Outreach: Youth Education

As part of the blog project, I've been trying to raise awareness about bees by using some of the information I have gained to educate. Last week, I taught a 6th grade class at a local middle school in Madison, WI called Spring Harbor Middle School about bees. Spring Harbor is a public school, but it is unique in that it accepts students from all of Dane County. As a result, the student body is composed of youth with a diverse range of multi-cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition, classes are small and give special attention to environmentally related issues. 

During my class, I gave a simple lecture about bees, pollination, and the negative consequences of our current agricultural systems. Reflecting on the session, the students were very engaged and seemed excited to learn about the material. If I were to do this again, I would love to take a class out to an actual hive to show them how an actual colony operates. While teaching in a class from is an important first step, fieldwork is an even more powerful way to get kids involved with sustainability. 

Adding environmental education programs to our public schools is one of the greatest things we can do to strengthen our current education system. Sustainability is a topic that can be applied to every type of work force and discussed by any type of person. Being conscious of environmental issues is important regardless of differences in cultural, economic, and political backgrounds and I think making children aware of this is extremely important. In addition, exposing children to environmental education encourages community activism. Making strong environmental education programs is not only essential for developing skills in youth, but also for promoting community engagement. Many schools want to have stronger education programs, but the lack funding to do so. That being said, many schools welcome volunteers to teach students about environmental topics. If you are interested, ask your local schools if there is anyway to get involved.

6th grade class at Spring Harbor Middle School

Bee Activist of the Day: Heather Swan

One of the goals that I have for this blog is to honor the people who dedicate themselves to bees. As I’ve mentioned before, beekeepers are fascinating people, but there are a lots of other types of people out there ranging from political activists to artists with a profound love for bees. The first person I’d like to feature is Heather Swan, my TA and inspiration for learning about bees.

As an artist, poet, gardener, baker, and teacher, bees have always played an extremely important role in Heather’s life. Heather’s love for bees began as a child when she saw her first honey harvest with her dad. Since then, bees have been an inspiration to some of the things she loves most. While Heather has kept bees before, her main focus right now is to raise consciousness about the importance of bees.  She does so through teaching, giving lectures, writing poetry, and managing community hives. I first saw Heather’s work when she took me out the UW student run hive at F.H King. Check out the photos below to see the hive:

Heather at the F.H. King Hive

Opening up the hive

Holding up a section of the hive where the bees make honey comb

Bees have an acute memory, Heather often sings and talks to the bees so that they become familiar with her and are calm when she works on the hive.

And of course, here is one of Heather's poems about bees:

The Edge of Damage

Poetry by Heather Swan

Parallel Press 2009

University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI

Cows, Rain, Bees

Once again, rain

eliminates boundaries.

Where once there was sidewalk

edged with street,

now there is only water.

In the same way, pain

can seem larger than the body,

passing through the boundaries,

emanating outward

until everything aches:

the trees, the grass,

the solitary cow

lagging behind the homeward herd,

glancing back and back

to the valley of bees.

Bees, who labor

toward a sweetness

which is taken from them

again and again,

but keep returning

from the fields of clover.

The Worker Bee

With all this talk about worker bees, I thought it might be helpful to include a diagram of what a worker bee actually looks like. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the worker bees are the ones in charge of foraging for nectar and pollen, caring for larvae, seeking out new hive environments, and general maintenance of the hive. This diagram represents a worker bee. While most of the labeled parts are pretty self-explanatory, I've highlighted a few important ones:

• Antennae: Bees have a strong sense of smell to help them seek out food sources. They use the antennae to sense these sources. In addition to dancing, bees also communicate through pheromones. The queen, workers, and drones all use pheromones to communicate with each other. Some of the pheromone functions include attracting swarms, differentiating between larvae and pupae, creating alarm, and searching for nectar.
• Proboscis: This is the tube like tongue that allows worker bees to get nectar.
• Pollen Basket: These are on the worker bees back legs. When flying from flower to flower, the worker bee collects pollen to bring back to the hive. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the orange pollen on the worker bees that are flying back into the hive.

Check out Honey Bee Suite!

Was delighted to come across another bee blog created by beekeeper from Washington. The guy is a great writer and gives a lot of good information about honey bees, beekeeping, and pollination. The site also provides links to lots of other bee keeping blogs. I recommend checking it out!

