The Future of American Beekeeping

This podcast was recorded in Denver, Colorado, and features a round table discussion with Tom Theobald and Miles McGaughey of Boulder County and Christy Hemenway, who was visiting from Maine. 

We focused on the current situation in the USA regarding agriculture in general and beekeeping in particular, looking at what we feel needs to be done to put right the damage caused by the use of toxic insecticides and herbicides.

Check out this episode!

Bees and Other Bugs: Teaching Natural History with PUPA Education

PUPA (Preservation & Understanding of Plants and Arthropods)

Today's podcast is a conversation with Duncan Allen and Tarryn Castle of PUPA Education, a UK-based social enterprise dedicated to educating people about the natural world, especially the myriad tiny creatures that are collectively responsible for the quality of the soil, upon which all land-based life ultimately depends.

About Duncan and Tarryn

 

Duncan Allen (CRB certified): Has 5 year’s experience of working with the public at both the University of Plymouth and the Plymouth City Museum.  He has been, Science Week co-ordinator and involved with summer school activities, seaside safaris, school visits and bug hunts promoting insect awareness and education; and most recently with the BBC “Live ‘n’ Deadly” road show.  He is the Royal Entomological Societies student representative and is currently employed at Plymouth City Museum Natural History Department where he is the volunteer supervisor.

 

Tarryn Castle (CRB certified):  Has great passion and concern for the environment.  Growing up in New Zealand she assisted children’s after school art classes whilst attending Manukau Institute of Technology.  She has spent a number of years volunteering for the green party and WOOFING (Working On Organic Farms an international volunteer organization) in New Zealand and the Wilderness Society in Australia. Whilst attending University at Aberystwyth she was involved with setting up a local Beach Cleaning Group and helped to organise and co-ordinate student volunteers as well as work with the public and raise general awareness. She is currently working on a number of projects for Buglife: The Invertebrate Conservation Trust.

 

Both Duncan and Tarryn have completed an MSc in Entomology and have practical experience and knowledge of invertebrate conservation in the U.K.

Duncan Allen & Tarryn Castle
PUPA educational Workshops
3 Newnham Road
Plymouth
Devon
PL47AN
PUPA.education@gmail.com
www.pupa-education.co.uk

PUPA Education web site - http://www.pupa-education.co.uk

Check out this episode!

Conversation with Christopher Titmuss

Christopher Titmuss, a former Buddhist monk in Thailand and India, teaches Awakening and Insight Meditation (Vipassana) around the world. He is the founder and director of the Dharma Facilitators Programme and Mindfulness Training Course, an online mentor programme.. He gives retreats, leads pilgrimages (yatras) and Dharma gatherings, as well as establishing a network of Dharma teachers around the world. Christopher has been teaching annual retreats in India since 1975

A senior Dharma teacher in the West, he is the author of 14 books includingLight on Enlightenment, Transforming Our Terror and Mindfulness for Everyday Living. More than 2000 of his Dharma talks have been recorded. A campaigner for peace and other global issues, Christopher acts in an advisory capacity to various networks and organisations working to resolve suffering including Australia, Asia (Israel, Palestine, India) and Europe. Christopher has not spent more than two months in one place since 1975, when he resided for five months teaching in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Poet and writer, he lives in Totnes, Devon, England. His work takes him to three continents every year.

www.christophertitmuss.org

www.insightmeditation.org

www.dharmafacilitators.org

www.mindfulnesstrainingcourse.org

Check out this episode!

2012 UK Natural Beekeeping Conference Panel Discussion

This is the recording of the panel discussion that took place on Sunday 12th August. On the panel were: Penny Crowder, Paul Smith, Phil Chandler, Heidi Herrmann, Johannes Wirz, Thomas Radetzki, David Heaf and John Haverson.

This recording suffers from some low-frequency vibration caused by placing the microphone on a tripod directly on top of the table the panel were using. I had to remove some voices from the back of the room that were not sufficiently clear to include.

Check out this episode!

2012 Natural Beekeeping Conference Part 1

The 2012 Natural Beekeeping Conference was held at Emerson College, East Sussex over the second weekend in August. 

This is the first podcast from the conference, featuring the opening keynote address by Phil Chandler. This blog http://beesontoast.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-importance-of-being-drone.html supports the content of the speech with a more detailed argument.

Check out this episode!

The Importance of Being a Drone

At the 2012 UK Natural Beekeeping Conference, held in August at Emerson College, East Sussex, I included in my opening speech an idea that had only occurred to me a few weeks previously, but which struck me as being fundamental to the way I had come to think about bees. Some other people at the conference also considered that the idea deserved further exploration, so I thought it worth writing more about it.

While 'natural beekeepers' are used to thinking of a honeybee colony more in terms of its intrinsic value to the natural world than its capacity to produce honey for human use, conventional beekeepers and the public at large are much more likely to associate honeybees with honey. This has been the main cause of the attention given to Apis mellifera since we began our association with them just a few thousand years ago.

In other words, I suspect most people - if they think of it at all - tend to think of a honeybee colony as 'a living system that produces honey'.

