From the Gospel of Maurice: “We touch here the hermetically sealed vases that furnish our conception of the universe.”
The next class consists of veteran beekeepers discussing the nuances of queen rearing. A Land Rover parked out front has a “GIVE BEES A CHANCE” peace symbol on a tire cover. Nine older gentlemen sit around the table inside. A skylight filters sunlight from above. Were you to pop your head in, you might think this a mafia boss meeting of villagers taking orders from their apiary-outfitted queenpin. Clare Densley even has a faded mobster-like tattoo of two bees on her forearm.
I ask the owner of the Land Rover, Joe, a middle-aged Scotsman and “bit of a James Dean … crazy” type about his native country’s outrage over Buckfast Abbey tonic wine. He confirms it. “That’s why men in Scotland throw telegraph poles, wear skirts, and do some crazy dancing on swords,” he jokes. “Who else would do that? That’s why you drink Buckfast tonic wine. Didn’t realize I was 94, did ya? All the monks must be 140 years old, innit?” He nods his head, agreeing with himself. “Aye.”
Later, as we visit another apiary, Joe brushes bees off the comb with a goose feather as we examine colonies, hands folded behind our backs. He turns to me: “David, would you like to hold a frame?” I’ve done plenty of trying things on this journey. But holding a piece of this inspired design,13 viewing the intricacies up close, mesmerizes me completely.
The frame I hold is from the Langstroth hive, and I observe the teeming honeycomb in search of the queen. She’s there, denoted with a blue dot on her back. A large and happy mongrel.
The next day, Brother Thomas, clearly benefiting from the longevity of tonic wine, offers to drive me to the train station in Newton Abbot. Actually, he used to drive Brother Adam to Heathrow airport when he went on global lecture tours. He cheerfully explains how stingy the Buckfast bees would get. My next stop, I tell him, is a train to Brighton. There, at the University of Sussex, a team of scientists at the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects is doing a bit of queen-breeding of their own, but for a specific reason: their queens could stave off many of the ailments causing massive colony die-offs.
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No other animal is more anthropomorphic than a bee. (Okay, maybe chimps.) Some examples include “busy as a bee,” “the birds and the bees,” or “that’s the bee’s knees!” Then, of course, you have poet Barbara Hamby’s colorful parallels made to colonies—of which females are dominant—in “The Language of Bees.”
For the queen: regina apiana, empress of the hive, czarina of nectar, maharani of the ovum, sultana of stupor, principessa of dark desire
The hive: octagonal golden chamber of unbearable moistness, opaque tabernacle of nectar, sugarplum of polygonal waxy walls
And on communication: a musical dialect, a full, humming congregation of hallelujahs and amens
The first true scientific interpreter of bees is twentieth-century animal behaviorist Karl von Frisch. Like Clare Densley, he also spoke aloud to his bees. He was the first to interpret what they were saying, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1973 for “Decoding the Language of the Bee.”
The discovery of their communication methods came nearly 30 years prior. To an outside observer, Frisch may have appeared odd. Sure, he did experiments on bees but, unlike others, he nurtured them as a parent, points out anthropologist Hugh Raffles. For example, he let them warm in his palm as he spoke to them. In 1919, he figured out their means of communication, attracting them with sugar water and painting dots on the backs of scouts. “She performed a round dance on the honeycomb, which greatly excited the marked foragers around her and caused them to fly back to the feeding place,” he wrote. But in his Nobel lecture, he admitted that the dance’s “most beautiful aspect had escaped” him. It’s significantly more complex.
Beginning in the summer of 1944, the Austrian-born scientist questioned the exactitude of bee foragers’ precision. How well could they denote distance? They make a figure eight known as a waggle dance. The center line, or waggle tail run, does the bulk of the communicating with the bee circling back to starting position. The run is important. While working the honeycomb “dance floor,” as Frisch called it, surrounding bees take map direction and smell the type of flower to assess the quality, like company taste testers. The duration of the shake communicates distance, with a formula of roughly 750 meters per second. Anything 4,500 meters away could last about four seconds in what’s called a tail-wagging dance, wrote Frisch. It was awe-inspiring. Another important bit of information is the angle of the feeding spot in relation to the hive and direction of the sun. For instance, if the hive entrance directly faced the sun, the figure eight would be completely vertical. If some dandelions were 35 degrees left of the hive, the round waggle pitches to the relative angle.
