December 2012

Some mild November days have brought out insects including butterflies and bees.  These little animals have had a hard summer with so much rain and little sunshine.  This will have had a knock-on effect on the insectivorous vertebrate animals such as bats, birds and reptiles.  The wet summer will also have encouraged fungi including the infectious types such as the ash die-back fungus.  Please do keep a watch out for this disease.  A forester told me the other day that there are many diseases of trees that are taking effect this year; it is likely to be due to the unusually wet summer weather.

Honeybees are still active, collecting nectar and pollen mainly from ivy at this time of the year.  However, apparently, ivy honey tends to go hard quite quickly, and often needs diluting.  I was stung by a honeybee yesterday. Some colonies of bees are more aggressive than others.  One of the research objectives at the University of Sussex honeybee research lab is to produce colonies of passive bees that are also hygienic.  Hygienic bees are ones that remove dead bees and bee larvae from their colonies, and generally keep the hive clean.  If dead material is left in the hive, it will decay and harbour disease.  We also working to understand how bees communicate with each other, and police the behaviour of nest-mates.  Bees communicate by dancing; this dance tells nest-mates how far food is from the colony, which direction it is and an estimate of the quality of the food.  Receivers of this information are expected to go straight out and get some more.  If bees become lazy, other bees will jump on them and shake them to encourage them to work harder.  If lazy or sick bees will not work, they are often killed by other bees and thrown out of the hive.  Newly emerged bees from the waxy brood comb will take some time to learn what they have to do, and go on practice flights, a little further each time until they learn to find nectar and pollen for their queen and nest-mates.  All ants, bees and wasps that we see running or flying around looking for food are females.  Males only emerge in the summer for short periods to make a nuptial flight and mate with a queen. Males cannot sting.  When the queen decides to swarm, a new queen is raised and left behind, and the old queen takes about half the colony to find a new nesting site.  When swarming, bees rarely sting, even if the swarm looks quite frightening.