aggienaut: (Bee Drawing)


I was recently up at Davis, California, learning how to instrumentally inseminate queen bees.

The ten person class included beekeepers who had come from the United Kingdom, Colombia, Hawaii, Georgia, Connecticut, Washington, Florida, and possibly other states. The fellow sitting next to me was an Eastern Orthodox monk (complete in his monk robes) named Brother Daniel from a monastery in Florida.



Slideshow! --



Or see the set on flickr.

See also: my friend Maureen stopped by and took a bunch of really good pictures as well!!
aggienaut: (Default)

   Dorothy walks along a suburban sidewalk in a neighborhood full of lush overhanging trees on a nice sunny day. She carefully avoids tripping over the uneven rises in the concrete caused by roots, while talking on the phone. Her call comes to an end in the shade under a tree. Readjusting her aviator sunglasses she lets out a deep breath as she puts her phone back in her pocket. "Well that phone call went as well as it could have," she thinks to herself, feeling proud that she'd stood her ground on the issue. "But I'm going to need to either find a new roommate or a new place to live" she contemplates with concern, pursing her lips to the side in thought.
   Noticing a buzzing sound she turns a slow three-sixty but doesn't see the source. Then she looks up. Just inches from her head, hanging from a low branch, is a solid mass of bees about the size of a basketball. She lets out a shriek and runs down the street.



   A bee we'll call Devra lifts off from the swarm and strikes out westward, rising at about a 30 degree angle. She continues over the street and between two houses before banking left. She keeps an eye out for predatory birds, which isn't hard since her compound eyes allow her to keep a wide arc around her in focus all at once. She banks sharply right at a particular point a few hundred yards later and descends to alight on the wall of a house just below the roof pitch.



   About 25 days ago she'd first emerged from a brood cell as a new member of her hive of 60,000. She spent her first two days cleaning the hive and helping maintain the temperature in the central part of the beehive where the capped cells containing brood were located. On the third day she started to feel like she needed to help feed the larvae, partially because some of the older nurse bees had moved on to other things.
   After about a week of feeding the larva, however, Devra began to feel she was encountering more than enough nurse bees and not enough work was being done producing wax and building comb, so she began to concentrate on building. Unfortunately Devra found that they had filled up almost all the space in the cavity in the old oak tree in which the hive was located. There wasn't anywhere else to build comb and the hive was starting to feel a bit overcrowded. Sp on day five of this Devra decided it was high time to start constructing peanut shaped "queen cells" to create a new queen to allow bees to split off and create a new colony, and Devra found that her fellow builder-bees were doing the same thing. Once completed, the Queen's attendants would direct her to lay an egg into each queen cell, and simply by virtue of a large queen cell and a steady diet of royal jelly these eggs would grow to be queens rather than workers. After this project Devra rotated into guard duty outside the entrance. After a few days on guard duty, Devra found more bees coming down to do guard duty so she took to the air to become a forager.



   Back in the present, an elderly woman peers out her window at the bee swarm on the branch.
   "Leroy! You need to do something about those hornets out there! They're going to bite someone!" she calls out to her husband in a slightly screechy voice.
   "Okay okay I'll call the po-lice I guess" calls back her husband from their lime green kitchen, where he's reading the newspaper.


   Elsewhere, Devra climbs into the gap between the roof and the wall on the house she's landed on. Inside there is a cavity between the outer wall and the inner drywall. Devra crawls along the sides, taking note of the distance. The area contains about 10 gallons of cubic space -- ideal for a beehive. The area also only has a very small entrance, ideal for defense. Altogether its an excellent beehive location. Already there are about two dozen other scouts from her hive also evaluating the location.



   Two days ago the first new queen had emerged from its chamber. The old queen (whom we'll call Queen Amidala) and about 20,000 of the bees had subsequently left the hive and took flight in a giant cloud of bees. It flew only about 200 yards before settling on a branch overhanging the sidewalk. It settled in a sort of ball shape, with only a few bees in contact with the branch, most of the bees hanging on to those bees or hanging on to bees that were hanging on to those bees, etc. Somewhere in the middle would be Queen Amidala.
   The bees that had been foragers now became scouts and dispersed to find potential nesting sites. The 95% of the swarm that weren't "field bees" yet would sit tight for now. When the scout bees found a good nesting site they'd evaluate it and measure it and then return to the swarm to report their findings. This is communicated through the "waggle dance," as a bee shimmies and twirls, shakes its rump and shimmies some more, to say, perhaps "go west across the street, cross between the tow houses and turn left, turn right after three hundred yards and it'll be the next house on your left, at the roof pitch."
   Outgoing bees then will head out to check out the locations best reported by their predecessors. Eventually all the scouts will be headed to the same location.




   A police car had arrived and the officer is very anxiously putting caution tape around an area enclosing everything within 100 feet of the swarm, as Devra returns. Elsewhere an exterminator is looking up into a tree and informing a homeowner "no ma'am, that is not a swarm of bees, that is a pinecone." He walks back to his car to receive his next call, an emergency bee call from the city. He gets into his truck and turns the ignition.
   Back at the swarm, Devra begins her report: a shimmie, a twirl, shakeshake, shimmie...
   Barely has Devra finished this dance then she realizes there's at least sixty bees present doing the same dance on the surface of the swarm, all indicating the same location. This certainly feels to Devra like enough of a consensus to make a decision about. She decides its time to move things along. Though she's never been involved in swarming before, she knows the next step. She starts trumpeting.
   Almost immediately the piping is taken up by the other scout bees. A bee's flight muscles need to be about 95f in order to fly, and it can take half an hour from "cold" resting temperature to heat up. Upon hearing the piping, all the bees of the swarm decouple their thoracic muscles from their wings and vibrate them to warm them up. The entire swarm begins to buzz.

   The exterminator gets off the freeway a few blocks away. In the back of his truck he has a number of buckets in which he puts the honeycomb he removes from walls. "DO NOT EAT" is emblazoned upon the buckets because he sprays beehives with a pyrethroid gas -- a synthetic version of the natural pesticide "pyrethrum" produced by chrysanthemums. The bees it doesn't kill outright spin on the ground like tops for a minute or two before dying. Any person foolish enough to eat the infected honey should immediately go to the hospital and have their stomach pumped. People still try to eat the honey out of the back of the truck sometimes.

   The surface of the swarm is the last to heat up. As the piping bees feel the outside reach flight temperature they begin racing along the surface with their wings spread out, making sure the temperature is the same all around and everyone is on the same page.

   The exterminator truck rounds the corner and rolls down the street. He comes to stop just outside the yellow police tape. He gets out of his truck, puts on a bee suit and veil, wrapping red duct tape around his ankles to prevent bees from getting into his workboots. Putting on green rubber gloves he pulls a canister with a thin hose attaching it to a nozzle out of the truck and saunters over to the low branch at the centre of the police tape circle, and looks up.
   There's nothing there except a small amount of wax the bees had attached to the branch.

   Across the street to the west, a cloud of bees is just passing between two houses. In front of the cloud, Devra and the other scout bees dart ahead to show the way and then slow down for the cloud to catch up. A small child playing in his backyard stands and stares in awe at the cloud of bees that passes harmlessly around him.
   Arriving at their destination, Devra and the other scout bees land around the entrance and use their wings to fan out a pheromone to help the rest of the swarm find their way in. Within a couple of minutes they're all safely moved into Dorothy's wall.


  • Potential alternate ending: the true story of what might happen if a beekeeper shows up, collects and rehives the bees, including a video in which I get stung in the face.
  • Potential alternate ending: What becomes of one residual bee left behind by the departing swarm -- the true story of Melissa the Honeybee.





