Culprit found for honeybee deaths in California almond groves

February 4, 2019 by Misti Crane, The Ohio State University

It's about time for the annual mass migration of honeybees to California, and new research is helping lower the chances the pollinators and their offspring will die while they're visiting the West Coast.

Each winter, professional beekeepers from around the nation stack hive upon hive on trucks destined for the Golden State, where February coaxes forward the sweet-smelling, pink and white blossoms of the Central Valley's almond trees.

Almond growers rent upwards of 1.5 million colonies of honeybees a year, at a cost of around $300 million. Without the bees, there would be no almonds, and there are nowhere near enough native bees to take up the task of pollinating the trees responsible for more than 80 percent of the world's almonds. The trouble was, bees and larvae were dying while in California, and nobody was sure exactly why. The problem started in adults only, and beekeepers were most worried about loss of queens.

Then in 2014, about 80,000 colonies—about 5 percent of bees brought in for pollination—experienced adult bee deaths or a dead and deformed brood. Some entire colonies died.

With support from the Almond Board of California, an industry service agency, bee expert Reed Johnson of The Ohio State University took up the task of figuring out what was happening. Results from his earlier research had shown that some insecticides thought safe for bees were impacting larvae. Building on that, Johnson undertook a new study, newly published in the journal Insects, that details how combinations of insecticides and fungicides typically deemed individually "safe" for honeybees turn into lethal cocktails when mixed.

Johnson, an associate professor of entomology, and his study co-authors were able to identify the chemicals commonly used in the almond groves during bloom because of California's robust and detailed system for tracking pesticide applications. Then, in a laboratory in Ohio, they tested combinations of these chemicals on honeybees and larvae.

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Finding an elusive mutation that turns altruism into selfish behavior among honeybees

Date:  January 8, 2019

Source:  Molecular Biology and Evolution (Oxford University Press)

Among the social insects, bees have developed a strong and rich social network, where busy worker bees tend to the queen, who in turn, controls reproduction for the benefit of the hive.

But the South African Cape honey bee (Apis mellifera capensis) can flaunt these rules. In a process of genetic trickery called thelytoky syndrome, worker bee females ignore the queen's orders and begin to reproduce on their own.

Scientists, in their own altruistic effort to protect the Cape honey bees from a recent devastating blight, transferred the Cape honey bees to a northeastern region -- only to see the Cape bees wreak havoc among colonies of the neighboring honey bee subspecies A. m. scutellata.

The A. capensis bees turned from altruistic workers to the guests who would not leave -- becoming social parasites that forage on their own into foreign colonies, reproducing an army of loyal workers, stealing all the honey, and eventually, dethroning the queen and taking over the host colony.

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Think of honeybees as 'livestock,' not wildlife, argue experts

Date:  January 25, 2018

Source:  University of Cambridge

Summary:

Contrary to public perception, die-offs in honeybee colonies are an agricultural not a conservation issue, argue researchers, who say that manged honeybees may contribute to the genuine biodiversity crisis of Europe's declining wild pollinators.

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All the buzz—bigger honeybee colonies have quieter combs

January 23, 2018 by Lindsey Hadlock, Cornell University

When honeybee colonies get larger, common sense suggests it would be noisier with more bees buzzing around.

But a study recently published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology reports that bigger honeybee colonies actually have quieter combs than smaller ones.

"The surprising result was that - and at first I thought something must be wrong - when there are more bees on the comb, the vibrations are actually reduced," said Michael Smith, a doctoral student in neurobiology and behavior and the paper's lead author. Po-Cheng Chen, a former doctoral student in the field of electrical and computer engineering, is a co-author of the paper.

The researchers found the bees actively damp vibrations in the comb, possibly by the way they grasp the combs, though more study is needed to verify the mechanism.

The finding is important because bees communicate with substrate vibrations in the comb. Bees perform a waggle dance to communicate to other bees the exact location of a patch of flowers; the dance vibrates the comb to spread the message to other bees. Even queen bees transmit vibrational signals to communicate with other queens. But in order to convey these messages, or any message, one must eliminate noise.