Honey Bee Suite

It's cold season...

Yuck! Hate to say it, but it’s about that time for us to face the season of sore throats, stuffy noses, and chest colds. Winter is that season when we are constantly forced to battle off those mild, but troublesome sicknesses that can really take a toll on our daily routines. While the common cold may not be the most disasterous problem to deal with, it can interfere with our lives. The question, however, is what do we do about it? Sure, you can try to self medicate with a bunch of over the counter products from pharmacies, but thanks to bees, there is a much cheaper, effective, and healthier solution and it’s called Propolis. Propolis is a somewhat mysterious product produced by bees used by colonies to manage the structure of the hive. Bees use it to seal holes, protect against bacteria, and mummify intruders (yep, this happens quite frequently!), and we can use it to strengthen our immune systems. Propolis seems to be one of those cure all natural remedies that can be used to fight off anything ranging from sore throats to warts to canker sores. All you need to do is put it on the site of infection, or swallow a couple drops when you feel a cold coming on. Users of Propolis swear by it and I recommend trying it!

Check out Honey Garden's, a bee keeping organization in Vermont, that sells Propolis. Even if you aren't interested in buying the stuff, check out the website for more interesting facts about bees!

The Importance of Diversity

If you had to choose one, and only one, thing to eat for the rest of your life what would it be? At first, the answer to this question may come easily: just pick your favorite food. Can you imagine eating your favorite food all the time for the rest of your life? That doesn’t sound so bad. No hard decisions, no need to avoid unwanted meals, but just you and your favorite food every single day. Wait a second, every single day?  At every single meal?! For the rest of your life?!? Okay, I take it back, maybe that does sound pretty bad.

We all have that favorite food that we love, but there are few of us who would choose to eat it, and nothing else, for the rest of our lives. Not only would consuming one type of food be disgusting and repetitive, but it would also prevent us from gaining the nutritional benefits that come with a balanced diet. When it comes to food, the more diversity the better. A diverse diet ensures that one is getting enough vitamins, minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, and fats necessary to living a healthy life. This is true for all humans, and it is also true for all bees.

Bees use pollen and nectar from flowers to feed themselves and the hive. Nectar provides bees with carbohydrates, while pollen is a source of proteins and fats. The worker bees eat these plant parts while they are at the flower, but they also bring them back to the hive to make the three foods crucial to bee life: honey, bee bread, and royal jelly. Honey, which we all know and love, is the distilled nectar stored in the hive to feed the queen, drones, and young worker bees and sustain the hive during seasons when food sources are unavailable. Beebread is stored pollen that provides bees with proteins, lipids, nitrogen, and amino acids. Lastly, royal jelly is the substance made by young worker bees to feed hungry larvae. The combination of these three types of food keeps a healthy hive buzzing.  (Buchmann)

While the three food sources provide bees with the basics, it is important that they do not all come from the same type of flower. Like us, bees need to eat a balanced diet. And since they only consume nectar, pollen, and honey, this diversity needs to come from the original feeding source—the flower. Getting food from different kinds of flowers provides bees with lots of nutritional values leading to benefits like enhanced immune systems. Bees only visit one type of flower for an extended period of time (allowing for pollination of each species!), but the type of plant shifts throughout a season. For example, a colony may take nectar only from Dandelions in early spring and then transition to Goldenrods later in the season. This feeding mechanism not only ensures that multiple types of plants are pollinated, but also guarantees that bees receive benefits from a range of pollens and nectars. Each plant species’ pollen is composed of a unique composition of proteins and amino acids. By using pollen that comes from different plants, the bees are rewarded with a multitude of amino acids and proteins thus contributing the vitality of the entire colony.

One of the problems our current ecosystems face is a decline of biodiversity. As our natural environments shrink and our meadows and forests are converted into mono-crops, many species, especially bees, face a shortage of food and nutrients. Bees can still obtain food from a limited amount of plant species, but it is probably not the healthiest way for hives to do so. Instead of living in environments filled with many different plant species, bees used for commercial honey production are now trucked from mono-crop to mono-crop with an expectation to pollinate entire fields and provide us with enough honey for human consumption. For example, a single hive may move from pollinating a peach orchard in Vermont to an almond grove in California within a matter of a couple weeks. This not only limits the types of flowers bees can visit during nectar collecting seasons, but also puts an incredible amount of stress on colonies. This is a lot to ask of bees, and we are experiencing the consequences of it through problems like Colony Collapse Disorder.