    Technical Notes and Fun Facts
       Special thanks to the article "Swarm Intelligence: How Tom Seeley Discovered Ways that Bee Colonies Make Decisions" in the January 2011 issue of American Bee Journal. I don't know about you but I'm just itching to get my hands on Seeley's new book, Honeybee Democracy.


    A swarm.

  • Devra is Hebrew for honeybee.
  • Note the queen does not actually make any decisions, the hive economy is managed successfully by individual bees making individual decisions.
  • Bees really do make a trumpeting noise on occasions such as this, and its audible to the human ear. And adorable.
  • aggienaut: (Bees)

       Dorothy walks along a suburban sidewalk in a neighborhood full of lush overhanging trees on a nice sunny day. She carefully avoids tripping over the uneven rises in the concrete caused by roots, while talking on the phone. Her call comes to an end in the shade under a tree. Readjusting her aviator sunglasses she lets out a deep breath as she puts her phone back in her pocket. "Well that phone call went as well as it could have," she thinks to herself, feeling proud that she'd stood her ground on the issue. "But I'm going to need to either find a new roommate or a new place to live" she contemplates with concern, pursing her lips to the side in thought.
       Noticing a buzzing sound she turns a slow three-sixty but doesn't see the source. Then she looks up. Just inches from her head, hanging from a low branch, is a solid mass of bees about the size of a basketball. She lets out a shriek and runs down the street.



       A bee we'll call Devra lifts off from the swarm and strikes out westward, rising at about a 30 degree angle. She continues over the street and between two houses before banking left. She keeps an eye out for predatory birds, which isn't hard since her compound eyes allow her to keep a wide arc around her in focus all at once. She banks sharply right at a particular point a few hundred yards later and descends to alight on the wall of a house just below the roof pitch.



       About 25 days ago she'd first emerged from a brood cell as a new member of her hive of 60,000. She spent her first two days cleaning the hive and helping maintain the temperature in the central part of the beehive where the capped cells containing brood were located. On the third day she started to feel like she needed to help feed the larvae, partially because some of the older nurse bees had moved on to other things.
       After about a week of feeding the larva, however, Devra began to feel she was encountering more than enough nurse bees and not enough work was being done producing wax and building comb, so she began to concentrate on building. Unfortunately Devra found that they had filled up almost all the space in the cavity in the old oak tree in which the hive was located. There wasn't anywhere else to build comb and the hive was starting to feel a bit overcrowded. Sp on day five of this Devra decided it was high time to start constructing peanut shaped "queen cells" to create a new queen to allow bees to split off and create a new colony, and Devra found that her fellow builder-bees were doing the same thing. Once completed, the Queen's attendants would direct her to lay an egg into each queen cell, and simply by virtue of a large queen cell and a steady diet of royal jelly these eggs would grow to be queens rather than workers. After this project Devra rotated into guard duty outside the entrance. After a few days on guard duty, Devra found more bees coming down to do guard duty so she took to the air to become a forager.



       Back in the present, an elderly woman peers out her window at the bee swarm on the branch.
       "Leroy! You need to do something about those hornets out there! They're going to bite someone!" she calls out to her husband in a slightly screechy voice.
       "Okay okay I'll call the po-lice I guess" calls back her husband from their lime green kitchen, where he's reading the newspaper.


       Elsewhere, Devra climbs into the gap between the roof and the wall on the house she's landed on. Inside there is a cavity between the outer wall and the inner drywall. Devra crawls along the sides, taking note of the distance. The area contains about 10 gallons of cubic space -- ideal for a beehive. The area also only has a very small entrance, ideal for defense. Altogether its an excellent beehive location. Already there are about two dozen other scouts from her hive also evaluating the location.



       Two days ago the first new queen had emerged from its chamber. The old queen (whom we'll call Queen Amidala) and about 20,000 of the bees had subsequently left the hive and took flight in a giant cloud of bees. It flew only about 200 yards before settling on a branch overhanging the sidewalk. It settled in a sort of ball shape, with only a few bees in contact with the branch, most of the bees hanging on to those bees or hanging on to bees that were hanging on to those bees, etc. Somewhere in the middle would be Queen Amidala.
       The bees that had been foragers now became scouts and dispersed to find potential nesting sites. The 95% of the swarm that weren't "field bees" yet would sit tight for now. When the scout bees found a good nesting site they'd evaluate it and measure it and then return to the swarm to report their findings. This is communicated through the "waggle dance," as a bee shimmies and twirls, shakes its rump and shimmies some more, to say, perhaps "go west across the street, cross between the tow houses and turn left, turn right after three hundred yards and it'll be the next house on your left, at the roof pitch."
       Outgoing bees then will head out to check out the locations best reported by their predecessors. Eventually all the scouts will be headed to the same location.




       A police car had arrived and the officer is very anxiously putting caution tape around an area enclosing everything within 100 feet of the swarm, as Devra returns. Elsewhere an exterminator sitting in his pickup truck receives a call from his dispatcher, new marching orders -- an emergency bee call had come in from the city. He finishes wolfing down his burrito from Taco Bell's 99 cent menu and starts punching "154382 Emerald St" into his GPS.
       Back on Emerald Street, Devra begins her report: a shimmie, a twirl, shakeshake, shimmie...
       Barely has Devra finished this dance then she realizes there's at least sixty bees present doing the same dance on the surface of the swarm, all indicating the same location. This certainly feels to Devra like enough of a consensus to make a decision about. She decides its time to move things along. Though she's never been involved in swarming before, she knows the next step. She starts trumpeting.
       Almost immediately the piping is taken up by the other scout bees. A bee's flight muscles need to be about 95f in order to fly, and it can take half an hour from "cold" resting temperature to heat up. Upon hearing the piping, all the bees of the swarm decouple their thoracic muscles from their wings and vibrate them to warm them up. The entire swarm begins to buzz.

       The exterminator gets off the freeway a few blocks away. In the back of his truck he has a number of buckets in which he puts the honeycomb he removes from walls. "DO NOT EAT" is emblazoned upon the buckets because he sprays beehives with a pyrethroid gas -- a synthetic version of the natural pesticide "pyrethrum" produced by chrysanthemums. The bees it doesn't kill outright spin on the ground like tops for a minute or two before dying. Any person foolish enough to eat the infected honey should immediately go to the hospital and have their stomach pumped. People still try to eat the honey out of the back of the truck sometimes.

       The surface of the swarm is the last to heat up. As the piping bees feel the outside reach flight temperature they begin racing along the surface with their wings spread out, making sure the temperature is the same all around and everyone is on the same page.

       The exterminator truck rounds the corner and rolls down the street. He comes to stop just outside the yellow police tape. He gets out of his truck, puts on a bee suit and veil, wrapping red duct tape around his ankles to prevent bees from getting into his workboots. Putting on green rubber gloves he pulls a cannister with a thin hose attaching it to a nozzle out of the truck and saunters over to the low branch at the centre of the police tape circle, and looks up.
       There's nothing there except a small amount of wax the bees had attached to the branch.

       Across the street to the west, a cloud of bees is just passing between two houses. In front of the cloud, Devra and the other scout bees dart ahead to show the way and then slow down for the cloud to catch up. A small child playing in his backyard stands and stares in awe at the cloud of bees that passes harmlessly around him.
       Arriving at their destination, Devra and the other scout bees land around the entrance and use their wings to fan out a pheromone to help the rest of the swarm find their way in. Within a couple of minutes they're all safely moved into Dorothy's wall.





    Technical Notes and Fun Facts
       Special thanks to the article "Swarm Intelligence: How Tom Seeley Discovered Ways that Bee Colonies Make Decisions" in the January 2011 issue of American Bee Journal. I don't know about you but I'm just itching to get my hands on Seeley's new book, Honeybee Democracy.


    A swarm.