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Agricultural fungicide attracts honey bees

Date:  January 8, 2018

Source:  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Summary:

When given the choice, honey bee foragers prefer to collect sugar syrup laced with the fungicide chlorothalonil over sugar syrup alone, researchers report.

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Honey bees fill ‘saddlebags’ with pollen. Here’s how they keep them gripped tight

By Katherine KorneiNov. 27, 2017 , 10:35 AM

Bees don’t just transport pollen between plants, they also bring balls of it back to the hive for food. These “pollen pellets,” which also include nectar and can account for 30% of a bee’s weight, hang off their hind legs like overstuffed saddlebags (pictured). Now, researchers have investigated just how securely bees carry their precious cargo. The team caught roughly 20 of the insects returning to their hives and examined their legs and pollen pellets using both high-resolution imaging and a technique similar to an x-ray. 

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Colony density, not hormones, triggers honeybee 'puberty'

May 5, 2017 by Linda B. Glaser

New research helps answer a long-standing mystery of how honeybees sense the size and strength of their colony, a critical cue for the bees to switch from investing solely in survival to also investing in reproduction.

In a paper published May 3 in the Journal of Experimental Biology, a Cornell-led research group reports on how workers detect that their colony has reached a threshold to invest in a special type of reproductive comb.

In honeybees, the first sign that a colony can "afford" to invest resources in reproduction, as opposed to making investments only in survival and growth, is when workers begin to build a special type of beeswax comb, drone comb, used for rearing drones (reproductive males). Like pubescent humans, a colony that is building drone comb is not yet fully reproductive, but its workers have detected that the colony is strong enough to begin investing resources into reproduction for use in the future. Bees only begin building drone comb once their colony has enough workers, about 4,000. But how do the workers detect that their colony is large enough?

The researchers – neurobiology and behavior doctoral student Michael L. Smith, Phoebe A. Koenig '16, and Harvard University doctoral student Jacob M. Peters – experimentally tested the effect of three possible cues that would trigger bees to begin constructing cells of beeswax comb used for rearing drones. These potential signals included worker density, volatile pheromone concentration and nest temperature. After experimentally increasing each of these cues, they measured how much drone comb the bees then built. They found that only increasing worker density induced workers to build a higher proportion of drone comb relative to a control. Both higher temperature and higher concentration of volatile pheromones had no effect on the colony's comb building.

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Seek and you shall find: Bees remain excellent searchers even when ill

Date: September 12, 2016

Source: Queen Mary University of London

Honeybees are hardwired to efficiently search the landscape enabling them to continue working for the greater good of their hives even when they are sick, according to new research co-authored by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

Radar technology has been used to show for the first time that bees remain nimble and able to search and respond to their environment even when they have infections or viruses.

Honeybees tirelessly commute between rewarding flower patches and their hive, often hundreds or even thousands of metres apart. Their remarkable navigational skills rely on distinct landmarks, such as trees or houses, which they very efficiently find and memorise on orientation flights.

Experts fitted a transponder, a tiny dipole aerial much lighter than the nectar or pollen normally carried by the bee, to the thorax of the bee. Tracking each bee individually they would pick up a radar signal form the transponder showing where and how it was flying.

Co-author Professor Juliet Osborne from University of Exeter, said: "We tracked the individual flying bees with a harmonic radar system. This involves attaching a very lightweight aerial to their back but it doesn't affect how fast they fly, or how much nectar they collect. It is still the only method for getting these really detailed data on where the bee flies."

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China's honey bee losses are low compared with West

August 24, 2016

Since concern about widespread honey bee colony losses began 10 years ago, there have been surveys carried out to assess winter losses in North America and many European countries. So far, the picture in China, the largest beekeeping country in the world, has been unclear. Now for the first time, information about winter losses from a large-scale survey carried out from 2010-13 has been published.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Apicultural Research, official journal of the International Bee Research Association (IBRA), Zhiguang Liu and Wei Shi from the Institute of Apicultural Research, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing and colleagues, report on a three-year survey using standard questionnaires developed by the international COLOSS Association. In total, they received 3,090 responses, including 485 from part-time beekeepers, 2,216 from sideline beekeepers, and 389 from commercial beekeepers. Between them these beekeepers managed some 140,000 colonies, that is about 2.4 % of China's six million colonies.

