about the hive. Eat. Wait for a sunny day to fly out to the drone congregation area—how exactly the drones know the congregation’s location is a mystery—and find a young virgin queen to explosively impregnate. And die, gracelessly but with purpose.

The worker bee’s life isn’t so bad either. She has a number of roles, from nurse to scout, so it’s never boring, and workers have the highest “autonomy,” collectively making the hive’s “decisions.” A worker’s life is always busy, always productive.

Read the full article here: Beek Reads: Nobody Wants to be the Queen — Q Gardens

The Background Hum – Drones by Why Do Bees

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biology, drones, honey bee biology

They’re freeloaders yet vital to the colony’s success. Most of the time they’re laid back bordering on lazy, yet they give it all to their mission when pheromones beckon, dying in the process. They’re allowed to play in the hive all season then bullied out in the fall. It’s all about colony survival. In a healthy hive, drones are the background hum, the harmony behind the melody, a small but important part of the symphony.

Read the full article at: The Background Hum — Why Do Bees

Why Smoking Soothes the Stressed-Out Bee Hive by Meredith Swett Walker

Tags

art, bee smoker, beekeeping equipment, defensive behavior, honey bee behavior

Smoke has long been the beekeeper’s secret weapon to avoid getting stung. Ancient Egyptian art dating back over 2,500 years ago depicts beekeepers blowing smoke into hives. But despite the age of this practice and human’s enduring fascination with honey bees, we still haven’t figured out exactly why smoke soothes bees.

Meredith Swett Walker

In research published in August in the Journal of Insect Science, Stephanie Gage, Ph.D., with colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Carl Hayden Bee Research Center and at BetaTec Hop Products, presents a scientific evaluation of smoke on the honey bee’s defensive behavior. The researchers focused on the “sting extension response” and evaluated the effects of two different types of smoke: burlap, which is commonly used by beekeepers, and spent hop pellets—a recycled material made from hop flowers after they have been used to make beer.

Because a honey bee (Apis mellifera) hive contains valuable treasure—sweet honey and protein packed larvae—bees must mount a coordinated defense to protect the hive from the many predators that would love to plunder it. A small number of worker bees serve as “guard bees” that patrol the entrance to the hive and watch for intruders. If a threat is detected, the guard will raise her abdomen and extend her stinger into the air. This behavior is called the sting extension response, and it releases an alarm pheromone, or a chemical signal, to the rest of the colony, mobilizing other workers to prepare to attack an intruder. If the intruder provokes the bees further, stinging commences.

Read the full article here on Entomology Today Why Smoking Soothes the Stressed-Out Bee Hive — Entomology Today

A quick-start guide to honey bee antennae by Honey Bee Suite

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antennae, bee biology, beekeeping, Honey bee

Every few weeks a photo of a fly lands in my inbox, always accompanied by the same question: “What kind of bee is this?” The answer is simple. If your insect has short, stubby, barely visible antennae, it is not a bee.

On the contrary, a bee antenna is long, graceful, mobile, and insanely cute. But beyond that, the antennae are a bee’s major data collection tools, containing receptors for touch, taste, and smell. Antennae can also detect temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide, along with gravity and wind speed.¹ Much of what a bee “knows” arrives through those two slender filaments.

The word antenna is derived from the Latin antemna. On Roman sailing ships, an antemna was a type of horizontal mast-mounted spar designed to spread square-rigged sails. With a little imagination, perhaps you too can envision your bees with rigging. Sail ho!

Read full article here: A quick-start guide to honey bee antennae — Honey Bee Suite

A Bee’s Eye View of the Garden — Native Beeology

Tags

bee biology, colors bee see, honey bee biology, planting for bees

Planning a Garden With Bees in Mind –

The sweeping vista of flower filled meadows is a sight to behold yet aesthetics are a side effect to the flowers true intent. Flowers are not seeking human admiration but seeking the attention of pollinators. Through visual cues, the flowers are shouting… “Pick me! Pick me!”   A closer look reveals that over evolutionary time flowers have gone to extreme lengths to get the attention of their preferred pollinators: whether insect, bird, bat or wind.    Many factors come into play in regards to attracting any pollinator including colorful (or not colorful) petals and sepals, nectar guides, good or bad smells (or lack of) and overall shape and size. These features are often characterized as pollinator syndromes and understanding them can clue you in as to who might be most likely to visit a particular flower. If you are planning a garden that caters to our native bees it important to understand the type of flowers that they are most attracted to. Here are a few pointers to understanding the bees-eye view of the world.

Read full article at: A Bee’s Eye View of the Garden — Native Beeology

Sex between species: what happens when invasive honey bees meet the locals? by Ros Gloag

Tags

apis cerana, apis melifera, biology, honey bee biology, honey bee genetics

Some social insects have proved to be adept invaders. Assisted by the international trade of the modern world, these species have spread far beyond the ocean and mountain barriers that once determined their distributions. In some cases, these range expansions have brought previously isolated sister species back into contact. What happens when such species try to mate?

