More than Honey

Very quickly:

While on the road in North Dakota we were lucky enough to catch some very late sunflowers for beautiful shots of foraging honeybees.

We also saw quite a few of these other bees, but have no idea what they are. Can anybody help?

(click photo to enlarge)

We are out filming some honey extracting in North Dakota these days, among other things. So I will dwell on the honey issue for a little longer.

In popular perception, bears and honey seem to be closely related – not just in packaging.

One of the reasons might be the early exposure of most of us to the sweet pursuits of this little guy:

But something ist off here. Because real bears, like really real bears, look more like this:

(Photo credit)

And when they do approach a beehive for food, which reportedly they do, then they are not after the honey. They are after proteins. As in: larvae and pupae. That is: bee-babies.

And when they are really hungry, they go after all sorts of other babies as well…

Or maybe not. But these are definitely traces of bear claws that we found in an abandoned cabin in Arizona earlier this year. Choose your story.

Everybody in the bee-world is atwitter about extracting honey these days, so I thought a little honey fact-check is in order. However, the results are not very satisfying. Maybe you can help me to figure this out.

I am sure there is some variation in the activity and productivity of honeybees around the world. But I doubt that it is as big as one would expect if all these numbers were correct.

It’s about the distance that bees fly to produce a kilogram of honey. It’s far, that much we know. But just how far, specifically, how often “around the world” seems to be – well… open.

(Photo via mpg)

According to the British Beekeepers Association bees fly “about 55,000 miles to make just one pound of honey, that’s 1½ times around the world” (or 3x for 1kg). However, if you take the circumference of the earth to be roughly 24.900 mi (ca. 40.000 km), British bees are actually flying a bit more than twice around the earth for the pound (or 4x for 1kg).

Similar seems to hold for American bees who “…travel as much as 55,000 miles and visit more than two million flowers to gather enough nectar to make just a pound of honey.” (again: approximately four trips around the world for one kilogram)

However, on the FAQ-page of the International Bee Research Association (IBRA), I find the following information:
“Q: How far does a honey bee fly to get food?
A: Honey bee foragers commonly fly up to four miles (6.5 km) to collect nectar and pollen from flowers, and can potentially cover 50 000 acres (20 000 hectares). It is estimated that it takes 10 million foraging trips to make the equivalent of one jar of honey (1lb or 454 g).”

Now, unless I am missing something here, even with a very conservative estimate of just one kilometer per foraging flight, this would result in a distance of 20 million kilometers for 1kg of honey or 500 times around the world. Really?!

In Germany, the numbers also vary: From “Twice around the World” for one glass of honey (0,5 kg) (i.e. 4x around the world for 1kg) to three times around earth for 0,5 kg (i.e. 6x for 1kg) to just ONCE around earth for one kilogram.

The last number seems to be a bit of an outlier, but comes with the most detailed explanation of how it was calculated and also from a very respectable source, so I am inclined to believe it. But this still doesn’t explain the differences between German and British or American bees. It’s probably an artefact (people copying from each other, some mixup with units…), but is there any good data on this? Anywhere? I would love to know!

At this time of the year, bees are preparing for winter, the period of scarcity. No flowers, no nectar, no pollen, no brood. They have to live on what they have collected over the summer and if it’s not enough, the entire colony will die.

As with everything else, the bees are well adapted to deal with this; and – naturally – not very squeamish about their means. They raise long lived workers who will be heating the hive during the winter. And they will adjust the number of individuals according to the food supply by producing less brood and by throwing out expendable members of the hive – the old, the sick, and the male.

(Foto credit)

It makes sense. There is no mating going on, because it is too cold and there are no queens flying. The drones do not contribute to the survival of the colony during winter and wouldn’t live through to the end of winter anyway. And since they are raised from unfertilized eggs, they can easily be produced from scratch in the new season. Nature has it all worked out.

And still: We filmed some drone evictions last week in Austria and when you see them being pushed out of the hive and off the landing board by the guard bees it’s kind of hard not to feel sorry for them. The anthropocentric trap, I guess…

Astacus over at Bienenforum posted some beautiful pictures of the eviction and the fate of a homeless drone last year (the second link requires registration, sorry).

When researching for a bee-project, you are bound to come across all sorts of bee-related metaphors (the sting, the buzz, the workerbee etc.) and phrases. Most are easy to deal with, even when English is not your first language. But what is it with ‘the bee’s knees’?

Sometimes, you can get away with taking the phrase literally:

(Although, in this case, the joint in the picture would be described more adequately as the ‘bee’s heel’ – if you were willing to impose any term taken from vertebrate morphology on the somewhat different arrangement of insect extremities…)

.

But what do you make of these? Surely, they can’t be meant literally?

A Fulwood couple’s hobby is the bee’s knees (BBC)

…it is more about conclusive proof (…) that they are the bees knees of football right now… (The Guardian)

…Hall One at London’s new Kings Place arts venue (…) represents the bees-knees in acoustic design... (The Guardian)

…Inevitably, Heather Mills-McCartney has been photographed with her bees-knees divorce lawyer… (The Times – behind the paywall, sorry)

.