The bees’ dances only added to the mystery of the species. But Frisch’s discovery may not have happened were it not for a honeybee disease in Germany during World War II.
Under the Third Reich, professors were required to prove a full Aryan heritage. Frisch, however, was classified in 1941 as a quarter Jewish. He lost his position as the head of zoology at the University of Munich. At the same time, Germany struggled with an outbreak of Nosema—a spore-forming parasite that invades the bees’ intestinal tracts, sometimes causing them to have dysentery—for years creating the same agricultural worry England faced with the Isle of Wight disease. Fortunately, Frisch had a friend in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture who knew how important his work on animal behavior would be. (A story that has close bearings to the beetle that saved Pierre André Latreille; see chapter 1.) So Frisch was assigned to investigate the massive colony losses and received a stay of academic expulsion until World War II ended.
His work on Nosema was “largely inconclusive.” It had only been discovered in 1907. But his advances in understanding bee behavior have helped us to decode present-day issues. Honeybees have faced a long, uphill battle with ailments. In the first century, Pliny the Elder describes what we know as American foulbrood (AFB) today. Historians believe the first die-offs reported in America in the 1670s were caused by AFB. “Mysterious departures” from hives have been recorded in magazines from the late nineteenth century, including one called May disease, which is very similar to what’s been the largest shake-up in the history of apiculture: colony collapse disorder, or CCD.
From the Gospel of Maurice: “The intelligent initiative of the insect has evidently received the sanction of natural selection, which has allowed only the most numerous and best protected tribes to survive our winters.”
Pennsylvanian Dave Hackenberg was the first to report colonies’ mysterious abandoment of their hives. Hackenberg was a commercial beekeeper for 40-plus years, taking hundreds of hives to agricultural sites for pollination. Some entomologists have disparagingly referred to Hackenberg as a truck driver who handles bees, as his hives had been aflicted with a number of bee diseases. But what he saw in 2006 puzzled him. Bees deserted 3,000 colonies—30 percent of his business—and left no trace. Investigators found, based on what little evidence there was, that such afflicted hives had been hit with multiple pathogens and an increased amount of a parasitic mite with the foreboding name Varroa destructor.
To the naked eye, varroa mites are just slightly larger than the dot of an “i.” But to a honeybee, as bee expert Jerry Hayes has said at multiple honeybee-related conferences, varroa is the human equivalent of having a “parasitic rat on you, sucking your blood.” These virus vectors deplete bees’ immune systems, physically weakening them with afflictions such as weight loss and deformed wings. But varroa, discovered nearly a century earlier, first caught our attention in the United States in 1987, so pinning them as the sole cause for CCD, nearly two decades later, was difficult.
The harrowing mystery of CCD carried on for the next two years, spawning documentaries, reports from major networks, magazine features, and various “Beemageddon” hoopla surrounding the bees’ steady decline from 5.8 million in 1946 to 3.3 millio
n (1990) to 2.4 million by 2006, notes Hannah Nordhaus in The Beekeeper’s Lament. CCD then hit Europe for the first time in October 2009. Since CCD, colony loss surveys have been taken biannually in the United States, given the public’s dramatic awakening to honeybee health and how fragile these creatures are. The number of colonies rose to 2.6 million in 2015, despite a detrimental annual colony loss rate of 44.1 percent.
Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the University of Maryland entomologist who helped Hackenberg diagnose CCD, doesn’t see many case-specific diagnoses of CCD today, making the sudden jolt all the more strange. However, mass die-offs still occur for various reasons. In a more recent survey, from 2015 and 2016, the winter loss in Europe was 11 percent. (Admittedly vanEngelsdorp is worried that Europe’s survey-taking techniques differ too much for accurate comparisons.) Canada’s loss was 16 percent. And the United States suffered a 28 percent loss that winter, discouraging hobby beekeepers and closing businesses that couldn’t afford to replace hives. Nailing down the cause, therefore, is urgent. “I think CCD brought to light that there is a real problem with bee health,” says vanEngelsdorp. It also revealed how “complicated” pollinator health can be altogether.