While bees play an essential role in pollinating our crops, it is unwise for us to simply see bees as tools rather than as a species. When we think of Honey Bees as tools to pollinate, we forget that they are living creatures with needs of their own. By doing so, we fail to remember that like us, bees need a diet composed of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates from a wide range of plant sources to ensure that they are getting enough nutrients and health benefits to sustain their colonies. If we want to rely on bees to pollinate our crops, we need to do so in a way that is best suited for the bees. With the way our population is growing and our current food system is set up, it may be unreasonable to provide a way for all bees to live the best possible lives, but we can try our best to form ideal environments for many more bee colonies than we do now. Over thirty percent of the world’s hives collapse on an annual basis. If we continue to treat bees the way that we do this number will most likely increase.

There are many ways that we can help bees, but one of the most important things that we can do is reestablish the ecosystems that bees rely on to survive. This means we need to protect our meadows, forests, and poly-culture farms. Even a simple act such as planting a small pot of wildflowers in an outdoor window box provides bees with a healthy feeding source. We can save the world’s bee colonies, but we can only do so if we give them a place to live. This is where we need to start.

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind.New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

We’re eating honey that isn’t actually honey?

Ever think that the honey you see in most grocery stores isn’t actually honey? Probably not because, well, why would you? The bottle this mysterious substance is in claims that it’s honey. It smells like honey, looks like honey, and tastes (somewhat) like honey, but we now know that it’s not. After a series of tests ran by the World Health Organization, results have proven that over three-fourths of honey sold in American grocery stores is not normal honey, but instead a pollen-less substance that could be dangerous to our health and even fatal. While researchers are unsure as to why most honey in grocery stores shows no sign of pollen, many believe that it is because the honey is either actually diluted by other sugars, or ultra-filtered to cover up a deeper problem. If you are interested in learning more about the consequences of consuming this kind of honey, please check out the article below published in Food Safety News.

Food Safety News: Contaminated Honey

Support Local Bee Keepers! A Short Film on Eugene Woller.

As consumers, one of the most important ways that we can support bee populations is by supporting bee keepers. Bee keepers are passionate about bees and our environment in ways unlike anybody else. There are so many amazing bee keepers around the world, all with a unique story, that need our help. In addition to purchasing local honey, you can support bee keepers by just getting to know more about them! Below is a link to a short film made by Heather Swan and Sara Randle that shares the story of Eugene Woller, a bee keeper from Wisconsin:

Eugene Woller's Story

Also, be sure to check out his bee keeping website:

Gentle Breeze Honey

(...And I can testify that the honey he and his family produce is absolutely delicious!)

A story from Thailand: Bees and Elephants

In ancient myths across the globe, bees have not only made an appearance as friends of man, but also to other species. The following story comes from Thailand and describes the relationship between bees and elephants. While this story is clearly a tale, is does give some insights as to how cultures may have figured out how to take honey by smoking out the colonies, a main method of bee keeping today. In order to calm bees down, bee keepers lightly blow smoke onto the hive which stuns the bees in a relatively harmless way for a short period of time thus allowing the bee keepers to take honey. I will post at another point about bee keeping methods, but for now enjoy the story!


In ancient times, elephants did not have the long trunks they do today and bees did not live in nests in hollow trees. Instead, the built their nests on branches in the open air. One year the rains were extremely meager and the land became dangerously dry. The elephants found it increasingly difficult to find enough leaves to feed on. The bees were also having trouble collecting the nectar and pollen they needed, as all the flowers were dying. Finally, as dry as tinder, the forest caught fire. The elephants tried to outrun the danger, but the lumbering creatures soon grew tired as the flames spread unchecked. When they called for help, the bees offered to lead them to safety in return for free transport. The elephants opened their mouths, and the bees flew inside to escape the hot air and choking smoke. They settled in the elephants' short snouts and from there directed their companions to a nearby lake. The elephants waded into the middle of the lake and stayed there until the fire had spent itself. 


