Bee News - December 2009

 

There is very good reason why honey produced by Australia’s bees is considered to be among the world’s cleanest and most delicious.

 

The country is one of the last in the world to resist the insidious encroachment of the Varroa mite, a pinhead-sized insect that has devastated bee populations around the world in the past 30 years.

 

Australia’s sea border and some original quarantine methods have kept the deadly mite at arm’s length.

 

The nation’s apiarists manage their hives without the armoury of chemical sprays that keep bees in Europe, North America and most other places alive. Honey in Australia is still the product of bees doing what they do, with a minimum of human interferences.

 

But the latest report from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, reflecting mainstream opinion on the topic, says an outbreak of Varroa mite here is “almost inevitable”.

 

One strain, known as Varroa Destructor, latches on to European `honeybees and sucks their blood, weakening bees and spreading viruses and deformities among a colony. The honeybees have no answer to the mite once they enter a colony.

 

“Bees have been in decline everywhere since Varroa got into the population,” said Denis Anderson, a CSIRO virologist and world specialist on bee health.

 

“In the US, for example, they had about 5 million colonies in 1987 when Varroa first got into the population - now they have about 2.5 million and that’s with a lot of expensive chemicals being used.

 

“It won’t destroy the European honeybee completely, but until we come up with some way of controlling the mites bees everywhere are in trouble.”

 

Dr Anderson has made it his crusade to understand and, if possible, overcome the Varroa threat since he began studying the encroachment of Asian honeybees into West Papua in the 1980s. His research led to the recognition of the deadly Varroa Destructor strain in 2000.

 

The mites have now spread further than PNG, and New Zealand’s quarantine measures were breached in 2000.

 

The consequences are not limited to the wellbeing of bee colonies. In Australia, a growing industry is built on bee pollination and transporting mobile hives around the country to pollinater food crops. Almonds, strawberries, apples, pears, cherries and most citrus fruit crops depend either totally or mainly on bees to pollinate.

 

“If honeybee pollination were to stop immediately and completely, large losses would be felt in a horticulture sector that provides produce valued at $3.8 billion per annum,” the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation report said. “This is because approximately 65 per cent of horticultural and agricultural crops produced in Australia require pollination services from honeybees.

 

“There is a widely held view in the Australian scientific community that an incursion of the highly destructive Varroa mite, potentially from either New Zealand or Papua New Guinea, is almost inevitable.”

 

The bee community in Australia - which manages about 500,000 productive hives - is preparing for the threat.

 

Bess buzzing around most of Australia’s major sea ports also provide a kind of airborne early-warning system.

 

A network of 37 strategically placed hives are maintained by a Federal Government grant and regularly studied for any signs of a Varroa outbreak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tickets available from: Serena Fraser, 8 Claremont Road, Claygate, ESHER, Surrey KT10 0PL

Tel: 01372 464885 • Email: serena@thefrasers8.plus.com

 

• Limited number tickets availabile, book early to avoid disappointment

 

 

 

Japanese honeybees form "bee balls" - mobbing and smothering the predators.

 

This has previously been referred to as "heat-balling", but a study has now shown that carbon dioxide also plays a role in its lethal effectiveness.

 

In the journal Naturwissenschaften, the scientists describe how hornets are killed within 10 minutes when they are trapped inside a ball of bees.

 

Japanese giant hornets, which can be up to 5cm long, are voracious predators that can devastate bees' nests and consume their larvae.

 

But, if the bees spot their attacker in time, they mount a powerful defence in the form of a bee ball. This study found that the heat inside the bee ball alone was not enough to reliably kill the hornets.

 

Giant hornets were taped to temperature and gas probes

 

"They can survive for 10 minutes at a temperature up to 47C, and the temperature inside the bee balls does not rise higher than 46C," said Fumio Sakamoto, a researcher from Kyoto Gakuen University in Japan, and one of the authors of the study.

 

His team recreated experimental bee balls and took direct measurements from inside them.

 

They anaesthetised giant hornets and fixed them to the tip either of a thermometer probe, or the inlet of a gas detector.

 

Once the hornets recovered from their anaesthesia, the probes were touched to the bees' nest.

 

"The bee ball formed (around the hornet) immediately," said Dr Sakamoto. After 10 minutes the bees were packed solidly enough around the probe to be removed from the nest in a distinct ball.

 

As the temperature inside the ball increased to more than 45C, the carbon dioxide level also rose sharply.

 

In a parallel experiment, the scientists found that in an atmosphere relatively high in carbon dioxide, the temperature at which hornets could survive for 10 minutes was lowered.