The results showed that colony losses were generally low (on average 10.1%), compared to published results from Europe and the USA. There were however variations between years (ranging from 8.5 to 12.0 %), between provinces (ranging from 2.5 to 19.0%), and between different sizes of beekeeping operation (ranging from 7.6 to 12.1%).

The authors speculate that reasons for the lower losses compared to those of other countries may be due to a high genetic diversity in their honey bees, regular replacement of queen bees by the beekeepers, and because the average size of beekeeping operation is small, meaning that beekeepers can pay close attention to their hives, in particular to the way they control the parasitic varroa mite. The authors also discuss why losses may be consistently higher in certain regions.

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How honey bees 'telescope' their abdomens

Date: July 25, 2016

Source: Entomological Society of America

Honey bees are able to wiggle their abdomens in a variety of ways. Now new research published in the Journal of Insect Science shows how they are able to do it.

In 2015, a team of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing used a high-speed camera to observe how honey bees curl their abdomens while in flight and under restraint, confirming that bees can manipulate the shape of their abdomens, but only in one direction -- down, toward the bee's underside.

Now the same team has identified the mechanism behind that movement. Specialized membranes that connect a honey bee's abdominal segments are thicker on the top of the abdomen than on the bottom, allowing curling in just one direction.

Honey bee abdomens contain up to nine overlapping segments that are similar to little armored plates. A thin, flexible layer of cells called the folded intersegmental membrane (FIM) connects the tough outer plates, allowing each concentric segment not just to attach to its neighbor, but to slide into the next one. The authors call this movement "telescoping."

"Our research on the ultrastructure of the FIM is of great significance to reveal the bending and flexing motion mechanism of the honey bee abdomen," said Professor Shaoze Yan, one of the co-authors. "During nectar feeding, a honey bee's abdomen does high-frequency respiratory exercises and assists the suction behavior of mouthparts to improve the intake efficiency."

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Artist plans to paint 50,000 honeybees around the world

Jun 20, 2016

Matt Willey talks about his Good for the Hive Initiative to paint 50,000 honeybees (in about 100 murals) around the world. He's painting 3 this summer in Durham, Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

Mark Schultzmschultz@newsobserver.com

Watch video

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/chapel-hill-news/article84895822.html#storylink=cpy

Bee McBeeface and Beeyoncé win internet poll to name university's bees

Date: June 14, 2016

Source: KTH The Royal Institute of Technology

A Swedish university conducted a web poll to name the queens of the campus' two new honey bee hives, and the results were perhaps not so surprising: "Bee McBeeface" and "Beeyoncé" were the winning names.

Bee McBeeface and Beeyoncé are the names the internet has chosen for the queens of two honey bee colonies that were recently introduced to the Stockholm campus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Like the participants in the online poll that voted to christen a British polar research vessel Boaty McBoatface, the majority of participants in this poll showed a clear preference for the silly names over more earnest nominations -- some of which paid homage to women who broke through gender barriers at KTH and in Sweden.

While the British Antarctic Survey ultimately overturned Boaty McBoatface's victory, KTH accepted the voice of the people without hesitation. "The vote was fair and open, and a solid majority favored these names," says KTH's Environmental Coordinator Lina Häckner. "We received more than 10,000 votes; Bee McBeeface won 69 percent of the votes, and Beeyoncé got 16 percent."

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How honeybees do without males

Date: June 7, 2016

Source: Uppsala Universitet

An isolated population of honeybees, the Cape bees, living in South Africa has evolved a strategy to reproduce without males. A research team from Uppsala University has sequenced the entire genomes of a sample of Cape bees and compared them with other populations of honeybees to find out the genetic mechanisms behind their asexual reproduction.

Most animals reproduce sexually, which means that both males and females are required for the species to survive. Normally, the honeybee is no exception to this rule: the female queen bee produces new offspring by laying eggs that have been fertilised by sperm from male drones. However, one isolated population of honeybees living in the southern Cape of Africa has evolved a strategy to do without males.