It was now time to leave the lake and resume their hunt for food, but the bees had become accustomed to the cool, dark interior of the elephant's snouts and began building their hives there. The elephants bellowed and trumpeted in rage and began to exhale mightily in order to evict their unwanted lodgers. After several hours of trumpeting and exhaling, their snouts had stretched into full-sized trunks, but the bees remained stubbornly inside. The elephants finally decided that since the bees had flown inside their snouts to escape the smoke, smoke would be the best way to get them out. So they walked into the still- smoldering ashes of the fire, inhaled deeply, and held the smoke in their mouths and trunks until the bees had fled. 


Then they returned to the lake to drink and cleanse their palates. Thanks to their new, improved appendages, they could reach the water without having to stoop. The evicted bees, having become very comfortable building their hives in cool, dark places, searched for something similar and found that the next best thing to an elephants' trunk was the hollow trunk of a tree. This is why an elephant's trunk was the hollow trunk of a tree. This is why an elephant's nose and the body of a tree are called trunks, and why bees who live in hollow trees are called phung phrong or "elephant's mouth bees." - Found in Stephen Buchmann's book, Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind.

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

Saving Trees can Help the Bees!

Bees around the world are currently facing the problem of habitat decline. Bees, like many other pollinators, need to live in a habitat rich with plant diversity to ensure high rates of survival. With increasing rates of urbanization, forest degradation, and mono-crop agriculture, levels of plant diversity are shrinking on a global scale, leaving many colonies without a habitat. One of the ways that we can protect bees is by restoring and conserving the very places that they live. We can do this by preserving wildlife areas like forests. In addition to providing bees with more areas to live, conservation areas can also improve our own economies. In Central America, efforts to preserve forests surrounding coffee farms have caused crop yields to rise tremendously. Protecting forests gives bees a place to live thus allowing them to pollinate coffee-plant flowers. Increased pollination around coffee farms in Costa Rica lead to 20% greater crop yields and an average 7% increase in annual farm incomes (Chivian, 105). That being said, we should strive to protect forests around the world for the sake of bee colonies, levels of plant diversity, and farming economies.

Cited Sources:

Chivian, Eric, and Aaron Bernstein. Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

The Basics of Honey as an Antibiotic

Antibiotic is one of those words that has a scary ring to it. When we hear the word antibiotic, we often shrink away from the subject, believing that antibiotics are extremely complicated substances that require excessive research and knowledge to understand. When we think antibiotics, we imagine man-made medicines in packaged bottles and pills that come from laboratories and factories. All in all, we know that antibiotics are effective at managing disease and dangerous if consumed at too high or little levels; but the rest, well, we kind of just don’t talk about. This view that antibiotics are things that we cannot understand needs to stop because we can understand them and should for the sake of everyone’s health.

An antibiotic is simply a substance that kills, resists, or slows down the growth of bacteria. Bacteria are single celled organisms that exist pretty much everywhere in the world. We all have bacteria in our bodies and most of it is harmless or beneficial including the bacteria, gut flora, which lives in our colons. Some bacteria, however, is dangerous to humans and can cause infectious diseases like Cholera. We create antibiotics in order to prevent the spread of these harmful types of bacterium. Currently, our technology has allowed us to create many synthetic antibiotics and we are using them more than we ever have in the past. Synthetic antibiotics are good in a sense that they are very effective in managing disease, but terrifying due to the fact that they can cause the formation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and lead to an even more harmful disease. While we know that this can occur, we still continue to excessively use them on ourselves, and our food sources.

There are bacteria that we should use synthetic antibiotics to fight like extreme diseases such as Syphilis, but there are also bacteria that we can fight using much more natural practices like in the case of a skin or wound infection. Honey, believe it or not, is a completely natural, effective, and safe antibiotic. Like I said before, an antibiotic is simply something that kills bacterium; and this is exactly what honey does. Honey, thanks to the relationship between flowers and bees, is mainly composed of sugar. As a result, honey is a highly concentrated substance made up of about 80% sugar and 20% water (Buchmann, 208). Most bacterium, on the other hand, are made up of single cells mainly composed of water. So, when honey is put on a cut containing lots of infectious bacteria, it often kills the bacteria through a process called osmosis. Osmosis occurs when two mediums (ie. two different cells) with differing concentrations come in contact. As a rule of nature, osmotic pressure causes the flow of a solvent to move through a semi-permeable membrane into a highly concentrated solution in order to even out the differing concentrations. In the case of honey and bacteria, this means that the water within the bacteria cells actually moves through the cell walls in order to dilute the highly concentrated honey. Without water, the bacterium shrivel up and die.  It is in this way that honey is a very effective antibiotic.

