Bee Hacker

Honey Bee Intelligence

beehacker — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:58:03 +0000

A single honey bee has a brain the size of a grass seed. That singular honey bee is able to do some pretty amazing things with that little seed.

It is the only animal other than us to communicate in a symbolic language. A forager/scout bee communicates to other bees the distance and direction to nectar sources or potential new homes by performing a dance in the dark. (Video after the jump…)
Individual bees are capable of being trained to recognize and differential between human faces! Researchers wondered if the bee simply matched a set of features. The trained bees on the image of the complete human face (shown at right) using sugar water in a clear glass plate. The other images contained only water. When the plates were removed (and the images were not in the same relative position to each other), the bees were attracted to the whole human face and not the scrambled face – which contains the same features. The message here is that bees perceived not only the features of the face but the spatial syntax or structure of those features.

We are now presented with a new discovery: that bees are able to teach each other. I will leave it to the scientific community to decide if these results are repeatable and if the conclusions are accurate. Enjoy.

Monitoring Honey Bee Colonies Electronically

beehacker — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 02:34:25 +0000

I recently got an email from Frank Linton. Frank works at Mitre Corp and has been interested in hive monitoring for a long time. Last year, he organized the first workshop on hive monitoring at Eastern Apicultural Society’s annual conference in Vermont. I’ll let Frank speak for himself – the following is an excerpt from his email:

Greetings fellow colony monitoring enthusiasts,

The colony monitoring website I’ve promised myself for some time 
is finally up: http://colonymonitoring.com [...] If there are 
other monitoring sources you are aware of, feel free to add them 
to the site (it’s in blog format, so you can add info yourself, 
or send me an email). [...]

I had a chat with Kim Flottum last night about what beekeepers 
really need to get from a colony monitoring device. He was quite 
clear; the two most important things beekeepers need to know are:

first, the status of the queen, and

second, the status of the colony with respect to Varroa mites.

Any ideas for a device to monitor one or both of these factors?

There’s a big market out there if you can make a device that is 
useful, reliable, and economical.

Buckaroo Beekeeper

Two of these projects, Electronic Hive Scale and Bee Counter, are very close to my heart. I encourage you to visit Frank’s fascinating website.

Apologies to readers that wish I posted more. I know…it has become a dribble. I have not been lazy. I hope to have 4 hives make it through the winter. I am building 2 pry scale kits for Puget Sound Beekeepers Association. I have a CEO job. And mostly, I have a new passion that combines multi-rotors with Tom Seeley’s work. No, really. So do stay tuned. I promise it will be interesting.

Zombies, Citizen Science, & Motivation

beehacker — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 01:47:14 +0000

A really dead zombie honey bee after phorid fly larvae emerge

As if there were not enough pests that kills bees already, we can now add parasitic phorid fly to our list of worries. This fly, recently reported in PLoS, lays its eggs in the honey bee and this turns the honey bee into a zombie. Rather, the infected honey bee exhibits zombie-like behavior. According to a fascinating, new website, ZombeeWatch.org, “Honey bees infected by the Zombie Fly leave their hives at night and are attracted to nearby lights where they become stranded and eventually die.” Kinda like zombies.

Dr. John Hafernik is a Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University and is a leading authority on phorid flys. I guess somebody has to be. Dr. Hafernik wants to know the extent of this zombie bee problem. Randy Oliver commented on the PLoS article that phorid flys have been in the US long before we saw a honey bee decline. But what if pesticides, loss of forage, viruses, narrow genetics, yada yada yada…have weakened the honey bee to a point where zombees become a significant threat to the survival of honey bees? So it is a valid question. To answer that question, Dr. Hafernik has turned to the Internet.

ZombeeWatch.org is not only an informative website but it is a great example of crowd-sourcing and citizen science on the Internet. The website uses illustrations and videos to instruct visitors how to recognise zombie behavior in honey bees, how to construct light traps, how to recognise the emergence of phorid fly larvae (or not), and finally, how to report the results back to Dr. Hafernik.

ZombeeWatch is hardly the first example of Internet-based crowd-sourced data collection and citizen science. Wayne Esaias of NASA near Beltsville, Maryland created HoneyBeeNet and is, as far as I am aware, the first bee-related citizen science website. According to the website, “Honey Bee Net is a network of beekeepers who monitor and report the weight of their hives as a way to track the timing of the honeybee nectar flow.”

Reminder: the bold purple words in this post are live links to external web pages. I put them there so you can explore each one in greater detail. They will open up in the different page from this one. If your cursor simply dwells over the link, a pop-up text message will tell you where it takes you.

There are hundreds of citizen science/crowd sourcing websites. I have compiled a short list of sites that deal specifically with bees and insect pollinators. If I missed one, please post a comment and let us know (another example of Internet crowd sourcing):

Bee Hunt – A “scientific study to understand the impact of climate change and other factors on plant-pollinator interactions, their geographic distributions, and seasonal abundances.”
Native Buzz – “Native Buzz is a citizen science project created by the University of Florida (UF) Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab. Our goal is to learn more about the nesting preferences, diversity and distribution of our native solitary bees and wasps, share the information gained and provide a forum for those interested in participating in the science and art of native beekeeping.”
Osmia Phenology Project - “The Osmia Phenology Project (OPP) is a trial project designed to test how a network of individuals of Osmia nestwatchers can contribute information about climate change through watching when bees make their nests. This project is based on past work by Wayne Esaias and his network of honeybee hive watchers( need link ) who evolved the basic protocol.”
The Great Sunflower Project - They claim that their Backyard Bee Count is the “world’s largest citizen science project focused on pollinator conservation.”
Bee Spotter – “BeeSpotter is a partnership between citizen-scientists and the professional science community designed to educate the public about pollinators by engaging them in a data collection effort of importance to the nation. It is a web-based portal at the University of Illinois for learning about honey bees and bumble bees and for contributing data to a nationwide effort to baseline information on population status of these insects.” This effort is currently limited to the state of Illinois.
Bumble Bee Conservation Initiative – “We are very interested in tracking the status of these five bumble bee species and finding out where current populations are situated. If you have seen any of these bees please send us a photo. If you are interested in finding out more, would like to see the historical distribution of these bumble bees, or would like to know how to identify them, please check out each species profile page, and consider downloading our pocket ID guides.”
Bees, Wasps, & Ants Recording Society – “BWARS is a subscription based volunteer recording society, operating under the aegis of the UK Biological Records Centre (BRC). The Society is affiliated to the British Entomological and Natural History Society (BENHS). The Society aims to promote the recording of aculeate Hymenoptera in Great Britain and Ireland, and to foster links with similar societies and interested individuals throughout Europe.” BWARS (I love that abbreviation) has two on-going citizen science projects: Colletes hederae mapping project & Bombus hypnorum mapping project.
Plant/Phenology Projects – I include this category here because flowering plants are intimately linked to insect pollinators. No forage, no pollinator. There are many citizen science phenology projects. The two best (IMHO) is National Phenological Network and Project BudBurst.

I was a little surprised at how many bee-related citizen science projects there are. However, I was not impressed with the quality of all of them. I could forgive someone for thinking, “This citizen science is just another name for cheap science“. It is inexpensive but is it effective? Some of it looks like busy work with no clear goals, timelines, or end.

Certainly crowd sourcing has worked for DARPA. The mission of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency mission is to keep the U.S. military more technologically advanced than that of potential enemies. DARPA has around 240 personnel (about 140 technical) and manages a $3.2 billion budget. They are poster boys of Big Science. In 2004, DARPA published a Grand Challenge to make a vehicle travel driverless across a 150 mile desert track . The only communication with the vehicle would be a kill switch. 100 teams registered to compete but none completed the challenge and no award was paid out. In 2005, 195 teams entered the race. Not only did 5 teams complete the entire 55 mile course consisting of more than 100 sharp turns, 3 tunnels, and sharp drop-offs but four of them did it under the 10 hour requirement. The awards paid out to winners totaled $2 million – a relative pittance. Not only did the lure of a reward (and bragging rights) inspire four successful self-piloting solutions but it also provided 291 examples of what does not work (potentially even more valuable). This idea has caught on with other branches of the U.S. government - there is now a government website listing challenges at Challenge.gov.

Let’s not forget that the U.S. Patent Office has been practicing crowd sourcing since well before the Internet. It still awards inventors with very profitable monopolies (aka patents) in return for creating useful inventions.

So is cash the answer? To solve any problem, all we need to do is to simply pour cash on it? No. I sincerely believe that the engineers that work on DARPA’s first and subsequent challenges are motivated more by a sense of accomplishment and purpose than cash. Inventors invent for the same reason that painters paint and dancers dance – they want to. Perhaps they need to. But the point I am making is that there still needs to be a reward. Hackers that write open source software, that publish Creative Commons content websites, that publish in the free-access PLOS or Wikipedia – these people are not motivated by greed. But everyone likes recognition.

For more on what motivates people, see my earlier blog posting, What Motivates Hackers and Beekeepers?

Bee City 1951

beehacker — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 01:01:43 +0000

In 1951:

Average Cost of new house $9.000.00
Average wages per year $3,510.00
Cost of a gallon of Gas 19 cents
Average Cost of a new car $1,500.00
Loaf of Bread 16 cents
Direct dial coast-to-coast telephone service begins in the United States.
First Color Television Pictures broadcast from Empire State Building
22nd Amendment is ratified which limits US presidential term of office to 8 yrs ( 2 terms )
United Nations forces recapture Seoul during the Korean War
President Harry S Truman fires General Douglas MacArthur as commander of United Nations Forces
The term Rock N Roll is coined by Cleveland Disc Jockey Alan Freed
Paul F. Moss & Thelma Schnee produce the movie Bee City (movie after the link):

This movie is in the public domain and is part of the Prelinger collection at the Internet Archive. I learned about it via Maria Popova’s blog Brain Pickings. Enjoy.

Ulster Observation Hive Project

beehacker — Mon, 28 May 2012 02:40:09 +0000

This is a posting stub where readers can comment on the Ulster Observation Hive.

What are your comments? Suggestions?

Beekeeper Rock Star

beehacker — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:56:51 +0000

Who ever thinks that self-gratification is somehow more rewarding than service to others has never taken 20,000 stinging insects into a 7th grade science class.

I recently took my newly built Ulster observation hive (click here for building instructions) with 5 frames of bees into a local elementary school. I had a PowerPoint presentation called Thank a Bee which was mostly images and few words. I talked about the difference between bees and wasps, how to remove a stinger, and how to escape Africanized Honey Bees. I followed that with several slides showing how gentle bees can be and how their pollination enables the food we love. I finished it with some photos of young people wearing bee beards! The presentation was about 20 minutes with 10 minutes for questions and 10 minutes for close viewing of the hive, putting on the beekeeper’s jacket, and inspecting other bee stuff. Each of the two class presentations went fast.

qoa1

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What I got back was worth much more than my investment. The two classes were really engaged and the kids asked a lot of really good questions. If that were not enough, today I received 56 hand written thank you letters! I’ve included four of them as a sampling.

This is just another one of many diverse rewards that beekeeping delivers. In addition to protecting insects that pollinate our food, beekeepers can inspire and entertain young people. In the eyes of 7th graders, beekeepers are rock stars. Who wooda thunk it?

Review of ‘The Queen Must Die’

beehacker — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:12:42 +0000

The_Queen_Must_Die by William Longgood

Have you ever read a book, thoroughly enjoyed it, and wondered why everyone didn’t enjoy it as much as you. Reading a book is a mostly creative process – the dry words of printed books are like mallets on the chimes of our experience. That is what makes reading such a personal experience. For too many people, all books sound tinny. For experienced beekeepers, The Queen Must Die resonates long and harmoniously.

I read so many things in The Queen Must Die that I could relate to as a maturing beekeeper yet I also learned many new things about bees as well. But Longgood is not satisfied with facts – he seeks insight by linking facts into a contextual network. Bees become a metaphor for and a reflection of humanity. That is not an easy task but he succeeds with this reader. I dislike anthropomorphism in any form – I found The Bee Movie to be thoroughly repugnant – but in The Queen Must Die, bees become a pure metaphor, a means for introspection and not simply an instrument for romantic sentimentalism.

In Chapter 49, Longgood writes about a preventing swarming in Spring:

“Beekeeping, like most human endeavors affecting nature, has a primary law: tampering begets tampering. Nature, as we now recognize, is delicately balanced. When one change is made, others must follow to accommodate the first disruption. This often sets in motion a chain of unexpected events which ultimately bring about the very result the original tampering was intended to prevent, or worse.”

There are faults in this book. It was published in 1985 – a simpler time before Varroa mites, Colony Collapse Disorder, several viruses, and Africanized Honey Bees. But none of that changes the messages in this book.

You have probably figured that I am not one to run out and buy a book simply because it is on the NY Times Best Sellers List and I doubt if this book ever made it there. The list of truly great books is long and life itself is very short. But if you enjoy beekeeping, this is a book worth reading.

2011 Beekeeping Mea Culpas

beehacker — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:33:44 +0000

One of the bloggers I admire most is Linda Tilman of Linda’s Bees – not so much because she is a Master Bee Keeper – which she is – but because she is self-confident enough to share her own failures as well as her successes on her blog pages. That is what makes her blog so damn useful and informative and fun.

So in that spirit, I am going to swallow hard and confess the errors of my beekeeping ways for 2011. I hope that you (and I) learn from my mistakes. Here we go.

1. I forgot about the bees for almost a month after harvesting 10+ gallons of honey. It was the end of the summer and not much was going on…I thought. In those four weeks, the larvae of wax moth pretty much devastated my #3 hive. It really made me feel sick to see those frames covered in webs and feces. Most of the hive absconded. If I had checked on the hive sooner, I could have removed enough frames and fat larvae to prevent absconding.

2. I did a lousy job of record keeping. I didn’t record where I got replacement queens for various hives. And I only had 3 hives but – by the end of the year – I could not reliably remember what I had done to each one. This is important because colonies are like children: they are all different and you cannot treat each one the same. I stopped weighing hives at the end of the year. Ok, I know that most beekeepers do not weight their hives but they don’t know how valuable my pry scale is as an indicator of health. If you look at what I did record (click here to see a timeline of the three hive weights), you will see that hive #3 was trying to tell me something at the end of July (“we’re outta here”). We were able to save the remaining colony by introducing a new Russian queen and putting them in a nuc for the Winter. They are now our healthiest colony.

3. I was lulled into complacency by our most vibrant hive. This hive produced the most honey and had the largest population of bees with 2 deeps full of brood. I figured that it could take care of itself. I didn’t suspect a problem until I started seeing black, greasy-looking hairless bees and bees with shriveled wings. Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus and Deformed Wing Virus probably resulted from a too high Varroa mite infestation. The mites bite the bees and so act as a vector for viruses. We applied HopGuard in September but I believe it was too little too late. The numbers of bees crashed to the point where the once vibrant hive was a deadout by January. There must be 80 pounds of honey left in that empty hive.

Deformed Wing Virus

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There were other sins of course. I could have done more to reduce Small Hive Beetle. I probably dropped or rolled one or two queens. Hive #2 had egg laying workers twice in 2011 alone. The bees got dumped out 100 yards away twice and survived (Click here to read and view)! In spite of that the hive produced honey! But these mistakes are listed under the “Shit Happens” category.

Sins #1 to #3 are avoidable. But I do have a plan for improvement this year. No, I am not going to promise to become more diligent. At my age, that would be self delusional and in denial of human nature. What needs to be done is that weights and bee counts need to be compiled automatically and mailed to me as attractive graphic charts. The hives – or small computers in the hives – need to remind me to tend to them and indicate if anything is out of nominal range. I hope I can report progress on this front by this time next year.

So in summary: Wax Moth, Small Hive Beetle, Varroa, Chronic Paralysis Virus, Deformed Wing Virus, egg-laying workers (twice), absconding, dead-out, and 10 gallons of honey. All in all, 2011 delivered a pretty good education and honey to boot. We are planning five hives this year. You can call beekeepers a lot of things but you can’t call them pessimists.

So whats your bad? I know there must be other sinners out there. Step up brothers and sisters and share your story with us.

Harvard’s RoboBee Project

beehacker — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:12:00 +0000

Robobee

You may remember about one year ago, I posted a video of robotic flying multicopters building a structure. I was so intrigued that I have built my own robotic quadcopter based on the Arducopter design with the intent of engineering a true autonomous swarm. But more on that at a future date. Here is RoboBees (click here) - a research project at Harvard seeking to develop mechanical structures that fly – inspired by bees and enabled by microelectronic fabrication technology. The mechanical device shown is the size of a penny but the MEMS technology could be used to build something much smaller. The video below shows the result of the manufacturing process but they also have videos of this thing flying and are working on an optical sensor and swarm behaviors.

Video after the jump…

Mind you, this is still very preliminary work but it is still impressive and the idea of swarms of these things in 10 years does not seem as far fetched as it did a couple months ago.

Entomologist: Meet Etymologist

beehacker — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:43:50 +0000

I am pleased to report that ‘beehacker’ has been entered into the lexicon of popular culture. WordSpy, “the word lover’s guide to new words”, has identified an emerging new meme: beehacker. A beehacker has been defined as

n. A beekeeper who uses digital tools and technology to help monitor and manage a collection of hives. Also: bee hacker.
—beehacking pp.

I would not limit the definition to only digital technology as there are a lot of different kinds of hackers. Paul McFredries is the author of both the website wordspy.com and “Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to Modern Culture”. A doff of the beekeeper’s white hat to Paul.

I feel as if an apology is in order since I have not posted since June. If you have been waiting for the next post with vexatious anticipation, then I am truly sorry…and get a frickin life. If you have been visiting the apiary timeline, you would see that I have been recording hive weights through the summer. Since harvest in June, though, it has not been a happy story…but that story will be told soon enough.

Enough about me. What have you got? Let me know what projects you are working on. Post a reply or send private email to beehacker at beehacker dought com.