In the Cape bee, female worker bees are able to reproduce asexually: they lay eggs that are essentially fertilised by their own DNA, which develop into new worker bees. Such bees are also able to invade the nests of other bees and continue to reproduce in this fashion, eventually taking over the foreign nests, a behaviour called social parasitism.

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Biologists discover sophisticated 'alarm' signals in honey bees

'Stop signals' found to encode predator danger, attack context

Date: March 25, 2016

Source: University of California - San Diego

Bees can use sophisticated signals to warn their nestmates about the level of danger from predators attacking foragers or the nest, according to a new study.

Biologists at UC San Diego and in China found that an Asian species of honey bee can produce different types of vibrational "stop signals" when attacked by giant Asian hornets.

These signals have different effects depending upon type of danger and the context. A bee delivers a stop signal by giving another bee a brief, vibrational pulse, usually through a head-butt.

"Surprisingly, this signal encodes the level of danger in its vibrational frequency, its pitch, and the danger context through the duration of each pulse," said James Nieh, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who headed the research team., which was also led by Ken Tan, a professor at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Science.

The scientists report their discovery, which they say is the most sophisticated form of alarm signaling found in a social insect, in a paper published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

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57 different pesticides found in poisoned honeybees

A new method to detect a wide range of pesticides could help save bee populations

Date: March 10, 2016

Source: Elsevier

European honeybees are being poisoned with up to 57 different pesticides, according to new research published in the Journal of Chromatography A. A new method for detecting a whole range of pesticides in bees could help unravel the mystery behind the widespread decline of honeybees in recent years, and help develop an approach to saving them.

Honeybees are under threat globally: in the US, dramatic declines in bee populations due to a condition called colony collapse disorder (CCD) continues to put crops at risk an farmers out of business. Several studies have shown a link between pesticide use and bee deaths and the European Union has banned the use of neonicotinoid pesticides.

But it's not as simple as banning one pesticide that's killing bees; the relationship between pesticide use and bee death is complex and scientists are still trying to figure out exactly what's happening. In the new study, researchers from the National Veterinary Research Institute in Poland have developed a method for analyzing 200 pesticides at the same time, to figure out what's really putting honeybees at risk.

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Honeybees, ants may provide clues to suicide in humans

Date: January 27, 2016

Source: Florida State University

Could human suicide have evolutionary roots in self-sacrificial behaviors like those seen in species such as honeybees and ants?

A Florida State University researcher who is one of the nation's foremost experts in suicide is trying to find out.

Thomas Joiner, the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Psychology, led a team of researchers in examining scientific knowledge and drawing parallels between suicide in humans and the self-sacrificial behaviors of colony-like -- or eusocial -- species such as shrimp, mole rats and insects.

"The idea that something mysterious and scary like suicide in humans could have some sort of analog in animals is not only kind of fascinating, but also really promising in terms of trying to figure it all out," Joiner said.

In a paper recently published in the journal Psychological Review, the researchers theorize that humans exhibit the characteristics of eusocial species such as relying on multigenerational and cooperative care of young and utilizing division of labor for successful survival.

"Humans are a species that is eusocial, and that's an important starting point," Joiner said. "That suggests a certain set of characteristics, including some really striking self-sacrifice behaviors."

Those eusocial behaviors, understood as part of what is called inclusive fitness in evolutionary biology, are adaptive.

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Queen creates army of super honeybees that can defeat deadly varroa mites

The queen’s mother was from a colony in Vermont which managed to survive the cold winters there and also outbreaks of disease

Ian Johnston

Friday 15 January 2016

A beekeeper in the US is breeding honeybees can kill the varroa mite, one of the main reasons why colonies have been dying off around the world, according to a report.

Jeff Berta, who lives on a farm in western Pennsylvania, has a honeybee queen whose appear to be resistant to the mites, according to the NPR radio station.

The queen’s mother was from a colony in Vermont which managed to survive the cold winters there and also outbreaks of disease.

