The Waggle Dance

Imagine if you and your friends went out for a night of dancing at a nightclub and during the evening you learn that there is a really great source of free food just two blocks to the northwest. Some of you leave to find the food and bring it back to the nightclub. Later in the evening you learn that there are a few nice places for some of you to move into. As you dance, part of the group decides to move to a new home just to the west of where you’ve been living.

Ok, humans would probably never communicate basic survival information about food and shelter through dance, but honeybees do. It’s called the ‘waggle dance’ and it was first discovered and explained by an Austrian scientist and Nobel Laureate, Karl von Frisch in 1927. He observed bees dancing in a figure eight pattern on a frame of honey, surrounded by forager bees. The dancing bees can communicate the location of a food source through the direction and distance of the figure eights.

Dr. Thomas Seeley later observed similar behaviour in honeybee swarms, except in the case of swarming bees, the information being communicated through dance relates to the location of a new home for the swarm. In his book, Honeybee Democracy, Seeley describes how swarms of up to ten thousand bees and the old queen bee leave their hive to cluster temporarily on a nearby tree branch. The swarm sends out scouts who find potential new homes for the swarm. The dance done by the returning scouts tells the bees about the pros and cons of each possible new home. Through repeated dances and visits to the various sites under consideration, the bees eventually come to a democratic consensus about the best choice of a new home amongst the various alternatives.

Honeybees are endlessly fascinating, and the waggle dance is one of the best examples of how bees cooperate to survive.

Herman Van Reekum

March 4, 2024

Beekeeping In Alberta

This recent article on the CBC highlights the success of the commercial beekeeping industry in Alberta: What's the Buzz - CBC Story

Interesting facts from the article include:

• Alberta beekeepers produce about 40% of all the honey produced in Canada.

• The value of the Alberta honey crop last year exceeded $100 million for the first time ever.

• There are more that 300,000 beehives in Alberta and most of them are cared for by 170 commercial beekeepers.

• The annual value of honeybee pollination is estimated at $3.2 billion and increases to $7 billion when factoring in the impact of hybrid canola pollination.
  

The article also points to the challenges that beekeepers face in keeping their colonies alive and replacing colonies that have died. Factors that can lead to colonies dying include Varroa mites and extreme weather conditions such as drought and prolonged cold snaps.

There are only two ways of replacing dead colonies: split existing hives using queens that are domestically produced or import queens and bee packages from southern countries. Speakers at a recent Bee Tech conference in Calgary cautioned that importing bees from outside of Canada increases the risk of importing new pests and pathogens. Many experts encouraged beekeepers to learn how to raise queens and make bee packages here at home rather than

relying on costly and inferior imports.

The Bee Cube™ will provide an ideal platform for queen rearing and queen banking and will support prairie beekeepers in developing a more sustainable industry as they build on the successes of the past.

Herman Van Reekum

February 25, 2024

Beekeeping in Canada: The Push for Homegrown Queens

At the recent Bee Tech Conference in Calgary, sponsored by the Canadian Honey Council, a clear directive emerged for Canadian beekeepers: it's time to prioritize domestic queen bee breeding.

Here's why:

1. Honeybees aren't native to North America, so we rely on either domestically bred bees or imports from warmer climates. Shockingly, Canadian beekeepers currently import over 350,000 queens annually from regions like Australia, Hawaii, California, Italy, and Ukraine.

2. Importing bees from abroad increases the risk of introducing harmful pathogens that have devastated bee populations elsewhere. These include Tropilaelaps mites, Asian Hornets, Small Hive Beetles, and others. By reducing reliance on foreign stock, we can minimize the spread of these threats within Canada.

3. Foreign-raised queens often struggle to adapt to Canadian conditions. However, Canadian queen breeders are making strides in producing queens better suited to our environment.
   

Commercial beekeepers at the conference reported a concerning trend: queens now survive for just one year, down from the previous three-year average. This highlights the urgent need for reliable sources of domestically bred queens.

Enter the Bee Cube™ – a game-changer in bee breeding. Equipped with sensors, these hives provide real-time insights into bee and queen health, empowering beekeepers with the data needed for expert hive management.

In collaboration with research scientists and industry experts, we're pioneering an initiative to use Bee Cubes™ for large-scale queen overwintering. This practice, unexplored in the Canadian prairies (which account for 70% of the nation's beekeeping industry), promises to nurture a sustainable commercial beekeeping sector.

Traditionally, queen rearing in the prairies occurs during summer, often too late to impact honey production and pollination significantly. With Bee Cube™, we anticipate a shift. By supplying healthy, fertilized queens in spring, these hives will drive bee population growth, ensuring robust colonies for honey production and pollination throughout the summer.

Exciting developments lie ahead. Stay tuned for more updates on the Bee Cube™ and other innovations shaping the future of beekeeping.

Herman Van Reekum

February 18, 2024