  • Devra is Hebrew for honeybee.
  • Note the queen does not actually make any decisions, the hive economy is managed successfully by individual bees making individual decisions.
  • Bees really do make a trumpeting noise on occasions such as this, and its audible to the human ear. And adorable.
  • Potential alternate ending: the true story of what might happen if a beekeeper shows up, collects and rehives the bees, including a video in which I get stung in the face.
  • aggienaut: (Bee Drawing)

       So we had one hive in the gully next to HQ here. The bees in there had come from a feral swarm and pretty much took care of themselves. They looked to be doign quite well.

       When I came by her during the rainstorm the river in the gully had risen to higher than the beehive. Goodbye bees.

       When the waterlevel receded the hive was not to be found. A few days later Dave found it tangled among some trees a short ways down stream. Reported it was certainly a total loss, was completely full of dead bees and mud. From the weight it probably also had been quite full of honey.

       Today he told me to go salvage what I could out of it, so after lunch I hopped over the fence and found it on its side in the gulley. The space between the frames was still choked with dead bees and mud, the whole thing still quite heavy. I set about pulling the frames out with the hive tool. Nearly all of them had mold on them, as well as all manner of bugs crawling about. There were just a few bees buzzing too and from the hive. Bees from other hives often pillage failed hives, but usually that entails a large number of bees bouncing around all the frames. Most of these frames seemed completely untouched and the bees were only travelling in a straight line to or from the furthest frame to one side. One by one I took out the frames from the closer side. Nothing but death and mold and the smell of garbage.
       Finally with anticipation I pried out the last frame, hoping against all odds to find surviving bees, but at the same time mindful that as I was wearing a black hoodie (its freezing here! in the fifties!) and bees don't like black (colour of bears), and I hadn't smoked them, I'd be liable to get mauled in the face if there were surviving bees.
       As I pulled off the last frame a few bees took off from it but that was all. Nothing else there except more muddy comb. So I moved the comb with more of a fast jerky motion than I normally would if there were live bees there, as there didn't appear to be, and a whole bunch more bees buzzed off it. I took a closer look ... there under a layer of mud there was a hollowed out cavity full of bees! They had survived their hive being completely waterlogged and floating downstream, plus a week of living in a damp moldy postapocalyptic hive!!

       I couldn't examine their refuge cavity without potentially disturbing it greatly so I couldn't determine if they still have a queen, but I'm extremely curious to see if they'll be able to bounce back from this!!

    aggienaut: (Bees)

       So last year a few different scouts from documentary producers inquired of us to potentially interview / film with us for their documentaries. That I recall we didn't end up filming with any of them but I think at least one sent someone to come interview us.

       Whenever they do so we're usually very adament that we do not wish to be involved in anything which misportrays major honeybee or beekeeping issues, and we are very suspicious (have learned to be after many bad experiences) about just about any documentary makers intentions and/or ability not to get things ass-backwards.

       Typically the incorrect information and utter misportrayel is actually in favour of beekeeping, portrays it as more important than it actually is, and garners more interest in beekeeping and honeybees, but as scientifically minded people who are very involved with educating the public about bees, we deeply resent any incorrect information about bees being proliferated, ESPECIALLY from ostensibly informative "documentaries."

       For example, one thing we constantly come across in news items is that "Einstein said that the human race would collapse if all bees disappeared" or some such crap, as if this is an absolute fact because he said it, whereas in fact he almost certainly did not say that. Apparently newspapers don't check their facts anymore.


       Anyway, one of last year's documentaries has finished production, produced a trailer, and will be screening their film in the nearby town of Laguna Beach here tomorrow. Judging by the trailer it looks like they are flogging the "OMG THE BEES ARE DISAPPEARING, ABOUT TO BE EXTINCT, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEEEE" line to the very fullest extent. I've written about this at length on some other occasions, but basically the bottom line is that this is not at all even a little bit the case. There are more managed colonies in the Northwest now than there were before the onset of Colony Collapse Disorder, for example. And to make a large scale documentary as this appears to do and still think the bees are actually endangered requires one to really be putting their fingers in their ears going "LALALALALALALA" and very pointedly ignoring all the experts and only listening to beekeepers that are either really uninformed or just glad to ham it up and say oh yeah this shit is bananas.

       Additionally, all the press for this documentary mentions front and center that "1 out of 3 bites you eat has been pollinated by honeybees." Another utterly incorrect fact that they apparently didn't bother to fact check.
       There is at least an original quote to this effect though. It was by one "S.E. McGregor," a figure with the federal agricultural commission or something, in 1976. He did say "It appears that perhaps one third of our total diet is dependant, directly or indirectly, upon insect-pollinated plants." However, he did not back this up with any research and I don't think he had any idea it would be taken as the word of god for the next thirty years
       I'll quote directly from noted entomologist Keith Delaplane for more quotes pertaining to this, from this excellent article:

    ...The authors of the FAO analysis concluded that the proportion of global food production attributable to animal pollination ranges from 5% in industrialized nations to 8% in the developing world.
    ...
    One can summarize from this paper that most of the calories that sustain human life derive from non-pollinator-dependent crops. This in no way denigrates the importance of pollination at the local level. One need only imagine the economic fallout of a pollinator crash on the California almond industry or Costa Rican coffee. But is it true, sensu stricto, that human life depends on bee pollination? No.
    ...
    ut there is another mega-trend at work, and that is that global demand for animal-pollinated crops is increasing faster than the demand for non-pollinated staples. The fraction of total production made up of animal-pollinated crops grew from 3.6% in 1961 to 6.1% in 2006, and even these statistics mask a huge jump in the years since 1990[iii]. In other words, more people around Planet Earth want ice cream, blueberry tarts, watermelon, almond chocolate bars, coffee, and yes McDonald’s hamburgers - and the trend shows no sign of slowing. So, to what extent does the quality of human life depend on bee pollination? I would say a lot - if you are fortunate enough to live in an economy where bee-pollinated crops make up a significant fraction of what one considers a “normal” diet.
    ...
    In conclusion, I suggest that what’s at stake here is not something so melodramatic as Einstein’s fictitious and dire warning about the collapse of Homo sapiens. I think bee advocates do their cause a disservice when they stoke the flames of hyperbole and sensationalism. Much better to pose the question as a quality of life issue. To the extent that we value a diverse food supply with minimized trauma to the environments where it is produced, we will place a high value indeed on honey bees and other pollinators.


       Again, if you're interested, I recommend you read the entire article I quoted above.


       In other news we're starting to look into booking next year's speakers for the bee club. One of the other officers wants to book this guy Jeremy Rose who wrote a book on beekeeping in California. I had never heard of him but on looking him up it looks like he's been beekeeping for five years and runs 300 hives. .... I'm pretty sure I have more experience than him, maybe I should write a book and tout myself as an expert too!

    aggienaut: (Bees)

       So I've finally had a chance to catch up on what's new in bee news these past six months.

       If you have been wondering what the deal with Colony Collapse Disorder and/or "I heard the bees were disappearing" is, it appears they may have figured it out. From everything I know about honeybees and past and other research on this subject, the following seems to fit exactly.

       "New Technology finds pathogens that may reconcile contradictory claims on Colony Collapse Disorder"

       I promise the article isn't too filled with technical jargon and mumbo jumbo. I found it quite readable, so if you're at all interested in the subject you should check it out.
       So yeah, them iridescent bees eh.


       In unrelated bee news, China's still trying to smuggle honey in to America.

    aggienaut: (Bees)

       "According to Albert Einstein, if bees were to disappear, humanity would follow within four years."

       "Some beekeepers have lost 90% of their bees to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)"

       "This winter 32 PERCENT of the bees in the United States were lost"


       Flowers go unpollinated, vast agricultural fields lie completely unproductive, humanity starves. And it's going to happen. Isn't it? We've all seen one if not all of the above three quotes multiple times in various reputable sources, and it pretty clearly spells out the upcoming bee apocalpyse (apipocalypse?).. doesn't it?