Many scientists have realized the benefits as honey as an antibiotic and researches have begun to use honey in medical products such as bandages and antiseptics. Why use a synthetic and expensive chemicals when you can simply use honey? So, next time you get a cut try reaching for that little honey filled bear on your counter instead of the Neosporin. Might sound odd, but I think you will be pleasantly surprised!

In case my description of osmosis was a little unclear, here is a diagram to help you out:

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

Looking for a dessert recipe? Try Honey Lemon Squares!

After reading Stephen Buchmann's book An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind, I was delighted to find a series of recipes that featured honey as a main ingredient. The first one I tried to make was Honey Lemon Squares. I will start posting recipes, but for now thought you might enjoy making this fun and delicious dessert!

Honey Lemon Squares

You'll need:


-1/2 cup of butter
-1/4 cup of confectioners' sugar
-1 cup plus 1 table spoon of flour, divided
-3/4 cup of HONEY (yay!)
-1/2 cup of of lemon zest
-3 eggs
-1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

Step 1:


In a medium bowl, cream the butter sugar until light and fluffy. Add 1 cup flour and mix until combined. Press the mixture evenly into the bottom of a 9-inch-square pan. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20 minutes, or until lightly browned.

Step 2:


Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients until thoroughly blended. Pour over the baked crust and bake all together for 20 minutes more, until the filling has set. Cool in the pan and cut into squares and serve.

Enjoy!!

Cited Sources:

Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

You can thank the bees for your Honey Moon

Ever wonder why that sweet little post wedding trip is called a Honey Moon? I mean, I guess it kind of makes sense. Honey because you get to spend time with your favorite honey and moon because you, um, travel somewhere new? Not exactly. The term Honey Moon actually originated among the Druidic Celt people during the time of the Vikings. Like many other ancient civilizations, these Celts used honey to make honey wine, or mead. Honey was generally harvested during the month of May, which was referred to as the Honey Month in the lunar calendar. In addition to harvesting honey, the Honey Month was a time for couples to be married. Celtic tradition mandated that all marriages occur on May Day, or the first of the Honey Month. Afterwards, newlyweds were allowed to flee to a secluded place for the rest of the month in order to get to know each other, enjoy one another’s company, and drink lots and lots of mead. Apparently, the tradition stuck around because it is the Celtic Tradition of marriage during the Honey Month of the lunar calendar that leaves us with the name “Honey Moon”.




Cited Sources:
Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print

Bees of Ancient Times: the Story of the San

Bees have long since been a part of our story telling history. Even before we could comprehend the science of pollination, humans understood that bees provided the world with a lot more than just delicious honey. Ancient societies across the globe all had the feeling that bees were involved with the construction of the earth, humankind, and other animals. While every culture has a different story about honeybees, help from bees seems to be an underlying theme in our most ancient myths. Many of these stories are very interesting; and from time to time, I will post a story passed down from an ancient civilization that explains the creation of bees and their importance in the world. I hope you enjoy them!

The first story comes from one of our oldest civilizations, the San people of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. The San people had a series of stories about how the world came to be. To the San, the bee represented an animal of tremendous wisdom and even a messenger of God. According to San myth, the bee played a huge role in the creation of humans and actually sacrificed himself for us. Here is the story:

San descendent, South Africa. -Lizzie Needham

A long, long time ago, Mantis asked Bee to carry him across the dark, turbulent waters of a flood-swollen river. Bee, known for his wisdom and reliability, agreed and told Mantis to climb onto his back. Buffeted by fierce, cold winds, Bee soon grew weary and searched for solid ground on which to deposit his burden. But the stormy waters seemed to stretch all the way to the farthest horizon. Exhausted and weighed down by the much larger Mantis, Bee sank closer and closer to the lapping waves. But just as he was about to go under, he spied a great white flower, half open and floating on the water, awaiting the sun's first warming rays. Marshaling his remaining strength, Bee struggled towards the flower, laid Mantis down in its very heart and planted within Mantis the seed of the first human being. Then, his task complete, poor Bee died. Later, when the sun had risen in the sky and warmed the white flower, Mantis awoke, and as he did so, the first San was born from the seed implanted by Bee. -Found in Stephan Buchmann's book, Letters from the Hive.