Figuring out the nuances as to why takes equally complex research. Jeff Pettis of the USDA Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, tampers with hives with various methods to deduce what is killing bees: climate, soil moisture, foraging, and pollen protein content. A type of pesticide class known as neonicotinoids, which confuses the bees’ ability to recognize flowers and crops, has long been cited as a cause of colony loss. Although neonics are usually applied as a seed treatment, footprints of the pesticide remain in the pollen and nectar. In one 2012 study in France, neonics were found to be highly toxic to bees, stirring great debate (often rallies with bee-costumed environmentalists14 shouting into megaphones) about the chemical, which eventually led to an EU ban on three insecticides containing it.
But the evidence is questionable. Many scientists directly dose the bees with neonics, which hurts the environmentalists’ argument against neonics.
One study validating these neonic claims came from Italy, where researchers sprayed commercial admixtures on Spanish chestnut leaves and then put the leaves into cages containing 30 bees. The 2011 paper describes how one insecticide of the neonic class called thiametoxam “caused total mortality within 6 hours” in concentrated doses. Toxins in another neonic called clothianidin “caused extensive vomiting” as well as tremors, staggering, and delirious movement. But like many similar experiments, this was done in a lab setting. One meta-analysis of 14 similar published studies on another banished neonic called imidacloprid showed that “a clear picture of the risk [neonicotinoid insecticide] poses to bees has not previously emerged.” Investigations, author James Cresswell said, had an “inconsistent outcome,” pointing out that the pesticide studies are done over a short time and don’t focus on sublethal impacts of long-term exposure.
A broad-spectrum analysis by researchers at Pennsylvania State University found over 170 different chemicals in hives. However, as entomologists Diana Cox-Foster and Dennis vanEngelsdorp wrote in a Scientific American article, “healthy colonies sometimes have higher levels of some chemicals than colonies suffering from CCD.” And some CCD cases shared attributes of one common affliction called the Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV). This virus strain, which solely attacks US bees, probably arrived from Australia in 2005. But while “the infection mimicked some symptoms of CCD,” not all exposed bees die the same way. It could mean that CCD may require a cocktail of factors15 or that some bees are IAPV-resistant.
So I ask again: what solution is there for the honeybee? Many beekeepers place blame on human folly,16 believing that such massive die-offs result from piss-poor management. “I don’t think commercial beekeepers could be ‘piss-poor beekeepers,’ otherwise they would go out of business,” counters vanEngelsdorp. “It’s a complicated situation, which means it has a complicated solution … There’s some mortality that’s happening that has nothing to do with management.”
Tracing this “happening” can be nerve-racking.
A 2016 study from Free University Berlin caught my eye. Researchers attached transponders to bees, monitoring them in a 900-meter radius field with a harmonic radar system. They then filled feeders with neonic thiacloprid sucrose solutions. What they found was that their untainted control bees “consumed 1.7 times more sugar solution per day than treated bees,” performing nearly double the amount of foraging trips. The fact that concentrated doses were harmful is not surprising. What was curious, at least to me, was this idea of tracking bees with chips—an interesting idea that could illuminate a microuniverse.
Paulo de Souza is using this idea to work with researchers across the globe. In a small lab room at the University of Tasmania, a sedate honeybee rests on an icepack like a patient prepped for surgery. Just removed from the lab’s freezer, the bee’s metabolism has been drastically slowed long enough—about three minutes—for a lab assistant to delicately glue a radio-frequency identification (RFID) sensor to its thorax without the risk of being stung. Soon it will rejoin 5,000 honeybees in several hives, each tagged with a 2.5-millimeter backpack. The goal? Capture microscopic real-time information on bee ecology, and ultimately the world.