       Native Americans had been living happily off the land for as long as any of them could remember when the first Europeans arrived in their caravels. One can easily imagine the amazement with which the indians first beheld the great wooden ships. Tiny by today's standards, each one would have been bigger than anything the local indians had ever seen constructed. And the bizarre people that came off these boats, for all their magical technology, seemed shocking daft in other ways. The natives easily found all the food they needed in the surrounding forests, but the newcomers just ate what they brought with them and nervously waited for more supplies to arrive from across the sea.
       One thing the Europeans did bring which the natives called "white man's flies." They vaguely resembled flies the indians would have been familiar with, but lived in little wicker huts in colonies of tens of thousands, and could each deliver a painful sting! But furthermore, the colony produced a delicious sweet substance called "honey," what madness is this?!
       The European colonists shortly learned that, shockingly, they could farm this side of ocean as easily as the side they came from, and began to come in increasing numbers. The honeybees, as honeybees do, also expanded their colonization, establishing wild colonies in trees in expanding area outside the European Human settlements. It is said that the Indians began to see "bee trees" as a telltall sign of an approaching European settlement whereever they came upon them.
       Gradually the honeybee range expanded to include all of North America. Gruff mountain men of the mid 19th century who lived off what they could hunt and forage for months at a time out trapping in the wilds became adept at raiding bee trees for their sweet bounty.

       The native Americans seemed to get along just fine without bees though.




       Coming up over Tejon Pass into California's Central Valley sometime around 4am on February first, the driver of a bigrig tractor-trailer with hundreds of beehives strapped to a flatbed trailer drifts off to sleep for a moment. In that moment the cab drifts off the side of the road, jack-knifes itself on the steep decline and the whole thing tips over across Interstate 5. Hundreds of beehives shatter on impact with the road, others bounce along for awhile, spilling out angry bees as they go. Thick gooey honey also spreads across the roadway.
       The entire highway has to be closed down for hours while firefighters and hazmat teams attempt to deal with the mess (by hosing down all the bees with foam and using bulldozers to push the debris to the side).
       Every year beekeepers from all over the country converge on California's Central Valley for the almond pollination season. Almond pollination is one of the most lucrative things one can do in beekeeping. All the contracts traditionally begin on February 1st, and bees are generally driven at night to keep them from overheating / freaking out other people on the road. It's a long crazy adventure loading up a truck of bees, driving them all night, and unloading them the next morning. Just about every year there is a bee truck crash somewhere on the Five.

       Some beekeepers, you could say, lose 90% of their bees to automobile accidents. Every year some also lose 90% to bears or skunks.




       For most of the 20th century, a beekeeper could expect to lose about 6% of their hives on average every winter. In the mid 90s varroa mites were accidentally introduced from asia, causing the average beekeeper in America to expect to lose 50-60% of their bees every winter for a few years. It is estimated that 98% of the honeybees in the wild were wiped out. For some reason the media didn't seem to really hit on this.
       Beekeepers were able to combat the mites with miticides, and quickly developed better ones, reducing expected hive loses to about 16% per winter after that. As to the wild bees, no one was around to give them miticide, so as you can imagine with 98% losses ... they are back stronger than ever. All susceptable bees died and resistant ones survived and now wild bees survive just fine without the miticides the managed population is dependant on.
       With the onset of Colony Collapse Disorder, expected winter losses of managed hives is now around 32%. Two important things to note about this number. (A) that doesn't mean 32% were lost from CCD, it means 16% presumably were (the increase over the background loss). (B) The key words here are "winter loss"
       Winter is the tough season for beekeepers. Things aren't blooming, the bees are cold, hungry, and cramped together in the hive trying to stay warm. You lose bees in winter. But Spring is boom time for bees. Everything is blooming and millions of years of evolution have taught the bees this is the time to hit the ground moving, to spin off as many new colonies as they can. In spring a beekeeper can split all their healthy colonies and increase their number of hives by a very significant percentage.
       And so, what isn't conveyed when you read about "32% losses" is that there was a subsequent 37% gain two months later. In the Pacific Northwest, where CCD has been hitting as hard as anywhere else, there are now more managed hives in operation than there were previous to the "disappearing bees."




       The Einstein quote deserves special attention in the examination of media hyperbole though. Why would Einstein say such a thing, if people clearly lived in the Americas without bees and got along just fine? Or, if Einstein did say such a thing, how could he be wrong?? The answer is simple: he didn't say it.
       You'll find him quoted as saying this in all kinds of reputable newspapers and other media, presumably they all can simply use eachother as a "source" to back up that he said it, but there's no underlying source. The earliest appearance of this quote attributed to Einstein was on a pamphlet by the beekeeper labour union (!?) in Brussels in 1994. It cites no source and given how carefully scrutinized Einstein's quotes have been I find it beyond unlikely that one of these Brussellian union beekeepers knows something the rest of us don't.

       But because the media just loves something that sounds apocalyptic, they keep whipping this "disappearing bees" thing into a frenzy, so that your average person now usually believes "the bees are disappearing."
       Why did the media jump on this and not the more serious bee die off in the 90s? Probably because this time beekeepers would agree bees are disappearing -- literally. The calling card of CCD is that the bees from an effected hive have literally disappeared. They're just gone. It is mysterious, but it's far far far from having anything to do with the bees as a species disappearing.


    aggienaut: (Fiah)
       The fair is over!! No more days of working 7am - midnight! ):


       The Orange County Fair, you see, has been going on for the last month or so. I was foolish enough to allow myself to be voluntold I was going to do the scheduling of shifts at the Orange County Beekeepers Association (not to be confused with rival club the Beekeepers Association of Orange County) booth at the fair. We have a nice little booth with lots of posters with interesting information about bees, an observation hive (think ant farm but with bees) and a "beeosk" -- a kiosk covered in bee posters (:
       Anyway two people needed to be working it at all times from noon till 11pm Wednesday through Friday, and 10am to 11pm Sat and Sun, for a total of 112 shifts. Now consider that we had only 29 people on the club mailing list, and the overwhelming majority of those avoided working any shifts ... so probably less than half a dozen of us ended up working all of them, the club officers and I (3 of us, minus the good-for-nothing treasurer, don't get me started on him) probably worked half those ourselves. And even with them...

       Most club members are retired so it was easy to fill the noon to 5:30 shift, but the evening shifts almost all had to be filled by myself or the officers. So many a day I'd work my normal workday of 7am to 3pm, then barely have time to turnaround and be at the fair 5:30 to 11 (and between getting back to my car and driving home it would be midnight by the time I got home) .. and then repeat the next day. ):
       Hence me not posting as much this last month ;)   :P

       It's very enjoyable to be talking to people who have a lot of intelligent questions about bees and are clearly interested in what you're saying, and there were definitely people like that ... but most people anything you say is clearly going right over their head and you know they're about to walk out and say "the bumblebees were cool!" or something. And then there were all the dumb questions...


    FREQUENTLY ASKED (DUMB) QUESTIONS ABOUT BEES:

    "How do they make honey if they're stuck in there?"
    "They come and go through that tube out the back of the tent"
    "They don't all just leave?!"
    "Why would they? That's their home"

    "So their job is to make honey?"
    or
    "So their job is to serve the queen right?"
       It's silly that people think that bees should have a "job" or "purpose." Their purpose is the same as all other organisms: to live and survive; to reproduce. They produce honey to store up food, and the queen lays the eggs, and when they have enough bees and honey stored up the hive reproduces by sending out a swarm to establish a new hive. The worker bees do all the work but that's not the same as "serving the queen" ... people seem to forget that only humans have this peculiar sense of "ownership."

