No. 48 January 2011

Edited by Ian Mootz ian.mootz@btinternet.com

http://www.keepingbees.co.uk/malvern&Upton.htm

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

It has seemed a very long time since we tucked the bees away for winter 2010/11 and they have since endured extreme UK weather conditions. At last though, it is with great relief that we see them emerge on the brighter days to taste their first air of a new year, their wings purring into action on the alighting board. The daylight is now lingering into the early evening, birdsong is jauntier and I have seen honeybees visiting the snowdrops. I took this picture at the Weir last year (a National Trust property just above Hereford – well worth a visit) and the bees were active there just the other day in the sunny intervals when I visited. Just a week ago we woke to several inches of snow in

the Lake District, so winter has still not quite left us. Our bees should be ramping up their numbers now and should be checked to ensure that they have adequate food supplies to sustain them through this critical period. Last weekend the beekeepers also became active, with a very successful ‘new starters’ session, held in Hanley Swan – it is good to know that a new brood is about to emerge into the fascinating world of beekeeping. Recently there have been some interesting articles about seasonal variation in honey yields. A strong correlation has been noted between sun spot activity and annual honey harvest. This means that the amount of honey produced will often relate to the mean annual temperature. Apparently it Is a cyclic phenomena, likely to peak in 3-5 years then decline again [so hope for some improving yields in the interim!] – Many thanks to Don Bond for copies of the Essex Beekeeper, which featured the articles.

With the increased awareness of the importance of honeybees and other pollinators, we have also seen an ‘insect pollinator initiative’ receive funding for 9 projects (active through last year). This investment is most welcome and is looking at threats to insect pollinators: adequate nutrition for UK pollinators, agriculture and land use impact on pollinator populations, emergent diseases impact and mitigation, ecology and conservation of urban pollinators, varroa destructor impact on bees and their relationship with viruses, impact of industrial chemicals [pesticides] on bees, sustainable pollination for crops, managing bee diseases and impact of habitat structure [nesting and forage] on worker bumblebees. Hopefully the research findings will help safeguard our bees into the future. Wishing you and your bees a great beekeeping year. Ian Mootz (Editor)

This years Queen colour : White

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LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN – by Brian Nicholls

We are all saddened by the news that Trevor has to give up beekeeping due to his allergic reaction to bee stings and therefore has decided to step down from the post of chairman. As the incoming chairman, I must, on behalf of Malvern & Upton Beekeepers, thank Trevor for all his hard work as chairman. He has been very active and instrumental in this branches continued success. During this time we have seen our membership almost double, as the interest in beekeeping continues to grow. Trevor has been responsible for putting us on the information and communication map, so to speak, by setting-up the branches own website and this year has been successful in acquiring a grant for the branch, from AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). This has enabled us to purchase some very useful items – A Projector, 2 new Display Boards, Beesuits and gloves for the beginners classes and a Virtual Bee Hive. As you can see, this is going to be a very hard act to follow.

THE BEE CAROL [provided by Kevin Fooks] Written by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, patron of the Natural Beekeeping Trust.

GENETIC ARITHMETIC from Brian Nicholls Back in September 1995, I produced an article for the Buzz, titled “ A Disloyal Sting in the Tale of the Bumble Bee “. At that time I had been keeping bees for about five years and as well as having an interest in honey bees, I became fascinated with the way Bumble Bees lived their lives and even envisaged trying to rear colonies in boxes, for pollination purposes. Now that our branch membership has increased so significantly in recent years, I thought maybe this would be a good time to repeat this article, as it would give our newer beekeepers an insight into the complex and special reproductive behaviour of both Honey and Bumble Bees. Bumble Bees are social insects very much like Honey Bees but there the similarity ends. They have small colonies of a queen, some drones and a few tens of workers, which last only one season. The Bumble Bee has not reached the sophistication of the

Bring me for my Christmas gift a single golden jar; let me taste the sweetness there, but honey leave to feed the winter cluster of the bees. Come with me on Christmas Eve to see the silent hive – trembling stars cloistered above – and then believe, bless the winter cluster of the bees.

Silently on Christmas Eve, the turn of midnight's key; all the garden locked in ice – a silver frieze – except the winter cluster of the bees. Flightless now and shivering, around their Queen they cling; every bee a gift of heat; she will not freeze within the winter cluster of the bees.