We were interested in this question of interspecific mating in the case of two honey bees: the Western honey bee Apis mellifera and the Eastern honey (or hive) bee, Apis cerana. These species diverged from a common ancestor at least 6 million years ago, with A. mellifera native to Europe and Africa and A. cerana native to Asia and India. Western honey bees have of course since been transported, in association with agriculture, to every human-inhabited continent on earth. Eastern honey bees meanwhile, have been quietly expanding their range too in recent decades, invading both Papua New Guinea and Australia. Thus what were allopatric (or separate) ranges for millions of years have suddenly become partially sympatric.

Read entire article at:  Sex between species: what happens when invasive honey bees meet the locals? — insectessociaux

Cross-kingdom regulation of honeybee caste development by dietary plant miRNAs by Save The Bees Concert

Tags

biology, honey bee biology, honey bee genetics, honey bees, queens

Honeybee larvae develop into workers but not queens, in part, because their diet of beebread/pollen is enriched in plant miRNAs. While miRNAs are generally negative regulators of gene expression in eukaryotes, they also negatively regulate larval development when honeybee larvae consume beebread/pollen and take up plant miRNAs. Xi Chen and Chen-Yu Zhang’s group in Nanjing University, report this finding on August 31, 2017 in PLOS Genetics.

How caste has formed in honeybees is an enduring puzzle. Although queens and workers are genetically identical, queens are reproductive and have a larger body size, develop faster and live longer than workers. Prevailing view is that differential larval feeding determines caste differentiation: royal jelly stimulates the differentiation of larvae into queen, whereas beebread and pollen consumed by the rest of the larvae lead to the worker bee fate. However, it is still not fully understood how alterations in diet modify so thoroughly the developmental trajectory of honeybees.

In previous studies, Chen-Yu Zhang’s group has reported a striking finding that plant miRNAs are ingested from plant diets and pass through the gastrointestinal tract, enter into the blood, accumulate in tissues and regulate endogenous gene expression in animals. Their findings suggest that ingested exogenous miRNAs can regulate endogenous gene expression and reshape animal phenotypes. Interestingly, since the components of beebread/pollen are mainly plant materials and royal jelly is a glandular secretion of nurse bees, the diets for worker- and queen-destined larvae are differentially derived from plant- and animal-sources. Therefore, Xi Chen, Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues decide to investigate if miRNAs from different larval diets may have distinct impacts on honeybee development.

Here, they report that plant miRNAs are more enriched in beebread/pollen than in royal jelly. While plant miRNAs of beebread/pollen are fed to larvae, they cause developmental delay and reductions in body and ovary size in honeybees; in contrast, miRNAs in the royal jelly are not sufficient to reach a functional level, therefore queen-destined larvae evade this regulation. Mechanistic studies reveal that amTOR, a stimulatory gene in caste differentiation, is the direct target of miR162a. Interestingly, ingested plant miRNAs have a similar inhibitory effect on fruit fly development, even though fruit fly is not a social insect. In summary, this study uncovers a new mechanism that plant miRNAs in larval diet of worker bees delay caste differentiation and keep ovaries inactive, thereby inducing sterile worker bees.

The findings of this study are important for the following reasons:

Read full article at:  Cross-kingdom regulation of honeybee caste development by dietary plant miRNAs — Save The Bees Concert

Where do bees sleep? by BEEKeeperTom’s Blog

Tags

honey bee behavior, honey bee biology, honey bees

A beehive is a busy place; many bees are working together to produce honey. Working so hard makes bees tired, and they need to rest. Lovely honeybee on a flower, pollen baskets loaded to the gunnels

Same as humans, bees get rest by sleeping. But, even though that seems logical, up until 1983 scientists didn’t know that bees sleep. The scientist who discovered that bees sleep is Walter Kaiser. He noticed that bees sleep by bringing their head to the floor and their antennae stop moving, some bees even fall sideways. The beehive seems like a hectic place, so it makes you wonder, where do bees sleep? But, before getting into that, we should explain why is sleep so important for bees. What happens if bees don’t sleep?

Read full article at:  Where do bees sleep? — BEEKeeperTom’s Blog

Beekeeping Vocabulary – “R” is for…

Tags

apis melifera, beekeeping, biology, honey bee biology, honey bees, royal jelly

Larva floating in royal jelly By Waugsberg (Own work)

 

Today’s beekeeping vocabulary word is, “Royal Jelly.”