Prior to that first meeting between humans and honeybees, these adaptable insects had flowering plants and the natural world largely to themselves - give or take the odd dinosaur - and over a span of tens of millions of years had evolved alongside flowering plants and had selected those which provided the best quality and quantity of pollen and nectar for their use. We can assume that less productive flowers became extinct, save for those that adapted to using the wind, rather than insects, to spread their genes.

For all of those years - perhaps 130 million by some counts - the honeybee continuously evolved into the highly efficient, extraordinarily adaptable, colony-dwelling creature that we see and meet with today. By  means of a number of behavioural adaptations, she ensured a high degree of genetic diversity within the Apis genus, among which is the propensity of the queen to mate at some distance from her hive, at flying speed and at some height from the ground, with a dozen or so male bees, which have themselves travelled  considerable distances from their own colonies. Multiple mating with strangers from foreign lands assures a degree of heterosis - vital to the vigour of any species - and carries its own mechanism of selection for the drones involved: only the stronger, fitter drones ever get to mate.

An unusual feature of the honeybee, which adds a species-strengthening competitive edge to the reproductive mechanism, is that the male bee - the drone - is born from an unfertilized egg by a process known as parthenogenesis. This means that the drones are haploid, i.e. have only one set of chromosomes derived from their mother. This in turn means that, in evolutionary terms, the queen's biological imperative of passing on her genes to future generations is expressed in her genetic investment in her drones - remembering that her workers cannot reproduce and are thus a genetic dead end.

So the suggestion I made to the conference was that a biologically and logically legitimate way of regarding the honeybee colony is as 'a living system for producing fertile, healthy drones for the purpose of perpetuating the species by spreading the genes of the best quality queens'.

Thinking through this model of the honeybee colony gives us an entirely different perspective, when compared with the conventional point of view. We can now see nectar, honey and pollen simply as fuels for this system and the worker bees as servicing the needs of the queen and performing all the tasks required to ensure the smooth running of the colony, for the ultimate purpose of producing high quality drones, which will carry the genes of their mother to virgin queens from other colonies far away. We can speculate as to the biological triggers that cause drones to be raised at certain times and evicted or even killed off at other times. We can consider the mechanisms that may control the numbers of drones as a percentage of the overall population and dictate what other functions they may have inside the hive. We can imagine how drones appear to be able to find their way to 'congregation areas', where they seem to gather when waiting for virgin queens to pass by, when they themselves rarely survive more than about three months and hardly ever through the winter. There is much that we still do not know and may never fully understand.

An important aspect of this way of looking at the honeybee colony is that it calls into question many of the practices of 'modern beekeeping' - by which I mean post-Langstroth, post-1850  beekeeping - which has always been focussed on honey production above all else. From the point of view of our evolutionary model, many modern practices have been implemented with the specific objective of suppressing the raising of drones: thus running directly counter to the evolutionary interests of the queens.

In support of this thesis, we can cite the invention of wax foundation, impressed with the cell pattern of worker bees, deployed with the specific purpose of encouraging the colony to raise the maximum number of workers and the minimum number of drones. We can also lay some blame at the door of those who decided that frames should be spaced close together, thus allowing only for the building of worker cells and forcing drone cells to the outer fringes of the comb. More recently, we can mention and condemn the encouragement from certain quarters to 'cull' drone pupae with the intention of reducing the population of Varroa destructor in our hives.

Other recent practices, such as the sterilization of woodwork and the use of plastics ensure that hives will be relatively free from any of the other minute creatures that evolved to sharing hollow logs and trees with bees. Yet now we are discovering that some of these little bugs may well hold the secret of how pests and diseases are kept at bay. Significantly, experiments with mites of the Stratiolelaps genus are proving successful at controlling Varroa and I suspect that the humble earwig and wood louse have parts to play.

The almost universal use of miticides over the last half century has turned our bee colonies from models of biodiversity into sterile mono-cultures, at the expense of a multitude of moulds, fungi and insects whose functions and interactions we can only guess at. Who knows what concurrent damage the pyrethroids and neonicotinoids, widely used in our insane, toxic agricultural system may have done, not only to the bees but to the soil, which supports all life.

It seems to me that the history of modern beekeeping is replete with examples of anti-drone behaviour by beekeepers, from ignorance of their true role in the colony and in direct contradiction of the needs and instincts of the honeybee queen. Conventional beekeepers, however much they may protest their love and devotion for their charges, are in fact negating the wishes of the bees by focussing their efforts on the fuel of this intricate system, rather than its true purpose: the production of high quality drones, without which Apis mellifera is doomed as certainly as the dinosaurs.

So 'natural beekeepers', with their focus on creating close-to-ideal environments for the use of honeybees and working in alignment with the desires of their queens are best placed to assure the future of the species, so long as they do not succumb to undesirable 'modern' tendencies.

Phil Chandler
August 2012

 

2012 Natural Beekeeping Conference Part 1

The 2012 Natural Beekeeping Conference was held at Emerson College, East Sussex over the second weekend in August. 

This is the first podcast from the conference, featuring the opening keynote address by Phil Chandler.

Check out this episode!