    "So they're all guys except for the queen right?"
       I really really want to hunt down Jerry Seinfeld and slap him for this one. His "bee movie," which represented itself to actually be informative about bees actually got one of the most basic things totally wrong. Bee populations are 99.999% female!! (there'll maybe be a dozen to up to a few dozen male drones in a colony of 60,000)

    "Honey is bee vomit isn't it? That's so gross!"
       Yes bees make honey by injesting pollen and nectar and regurgitating it as honey, BUT it doesn't go in their stomach but a special "honey stomach" or "honey gizzard," and thus does not come in contact with gastric juices or partially digested food (which would be honey anyway) or anything else we associate with vomit. There are no germs or bacteria in honey which could be harmful to an adult human (honey should not be given to babies less than one year of age though as certain spores that can effect them can exist in honey) or cooties ... so it really has nothing in common with vomit thank you very much. Now go drink milk and leave me alone.

    "So the bees are disappearing right?"
       Yes and no. Colony Collapse Disorder has led to an average of 30% of hives in America being lost over winter, and specifically the bees seem to "disappear" (dead bees not present), but a bee population can more than double in spring, more than making up for the loss and a recent survey showed there were in fact more hives now in operation than before this "disappearance." I think it all stems from a misunderstanding of the word "disappearing."

    "But I'm always finding dead bees in front of my house!" (usually said in a "no you're a crackpot, I know they ARE disappearing!" way)
       You know what you need in order to regularly find dead bees in front of your house? A steady supply of live bees. In an average colony 1200 bees are born every day. That means 1200 are dying every day 47.7 days later.
       And besides, dead bees aren't disappeared bees, genius.

    "You know Albert Einstein said if bees disappeared all humans would be gone within three years"
       Fact: honeybees aren't native to the Americas
       Fact: people lived in the Americas before Europeans brought what the indians called "white man's flies"
       So you can suck it Eistein. Though agriculture would produce a lot less (other things pollinate, but can't be cultivated en masse like bees can, or you can do what China does since they accidentally killed all their bees with pesticides and pollinate by hand -- good for employment but surely drives the price way up)

       And about a million questions about the queen.

       The only questions that really stumped me is little kids kept asking me where they came from .. do I have to explain "the birds and the bees" to these kids?? I tried making an analogy to a farm but they looked unimpressed. I should have sent them over to ask the people manning the nearby piglet pen.


    Obligatory Non-LJ-Cut-ed Picture


    Photoessay: The Fair (conclusion: it's about giant hot dogs)

    aggienaut: (Bees)
    Tell me bees aren't adorable:


    (view ultra-big!)

    Melissa

    Apr. 4th, 2009 01:16 pm
    aggienaut: (Bees)

       I met a girl on Thursday.

       Her name is Melissa.

       And I brought her home with me.

       And she is a honeybee.

       When a swarm of bees moves on (from somewhere they've rested while searching for a new place to establish a hive), bees that were out scouting miss the boat. They return to the former location of the swarm and wait, and wait ... and wait...

       As you may recall, I moved a swarm on Wednesday. So on Thursday there was a clump of those "residual bees."
       Knowing what I know about bee psychology, I knew they were in a mind set of waiting for a swarm that would never come. So they'd be sitting tight where they were. And they wouldn't be stinging anything either.

       So I put my finger in front of one of them, and she climbed on. I drove home with her on my hand. And I named her Melissa.

       Bees in a residual cluster usually die within a few days. Probably from hunger (they don't conduct any food gathering or production) or exposure. So I figured she was probably hungry, but I didn't know if she'd eat "in captivity."
       Honestly, my first thought for some reason was to give her sugar water (I guess because that's what we feed the bees out in the field when there's not enough natural forage for them in winter). But then I was like, wait, I have honey, duh.
       So I put a dab of honey on my hand and, sure enough, she walked over to it and I could see her lapping it up with her little bee tongue.

       All Thursday evening I went about my business with Melissa on my hand. She was walking around pretty constantly, so I became worried she'd tire herself out. Turned out the lights (and laptopped just by laptop light) and she slowed down and shortly appeared to actually fall asleep.

       Previous to turning the lights out though, at one point she fell off my hand (onto my desk) and starting shaking violently. I was concerned by bee was going berserk! ): But I put my finger in front of her and she crawled on it and stopped shaking. I think she missed me <3 (:


       Overnight I put her in a cup with a piece of paper over the top so she wouldn't roam my room while I slept.


       I took her to work the next day and let her crawl around my desk. She made a surprisingly good office pet (though I'm guessing most offices wouldn't welcome her *sadface*)- she just roamed my desk and if it looked like she was going too far away I'd put my finger in front of her and she'd climb on.

    Meet Melissa:


    (Sorry the video mode on my camera absolutely fails at getting things up close)

       Around noon coworker Jeremy came in to inform us that Dave had lost the lawsuit. Melissa was on my hand at the time. For about a minute we stared at Jeremy waiting for him to say "just kidding." He didn't, but while we were distracted I didn't even notice Melissa crawl up my arm and onto my neck. At literally almost the exact moment it dawned on me that Dave really had lost the case, I felt a stinging sensation in my neck. ):
       Now I was pretty distracted at the time, and so was everyone else. So I waited a minute or two before asking "guys, um, did my bee just sting me?" "um... yes she did" "is she okay???" ):
       Amy gently picked her up from my neck and handed her to me. I anxiously examined her for the extent of damage to her. The stinger had pulled out but I couldn't actually see any damage to her. Someone has suggested maybe it broke off sideways and therefore didn't rupture her abdomen?
       "Aren't you going to take the stinger out of your neck?" someone asked. Oh yeah, that. sure.

       Now the fact that she stung me at that exact moment I find very interesting. I've always kind of suspected that bees can sense mood. That might sound like hocus pocus, but mood effects your tenseness, blood pressure, body temperature, any number of things that bees can probably sense. My boss Dave, who has much much more experience beekeeping than I do, gets stung more than I do, and I've kind of attributed it to this. He usually gets all riled up about one thing or another, and the bees start stinging him. I can walk right through a cloud of bees from a disturbed colony without getting stung, because I'm usually as calm as buddha out there. Actually I'm more than calm, I'm probably giving off loving vibes towards the bees. <3
       When I'm walking through clouds of bees that should be defensive, and they're not stinging me, I feel so trusted and loved by the bees.

       So my mood suddenly changed dramatically and it freaked Melissa out and she stung me. Either that or I just turned my head and pinched her. I think it's probably a combination of both -- I'd accidently pinched her before (when she'd crawl between two of my fingers while typing) and she hadn't stung me, and I doubt if she was on my hand and I got mad about something she'd immediately sting me.
       I was very concerned that she would now die, and carefully monitored her condition.
       At first she seemed very worked up, walking around fast in an agitated fashion, but then she calmed down to her usual demeanor.

       Shortly I went to lunch and took her with me. In the car on the return trip she flew off my hand onto the passenger side window. This was the first time I'd seen her fly any distance. So it was a good sign for her health but also kind of made me think "aw she wants to fly around ): "
       My plan at this point was to keep her alive until I visited where I'd moved her swarm to. Then I could reunite her with her hive and feel like I'd accomplished something. It would also be interesting to see just how long I could keep her alive, but I thought that seemed cruel -- bees are members of a hive of thousands, and she must be incredibly lonely on her own (it may seem silly to ascribe too many human emotions to something like a bee, but I'd imagine it makes sense that not being around other bees would cause her to experience actual stress).
       Walking back through the parking lot towards the office she took off, flew around me twice, and landed back on me. <3

       Then I went back to the car to get her cup, since it had a dab of honey in it for her to eat, and during this trip through the parking lot she took off and flew off into the sunny afternoon air.
       I was sad to see her go but I'm going to go ahead and wildly assume she flew off and went on to have exciting adventures and be adopted by a new hive (:

       Once again this provides an insight into bee psychology though. Previously, as I noted, her life mission was to hang tight. I think stinging probably erased that mission statement (since stinging is usually a life changing experience for bees of course) and she thereafter no longer felt the obligation to sit around waiting for a swarm that would never return, and flew off to seek her fortune.