 

"So we concluded that carbon dioxide produced inside the bee ball by the honeybees is a major factor, together with temperature, involved in the bees' defence."

 

Dr Sakamoto is not sure, at this point, whether the bees were effectively "gassing" the hornets, or simply depriving them of oxygen.

 

"Either way, the carbon dioxide increase and/or the oxygen decrease lowered the temperature that was lethal to the hornets, " he told BBC News.

 

"We are going to do the additional experiments about this point using mixed air of various oxygen and carbon dioxide (concentrations)."

 

The mob of bees also appeared to operate in "two phases".

 

"The hornet may be killed during the first 0-5 minute period, in which the highest level of heat production and carbon dioxide emissions take place," said Dr Sakamoto.

 

This might suggest that the bees are aware of what physiological state the hornet is in.

 

Dr Sakamoto said: "The latter 5-10 min period may be free running to ensure their victim's death."

 

2009 has been a good year for the Kingston Division of SBKA, we have seen our membership grow and the new members have bought fresh enthusiasm to our group. Also at the start of the season we managed to get the apiary clear of European Foul Brood, to the great relief of all those who have hives at the apiary.

 

Saturday afternoons became quite busy with people opening up hives so that beginners and observers can see what regular maintenance of a hive entails. Avis and David were also on hand each week to answer questions and give a short talk on some aspect of beekeeping and Chris provided tea and cakes so that members could have refreshments at the end of the afternoon whilst putting the world to rights. The annual honey crop has once again was been a story of mixed fortunes, some hives experiencing quite poor results whilst others seemed to achieve a normal harvest.

 

A further development of the club’s activities is our Winter Lecture, please support this venture, Dr Ivor Davis is an interesting speaker and he will be well worth the £4.00 ticket.

 

General interest in beekeeping nationally has continued to grow thanks to an increase in publicity, quite a lot of it generated by the PR?people at BBKA. The plight of the honeybee has been discussed in several television programmes and regular articles in the broadsheets have been a feature of the past year. On a related subject the National Geographic magazine has an interesting article this month on pollen, illustrated with their usual high quality photographs. It’s been given the evocative title of ‘Love is in the air’.

 

Finally, thank you all of you who have sent me articles for inclusion in our Bee News. It has helped to make this newsletter a joint effort and added interest to each edition. This will be my last effort at trying to keep you all informed on bee related news and events, from the new year I’ll be handing over to Farag Hazem. Please keep the news coming to Farag, it’s your contributions that help to make the newsletter what it is.

 

 

 

 

 

An American magazine held a competition, inviting its readers to submit new scientific theories on ANY subject. Below is the winner:

 

 

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands buttered side down. Therefore, if a slice of toast is strapped to a cat’s back, buttered side up, and the animal is then dropped, the two opposing forces will cause it to hover, spinning inches above the ground. If enough toast-laden felines were used, they could form the basis of a high-speed monorail system.

 

 

I’ve been thinking about this cat/toast business for a while. In the buttered toast case, it’s the butter that causes it to land buttered side down - it doesn’t have to be toast, the theory works equally well with Jacob’s crackers. So to save money you just miss out the toast – and butter the cats. Also, should there be an imbalance between the effects of cat and butter, there are other substances that have a stronger affinity for carpet.

 

Probability of carpet impact is determined by the following simple formula:

 

p = s x t(t)/tc

 

Where ‘p’ is the probability of carpet impact ‘s’ is the “stain” value of the toast-covering substance - an indicator of the effectiveness of the toast topping in permanently staining the carpet. Chicken Tikka Masala, for example, has a very high ‘s’ value, while the ‘s’ value of water is zero. ‘tc’ and ‘t(t)’ indicate the tone of the carpet and topping - the value of ‘p’ being strongly related to the relationship between the colour of the carpet and topping, as even chicken Tikka Masala won’t cause a permanent and obvious stain if the carpet is the same colour.

 

So it is obvious that the probability of carpet impact is maximized if you use chicken Tikka Masala and a white carpet - in fact this combination gives a ‘p’ value of one, which is the same as the probability of a cat landing on its feet. Therefore a cat with chicken Tikka Masala on its back will be certain to hover in mid air, while there could be problems with buttered toast as the toast may fall off the cat, causing a terrible monorail crash resulting in nauseating images of members of the royal family visiting accident victims in hospital, and politicians saying it wouldn’t have happened if their party was in power as there would have been more investment in cat-toast glue research.

 

Therefore it is in the interests not only of public safety but also public sanity if the buttered toast on cats idea is scrapped, to be replaced by a monorail powered by cats smeared with chicken Tikka Masala floating above a rail made from white shag-pile carpet.