Coming Events

Bee Talks by Tom Seeley

1. Five wondrous behaviors of honey bees

Worker honey bees are remarkable creatures.  In this talk I will present five short “stories” about the behavioral skills of these bees.  We will look at how worker honey bees 1) provide directions to important places, 2) rouse sleepy hive mates in the morning, 3) call for help in unloading nectar, 4) request help in grooming their bodies, and 5) prevent mass asphyxiation inside their homes.

2. Nature-based (Darwinian) beekeeping.

Nature-based beekeeping is an approach to beekeeping that aims to provide managed honey bee colonies with living conditions that are as close as possible to those of free-living honey bee colonies.   The goal is to harmonize our beekeeping methods with the natural history of Apis mellifera, and thus allow the bees to make full use of the toolkit of adaptations that they have evolved over the last 30 million years.  I will review ways in which the living conditions of honey bees differ between free-living and managed colonies.  I will also show how we can pursue beekeeping in a way that is centered less on treating a bee colony as a honey factory and more on nurturing the lives of the bees.  The fundamental question is “What can I give to the bees?” rather than “What can I take from the bees?” 

3. How a honey bee swarm chooses its home

The bees in a swarm make their choice of their new dwelling place collectively and democratically.  They stake their future on a process that includes collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building.  We will look at how these bees evaluate potential nest sites, advertise their discoveries to one another, engage in open deliberation, and choose their new home.  Finally, we will review “The Five Habits of Highly Effective Groups” that are found in honey bee swarms and that can be adopted by human groups to achieve higher collective intelligence.

4. How a honey bee swarm moves to its chosen home site

We will look at the mystery of how a swarm of bees steers itself to its new home, something that at first glance seems a mind-boggling puzzle.   Somehow, a school  bus-sized cloud of some ten thousand flying insects manages to sweep straight from bivouac site to new dwelling place.  In the past few years, with the introduction of digital video technology, it has become possible to perform the sophisticated data collection and image processing needed to track individual bees in a flying swarm and thus unravel the mechanisms of flight guidance in swarms.

5. The bee colony as a honey factory

We will explore how a colony of honey bees operates as a factory that produces honey efficiently despite tremendous day-to-day swings in the supply of nectar, the raw material for making honey.  An important feature of the organization of the honey production process is a division of labor between the nectar foragers (elderly workers who toil outside the hive collecting the nectar) and the nectar receivers (middle-age workers who toil inside the hive converting the nectar into honey).   We will see how the nectar foragers can boost their colony’s rate of nectar collecting during a honey flow, using the waggle dance and the shaking signal.  And we will see how these bees can also boost their colony’s rate of nectar processing—to keep the rates of nectar collecting and nectar processing in balance—by means of the tremble dance and stop signal.   I will show videos of nectar foragers producing these signals, each in its own, specific context.

6. The craft of bee hunting

In this talk, we look at bee hunting—locating wild colonies of honey bees—which is one of the most fascinating games in the world.  We will review the equipment involved and the process of establishing and following beelines, which are lines of bees flying back to their secret homes.  This outdoor activity is one of infinite variety, of suspense, disappointment, perseverance, and triumph.   You go out into the fields.  Before you rises a hillside with ten thousand trees.  One of those trees is a bee tree.  With simple equipment, and special skills, you can find it!  

7. Colony thirst

Water collection is essential to two parts of the physiology of a honey bee colony:  thermoregulation of the broodnest and nutrition of the larvae.  When overheating of the broodnest threatens on a hot day, a colony must increase its water intake.   And when a colony is rearing brood but is not gathering much nectar, then it must boost its water intake to produce the watery (70-80% water) food for the larvae.  We will look at when and why a colony takes in water and at how a colony’s water-collection specialists precisely start and stop their work as a colony’s need for water rises and falls.

8. Bait hives: how to get high-quality bees for free

The basic process of capturing honey bee swarms with bait hives is extremely simple.   You just put up a box of the right design in the right location and at the right time of year.   This talk will explain how to capture swarms using bait hives.  If you need additional colonies of bees, this is an efficient, and fun, way to get excellent, locally-adapted bees.

9. The dance language of honey bees

In this talk, we will look at the zig-zag path of investigation that Karl von Frisch blazed as he deciphered the famous waggle dance of the honey bee.   We will also look at new studies that have recently deepened our understanding of this amazing communication system of the bees. 

10. The honey bee colony as an information center

Whenever foraging is possible, a honey bee colony must solve the problem of keeping its foragers optimally allocated among the flower patches that its scouts have found.   Flower patches that are large and highly profitable should be allocated many foragers, while those that are small or less profitable should be allocated relatively few foragers.  We will look at how a honey bee colony solves this highly dynamic problem, and we will see that the logic of the solution that they have evolved (the so-called “Honey Bee Algorithm”) is extremely important to human beings as well, for we use the same logic for allocating server computers (analogous to worker bees) among web sites (analogous to flower patches) around the world.