“Each honeybee has an ID tag, like a license plate,” Souza says about the experiment. Funded by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the honeybee backpack project took flight in 2014. Some RFID bees have shown up as far away as Chernobyl. The five-milligram RFID computers have a clock and memory for storing measurements so the research team can detect when bees depart and arrive at feeder stations. But by using Monte Carlo simulation software, the researchers are able to predict the 4-D ecological information they’ll obtain in the future, such as the impact of weather in regard to the bee’s weight loss and decrease in numbers. This type of airborne microelectromechanical system is comparable to “smart dust.” It can detect atmospheric gases, temperatures within microclimes, and magnetism. Through quantum and statistical mechanics, information via smart dust can help explain internal energy, heat capacity, and any other thermal dynamic behavior of an ecological system on a particle level. As tiny weathermen, bees may also expound on the major factors killing our planet in real time.
If successful, CSIRO’s environmental monitoring may finally help us understand massive bee die-offs, since the scientists are introducing hives to pesticide-ridden lands and bloodsucking mites. (Though Varroa destructor has luckily not hit Australia.) These mites’ first appearance in the United States coincides with the grand decline of colonies, and they carry an array of viruses with interesting names: Lake Sinai, deformed wing, Israeli acute paralysis, slow bee paralysis, Kashmir bee, black queen cell, chronic bee paralysis.
Although bees have evolved durable bodies over millions of years, human-propelled ecological interference renders them feeble. In the past, a bee colony could still survive, even after 20 out of 100 bees were infested with varroa mites. Today, you have to worry if you find 5 out of 100.
“You wouldn’t let your dog die from pests. You shouldn’t let your hive die from pests,” says vanEngelsdorp. “If you really want to breed for resistance, and I think there’s a lot of evidence that there are resistant bees out there, the responsible way to do that is to monitor your mites and breed from the ones who had the lowest population [of mites].”
One Monsanto employee is closer to finding a solution for the collapse. As reported by science writer Hannah Nordhaus, Monsanto’s Beeologics lab is trying to use an RNA interference technique to modify crops that will directly target the varroa mite’s genome. Jerry Hayes, who heads up Beeologics, tested this specially modified RNA in sugar syrup, and is currently doing a trial with over 1,000 bee colonies across the United States.
There may also be another solution that involves a technique used over the past 130 years: captive queen-breeding.
Th
e Honeybee Breeding Laboratory in Baton Rouge has been producing queen bees with varroa-sensitive hygienes (VSH) since 2001. VSH-imbued worker bees can detect the destructive mites and remove them. Bee expert Patrick Heitkam in Orland, California, produces 1,000 queen bees per day. Some breeders can make up to 3,000. University of Minnesota entomologist Marla Spivak also breeds for hygienic queens, saying that we shouldn’t perpetuate bees requiring chemicals and antibiotics.
It’s this type of queen-rearing that took me to the English seaside city of Brighton—more specifically a renowned lab populated with minds from across the world contemplating how bees might adapt to the environmental constraints we’ve placed on them.
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Fragments of golden sun bleed through the blur of leaves as I prop my head upward, elbow resting on the train’s armchair, riding into East Sussex. Rapidly passing dairy cows and riverboats, I approach the quaint hills of green where Winnie-the-honey-bowl-headed-Pooh was created. As we pull into the Brighton railway station, blue beams lift the glass pitched roof high above, braced by a web of steel.
At the bus stop, I meet a woman who’s also heard of Buckfast Abbey’s tonic wine. (Man, this stuff gets around.) I tell her I’m here to have a quick lunch with Professor Francis Ratnieks at the University of Sussex.
A few hours later, up two flights of stairs, I’m writing in a sloped-ceiling bedroom. A bee lands on the inside windowpane in front of my desk, crawling across the blemished lens of terraced homes. It buzzes frantically against the base, attracted to the sun rearing from the clouds. In the past, I might’ve tripped over my chair in a frazzled panic of getting stung. But this time, I jail the bee in an empty teacup, slide my notebook cover beneath it, and release it back out the window.
The next day, my bus deposits me at the university stop for my noontime lunch at Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI). I slosh about with my grocery bag of chicken salad and crisps (“potato chips” in American-ese), but I can’t find Ratnieks’s building. Or really, I have, but mistake the bland brick building several times for the electric generator room tucked in the campus’s corner pocket—which it kind of is. There’s near to zero signage except for a crud-covered post on a side gate that reads like a Neighborhood Watch sign. It says “DANGER: STINGING INSECTS,” and depicts a silhouette of a bee with a hemorrhoidal lightning bolt.
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