From Wikipedia:

Royal jelly is a honey bee secretion that is used in the nutrition of larvae, as well as adult queens.^[1] It is secreted from the glands in the hypopharynx of nurse bees, and fed to all larvae in the colony, regardless of sex or caste.^[2]

When worker bees decide to make a new queen, because the old one is either weakening or dead, they choose several small larvae and feed them with copious amounts of royal jelly in specially constructed queen cells. This type of feeding triggers the development of queen morphology, including the fully developed ovaries needed to lay eggs.^[3]

Royal jelly has long been sold as both a dietary supplement and alternative medicine. Both the European Food Safety Authority and United States Food and Drug Administration have concluded that the current evidence does not support the claim of health benefits, and have actively discouraged the sale and consumption of the jelly. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has taken legal action against companies that have used unfounded claims of health benefits to market royal jelly products. There have also been documented cases of allergic reactions, namely hives, asthma, and anaphylaxis, due to consumption of royal jelly.

Source and to read more: Wikipedia

AU BEES publishes paper on bee forage quality & pesticide contamination by Insect Pollination & Apiculture

Tags

feeding bees, forage, honey bee biology, opinion

@AuburnAg‘s Bee Lab and biologists from @acadiauniversity recently published a paper in the journal Ecology & Evolution about the quality of food encountered by bees in agro-ecosystems.

Unsurprisingly, diet quality and pesticide exposure heavily depends on crop type!

Check out the full Open Access article here!

via AU BEES publishes paper on bee forage quality & pesticide contamination — Insect Pollination & Apiculture

Changing of the Guard, Bee-Style by Longreads

Tags

beekeeping, honey bee biology, management, queens

The death of a monarch is never simple. There’s a vacuum of power that needs to be filled, an anxiety of influence that requires the successor to establish their power quickly, and a challenging period in which the memory of the deceased is negotiated and shaped (in some cases — hello, French Revolution! — this phase can last centuries). In a lovely essay at Nautilus, John Knight explores the war of succession that followed the death of the original queen in his Brooklyn-rooftop beehive. It’s a conflict not just between a wannabe-queen and her reluctant subjects, but also between human and insect, each following their own complex protocols for survival.

Read the full story here: Changing of the Guard, Bee-Style — Longreads

Beekeeping Vocabulary: “Q” is for…

Tags

biology, honey bee biology, queens

Queen bee with attendants by Pollinator at English Wikipedia

 

Today’s beekeeping vocabulary word is, “Queen.”

Queen honey bees are created when worker bees feed a single female larvae an exclusive diet of a food called “royal jelly“.^[35][36]Queens are produced in oversized cells and develop in only 16 days; they differ in physiology, morphology, and behavior from worker bees. In addition to the greater size of the queen, she has a functional set of ovaries, and a spermatheca, which stores and maintains sperm after she has mated. Apis queens practice polyandry, with one female mating with multiple males. The highest documented mating frequency for an Apis queen is in Apis nigrocincta, where queens mate with an extremely high number of males with observed numbers of different matings ranging from 42 to 69 drones per queen.^[39]The sting of queens is not barbed like a worker’s sting, and queens lack the glands that produce beeswax. Once mated, queens may lay up to 2,000 eggs per day.^[36] They produce a variety of pheromones that regulate behavior of workers, and helps swarms track the queen’s location during the swarming.^[36]

Source Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee#Queens

Beekeeping Vocabulary – “M” is for Mandible

Tags

beekeeping, beekeeping vocabulary, honey bee vocabulary

Source: Honey bee portrait by Gilles San Martin

My wife told me yesterday that one of my bees bit her. I cringed and corrected her, “You mean it stung you?” “Yes,” she said. I went on to explain that her faux pas might lead to an uncomfortable situation should she mention amongst a group of beekeepers that a bee bit her. She understood. But the fact is, it’s possible a bee bit her or at least could bite her.

Today’s beekeeping vocabulary word is “Mandible.” Honey bees have jaws called mandibles that have lots of uses. Below is an excerpt from Rusty Berlew’s excellent blog called Honey Bee Suite. Rusty writes an excellent beekeeping blog and tackles very interesting articles. I highly recommend it.

Here’s is Rusty’s take on mandibles. (Link to full article below.)

Honey bee mandibles are all-in-one tools

Like one of those fold-up multipurpose pocket tools, honey bee mandibles are used for anything that requires cutting, grasping, or squeezing. For example:

•  Cutting itself out of the brood cell
•  Working wax scales into honeycomb
•  Carrying dead bees from inside the hive
•  Removing detritus from the hive, including wood chips, paper, or cardboard left by the beekeeper
•  Fighting
•  Carving pieces of bee bread from storage inside the hive
•  Delivering food to larvae
•  Grooming themselves and the queen
•  Cutting drones from their cells and helping them emerge
•  Tearing down unused queen cells
•  Moving wax from one area of the hive to another
•  Working propolis into hive cracks and crevices
•  Biting flower petals, if possible, to access pollen or nectar*
•  Chewing wood to enlarge an entrance*

Read the fill article on Honey Bee Mandibles here: Honey Bee Mandibles Have Many Uses by Honey Bee Suite