       As a beekeeper I of course meet lots of bees, and experience a lot of bee behaviour. But one never gets the opportunity to observe a single bee as an individual, so this was an extremely interesting experience for me.

       Also you might be wondering why I would name a bee "Melissa." The answer is of course that "Melissa" was the most obvious name in the world. Melissa, you see, means honeybee.

    aggienaut: (Default)
    News Item: Bees Brains Morph to Avoid Mid-Life Crisis


    I'm at work right now but later I'll write about the lawsuit we just lost ): and my pet bee, Melissa.


    Also I just got a call from my favourite law firm - they want me back (as a temp). It's been a year and a half since I worked for them, I feel honoured they even remember me. (:
    aggienaut: (Bees)
    As you may recall, I am a beekeeper. So with the topic open I of course decided to go with an entry on bees I've been meaning to write for awhile now. See also the links at the bottem to a number of other entries I've written on bees

       Killer bees. You have no doubt heard of them. After being accidently introduced to Brazil (from Tanzania) by a mad scientist (Warwick Kerr; my boss actually has met him and reports he's a very nice man) in 1957, the Africanized Honeybees slowly spread through the Americas. By the early nineties they had reached the southern United States and there was panic. Now they are pervasive across the southern reaches of the United States, since they easily outcompete European Honeybees (there are no native American Honeybees).
       However this entry is not about Killer Bees. This entry is about the bees that are actually driving killer bees out of their own homeland.

       Bees that can clone themselves.



    Clone Wars
       The binomial name of honeybees is Apis mellifera. Honeybees can further be divided into subspecies.
       Apis mellifera mellifera I'm assuming was the first one named. It is the German honeybee and was popular previous to the 20th century and was the first to be introduced to the Americas. A. m. ligustica is the Italian honeybee, which is currently the favourite among commercial beekeepers. Generally this is what commerical beekeepers keep (at least in the US).
       A. m. scutellata is the so-called Killer or Africanized bee (-ized because its assumed to be a crossbreed between the 26 queens Kerr brought over and "nonafricanized" bees). As mentioned they are native to Tanzania and southern Africa. Bees in Europe evolved to be docile because those that survived were those people could work with to harvest honey. In Africa predators (and people) would destroy the hive to get the honey, so the bees that survived were the ones that were mean as shit
       And A. m. capensis is the Capetown Bee. Because there are strong winds around Capetown (South Africa) the queen would often get swept away on mating flights (did I mention queens go on mating flights?). To compensate for this potential loss of the only egg-layer (which would theoretically mean the death of the hive in 24.7 days), ALL the workers in a capensis hive can lay eggs!! O=
       HOWEVER, since these bees have never mated, their eggs have only the mother's DNA. They are therefore clones of the bee that laid them.
       Furthermore, capensis bees can actually infiltrate scutellata hives without being killed (the usual treatment of illegal immigrants in beehives). These "undocumented workers" then go about laying clones of themselves!
       It seems the capensis bees then proceed to loaf about and are underrepresented among the bees foraging for their new host colony. As they clone themselves and live off the welfare of their host colony the burden soon becomes too great and the scutellata hive collapses (not literally House of Usher style, but everyone starves). I’m assuming the capensis clone slacker army then moves on to a new scutellata hive.

       I find this interesting because, while there are certainly other insects, such as the cuckoo wasp (and animals such as the cuckoo bird) who sneak their eggs into a similar animal’s nest to be raised by them, I know of no other creature that is such a social parasite. They have a normal lifecycle like any other bee (the workers don’t reproduce themselves in a hive of their own with a queen of their own), but if their queen is lost or they become seperated from their hive, they switch to a new parasitic lifestyle. And furthermore they don’t completely loaf, they DO do SOME chores, just extremely half-heartedly,like bad roommates.
       So yeah. Apis mellifera scutellata may be taking the Americas by storm, but back home they are being pushed out by slacker clone armies.


    Related
    The Birds and the Bees - My official guide to bees, wasps, yelloyjackets, bumblebees, hornets, & bears oh my!
    Colony Collapse Disorder - Everything you wanted to know about everyone's favourite thing to ask me about.
    How to Write a Bee Attack Article - Since newspaper writers always bungle it.
    A Bee In Math - Find out how the numbers 24.7, 2,500, 61,750, 500, and 54f relate to bees.

    aggienaut: (fiah)

       On Tuesday night I got between 100 and 150 bee stings. Thats the range most hospitalized bee attacks are and about 8% to 11% of a lethal dose for me, so that was fun.

       You see Monday Professor Thoenes and I went back up North to work on the bees. Monday night we drove as far as Davis, ate at Woodstocks there and hung out at G St Pub. That was fun. Met some people in Davis who actually didn't want to kill me. (= And I introduce Allan Rae to Thoenes and Al's like "I think I met you through [UC Davis Entomologist] Eric Mussen" small world.

       Tuesday we get up to Redding and load half our hives (54) onto a trailer as its snowing. At the truck stop as we were leaving Redding they were changing the road condition sign from "chains required north of Redding" to "road closed due to snow north of Redding".
       We then drove six hours or so south to the bee broker's staging area near Coalinga. When we got to the last turnoff for the staging area Steve (Thoenes) says "I think this is the road" and I say "are you sure, that just looks like a field to me!" It was a three miles road of four inches of mud. We thought that was bad, but then we got to the actual bee yard where the mud was 6 to 8 inches deep and our truck got stuck twice (and a forklift got temporarily stuck trying to pull us out). At one point I picked up a pallet and turned to carry it somewhere else and nearly fell right over because my feet had become solidly stuck in mud and I couldn't get them out without putting the pallet down.
       Anyway, to stay on schedule we'd have to unload the bees immediately and drive a few hours back north that night, even though it was already pitch black. Since the bees had been very docile earlier in the day at it was way too cold out for bees to be active we didn't put stop to put on bee suits or anything before pulling off the tarp. Unfortunately, however, the bees had of course been shaken up something fierce on the muddy road and as soon as we pulled off the tarp we all got lit up. Two farmhands immediately disappeared (and one never came back) and the rest of us retreated to put suits on. At that point though we were already covered from head to foot in bees so we were putting bee suits on over bees.
       The bee yard foreman (Bill) and his brother (Chris) the bee broker (brother-in-laws of eachother) both had bushy mountain-man beards, wore overalls and flannel, and talked like farmers (You know, kiinda sloow). Bill was particularly grizzly, and kind-of drunk when we got there (due to a miscommunication apparently he hadn't been expecting us). He never put on a bee suit, but you could tell when he got stung by his exclamation of "motherf!@#$er!" (which came every few seconds). He also kept hollerin "are you sissies! go faster!" to no one specifically and I found it quite amusing.
       And this if of course when I got 100-150 stings. I had bees crawling over every part of my body. It was quite the adventure. Most of my stings were on my wrists and neck however.

       We drove as far back north as Stockton that night. Wednesday morning I could barely turn my neck or swallow. We stopped at the Fat Cat Cafe in Woodland as we passed through and I had some soup. They still remembered me there like I'd just been there yesterday so that was fun. Back in Redding we loaded the remaining 54 hives and hauled them back south. Arriving at the bee yard at 10pm we just unhitched the trailer and went to find a motel.

