Yoga Bean Magazine October 2008

Bees

Until recently, most of us have been fairly unaware of bees and their activities, with the possible exception of occasionally being concerned that we might be stung by a nearby bee. With the rise of Colony Collapse Disorder, suddenly bees are regularly in the news. What do we know about these creatures and why are we so concerned by their disappearance?

Bees are a winged insect, having 3 distinct body sections (the head, thorax and abdomen), 3 pairs of legs and 2 sets of wings. Bees have 2 compound eyes, which are excellent at detecting movement, and 3 small, simple eyes called ocelli, which detect light intensity. There are nearly 20,000 known species of bees world-wide, in nine recognized families. With the exception of one small sub-group of bees ('vulture bees'), which feed on carrion, all bees depend on flowers for their food source. Bees can generally be divided into two groups, solitary bees and eusocial bees (although a few species of bees form small social groups.)

Solitary bees emerge from their nests as adults and promptly leave in search of food. Males typically leave first and wait near nectar sources for receptive females to arrive. After mating, the males will die and the females will go in search of a nest site where she will construct a series of cells. In each cell she places a food package she has created from nectar and pollen and then lays an egg on top. She has to make a number of foraging trips in order to create enough food packets. She then seals the cell and leaves the nest after filling all the cells. She typically creates several nests during her lifetime. When the larvae hatch, they remain in the cell eating the food left for them. After becoming adults, they chew their way out of the cell and leave the nest. Most of the native bees in the US (except for bumblebees) are solitary bees.

Eusocial groups are defined as highly organized social groups with hierarchical division of labor, overlapping generations and cooperative care of young. Both honeybees and bumblebees are considered eusocial bees and their colonies are generally what we think of when we think of bees. Their complex societies have been well studied. A colony will contain a single queen, many workers and a lesser number of drones. A queen's sole purpose in life is to reproduce. She tends to be the largest bee in the colony. The queen bee will typically leave the colony shortly after maturity to mate with a number of males. This may be the only time she leaves the colony. She will store sperm from this one mating flight to use the rest of her life-2 to 7 years. She will lay up to 2,000 eggs a day-more than her body weight. A worker bee is a non-reproductive female. They make up the vast majority of the hive and may have a number of jobs during their life: food collecting, caring for the queen, guarding the colony, caring for the young, cleaning, controlling temperature of the hive via water evaporation, etc. A drone is a male bee whose sole purpose is to mate with the queen. Drones can be recognized by their extra large eyes-necessary because they mate with the queen in flight, often up to 100 feet off the ground. Drones are cared for their whole life by the worker bees, but a drone that successfully mates will die from the process. Drones may also be evicted from the colony and left to die when food is scarce.

The queen determines the sex of an egg but the workers determine when a female egg becomes a new queen. If the colony suddenly loses its queen or if the reproductive rate of the queen slows, the workers will feed several larvae in larger cells a higher sugar and higher protein food they make called royal jelly. If the old queen is still around when the new queens mature, she will leave the colony with some of the workers to form a new colony. The new "virgin queens" will fight among themselves until only one remains in the nest. The remaining will either have left the nest or been killed. For more information on the roles and lifecycle of eusocial bees see Wikipedia (queens, workers, drones) or Nova's The Anatomy of the Hive.

As you would expect, to maintain a complex system like a bee colony, eusocial bees have developed elaborate methods of communication. Most communication is achieved by pheromones, but this method is best when the message is straight-forward, such as when one new queen announces that she is victorious or when the hive needs to be cooled. Worker bees also create complex dances to tell other workers when they find a rich food source. They can communicate direction, distance, and richness of the source via dance (and they will share the odor of the flowers too.) This dance is performed on a specially designated dance space just inside the entrance to the colony. To see videos of bee dances, check out Nova's Dances with Bees.

We primarily associate bees with honey. Honey is created by bees from nectar. When a worker bee visits a flower, she sips the nectar (a sugary fluid includes the aromatic oils that give flowers their scent) through her proboscis and stores it in her honey stomach. She can store about 40 milligrams at a time. She will then return to the hive where she regurgitates the contents of her honey stomach to another worker bee who will either distribute it for immediate consumption or will process it into honey and store it in special honey cells. Nectar is about 70% water and honey is only 20% water. To process the nectar into honey, the worker will repeatedly swallow and regurgitate it as well as fan it with her wings. This process also adds enzymes from the bee's mouth while retaining the sugars and aromatic oils originally found in the nectar.

