The Bee Gym
The Bee Gym is a grooming station for honey bees, intended to assist the bees in ridding themselves of the varroa parasite.
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Pads and Claws
Bees' feet are more complicated than our own. A lot of engineering goes into them, to allow the bees to walk on different surfaces. Most bees I know can walk up glass, whereas most people I know can't. Jonathan Pattrick is a local student doing his PhD thesis on how flower petals and bees' feet interact, and he gave an evening talk to the CBKA on this subject.
See those tarsal claws, like grappling hooks at the tip of each leg? Those, Jonathan explained, are for walking on rough surfaces. Each foot has two claws, hooking outward. Between the claws is an adhesive pad. This secretes a liquid so that the foot can stick to a smooth surface by surface tension. The foot is unfoldable to expose the pad. So to walk on a rough surface, the bee uses its claws. To walk on a smooth surface, the bee unfolds its feet and uses the sticky pads, placing each pad down and then peeling it off in exactly the right way to detatch it.
Jonathan showed video footage from a light microscope positioned under a slide, looking up as the bee walked over the slide. You could see the footpads spreading over the glass to stick down and then peeling off again. The pads are BIG. The whole foot unfolds.
Apparently these unfoldable adhesive pads are found in ants and wasps as well as bees, but each species has its own version. And while honey bees have big sticky pads, those of bumble bees are much smaller. Which means, in practice, a honey bee can walk up a hollyhock flower (very smooth) whereas a bumble bee cannot - the bumble bee has to fly in for a direct landing on the anthers.
Debate ensued as to how flowers might be manipulating insects by having rough or smooth petals to pick and choose their pollinators - is the hollyhock strategically directing bumble bees to touchdown right on the pollen-covered anthers? Do other flowers "deliberately" have rough surfaces so that their chosen pollinators can easily walk in? What does that mean for crop breeding programmes? Hopefully Jonathan will return to tell us more when he has completed his thesis.
Meanwhile, I took this photograph of an ichneumon wasp on the window at home. Feet in action!
BIBBA-SICAMM Conference, Llangollen
September 2014
My first beekeeping conference! Trisha Marlow of Camlad Apiaries asked me to do a write-up for Beecraft magazine. Here's what I wrote:
The BIBBA/SICAMM conference, Llangollen, Wales, 26-28 September 2014
Hilary van der Hoff (Cambridge, UK)
Being new to beekeeping, I’d only met a couple of other beekeepers before I attended the BIBBA/SICAMM conference. And I didn’t know much beekeeping theory or practice either, only what I’d picked up from my friend who introduced me to beekeeping earlier this year, and from various publications I’d got hold of. So, I thought 3 days’ intensive education in beekeeping would be just what I needed.
Well, BIBBA and SICAMM are all about the “native black bee”, Apis mellifera mellifera, known as “Amm” to its friends. In case, like me, you didn’t know, that’s the particular race of honeybee native to Europe North and West of the Alps, including Britain. And BIBBA and SICAMM are working to conserve it against the influx of other honeybees that are brought to the UK from warmer climates, notably A. m. ligustica, the prolific amber-coloured honeybee from Italy. These days, it seems, your average colony of honeybees in a British back garden will be a genetic mix of Amm with ligustica and probably other races, these having all inter-bred and spread widely in the UK.
We had a wonderful range of speakers at the conference, and I learned that some (many? most?) breeders of Amm were relying on tiny differences in the vein patterning of the wings to distinguish between “foreign” bees and bees that had an Amm genetic background. However, one of the (younger) speakers at the conference pointed out that if you start with a hybrid population and select for the Amm wing, you may well breed a population of bees with beautiful Amm wings, but their overall genetic makeup will still be hybridised - you have selected for the wing but nothing else. Other speakers discussed more generally the benefits of having locally-adapted bees, that is to say bees that do well in the local climate, and how any local group of beekeepers can guide the evolution of their colonies to produce bees that are well suited to their area, have desirable temperament and over-winter well. Personally, as an amateur beekeeper, I favour this more general approach. I don’t mind if my bees are “mongrels” - I’m actually quite happy with that, as long as they are of good temperament and live healthily.
Besides the breeding and genetics angles, there were some very interesting talks about the natural history of bees. How wild colonies live, how bees communicate inside and outside the hive, the anatomy of bees, and some interesting theories about honeybee mating. There was myth-busting (drone congregation areas are not all that mysterious after all, they operate just like singles bars), and there were also some “alternative” ideas put forward (ley lines?). And that’s the great thing about big conferences like this, you hear a broad range of viewpoints and get lots of new ideas and inspiration, both from the speakers and from the variety of interesting people that you meet during the breaks. I’ve come home with a better understanding of bees, and an even longer reading list than before!
June 2017 update:
Look what I found in the CBKA Bee Shed when attending a practical apiary meeting today! The January 2015 issue of BeeCraft in which this piece appears: