Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

The practice of keeping bees in hives dates back at least as far as the ancient Egyptians.  The summer edition of the National Trust magazine has an interesting  article entitled ‘The Beekeeper’ in which Emma Hill the head gardener for Dunham Massey treats the reader to some interesting facts about bees:

A bee society is predominantly female. There are three castes of bee: the single queen, who lives for five years and lays some 2,000 unfertilised or fertilised eggs a day in summer. The unfertilised ones become drones – stingless males, whose only job is to mate with the queen. The fertilised eggs become the smaller, female worker bees. Their roles include polishing cells with propolis (tree sap), guarding the hive, foraging and removing dead bees – they keep the hive spotless. During summer a hive can have 50,000 workers and a few hundred drones.

Emma has been studying bee behaviour and has observed that:

When their stomachs are full of honey (a worker bee has two stomachs – an extra one for storing honey) they’re happy and emit a low hum. A high-pitched buzz means they’re angry. I know when they’re going to sting me. A worker bee can fly two miles (3km) to collect nectar, pollen, propolis and water. They perform a waggle dance – a figure of eight movement – to show other bees where to farage and their excitement is visible.

Our bee population is threatened by the varroa mite which weakens their immune system. The bee keepers at Dunham Massey are using icing sugar to treat the disease. The sugar is sprinkled onto the bees through a fine mesh, this encourages the bees to groom which in turn removes the mite.

My consideration when deciding how to vote was which choice is the most democratic.  The latest ‘Wallbook Weekly‘ post by Christopher Lloyd explains that democracy first evolved 100 million years ago:

Bees  make a collective colony-wide decision each year on where is the best location for their next nest. This is a critical decision – the very survival of the colony depends on it – so inevitably natural selection has determined that the best possible decision making process is the one that has stood the test of time.

I shan’t go into the intricacies of exactly how the bees do their voting – you can read all out it here or refer to the Honey Bees chapter on pages 152-3 of What on Earth Evolved? 100 Species that Changed the World.

But in summary, a team of scouts will identify various potential nesting sites and then report back the location of each one to the rest of the community by means of their various dances. Other bees check out the sites before returning to the nest and scoring each one based on the length of the dance they perform in the direction of the site they think is best. After about two weeks the site with the best score is the winner and the colony swarms. It has been estimated that using this form of range voting, bees will choose the best location approximately 90% if the time.

If such excellent decision-making already exists in nature, why don’t we humans follow the same pattern in our own fledgling democracies?

One view is that bees have had millions of years to learn – through trial and error – what works best, while human forms of democracy are still very much in their infancy. Another is that modern humans are an arrogant species usually incapable of learning and listening to nature – at least in our modern, urban form.

So what does all this have to do with the choice we made today?

Well, the idea of scoring votes is clearly much closer to AV than is our traditional system of first-past-the-post. And the reason bees use scoring rather than first-past-the-post isn’t just because it tends to make better decisions. It’s also because a colony of bees has evolved to behave like a super organism not an aggregation of individuals.

What that means is that no single bee is precious of its own right to an individual vote, or is in the least bit concerned about how effectively the colonies government suits its own individual self-interest. Instead, bees do what is best for the survival of their genes throughout the generations to come. The absence of fertility in many individual bees is another aspect of this super efficient decision making body. In the same way, individual cells in our bodies sacrifice themselves for the good of our corporate whole through a process called apoptosis. When they do not, we get cancer.

Range voting therefore tends to be about making decisions that are best for the community as a whole – regardless of any individual’s self-interest. Conversely, first-past-the-post systems tend to have more to do with the inalienable right of an individual voter to cast their vote exclusively for a single candidate (or party), regardless of whether that candidate counts for more or less than 50% of the votes cast.

Mother nature always knows best

You can read the full article here.

Richard Bach

Although there aren’t many flowers out yet I have seen rather a lot of bumble bees, especially in my garden. There have even been red-tailed bumble bees which I have never seen in my garden before.  They all seem rather larger than in previous years so something in the garden must be doing them good.

A bee and a flower of average size.

Trying to find a photo that might fit this theme left me pondering on the meaning of average; size, height, intelligence, beauty etc etc.

It left me with the thought that average is often used in the context that anything above is exceptional and anything below is sub standard.   A bit of a misuse of the word which really describes the middle point between to opposite values/extremes.

For more of this weeks PhotoHunt pictures check out tnchick.

Neonicotinoids work as an insecticide by blocking specific neural pathways in insects’ central nervous systems. The chemicals impair bees’ communication, homing and foraging ability, flight activity, ability to discriminate by smell, learning, and immune systems – all of which have an impact on bees’ ability to survive.

It seems bees genetic make up makes them particularly vulnerable to neonicotinoids. Recent mapping of the bee genome has revealed that bees’ capacity to detoxify chemicals is much lower than other insects. Instead bees have two strategies to protect themselves. On the first day of foraging in a new area, scout bees are sent out first to taste the nectar and pollens – if any are adversely affected they will be expelled from the hive immediately, and the colony will avoid the area.

More information on their effect on bees can be found here.

Meanwhile the Shropshire Star reports the there is a honey bee crisis in Shropshire:

Quarrelling queens in Shropshire honey hives have left a sting in the tail for local shoppers.

Queen bees have been fighting for supremacy in Shropshire bee hives, leading to a fall in population and a slump in honey production. Queen bees usually live for up to five years and each summer lay huge numbers of eggs, which keep local hives going, but beekeepers are warning of a crisis.

This year Shropshire hives have lost hundreds of thousands of bees because colonies are replacing their queens too early, which could leave honey stocks decimated.

Today Beryl Green, from the Shropshire Beekeepers’ Association, says: “This year, the early signs were that we were back on track because we had a bumper spring harvest, which we don’t normally get. The bees emerged from winter in good condition and were able to produce a healthy quantity of honey in spring.”

However, Mrs Green added that a bizarre re-queening phenomenon had put paid to hopes for a bumper harvest in July and August.

She said: “Normally, queen bees would live for three to five years. However, the hives have been re-queening, some of them more than once.

“That means the laying of eggs has been interrupted, which has led to smaller populations. Some of our bee colonies have been completely wiped out. Each colony, or hive, contains up to 60,000 bees, so when we lose a few colonies we find ourselves seriously depleted.”

Bees descended from wasps and emerged alongside the first flowers.  They switched from dining on other insects to a diet of pollen and nectar instead.  There are 20,000 different species of bee alive today.  Some of these – especially honeybees, bumblebees and stingless bees – form highly social groups that offer a deep insight into how nature’s civilizations work.

Eusocial creatures divide up jobs between themselves.  They pass knowledge and learning on form one generation to another, care for their youngsters and even, in certain circumstances, sacrifice lives for the benefit of the group.  Such characteristics were for a long time thought to be unique to mankind when it first organized itself into tribes and eventually cities and states.  But, as any beekeeper will tell you that is not so.

Katherine Swift who wrote The Morville Hours is a beekeeper and there were many interesting snippets about bees in her book too. One of the things she mentions is that bees are now threatened by Varroa which is a parasitic mite endemic in most countries.  It arrived in the UK in the mid 1990s.  The mites attach themselves to the bees and weaken their bodies.  This is easy to treat in domesticated bees, but not in wild bees which if left untreated can lead to the extinction of whole colonies.

I say long live the bee.