Some interesting honey facts:

- In the course of her lifetime, a worker bee will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.
- To make one pound of honey, workers in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers.
- In a single collecting trip, a worker will visit between 50 and 100 flowers. She will return to the hive carrying over half her weight in pollen and nectar.
- A productive hive can make and store up to two pounds of honey a day. Thirty-five pounds of honey provides enough energy for a small colony to survive the winter.
- Honey's flavor and color depend on the flowers from which the bees harvested their nectar.
- The pH of honey is between 3.5 and 4. In other words, it's slightly acidic - about as acidic as orange juice - which discourages the growth of bacteria.
- Honey is hygroscopic, meaning that it can draw moisture from its surroundings, and it has a high osmotic pressure. Bacteria that come into contact with honey undergo plasmolysis (lose their moisture content to the surrounding honey) and die.
- Although honey is generally very good at killing bacteria, there is one notable exception -- spore-forming bacteria, like Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism. The amount of botulism spores in honey is generally not dangerous to adults, but it could be deadly to infants under one year of age. Feeding infants honey is not recommended.
- Humans have been harvesting and using honey for more than 15,000 years. Honey hunting is depicted in rock art in Africa, India and Spain. Egypt, Greece, Italy and Israel developed organized beekeeping centers until the Roman Empire dissolved in approximately 400 A.D. Christian monasteries and convents then served as apiculture centers until Henry VIII closed them at the beginning of the Reformation.
- The average American consumes a little over one pound of honey a year.

While visiting a flower, a worker bee also collects pollen and packs it into specialized storage areas (located on the legs of most bees, but the abdomen of some species.) Pollen is an important source of vital amino acids, vitamins, and fats for bees. It is stored in special pollen cells near the brood cells. Nurse bees will later fashion the pollen into a kind of "bread" for supplying nourishment to developing larvae.

Next Issue: Commercial Beekeeping & Colony Collapse Disorder

Happy gardening!

Bryn Richard is a licensed landscape architect with a strong interest in sustainable design. She can be reached at Bryn@BlueTrillium.net and welcomes your questions and suggestions for further articles.

In June, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman stood looking up at the Saudi King Abdullah. The king sat perched on a dais in the middle of a palatial conference room with marble walls and glittering chandeliers. Bodman was pleading to the King to produce more oil while claiming that petroleum prices were too high. The King smiled down at the energy secretary but shook his head no. The U.S. consumes twice the oil as industrialized and pollution-laden China and four times as much as the European countries of England, Germany, France and Spain. The King waved Bodman away, exhibiting his disdain for the U.S. and other countries' "selfish interests [and] increased consumption" of petroleum.

We would not have needed to ask the king for more oil if America was already producing enough to feed our 20 billion barrel-a-day-habit. But whether the U.S. can generate enough oil to feed its energy habit has been a topic of debate for some time. While Americans continue to argue whether we should open up ANWR or other national lands to oil production, statistics fly back and forth as to how much is actually here. Currently the U.S. produces 6.9 million barrels a day from our private and national lands, which means we must import the rest. Organizations like Rand Corporation, the U.S. Geological Survey and other groups, however, claim that America has enough oil resources to feed it for over 60 years.

So if we really have this much oil, why haven't we started mining for it? That is America's conundrum. We don't want to mine for it here because we are afraid of what we'll do to the natural environment- meanwhile; we are fine with importing oil from other countries because we then don't have to deal with the production or the pollution. Now, with rising gas prices and limited global resources, the U.S. is absolutely dependent on foreign oil, and politicians, including both presumptive presidential candidates are, according to an editorial in the Boston Globe, considering drilling off America's coasts.

Our refusal to drill on our national lands has been the cause of much scrutiny, bitter debate, and finger-pointing. In 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a bitter editorial on President Bush's consideration to overturn a ban to drill off the coast of California demonstrating is "intent on wrecking years of progress in developing a coherent national energy policy." But what was that energy policy exactly? It appears we still have yet to put one in place that actually makes some sense.