       Thursday we offloaded the new load of hives and then spent the whole day (eight hours) opening up the hives to check on them and then putting them on pallets. In addition to bees there were sevel black widows the size of grapes in there, I had know idea they got that big!!

       After finishing that we were finally able to drive home. The end.

       So yeah. 100-150 bee stings, quite painful. Prof Thoenes said I seemed to be handling it better than most people, probably because I've had a lot of experience with small numbers of bee stings. I was feeling mostly better within 24 hours, but I still look like I have chicken pox on my wrists and neck.

    Bee Trip!

    Jan. 18th, 2008 02:08 pm
    aggienaut: (Wasp)

       A day after coming back from Flagstaff I was off again, bound for Redding, CA w the bee boss Dave & his friend Prof Thoenes (an entomology profressor from Tucson, his parents had owned Southwestern Bee Supply).
       Our mission was to purchase some beehives up in Redding. Dave was itching to get back in the beekeeping business because (A) we'd gotten so much crap lately from certain people in the OC Beekeeping Assn about being nothing but "bee killers" and (B) he also just felt like getting back into it for fun. Dave had previously owned Sundance Honey Co, an apiary he had bought from someone else but eventually folded up because bee busting was a lot more profitable in OC and took all his time. Dave still owned the name though so our new hives will be under that name again.
       The guy we were buying the hives from (Ed Allen) used to have 1,500 hives, but one of his coworkers got careless with a smoker and burned down a neighgbouring forest. Ed Allen subsequently got sued for $6.5 million and lost all but about a hundred of his hives. Now he's like 88 and just lost two more fingers so he's looking to reduce further down to just hobbyist levels.
       So we bought 102 hives. Mr Allen's even letting us keep them where they are for now, and after almond pollination Dave has another friend up there who's got some land we can move them to.

       Almond pollination, btw, is the most profitable thing one can do with a hive. One can get around $145 per hive to put them in almond orchards from Feb 1st through April 1st. Considering we bought the hives for much less than that it looks like we're pretty likely to turn a tidy profit already within just a few months. We've already talked to a Bee Broker (yes there's such a profession - they get $3 a hive to coordinate between beekeepers and almond growers).
       And almonds, incidentally, I think may be the most profitable crop in the central valley. Its one of the few places in the world they grow for some reason. Since everyone growing other things is seeing that their neighbour is making twice as much growing almonds, there's a lot of new almond fields being planted. Looked like the number of almond orchards are set to increase by at least 20%, judging by all the newly planted fields we saw. (And since it takes bees to pollinate them, this is good for the bee industry!)

       Anyway, the first night we stopped in Davis. I showed Dave & Steve (Dr Thoenes) G Street Pub & we ate at Woodstocks. Hanging out and talking about almond orchards and bee diseases, I actually rather felt like an "aggie" for once. Then I met up with my friend Allan Rae, who works for monsanto.
       In the morning we stopped by the UC Davis Bee Research Facility real quick before heading up to Redding.
       After concluding our business in Redding we headed on down to Chico where Dave had gone to school and his nephew Thaddeus currently goes. There Dave felt like going to a steak place, and he paid for it, so I got a $27 steak =d! The benefits of travelling with Dave. We also stopped by the Sierra Nevada Brewery that is there, and I had Sierra Nevada Scotch Ale (I've never heard of Scotch Ale before?!) and it was quite good. Tasted like almonds. ;) And we visiting some Chico bars.
       The next morning we came back.

       Arriving home I found all these movie set trailers on my street. Apparently Disney was filming something at one of the houses. d= Hollywood sure loves OC these days.

    aggienaut: (Wasp)

       Yesterday at work I perused countless articles on bee attacks in order to find more sources to cite in my own press releases and such. It quickly became apparent that most of them were about pretty much the exact same thing: people get stung by bees, writer includes a brief overview of the Africanized bee situation, a few quotes are thrown in, the end. Pretty standard really. In fact, so standard that I decided to create a standardized guide to writing bee attack reports (which if followed closely, will actually make the article a lot better than most).


       SO.. you are a reporter, you have been assigned to write up a recent bee attack, and you have found your way here (This was crossposted to my new google-searchable blog). Congratulations, you already appear to be doing more research than most!! Simply follow the following grading rubric to epic success! (the percentages noted refer to the relative importance as if it were being graded. Thus we can use this rubric to look at already-written articles and objectively compare just how bad they suck)

    Newsworthiness - up to 33% of total (is your article even really newsworthy?)
    (1) Obligatory title that is a pun involving the word "buzz." - Reporters never seem to be able to resist such gems as "the buzz on bees" or "locals buzzing about bees" (we would never do that here of course). For use of a bad pun as a title I actually give minus 10% to your article.
    (2) Did anyone get stung more than 10 times? 10% per person up to 33%. 15% per child or elderly woman.
    (3) Were any dogs killed? 5% per dog (up to 33%)
    (4) Were any people killed? 33%
    (5) Other - "Man stung by bees, then hit by car," "Man stung by bees, falls into agricultural thresher and killed," and "Pest control called out to kill bees surrounding homicide victim so police can investigate" were all articles I came across yesterday. Something really odd like this could give the newsworthiness of your article a bonus over 33% (making up for your otherwise bad writing)

    Research - up to 33% of total
    (1A) Have you cited any entomologists? Offhand I can think of and recommend UC Davis entomologis Dr Eric Mussen, UC Riverside entomologist Kirk Visscher (just do a name search at the respective schools for their contact info), Dr Steven Theones. Orange County (CA) Ag Commission Entomologist Nick Nisson is also a popular local choice but I don't have any personal experience with him. 22% (or you could you know, cite me. thats totally bonus) ;)
    (1B) Or did you just cite whomever was on hand dealing with the bees? - Goodwork, they were probably either a general pest control operator who thinks of bees as giant flying ants, or a hobbyist beekeeper who might just be a crazy hippie. 0% (you call that research?)
    (2) Have you explained the difference between Africanized and European bees? 11% Apis mellifera scutellata etcetera )



    Education - up to 33% of total - including these useful tidbits will give your article some redeeming value
    Yadda yadda )


       Unfortunately, the two most recent bee articles at the OC Register scored a -25% and -20% on my grading scale, respectively. I may have to readjust it.


       Also yesterday, I went undercover to a local bee supply store which Dave has declared a jihad on. I went in and pretended I knew nothing about bees and was interested in getting into it in order to see what they were telling people. Also, bought a hive from him.

    aggienaut: (Wasp)

       Wrote another letter-to-the-editor to the OC Register at work today. As usual, it was about some self-described expert who removed a colony live and advocated live removals. In addition to disputing their expert credentials and putting forth Dave's overwhelming qualifications, as usual (and last time I listed them I think I neglected to mention that he has also been deposed as a bee expert a number of times in lawsuits he would not have otherwise had a connection to), and taking issue with their advocation of live removal and release, I homed in on something specific -- by way of discrediting their "expert" description, and correcting a factual error, I took issue with the "experts" statement that the colony they removed in the article had "over 100,000 bees."
       This, you see, is quite easily proven a mathematical impossibility.* A queen is capable of laying a whopping 2,500 eggs a day (and there'll be only one queen), and worker bees who make up 99.99% of the hive live an average of 24.7 days, so you can simply multiply these together and find that the maximum size is 61,750 individuals!
       Now, I noted that one could certainly allow for bees to live a little bit longer (the lifespan is actually specifically 500 flying hours I think, and if the temperature were to drop below 54f the bees would pretty much stop flying around for winter -- but that doesn't happen here) or maybe the queen to be extremely virile, but thats not going to push the population beyond 70,000. No "expert" would ever estimate a random unnoteworthy exposed colony by a church to have 100,000 bees in it.

