Air Quality Monitors: Bees

It appears as though bees are useful in yet another application: monitoring air quality.

Popular Science: German Honey Bee Air Quality Monitors

Bees have also been used to detect explosives and other chemicals. They are taught using the Pavlov conditioning technique to be rewarded with sugar water every time a certain chemical is present. With a bit of training, the bees will stick out their tongues as soon as they detect the chemical. Scientists strap bees into a detection box and with a video camera they watch the bees to see if they detect anything.

Reminder: Replacing your comb every 3 years is good practice because enviromental toxins can build up in the comb and may be a contributing factor to honey bee losses.

Newspaper combine: Queen introduction

My blue hive queen has been doing poorly since the beginning of the year. The workers have been attempting to replace her but no supercedure cells resulted.  I found the queen Thursday evening and pinched her to kill her (Yes, it is very heart breaking to do this; I hate it). I then went to my other bee yard and took three pollen and honey frames from my big hive; which I had determined was pollen and honey heavy. I replaced these frames with brand new undrawn frames so that they can take some time to draw those frames out and their queen will have more room to lay.

Frame with pollen and some honey. Notice variety of colors (different flower sources)

Pollen in center and mostly uncapped honey surrounding

Thursday night I also went out to close one of my nucleus hives with  some wire mesh. When I went out there I saw that a skunk was rubaging through the grass in front of my big hive. I went back to the house to get the camera (shotgun would have been more appropriate) and this is the poor picture I took.

Skunk at my hives!

I followed it around for a bit to figure out where it was from but it took off and left a pretty nasty scent. I went back to the hives and put a wire mesh on the entrance to the nucleus hive that I was going to combine with my other hive.

The next morning I brought the bees and all my gear to the other bee yard. I placed the single sheet of newspaper down and put a small slit in the middle of the paper with my hive tool and then put all of my frames into the top box.
When I was placing the nucleus frames into the top box I was inspecting them while holding the frames generally above the box. I heard a very faint thud. The sound of bees falling and landing onto newspaper actually. It turns out that the very thing that I was looking for, fell right down into the box. It was the queen. Not a word of a lie. Had I not been holding the frame above the box, she would have fallen on the ground and all of my work would have been for nothing!

Saturday, this is what the newspaper looked like! It looks like the two hives are pretty much combined!

Lesson for the day: Always inspect frames while holding them above the hive box!

Nucleus Hives : Queens Laying!

Things have been really busy around the farm. I was ready to give up on my nucleus hives but an inspection tonight shows that both hives have laying queens. The eggs are very young, meaning that the queens just started to lay in the last couple of days.

4-frame nuc box

In other news, I found some evidence of a skunk going around my hives so I placed a skunk trap near my boxes last weekend. I did not catch anything yet. I think I am going to have to try something other than peanut butter on bread ( a suggested skunk bait).

Skunk trap

The hive which I created my nuc boxes from was very heavily congested so I spread out their existing frames and added another 9-frame box on top. I added 6 brand new frames into the hive and 3 used frames which were partially drawn out. I hope this keeps the bees busy and avoids a swarm. A swarm cell was found on a frame and I kept it in case that my nucs would not work. I must go back into the hive and cut it out as soon as possible!

Another deep super added to my 'swarm' hive

The next order of business is to place my new laying queen onto my blue hive so that the hive can start doing better.

'Land flowing of milk and honey'

Ancient Egyptian writings. Pic from link

Amihai Mazar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found the first real evidence of beekeeping the ancient east. In 2005 he excavated 30 clay cylinders which appear to be similar to ancient egyptian drawings. The hives were 80cm long and 40cm in diameter; the bees entered from a hole on one end and on the other end there was a flap so that the bee keeper could reach in and harvest honey.

I find this to be amazing. Another interesting fact is that the bees were not even local stock. They appear to be imported from what is now Turkey because the Turkish bees are less aggressive and up to 8 times more productive than the local Syrian stock. They determined what the bees were because their were some bees left in the hives.

Check out the article and the additional pictures.

Biblical Beekeeping

Cell phones vs. Bees

There has been articles circulating around in the news regarding cell phone radiation and their effects on bees. The study which I am talking about is from Panjab University, India. It claims to have found a co-relation with cell phone use and colony health.


Here is a link to the study:


PanjabUniversityBeeStudyPDF


I read through this study and I cannot stop laughing. They used what appears to be some fairly sophisticated equipment to measure 'Flight Activity', 'Returning Ability' and 'Pollen Foraging Ability' along with a power density monitor to measure the Electro Magnetic Radiation. They also recorded how productive the queens were and did other quantitative analysis. It turns out that the hive that was exposed to 15min twice a day during peak hours and only twice a week had its colony collapse. Oh no!


The key part of this academic study and that part that makes me laugh is the fact that there was only one hive exposed to cell phone radiation and another hive which had phones turned off in them. How did these people decide that a single test hive was sufficient to publish results? It is ridiculous that someone would publish a study that only tested two hives. All beekeepers and I would assume legitimate scientists know that in order to make any type of conclusions, you need test and retest and a variety of test subjects. Something much more reasonable would have been 10 beehives with active cellphones; 10 with inactive cellphones and 10 regular hives with no changes. That would have been a lot more convincing to me.


I do believe that Electro Magnetic Radiation does have an effect on many living animals. There has been some legitimate studies which this have proven that bees do not do as well when they are near high voltage lines and so on.

Just another reason not to keep a cell phone in your pocket.

Bizarro: Comic Strip

A co-worker gave me this comic at work today.

You can check out Dan Piaros' work at his website:


Bizarro Comics

It's not every day that you see a comic strip about bees!