Sun set in the Richtersveld, South Africa, home of the San people. -Lizzie Needham



Cited Sources:
Buchmann, Stephen L., and Banning Repplier. Letters from the Hive: an Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind. New York: Bantam, 2005. Print.

Movie Review: Queen of the Sun

Looking for a great documentary about bees? Look no further! Queen of the Sun, directed by Taggart Siegel, is a wonderfully done film about bees, beekeepers, and the threats both currently face. Siegel interviews a whole host of bee keepers from across the globe and a series of experts including Michael Pollan and Dr. Vandana Shiva about what we need to do to save our pollinators. In addition to being interesting and aesthetically beautiful, the film is extremely informative and gives thorough explanations as to how monoculture cropping, plant genetic modification, and industry stresses are harming our bees. This documentary is not one you want to miss and I highly recommend watching it.

Check out the trailer and enjoy!

Queen of the Sun Trailer

Honey is Money

...and it's worth A LOT of money. In addition to bringing in annual incomes to our bee keepers around the world, honey bees add substantial amounts to our agricultural systems. According to Kim Kaplin, USDA agricultural research service specialist, "honey bee pollination is critical to United States agriculture, adding more than $15 billion to the value of American crops per year." Seeing that honey bees are responsible for a whole lot of crop pollination and that bees rely on flowers and crops for food, farming and bee keeping have a very intimate relationship. Whether it be a thousand acre commercial almond grove or a ten by ten foot backyard vegetable garden, both types of operations need bees for pollination. Fortunately for us, bee keepers and farmers form partnerships across the country to make sure that this pollination occurs. While most of our honey production comes from larger scale commercial bee keeping, some of it also comes from smaller bee keeping organizations. Although small, these bee keepers are essential to a healthy sustainable agricultural system and they need our support! New York Times writer, Tammy La Gorce, writes an article outlining the importance of this partnership in her article "I'll borrow your farm, you keep my bees". It gives very good insights to local bee keeping and I highly recommend reading it if you are interested in this kind of thing.

Here it is: I'll Borrow your Farm, you Keep my Bees
For more information on local bee keeping organizations, check out Tassot Apiaries, a small bee keeping organization in New Jersey.

Works Cited:

Kaplin, Kim. "Survey Reports Latest Honey Bee Losses / May 19, 2009 / News from the USDA Agricultural Research Service." ARS : Home. Agricultural Research Service, 19 May 2009. Web. 17 Oct. 2011. <http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2009/090519.htm>.

Just a little reminder of the beauty that bees bring to our world

Roses in Tianjin, China. -Lizzie Needham

Meadow Flowers, North East Harbor, Maine. -Lizzie Needham

Pollinated flower, Cape Town, South Africa. -Leslie Needham

Bee at work, Cape Town, South Africa. -Leslie Needham

Wild flowers in North East Harbor, Maine. -Lizzie Needham

So you think you can dance? Well, maybe not, but you definitely thought you could last night.

In this world, there are those that can dance, and those that can’t, and I mean really, really can’t. If you’re one of those people who’s not blessed with dancing abilities, you’ll agree that your moves, for the sake of everyone else’s well-being and your own dignity, only come out in the most private of situations. That is, of course, unless you have a couple drinks. I know I’m not alone when I say that consuming a few too many cocktails always seems to bring out the dancer in me. Like I’m sure the rest of you ungifted ones feel, this dancer only comes out after a few drinks for a reason. It is not a pretty sight. And while we can wake up the next morning and laugh about our attempts to break it down in front of the entire bar, a couple bad moves are not a laughing matter to a species that relies on dancing for survival.