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Honey Bee with their teeming cities, their efficient divisions of labour and their selfless defence of the colony, even unto death. In the mid nineteen nineties I had read that there was a newly discovered reason for this difference between Bumble Bees and Honey Bees. Bumble Bee queens are monogamous; each only mates with one drone. Honey Bee queens are polyandrous; they mate with many drones. The result is a curious piece of genetic arithmetic. If you could ask a worker Honey Bee “ who would you prefer to be the mother of the hives’ males “? Her answer would be herself, her queen and only then another (randomly picked) worker, in that order; for that is the order of decreasing relatedness. Therefore, workers are careful not to let each other breed, they simply kill the offspring of other workers (drone layers). Bumble Bee workers however, would answer the same question differently, because they all share the same father, they are more closely related to the offspring of their sister workers than to the sons of their mother; to their nephews rather than their brothers. (As we know, the genetics of bees is different from that of people because males come from unfertilised eggs); therefore when the colony begins to produce males, the workers conspire, not like Honey Bees with the queen and against their sisters, but with their sisters and against the queen. They rear worker sons instead of royal sons. It is this disharmony between the queen and the workers that explains the Bumble Bees smaller colonies, which break up at the end of each season. Simple !!

BRITISH MAN CLAIMS TO HAVE BRED INDESTRUCTIBLE BEES [provided by Chris Reynard, from The Telegraph 25/08/10] A British man claims to have bred a strain of bee capable of protecting itself from a deadly parasite that is wiping out the environmentally vital insect. Ron Hoskins, a 79-year-old beekeeper, lost tens of thousands of bees after the parasitic varroa mite entered Britain in 1992. The mite poses a threat to mankind because the billions of bees it kills worldwide are crucial to pollinating crops and plants. Mr Hoskins, who has carried out research on his colonies for 18 years, has isolated and is breeding a strain of bees, which groom each other to remove the mites. He is now taking sperm from these bees and artificially inseminating queens from other hives to allow the new breed to spread through Britain. The British Beekeepers' Association, which represents 18,000 beekeepers, yesterday described the work as ''exciting''. Mr Hoskins, a former heating engineer from Swindon, Wilts., described the situation as ''serious' and warned that ''if the bees die, we die''. He said: ''What I want to do is redevelop the British bee so that it can protect itself against these varroa mites. ''If all the bees in the world die out then we die out - the situation is really that serious. ''Humans are reliant on completely reliant on bees for pollinating crops and plants which produce oxygen.

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''We are hoping that drones from my 'grooming' bees will mate with wandering female virgin queens and spread the footprint across Britain. ''This is not a short term solution and it will take a lot of work but it could be our only hope of saving the bee.'' The varroa mite entered Britain in 1992 and spread across the country - killing millions of bees. A survey released in May 2010 by the British Beekeepers' Association revealed that beekeepers lost 17 per cent of their colonies in the last year. The mite lays eggs on bee larvae, which suck their blood and stunt the growth of their wings so they can't fly. They also attach to the necks of adult bees and sap their strength.

WOODPECKERS from Cathy O’Donnell I have a general query into how many beekeepers had their hives attacked by woodpeckers during the very cold snowy period. Mine have never been attacked before despite being in a woody area, but when I went out to feed them a couple of days before Christmas I found a 1 cm diameter hole had been pecked right through into the back of the brood box on one hive, and a number of dead bees lying in the snow below the hole. I plugged it with a thick twig and placed a few old bricks up against it (which was all I had to hand at the time). I went back a few days later to find that the woodpecker had given up on that hole but had moved instead to the front of the hive where he had almost succeeded in pecking another hole through, and he had done the same to my second occupied hive too. I have now made a temporary cage of chicken wire around both hives. The bees came out to see what was going on and managed to navigate their way through the wire both out and back in. I shall go back in a week’s time to check if the wire has worked as a woodpecker deterrent, and will have to think of making some more permanent wire and wood cube to lift on and off each hive. I wonder whether it was just the extreme temperatures and therefore lack of food that caused this, or whether the woodpecker will return regularly and possibly into the summer months too? Does anyone else have any advice to offer on dealing with this problem? Ed – I have a Great Spotted Woodpecker, who is a regular visitor to the bird-table in our garden, only 20 yards from the hive. So far it has not touched the hive in five years (touch wood … red cedar of course). I have heard that once the woodpecker has discovered the delights of the hive contents it will often return and any of its offspring will also have learned the technique. A Green woodpecker does also visit the garden, but seems to prefer the ants in the lawn.

