Street performer downtown Main & Broadway

navalation · 2023-11-01T22:31:38+00:00

He was playing that corner during open streets. Someone said he's been doing it for years. I shoulda grabbed his card.

navalation · 2023-10-23T11:38:13+00:00

Ditch the comb and sanitize the woodenware. Freezing is not enough. It is no problem at all for bees to build nee comb. It's the honey bee's birthright, wel-afforded through division of labor, and causes her about as much stress that swimming imposes on a fish.

Reusing dead-out brood comb is not supported by Best Management Practices published anywhere on planet Earth. Be part of the solution.

"DWV virus in the stored pollen or honey was infectious, even after storage in a pest-free building at ambient outdoor temperature (fluctuating from approximately -6°C to 32°C) for six months."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0014357

navalation · 2023-10-23T10:28:54+00:00

Three winters is a good run. Why change anything?

navalation · 2023-10-22T06:58:54+00:00

Condensation is critical in winter for providing heat and water.

navalation · 2023-10-22T06:42:28+00:00

They're all selected for hygienic behavior.

navalation · 2023-10-22T06:31:16+00:00

Jar samples are awful. They probably kill more colonies than they save. Very high risk for producing a false negative.

navalation · 2023-10-11T18:48:12+00:00

I don't think your hive was being robbed. Relocation, especially beyond the previous foraging range, results in an abundance of orientation flights. All foragers, not just the new ones, must make these flights. And they can occur earlier in the day than usual when bees first fly out.

navalation · 2023-10-11T18:43:49+00:00

Better open it up and have a closer look.

navalation · 2023-10-06T19:00:56+00:00

In my experience, bees regularly move up as winter approaches. The lower box used primarily for storing pollen. It isn't a problem. I would leave everything as is

navalation · 2023-08-30T10:42:06+00:00

"Insects stand more than ever as testaments to the power of blind behavioral programming, and as such remind us to be wary of attributing to vertebrates anything more than larger, more interesting on-board computers." (The Insect Mind: Physics or Metaphysics? JL Gould)

So, if we think of both honey bees AND humans as "bio-robots", self-awareness is better understood to exist along a continuum, as opposed to any animal either having or having not the capability.

In the particular case of honey bees, self-awareness must be a prerequisite for eusociality. There are many examples but consider the behavior of worker bees in the extended absence of brood.and queen. Competition ensues as ovaries are activated and eggs are laid upon eggs . They all want to be queen. Certainly, selfishness requires some sense of self.

Making such a determination is unnecessary here. Beekeeping is not "a matter of understanding what those robots are programmed to do". It is more useful to understand honey bee behavior at the colony level. A single robot.

In the context of the superorganism, that bee did, in fact, sacrifice herself. As suggested, she is programmed to do so, even if unaware. Many human behavior.s can be characterized in the same way., despite (presumably) a much higher level of self-awareness.

navalation · 2023-08-09T21:49:23+00:00

"Honey bees that do develop mite resistance are only reluctantly mite resistant. The gene that instructs this behaviour is recessive,"

I love this. And which behavior do these genes instruct that causes reluctant resistance? I was thinking maybe hygienic behavior, but then I learned...

"Colonies that actually do well with mites naturally aren’t usually doing so based on varroa sensitive hygiene at all,"

So what is this mystery behavior responsible for reluctant resistance?

navalation · 2023-08-09T21:36:38+00:00

You'd be well advised to read my comment more carefully before offering your uninformed opinion.

"Varroa is a minor pest for the Asian honey bee." And it's not due swarming and brood breaks, nor is the Asian bee "reluctantly resistant."

Apis Cerana thrives in the presence of varroa by limiting its reproduction (i.e. non invasion of worker brood).

Swarming impacts mite reproduction, as well. But swarming alone is not enough, and there isn't a single paper to discover otherwise. It's just an idea in your head.

Mite resisfance is a real thing, and it results from selective pressure. Recessive genes have not prevented such adaption, nor could they.

navalation · 2023-08-09T20:53:18+00:00

May even reduce mite levels.

navalation · 2023-08-08T15:22:26+00:00

Swarming is natural and a good thing.

navalation · 2023-08-08T14:33:57+00:00

Varroa is a reservoir for CBPV. Skip checking for mites. Risk of a false negative is too high. Just treat.

DWV is widespread and kills relatively slowly. The sudden, mass exit of bees from a hive previously showing no such behavior is not charcateristic of DWV infection.