Bees, unlike humans, are all born with an ability to dance. In fact, dancing is one of the key components to Honey Bee life. Bees depend on communicative dances to find food sources, scout out new hive habitats, and keep things running smoothly in the colony.  Dancing is a way that hive members interact with each other and has been for thousands of years.  Since 2004, however, we have noticed a dramatic change in nearly 30% of all Apis mellifera worker bee dancing patterns. As many of you may already know, bee populations around the world are currently facing a mysterious threat called Colony Collapse Disorder. In CCD, healthy hives will randomly collapse and die out over a very short and sudden period of time. There is little understanding as to what happens during CCD or why it wipes out almost one third of hives on an annual basis, but we do know that in most cases, the worker bees simply stop returning to the hive.

While there are many things that could be causing Colony Collapse Disorder ranging from climate change to industry stress to invasive mites, I, along with many others, would argue that pesticides are main contributor to CCD. In our current agricultural system, we use pesticides on a majority of our crops and flowers. There are certainly benefits to using pesticides, but there are also a whole lot of downsides and one of them is the way that they impact bees. Honey Bees use nectar and pollen from flowers to feed themselves and produce their own honey. With that being said, when we add pesticides to crops we are subsequently changing their food sources.

Why, you may ask, does this matter, or have anything to do with Honey Bee dancing patterns? Well, think about it. A pesticide is a chemical toxin made to interfere with neurological activities of insects. In other words, when we use pesticides we are essentially creating a series of neurological nectar “cocktails” for the bees to drink. Sound familiar? Like we all know, mind-altering substances do not generally bide well for our dance moves. The same goes for bees. This could be a possible explanation as to why worker bees, the ones who drink the nectar and communicate with each other through dances, randomly leave the hive.

There are thousands of different types of pesticides, some worse than others, that currently affect bee populations. I will post information about more specific types later on, but for now I just wanted to give you all an introduction on the impact that pesticides can have on bees and the link between these toxins and CCD. For those of you interested in pesticides, countries like Germany and France have actually begun to outlaw some pesticides because of bees.

Below is a link to an article about Clothianidin, a pesticide banned in Germany and France.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/23/wildlife.endangeredspecies

For the meantime, help save the bees by signing this petition to ban Neonictinoid pesticides in the US!

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/673/611/950/  

So what's the buzz about? Why should we care about bees?

Bees are often given the unfair reputation of being ferocious little creatures with a knack for stinging people. Let me tell you, this is far from the truth. As cheesy as it may sound, bees are our friends and have been for, well, thousands of years. In addition to producing honey, bees are core pollinators of flowers and crops around the world. In the United States, one out of every three bites that we eat comes from a plant that has been directly pollinated by a bee. In other words, we need them, and a whole lot more than they need us.

Bee expert, Dennis Van Engelsdorp, gives a great overview of the roles that bees play in global agriculture. Click below for the link.
Dennis vanEngelsdorp: a plea for bees | Video on TED.com

What's something that all of the plants below have in common? They all depend on bees!

In the Hive...

While there is a lot to learn about bees, the best place to start is in the hive. A healthy hive is crucial to the survival of the Apis mellifera species. Honey bees are considered to be a eusocial species, one that shows an advanced level of social organization. This organization starts within the hive. In other words, a hive is the center of honey bee life. The hive not only serves as a protective home to the bees, but also as a place for honey production and breeding. Every hive contains three types of members that each play a unique role in its structure and organization: the Queen, the Worker bees (female), and the Drones (male).

1. Queen: There is one queen per hive and she is in charge of reproduction. She is the largest member of the hive and lays all of the eggs.
2. Drones: These are the male members that exist solely to provide sperm to the queen. Drones are slightly larger than female bees and die once they have mated with the queen.
3. Worker bees: These female members make up a majority of the hive. They are responsible for collecting pollen and nectar, producing honey, and overall construction and maintenance of the hive. In addition, worker bees seek out destinations for new hives and food sources through communicative dances.

Well, this is what the overall structure of a honey bee hive looks like. While there is a lot more to learn about the hive, having a basic grasp as to what goes on with in a bee community is the first step to understanding our favorite pollinator.

This information was found at: Readicker-Henderson, Ed, and Ilona. A Short History of the Honey Bee: Humans, Flowers, and Bees in the Eternal Chase for Honey. Portland: Timber, 2009. Print.