Enemy under the Microscope

I've previously posted about Varroa Destructor, the asian mite that poses a huge threat to european honeybees, this week I spotted a dead one on the plastic board that goes beneath the nucleus hive. At about 2mm across and flat like a little discus they take some searching to spot but every bee keeper needs to look out for these critters.

Tiny 2mm corpse

One aspect of beekeeping I've not really spent any time on yet is microscopy. There's various things one can do with a microscope such as identifying bee diseases and pollen grains, learning a bit about bee anatomy and artificial insemination of queens if you ever feel the inclination. I haven't got round to examining the stomach contents of squashed bees for bacteria or searching for tracheal mites but I may give it a whirl on a rainy day.

Anyway a couple of years ago and purely for aesthetic reasons I acquired an antique microscope and have never really felt the need to upgrade to one of those new fangled models made in the past hundred years or so. Actually it's probaby a replica really as those old microscopes didn't have the best quality glass lenses and this one seems pretty sharp when it's focused. Also if it'd been made back in the days of yore I suspect it would have a manufacturers name on it somewhere, optics manufacturers were keen on that sort of thing -afterall it pays to advertise. The only downside to this very easy to use antique/possibly mock antique gadget is that like pretty much everything else made before 1996 it lacks a USB port, does look pretty tho.

The cutting edge of microscopy,
circa 1870.

I popped the dead mite on a slide, flipped it onto it's back and stuck it under the microscope. To get a photo with it I held my cameraphone (which now an HTC Desire S if you were wondering) above the microscope and manouvered it till I could see into it on the phone screen.Sounds easy enough ..but it wasn't. The slightest movement or angle change on the phone meant losing the image entirely and letting the phone rest on the viewfinder meant pushing the viewfinder down and losing focus.

For your delectation here's what I saw..

Varroa Destructor under the lens

Not the prettiest thing you could find at the bottom of the garden.Well actually I've not seen what you keep in your garden but it's certainly not the prettiest thing in mine. The structures you can see are it's eight legs and I think the thing sticking up in the middle is actually it's mouthparts, they punch a hole in the bee and suck out the hemolymph. Since it's discovery in the Soviet Union and Japan in the sixties (thanks Wikipedia!) these critters have travelled all over the world affecting honeybee stocks everywhere warm enough to support them with the exceptions of Autralia who's bio screening measures seems to be working, part of Libya and the Pitcairn Islands -probably on account of there's nothing of any actual interest to anyone on them. You may be thinking hang on it's a tiny creature with little midget legs how far can they actually travel? Well they can go up to about 3 1/2 miles riding a bee but they've also managed to travel huge distances thanks to people. Yeah people moved them all around the world by shipping bees all over the place so basically it's a man made problem. Face palms all round! Weather permitting I'll be treating the nucleus for varroa this weekend.

The Swarm

The other Tuesday I was at work when I got a text from my housemate telling me the bees were swarming. I hadn't expected that but should've known that if they were going to do it it would be on a working day. Hive2 had been very populous so I guessed they were probably the culprits. To be fair they had been making swarm queen cells so they had warned me, however instead of doing an artificial swarm I'd hoped they'ed be happy with a couple of supers adding to give them more space and the swarm cells being squished but that wasn't the case. Next year I'll do an artificial swarm instead and hopefully avoid it.

A real actual photo taken in my back garden.
I'm one of the guys on the left with a flamethrower.

When people think of swarms they probably think of the 1978 killer bee film "The Swarm." The film was a disaster in every sense, a box office flop and an embarrassment to Michael Caine who said it was the worst film he's ever been in. It's basically about a humongous swarm of scary killer bees in america that kill loads of people. Inspired by the africanized honey bee which to be fair is an aggressive little hybrid bugger. The africanized bee was actually developed by a chap wanting to make a bee better suited to tropical conditions. He certainly managed to do what he wanted and they're great as far as honey yield goes, unfortunately they'll also happily chase people up to a mile before stinging them to death. :-s It's actually pretty rare for them to kill people really but the media had a field day with it. Fact is they're used by beekeepers all over the world these days having mixed with bee stocks everywhere warm enough to support them. Fortunately for us in the UK our climate is too cold for them to survive here so unless global warming changes that we don't need to lose sleep over them. So remember folks, no africanized honey bees in the UK and as disaster movies go avoid The Swarm.

People have asked me why bees swarm and in short the answer is to reproduce. Within the colony there's a queen laying eggs so technically the bees are reproducing but that maintains the colonies population, if you think of the colony as a one super organism then to reproduce it needs to make up a whole new colony and that's what the swarm is. They swarm leaves the parent colony find a new home and becomes another independent colony. When a colony throws out a prime swarm what happens is a large proportion of the workforce leave to start a new colony taking the old queen with them whilst the rest stay in the hive where hopefully a new queen they've made will then take over and head up the colony. They also throw out smaller secondary swarms or 'cast swarms' with new queens but typically these are pretty small and can be as little as a half pint of bees.

Back to the bees in my garden then.. right where was I? Well as I said I was at work luckily I was able to take an hour's annual leave and pop home. When I got there my housemate was watching them from an upstairs window and I have to say it was really impressive. Above my garden thousands of bees were milling about darkening the sky in a huge three dimensional cloud. They seemed to have a few false starts tho as they kept going back into the hive then pouring out again -was hard to believe they could actually all fit back into the hive. The sound was also something else. We all know the sound a bee makes but throw up about 20,000 including a contingent of drones and you've got quite a formidable noise.

Unfortunately the individual bees being small I couldn't get a decent photograph of them in flight but here's an image my housemate took from the bathroom window.

There's a buzz in the air

Doesn't really get across quite how impressive it was but you can see a few black dots.. Whilst bees are swarming they can look pretty intimidating but contrary to popular belief they're not really aggressive. Whilst I wouldn't suggest you run into the middle and start shouting and waving your arms about they're actually preoccupied with finding a new home to live in and not attacking people. After all the swarm has no actual home to defend, they're gorged on honey and it's not like they eat people anyway is it?

I quickly hatched a clever plan to catch the bees and put out three boxes with used honeycomb and food stores and a drop of lemongrass essential oil (it attracts bees dontchaknow) in them so that when they did settle and choose a place to live they'ed choose one of those boxes and I'd still have my bees :) I then went back to work and when I got home in the evening I could see bees coming and going from the box entrances. Having outwitted a creature with a brain the size of a sesame seed I felt rather smug.

Unfortunately I was completely wrong and when I checked the next  day I found that the bees in my baited boxes were just robbing them for their colonies back in the hives, the swarm itself has vanished. Going by the capacity of the Hive2 and how full it was before and after the swarm I reckon it was about 20,000 bees that went along with the old queen. Hopefully when they settled someplace some other beekeeper got a call and now has my bees in a new hive making lots of honey. All isn't lost for me tho, I still have bees in my hives just one of the colonies is slightly smaller now.