So, somehow, the bee’s knees got to indicate ‘excellence’ and ‘high quality’. But when, how or why seems to be unknown. The phrase has quite a history, though (thank you @BoraZ for the link!):

In the 18th century, ‘a bee’s knee’ was used “as a synonym for smallness, but has since disappeared from the language, replaced more recently by the less polite ‘gnat’s bollock’.”

It seems that ‘the bee’s knees’ then came up in the early 20th century in America when it had become fashionable to use nonsense terms to denote excellence – like ‘the snake’s hips’, ‘the kipper’s knickers’, ‘the cat’s pyjamas/whiskers’, or ‘the monkey’s eyebrows’. – Typical flapper talk, apparently.

Another connection might be to the dancer Bee Jackson, who by some is credited for bringing the Charleston to Broadway. However, although she certainly had very active and attractive knees, her appearance in 1924 somewhat post-dates the use of the phrase.

I am delighted, though, to see where these bees (and their knees) can take you!

Just when you think you are beginning to have a pretty good picture of these little critters and their daily pursuits, the bees will come up with something entirely new and outrageous to surprise you. Guaranteed.

Like washboarding. In the afternoon.

See for yourself. Biologist and photographer Alex Wild over at his beautiful Myrmecos Blog has the video:

Alex has two hives in his backyard – but only one of the colonies goes out washboarding in the afternoon. It’s mostly adolescent bees and has been observed at many other occasions, too. But nobody really knows why they do it.

Update 29.08.2010: Some more info on washboarding from Rusty at HoneyBeeSuite.

Mein guter Photographen-Freund Kai Hesse tourt gerade ausgedehnt mit Kind und Kegel und Wohnwagen um die Ostsee und hat dabei immer ein offenes Auge für idyllische Stellplätze, wie es scheint. Dieser hier in Polen war allerdings schon besetzt:

Und zwar nicht von einer netten campenden Kleinfamilie…

…sondern von ein paar-zig-tausend Honigbienen!

My dear photographer-friend Kai Hesse is currently traveling around the Baltic Sea. But while he is sharing his caravan with his wife and kids, this Polish camper apparently shares his with his bees!

Filming field experiments: It may look like a picknick…

…but it’s not. It takes patience and meticulous care. Every single bee has to be marked…

…and eventually becomes a data point.

Many thanks to the scientists and students in the field for being very patient with us, too!!

Nothing is simple. And certainly not communication. Not even in bees.

Not?! you ask. But what about the waggle-dance? The famous „dance-language“ of the honeybees? The one we learnt about in school? Hasn’t all that been worked out a long time ago?

(Image source)

Well – yes. And no.
As I said – it’s complicated (and for those who read German – this has caused quite a kerfuffle in the press here last year).

Because there is variablity. Bees behave differently. Sometimes they follow the instructions of the dancers, and sometimes they don’t.

Now, it is well established that they receive information from the dancer, that they can „read“ it correctly and use it to navigate to the appropriate location.

But they don’t always do this. They don’t always use the information. Or not right away. Or together with other input.
So they do not always fly directly to the place that the dancer communicated. They seem to make choices. For example, they choose between flying to a new food source as communicated by a dancer, or to an older one that they have visited before. And not only that: when they find out that their old food source is gone, they can change their flightplan on the spot, without going back to the hive, and correctly navigate to the new source where they have never been before.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

But it also raises a whole lot of new questions: On what do they base their decision? Quality? Quantity? Mood? What exactly is it that they remember and how do they calculate the new course? Vectors? Landmarks? Both? And how does all this fit into a 950 000 neuron brain?

It is not that long that people are able to ask those questions, let alone search for the answers. Because to be able to do so, you must be able to observe an individual bee in flight in a radius of at least a few hundred meters. Those of you who have their own bees probably have some experience with this. Those of you who don’t may well go out and try (yes, go ahead, it’s August, they are still out there!).

It is not an easy task. To be honest, it is virtually impossible. You may be able to mark them and wait for them at the feeder (as Karl von Frisch has done and many bee researchers after him), but you will have no way of knowing what every single one of these bees has been doing until it gets there.

Unless you have a harmonic radar. In a very flat field. And your bees carry not only a number, but a transponder too. Then you stand a chance. To find the right questions. And – possibly – some answers.

Mehr Informationen über die Arbeit von Prof. Randolf Menzel:
“Was denken Bienen, wenn sie tanzen?”
SZ-Interview über den Schwänzeltanz
Bee learning and communication (Wikipedia)

Bees see the world differently. So when we went out last week to film some experiments of Prof. Randolf Menzel and his group from the Free University of Berlin about bee navigation and memory, we thought we need to get the bees’ perspective as well.

Now, bees usually fly in a height of up to 8 or 9 metres (26-29 ft) and with a speed of up to 20 km/h (12 mph). In other words: too low for a helicopter, too fast for a balloon. But just right for a remote-controlled mini-helicopter (un-mini enough, though, to carry a payload of 1,5 kg (3,3 lbs), which is quite a bit for an aircraft that weighs only 5-7 kg (11-15 lbs) itself!).
There are only a handful of them in Europe that are equipped for filming and we were very lucky to get one of them on location!

We got some very nice views from above, despite considerable wind up there. You would be surprised what these bees have to put up with! Also: that they ever reach their destination at all, really.

In between, our carrier attracted some expert attention. We haven’t heard the verdict, though…