IF YOU SWAT WATCH OUT: BEES REMEMBER FACES [provided by Chris Reynard, By Sindya N. Bhanoo, Published: February 1, 2010 New York Times] A honeybee brain has a million neurons, compared with the 100 billion in a human brain. But, researchers report, bees can recognize faces, and they even do it the same

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way we do. Bees and humans both use a technique called configural processing, piecing together the components of a face — eyes, ears, nose and mouth — to form a recognizable pattern, a team of researchers report in the Feb. 15 issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. “It’s a kind of gluing,” said Martin Giurfa, a professor of neural biology at the University de Toulouse, France, and one of the study’s authors. It is the same ability, Dr. Giurfa said, that helps humans realize that a Chinese pagoda and a Swiss chalet are both abodes, based on their components. “We know two vertical lines, with a hutlike top,” he said. “It’s a house.” In their research, Dr. Giurfa and his colleagues created a display of hand-drawn images, some faces and some not. The faces had bowls of sugar water in front of them, while the nonfaces were placed behind bowls containing plain water. After a few failed trips to the bowls without sugar water, the bees kept returning to the sugar-filled bowls in front of the faces, the scientists found. The images and the bowls were cleaned after every visit, to ensure that the bees were using visual cues to find the sugar and not leaving scent marks. The researchers found that bees could also distinguish a face that provided sugar water from one that did not. After several hours’ training, the bees picked the right faces about 75 percent of the time, said Adrian Dyer, another author of the study and a vision scientist at Monash University in Australia. The researchers said that while they were biologists and not computer scientists, they hoped their work could be more widely used, including by face recognition experts. “If somebody else finds it interesting and it improves airport security, that’s great,” Dr. Dyer said. “The potential mechanisms can be made available to the wider facial recognition community.” Dr. Giurfa said that the benefit of studying a creature as simple as the bee was in knowing that it did not take a complex neural network to distinguish objects. This could offer hope to technologists, he said. “We could imagine that through repeat exposure, we may be able to train machines to extract a configuration and know that ‘This a motorbike’ or no, ‘This is rather a dog,’ ” he said. But while the research on bees is interesting, it does not help with the most difficult problem technologists are having, said David Forsyth, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois, whose research focuses on computer vision. That challenging problem is to build systems that can recognize the same people over a period of time, Dr. Forsyth said, after their hair has grown, or when they have sunglasses on, or after they have aged. These are all tasks that humans can usually perform but that computers struggle to replicate. “I highly doubt that bees can tell the difference,” Dr. Forsyth said, adding, “If bees did that, I’d fall off my chair.”

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Nonetheless, he said, it is important to add to the body of research on face recognition by studying animals. While computers have become very capable at detecting faces, dependable face recognition by machines continues to be elusive. “We know almost nothing about recognition, but it is really useful and really hard, and it helps us make decisions about the world,” Dr. Forsyth said. “Research into anything about identifying and recognizing seems to be a good thing.”

"A BOY'S SONG," by James Hogg (1770-1835), is a sparkling poem [provided by Steve Carrott]

SOME OF MY FAVOURITE BEEKEEPING PROVERBS

• The beekeeper never lacks dessert. (Spanish)

• A drop of honey catches more flies than a hogshead of vinegar. (German)

• All the honey a bee gathers during its lifetime doesn’t sweeten its sting. (Italian)

• As you are fated to eat honey, bees swarm in your beard. (Burmese)

• Even honey is bitter if served as a medicine. (Korean)

• To reach the honey, sometimes one must break his axe. (W.Africa)

• Who divides honey with the bear, will likely get the lesser share. (Italian).

• He is a very bad manager of honey who leaves nothing to lick off his fingers. (French)

• He that hath no honey in his pot, let him have it in his mouth. (Dutch)

• He that stirs honey will have some of it stick to him. (Spanish)

• He who makes himself honey, will be eaten by flies. (German)

• He who would gather honey must brave the sting of bees. (Dutch)

• Honey was not made for the mouth of the ass. (Spanish)

• It is difficult to spit honey out of a mouth full of gall. (Danish)

• Though honey is sweet, do not lick it off a briar. (Irish)

Where the hazel bank is steepest, Where the shadow falls the deepest, Where the clustering nuts fall free. That's the way for Billy and me. Why the boys should drive away, Little sweet maidens from the play, Or love to banter and fight so well, That's the thing I never could tell. But this I know, I love to play, Through the meadow, among the hay; Up the water and o'er the lea, That's the way for Billy and me.

Where the pools are bright and deep, Where the gray trout lies asleep, Up the river and o'er the lea, That's the way for Billy and me. Where the blackbird sings the latest, Where the hawthorn blooms the sweetest, Where the nestlings chirp and flee, That's the way for Billy and me. Where the mowers mow the cleanest, Where the hay lies thick and greenest, There to trace the homeward bee, That's the way for Billy and me.

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Courier Mail, Brisbane - printed 26/11/2010, provided by Chris Reynard