And its father was a drone from bees raised at Purdue University which were found to groom themselves in a unique way.

“The bees will take the mite and they will bite the legs and will chew on the mite,” Mr Berta told NPR.

“And if they bite a leg off of the mite, the mite will bleed to death.

“So the bees are actually fighting back. That's the type of genetic line we're after right now.”

A honeybee with a parasitic varroa mite has been compared to a human infected with a blood-sucking domestic cat.

The queen, known as number 18, is being studied by scientists with funding from the US Department of Agriculture.

Most efforts to save honeybees from the mites have used pesticides designed to kill the latter, while sparing the former, with limited success.

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More than 14% of England's honeybee colonies died over winter

British Beekeepers Association says level of winter losses is unacceptably high as European Food Safety Authority launches investigation into bee threats

Alison Benjamin

Thursday 25 June 2015 16.33 BSTLast modified on Thursday 25 June 201516.39 BST

More than 14% of England’s honeybee colonies died over the winter, the latest research from the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) has found.

The BBKA’s annual survey of beekeepers across England’s found that winter losses were highest in the west country (18%) and lowest in the north of England (11.8).

The average reported losses for 2014/15 of 14.5% were higher than 2013/14 when only 9.6% of colonies perished, but much lower than the winter of 2012/13 when a third of hives died, and below the average losses since the survey began eight years ago of 19.3%.

The BBKA says winter losses remain at an “unacceptably high levels and are still in excess of what might be considered normal losses of 5-10%”. It blames poor and variable weather, bee diseases and parasites such as the varroa mite and starvation.

But Francis Ratnieks, professor of apiculture at Sussex University, describes this year’s losses as very low and easily managed by beekeepers. “Honeybee colonies have the capacity to double in number every summer when they swarm, or the beekeepers splits the colony in two, so 14.5% winter losses are totally sustainable,” he says. “A good summer allowed the bees to forage and go into the winter well fed and strong.”

His own 100-strong apiary lost just two hives. “If you make sure your bees have food, a healthy queen and are treated for the varroa mite, you should be able to get winter losses down to single digits,” Ratnieks insists.

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A smelling bee? Deadly mite would be a favorite to win

Date: June 3, 2015

Source: Michigan State University

Summary: If there were an international smelling bee, a deadly mite would be a favorite to win. New research has revealed that Varroa mites, the most-serious threat to honeybees worldwide, are infiltrating hives by smelling like bees.

The Michigan State University-led study, appearing in the current issue of Biology Letters, shows that being able to smell like their hostess reduces the chance that the parasite is found and killed.

The parasites were originally found on Asian honeybees. The invasive species, however, revealed their versatility when they began infesting and killing European honeybees.

"The mites from Asian honeybees, or the original host, are more efficient in mimicking both Asian and European honeybees," said Zachary Huang, MSU entomologist and one of the papers' lead authors. "This remarkable adaptability may explain their relatively recent host shift from Asian to European honeybees."

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Bee-utiful Research: Experts Working To Improve Health Of Key Agricultural Pollinator

August 30th 2014

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

While honeybees may be best known as producers of honey and beeswax useful for candles and seals, experts from the University of Arizona want to remind you that the insects play an important role in the agriculture industry.

“Honeybees are responsible for pollinating agricultural crops that make up one-third of our diet, including fruits and vegetables. They’re the cornerstones of heart-healthy and cancer prevention diets,” adjunct professor Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, who is also a research leader at the USDA’s Carl Hayden Bee Research Center (CHBRC) explained in a statement Thursday.

In light of the essential role the insects play in pollinating crops, DeGrandi-Hoffman and her colleagues are working to optimize the health of honeybee colonies by improving their nutrition and finding ways to better control Varroa destructors – bloodsucking parasitic mites that can cause Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) in honeybees.

“We’re the honeybee nutrition lab,” DeGrandi-Hoffman said. “Humans are healthier when we have good nutrition and so are bees. We study the effects of malnutrition on bees, including the effects of fungicides and pesticides and how they alter the ability of bees to acquire nutrients from flower nectar.”

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