Bees in the Wild https://beeswitheeb.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/ccba-honeycomb-a-way-that-appears-to-bee-right/#more-398 Dr. Seeley’s ...
Bees in the Wild
https://beeswitheeb.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/ccba-honeycomb-a-way-that-appears-to-bee-right/#more-398
The Arnot Forest is south of Ithaca, New York, where Seeley lives. Ravens, bobcats and bears wander the 4500 acres (7 square miles) of rather isolated forest. The forest area is not suitable for farming, which creates a genetically closed population for the bees. In August of 1978 Seeley wondered about the density of wild bees. So he used a technique called bee lining to discover 9 feral hives in a one area of the forest, averaging around 2.5 hives per square mile. He reported his research and didn’t think much of it for nearly 25 years.
Varroa mites arrived in New York in 1993, and in 2002 he wonder whether any wild colonies still existed. Given his baseline of 9 hives in 1978, he again ventured into the Arnot forest and found, to his surprise, 8 colonies in a similar sized area. So for anyone out there that says bees can’t exist without treatments, some proof to the contrary. Seeley has asked the following questions since that time:
Do they have varroa?
What happened to the original bees?
How do they persist without treatment?
Do they have varroa?
In 2003 Seeley put up bait hives and caught 11 colonies. Of these, 100% had varroa mites, 9% (1 colony) had Chalkbrood, and no colonies had EFB or AFB. He looked at mite drops on a sticky board over 48 hours and in May found counts as low as 2; in October he found counts as high as 40. So the hives definitely have varroa, but seem to have found a way to coexist with it.
What happened to the original bees?
Perhaps the bees in the forest have been repopulated from stock managed by beekeepers. There is a beekeeper outside the forest, and in 2011 he had two apiaries (one of which was later destroyed by a bear). Working with Professor Sasha Mikheyev from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, he found very different genetics between the wild bees and the two nearby apiaries. So the wild bees have their own distinct genes and appear to be self-sustaining.
Seeley also realized that he had samples from 37 feral hives in the Ithaca area from the 1970s, so Mikheyev was able to reconstruct the older DNA and compare it to 2011 samples. The 1970s bees had 15 distinct queen lineages across the hives, while the 2011 bees were derived from a few queens. So there has been large loss of diversity. The mitochondria DNA, which is only passed through the queen, was especially impacted and mostly from a single queen, while the nuclear DNA carried by both queens and drones was a little more diverse.
How do they persist without treatment?
Seeley posited four differences between the wild bees and colonies managed by beekeepers: hive spacing, nest size, nest structure, and genetics. On the first, the wild hives were about a half mile apart on average, so perhaps there was less drift and less robbing which resulted in less spread of disease and pests.
To test this, he set up two apiaries, each with 12 hives. Of these, 10 hives had Golden Italian queens and 2 had New World Carniolan queens. The first apiary was a row of 12 hives, with the 2 Carniolans in the middle; while the second had 12 hives spread about and roughly 50 meters apart, with the Carniolans in the center. Neither apiary received any treatments. In the row hives, he found that 34% of the drones in the Italian hives were Carniolans and when a hive crashed it was robbed out. In the dispersed hives there was no mixing of drones and little or no robbing.
As to nest size, the wild hives had a nest cavity roughly 1 Langstroth Deep in size. So he ran another experiment with two identical apiaries and no treatments. The first had 12 hives with single Langstroth Deeps to represent wild bee cavities; the second 12 hives had 4 Deeps to represent large managed hives. In the test, 83% of the small colonies swarmed while 17% of the large colonies swarmed. When he checked for varroa mites later in the season, the large hives averaged 6.2 mites per 100 bees while the smaller hives averaged 1.1 mites per 100 bees. Even more telling, ten of the large hives died over the winter while 10 of the small hives survived the winter.
Seeley didn’t have a lot to say about the nest structure or genetics. The cell size was quite similar: 5.3 mm in the wild versus 5.4 mm in standard foundation frames, so smaller cell size was not a factor. The biggest difference was propolis, as wild hives he checked had a thick coating of propolis over the inside. He wonders if this might impact the health of the bees, though he is not sure how yet.
In conclusion, Seeley offered five suggestions for beekeepers: disperse hives so they are farther apart, don’t exchange comb between hives to reduce the spread of pests and diseases, perform artificial swarming by making nucs, rear your own queens to generate local stock, and place drone comb in survivor hives to help propagate their genes.
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