       * I've heard actually that some yellowjacket colonies at least get so big and crazy that there are queens at opposite ends of the hive who never meet, making it effectively a giant conjoined hive. I dunno if that could happen with a honeybee colony, but I wouldn't absolutely rule out some kind of freakish aberration like that. But in general, beehive populations do not exceed 60,000.


       In other news, I happened across this random photographer's photos on flickr and they're kind of amazing.

    aggienaut: (dictator kris)

       Yesterday I put over $11,000 of art on craigslist. At least thats the total we're asking for ... it was bought from real auctions for about $2,500 I think.

       This morning we already had an offer to buy one of the paintings for $1,500 --- we'd bought it at auction for $75.

       Dave wants to bring me to this auction in LA on August 7th. Says he's willing to invest up to $10,000 in auctioneering schemes. ...and he mumbled something about giving me a raise!


       Today the OC Register ran an editorial severely backpeddling their previous "all the bees are dying!!!" theme. I think iti would not be unrealistic for me to speculate that my press release on that subject could well have caused them to do so!
       Pwn!

    aggienaut: (Wasp)

       All day, every day, people tell me "Isn't there a huge shortage of bees?" or ask me "you know there is supposed to be a big bee shortage?" or otherwise bring up the subject as if I, a professional bee handler, have somehow managed to remain oblivious and have just been waiting around for someone to repeat to me what they overheard on Fox while flipping through channels the night before. So I'm assuming you have heard about it as well: Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
       If you've heard about it at all, what you have probably heard is "some U.S. honeybee hives have lost 90% of their bees to Colony Collapse Disorder." When researching the subject the other day this was practically the only statistic I could find in media. As I pointed out yesterday, "some US hives," have also lost "90% of their bees" due to bears, vandalism, and freak automobile accidents. And more seriously, "some US hives" have certainly lost 90% of their bees to varroa & trachael mites, wax moths, or the Small Hive Beetle (I have some pictures of the destruction these pests have wrought on some local colonies, it is not pretty).
       Yesterday I was researching the subject in search of material for the press releases. I called several commercial beekeepers and entomologists who specialize in honeybees, as well as trawling the open sources of the internet. I found the most concise and dependably accurate source to be a Congressional Research Service report thats only a month old.
       The Bee shortage everyone is talking about turns out is actually a loss of 38% of hives on average over winter as opposed to the normal average of 16%. Only a quarter of surveyed beekeepers reported symptoms of CCD, though these beekeepers lost an average of 45% of their hives.
       Basically, no, 90% of the bees are not gone. Yes, there is an unknown ailment effecting bees and the beekeeping industry is concerned. Its a matter of lost profits and increased costs though, not of the pending extinction of bees.

       But what IS CCD really? I find its symptoms to be rather strange. Basically, the bees just disappear. There is no corresponding evidence of dead bees. Affected hives are found to still be stocked with honey, and have a healthy queen who is still laying eggs (and a few recently hatched bees are still around) -- but 95% of the bees from that hive are simply not to be found!! Its a bit Bermuda-triangle esque if you ask me.
       The hive basically appears healthy except for the fact that for some reason all the worker bees have left. Wax Moths which usually are quick to invade any weak colony avoid the colonies completely for a few weeks after they've been thus abandoned. If one takes the hive box and places it on top of another healthy hive (hives usually consist of stacked boxes ("supers"), see picture to the right), the healthy hive dies. These facts would make you think there is something toxic about the hive, but I don't believe anything has been detected yet.
       Leading theories for cause are either a new or newly more virulent bee disease, or pesticides. Reports on "OrganicConsumers.org" report that from over a thousand organic beekeepers surveyed, not one reported CCD symptoms -- this might mean the cause is somehow linked to either pesticides or the rigours of commercial bee life (which often include a lot of being shipped around in flatbed trucks and other stressful activities), but I'm rather distrustful of information from pro-organic sources -- they're often way too enthusiastic to proclaim "organic" is the answer to everything. Anyway, also there are no reports of Colony Collapse in feral colonies ... not that anyone necessarily would report that though.
       Also, some media sources have apparently mentioned that "some people" think cell phone towers may be causing this. This is not a theory which is being seriously considered by any of the experts I've talked to or any of the professional reports I've read. This is just another technology-hating-hippie-theory. (=

       In other news, at least in Southern California, the extremely low levels of rain we have gotten this year is certainly having a greater effect on the number of bees in the area than CCD is.

    aggienaut: (Wasp)
       This is the letter-to-the-editor I wrote and submitted today, on behalf of my boss:

    Dear Editors,

       Recent news reports have hyped up some mild hysteria regarding Honeybee Colony collapse Disorder (CCD) by mentioning that “some U.S. hives” have lost “as much as ninety percent of their bees last winter” (“Mystery bee disease may destroy hives worldwide,” OC Register 06/25/07). While this may be true, “some U.S. hives” have also lost 90 percent of their bees due to bears, skunks, or freak accidents.
    ...etc )



       Additionally, I wrote the followed press release:

    Press Release )

       So there you have it. You may think "of COURSE you as a pest control company are biased against saving the bees" -- BUT keep in mind we DID do live removals but stopped for the exact reasons outlined above: no one wanted them and experts told us it was unsafe. Suprisingly, if we ever did have another bumblebee call (which I'm not sure we've gotten in literally years), we WOULD try to save the bumblebees, because they ARE nearly extinct in this area -- but you don't hear about that because no one cares about bumblebees.

       Tomorrow I believe I will write about the actual Colony Collapse Disorder
    aggienaut: (Wasp)

       Internet's been down all day [Friday]. I can't figure out whats wrong. We have an internet for our connection, but I can't connect to any sites. Its not even sending as few packets of information back as it does when the system is down at my apartment complex. I reset my computer, the modem, and the router, respectively, and nothing seems to resolve the situation.
       Now I've resorted to writing an entryi in notepad (maybe I ought to download one of those lj update programs for offline writing such as this).


    *** EDIT: 2:19pm Saturday*** - Internet is back. Don't know what was wrong. Anyway, yesterday I wrote this and the 30 in 30 on zombies I'm about to upload. I'd have made a phone post to remove any question that I got something in on the right day, but I'm saving those for the road trip. Anyway, I think a complete lack of internet access is a valid excuse. Just remember "today" in this entry refers to yesterday.


       Anyway, today at work:
       This morning I was cleaning out the tools we had salvaged from our truck that was totalled the other day. While I doing so Dave, the owner, asked me if I was still looking for other jobs. Assuming he was about to remind me that they really don't need me right now and they're doing me a big favour by employing me and I shouldn't get too comfortable, I was quick to answer that I was. To this he responded "Whats wrong with this job?"
       "Well I feel like I need a more college-graduate-oriented job"
       "We can make some graduate work for you around here, on monday I'll call my friend Dr Tanis and ask about getting us a research grant. I've already got microscopes and everything else you'll need."

       I had actually already checked to see if the Bee Research Facility at Davis was hiring any laboratory assistants. With the mysterious "colony collapse syndrome" decimating commercial bee populations at the moment, Bee research is of high interest. The Bee Research Facility at Davis, btw (which I visited while up there last week), is ramping itself back up. Its been just barely maintaining its existence since the nineties, without any professors attached to it at all. By November I believe it'll be back in operation with three attached professors and accompanying staff.



       Anyway, we spent much of the morning cleaning the stuff from the truck. Somewhere in the middle I was interrupted by Dave inviting us to watch an old John Wayne movie ("The Searchers") on his new laptop. Dave also gave me the traning manual to get an applicator's liscense, which would make me legally allowed to kill bees on my own (as opposed to the legally questionable services performed by the Davis Beekeepers Collective ;) (Scroll to the very bottem of that page to see me being a jerk) ) Later on Bob and I went and did some calls.

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