Now, as we struggle to come to terms with outrageous gas prices one has to wonder about Bush's intent when he tried to open up our lands to drilling. Could he have possibly been right about overturning bans to drill on national lands? Could he have had the foresight to see that if we could drill on our own soils, then we could have become more independent as a nation in terms of our energy needs? I wonder if there is a single person in this country who would not stop to think about that, now that the U.S. is beholden to finishing what we have started in Iraq?

Twenty years ago, there was far more petroleum output than demand needed in the global market. Fifteen times more, according to an article in The Washington Post. Seeing a surplus in cheap fuels, America banged out millions of cars and encouraged driving, as we settled into road-laden, sprawl-infested neighborhoods outside of our nation's cities. Instead of preparing our own oil fields for discovery - partly because Americans were against drilling on our own soil, we looked to simply import it from Canada, Venezuela, Mexico and a number of other countries, as well as Saudi Arabia, to supply it cheaply. Some of those countries are in a constant state of war because of our desire for foreign oil - Iraq is only one of a few.

Cheap oil did not enable only the U.S. to become addicted to this once ample energy source. Over the last decade in particular, oil has become the catalyst to the modernization of India, China, Japan and other world markets that are hungry to compete with the United States.

Therefore, the global oil surplus has quickly disappeared and now we Americans are left unprepared to handle the current oil crisis. When oil was flowing freely from the Middle East and the rest of the world, the U.S. delayed exploration for new fields on national and private lands. Capital spending and investments in oil exploration decreased, oil refineries were not expanded or upgraded, and only a few rigs were erected on national soil and waters.

When it became apparent that we needed to open national lands, Alaska became both the target for oil exploration and the poster child of media wars. Frankly, for some Americans, discussing drilling in Alaska is akin to killing the Easter Bunny. However, we seem to have so much oil sitting underneath the Rockies, according to a USGS study, that one would think we could have come up with a better way to make drilling in America more palatable - especially since we do it already in other places the media rarely mentions.

Environmental and other interest groups have been successful at convincing past presidents and the public that drilling exploration onshore or off shore is a dirty, resource damaging process. Yet we've gladly taken the oil from countries like Ecuador and Nigeria, whose lands and waters have been polluted by poisonous crude oil wastes, the people have been persecuted and killed over oil battles, and the governments have been at the mercy of U.S. policies.

So now, when we need to wean ourselves from foreign oil, we don't have it ready for production. Republican presidential candidate John McCain cannot stand up on a podium and yell, "drill now!" when the drilling should have already occurred. Those crazy rants during the republican national convention sounded irrational when it is clear drilling now won't do much for the here and now. Let's face it are behind the eight ball and only a combination of alternative resources combined with oil exploration will work as sound energy policy.

As we think out the upcoming election, the person who talks most about alternative energy sources coupled with drilling offshore (which seem inevitable) will win my vote. But I hope drilling and the pursuit of other sources of energy are completed with the proper environmental impact assessments (EIAs). I worry that in our desperate search for oil reserves, that we'll act too quickly, and that the EIAs will not be conducted, nor will proper "best management controls" will not be put in place. It is then that bad policies are put in place and oil spills happen. It is not worth destroying America's lands and oceans to produce oil in haste. If we are going to drill here for it, I expect due diligence to be paid to the process - therefore, I am willing to wait longer for it. By then, I may have found a different way to live my life more sustainably. I have no problem being forced into that type of lifestyle. Realizing I can live with less is certainly refreshing.

The media's ploy to convince Americans to drill on our soil is indeed tempting. While I don't condone it, because I have the same "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) philosophy many American have, we've imported billions upon billions of barrels of oil through the years from other countries. I think it is time we acted responsibly and showed the world we can become an independent, environmentally responsible nation, who takes the lead on using a plethora of different environmentally friendly resources, including oil. We should "drill now" but understand that it will only impact us later. If we don't continue to pour money into alternative energy sources, we will only be subject to price gauging on oil prices for the foreseeable future.

Statistics to be proud of:
The estimated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by American motorists has fallen by 17.3 billion miles since November 2006.