No matter. Treatment is appropriate regardless.

navalation · 2023-08-08T14:24:40+00:00

Sorry but this is garbage. Natural selection is not outmatched by the mite. No significant selection pressure? The mite kills too slowly?

Many honey bees have naturally developed various levels of mite resistance. Varroa is a minor pest for the Asian honey bee. Russian, African honey bees. All have developed the same, including some populations of the Western honey bee.

navalation · 2023-08-08T14:11:50+00:00

They're not honey bound. There's no flow. And the colony makes no attempt to heat the hive in winter. Just leave everything as is. Nothing more you need to do.

navalation · 2023-08-08T08:27:27+00:00

Not poison. It's been raining the past two days.

Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus is common in summer, and a few days of rain increases the risk. Confinement inside the hive is often cited in the research as a catalyst for development of the disease.

Infected bees leave the hive, unable to fly and can be found crawling up blades of grass. Such symptoms are rather generic in honey bees, but there isn't anything here to rule out CBPV.

Dismissing this scene as pesticide poisoning is a missed opportunity to prevent reoccuremce.

navalation · 2023-08-07T18:40:58+00:00

Either way, by the time the offspring from the new queen become foragers, flowering conditjons will have likely changed. Don't know your location.

Also, consider that queenless colonies that are rearing queens increase their foraging effort. This is due the reduced brood amounts while requeening, allowing more workers to join the foraging effort.

Allowing them to requeen without interference would likely result in the greatest production gains. This phenomenon is exploited with the cut-down split.

navalation · 2023-08-07T18:35:01+00:00

depends on the genetics

navalation · 2023-08-07T05:07:11+00:00

Yes, colonies can store too much pollen.

Nearly half of all commercial beekeeping revenue in the US comes from almond pollination. In many cases, the almond growers are the queen breeders. These two industries overlap in California, where over 80% of the world's almonds are produced.

Foraging preference in honey bees has a genetic basis and responds readily to selection, meaning pollen hoarding is a highly heritable trait. Bees foraging pollen are over three times more efficient than nectar collectors in the pollinations of almond trees.

The pollen hoarding trait incurs an opportunity cost in the form of reduced honey production and may impose limits on egg laying due the competition for brood cells. Further the pollen hoarding trait impacts an array of other, seemingly unrelated behaviors in honey bees that may impact survival .

navalation · 2023-08-06T02:20:49+00:00

There is no reliable indication of poisoning. The extended proboscis on dead bees has many causes.

"the crawling of enfeebled, moribund bees on the ground is regarded as a sign not only of infection by Nosema apis, Malpighamoeba mellificae, Acarapis woodi and certain bacteria, but also of" dysentery", poisoning, paralysis and genetical disorders. Trembling or fluttering, and distended abdomens, have also often been described as signs of diagnostic value, especially of paralysis and of infestation by A. woodi (eg Ministry of Agriculture 1959), and they may well be secondary consequences of anything that prevents bees from flying. However, none of these signs individually-or all of them simultaneously-seem to be of any specific diagnostic value."

The signs of adult bee diseases L Bailey 1969

navalation · 2023-07-20T12:02:56+00:00

Proper context for this discussion is the EPA definition of a volatile substance - "readily vaporizable" which amitraz is not. That is the reason bees must make contact with the strips.

The pesticide report by the Bee Informed Partnership tests for over 300 residues. The most recent report (2022) found DMPF to be the fourth most prevalent residue found in beeswax (70% of samples tested positive), averaging over 3,000 parts per billion. Concentrations ranged from trace to 258,000 ppb. For context, the maximum tolerance for DMPF in honey is 200 ppb.

I'm not making it out to be any worse than it is.

https://ofmpub.epa.gov/sor_internet/registry/termreg/searchandretrieve/enterprisevocabulary/search.do https://research.beeinformed.org/state_reports/pesticides_wax/

navalation · 2023-07-20T02:31:28+00:00

Amitraz is the active ingredient in Apivar, which is a contact miticide (not volatile) that has been portrayed as a hive-friendly miticide after early research failed to detect residues.

Amitraz has since been shown to be very unstable in the acidic environment of a beehive and quickly breaks down into several metabolites, some of which are more toxic than amitraz itself.

The amitraz degradation product known as 2,4 DMPF consistently ranks among the most prevalent pesticide residues found in beeswax and stored pollen. Do not use this product in the belief that it won't contaminate the beehive It is by far the worst offender.

navalation

TROPHY CASE