Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #4: BEES with Amanda Shaw

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

YA LIKE BEES? You will -- after this short, edited-for-all-ages Smologies cut of our classic Melittology episode featuring President of the Urban Beekeepers Association, Amanda “Mandy” Shaw. We chat about honeybees vs. native ones, hives vs. nests, honey, how to become a beekeeper, social structures, why a queen becomes a queen, how to keep Mason bees as outdoor pets, if you should eat honey to deal with seasonal allergies, and why planting some flowers could make you and the bees pretty happy.Listen to the ORIGINAL, juicy, swear-filled version of MelittologyMore Smologies episodesFollow Mandy on Twitter and InstagramMandy’s podcast!Mandy Shaw’s Bella Beek: Handcrafted Beekeeping Veils, Tools and GiftsDonations were made to Pollinator Partnership and Xerces SocietySponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Zeke Thomas Rodrigues & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Steven Ray MorrisSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hey, it's that sweater that lives in the backseat alleyboard. I'm here with episode number four of Smology's. Smology's, if you're like, what's that? They are bite-sized classroom-friendly edits of our original oligies classics. So if you haven't heard the original Melatology Bees episode and you don't mind swearing and juicy, sometimes filthy details, stop what you're doing and listen to that version at the link in the show notes. But if you need a shorter G-rated director's cut, you're in the right place.

So this episode still has me buzzing around the room with excitement because it's all about bees. So Melatology, by the way, comes from the Greek for bee. So everyone you know named Melissa, their name means bee. Go tell Melissa that fun fact. So I met today's oligist in Portland, where she is a Melatologist and President of the Urban Beekeepers Association there. And after we recorded in 2018,

she decided to start her own amazing podcast called Beekeeper Confidential. And if that wasn't enough, she also was the founder of Bellabeak, a company that creates made-to-order bee veils. So get ready to find out all about bee bread, what colors make you most attractive to bees, who has stingers and why, why agricultural honey bee populations are threatened, but why native bees are of greater concern,

how you can help them hives versus nests, carpenter bees, blue bees, and how honey bees have a call-and-response song of their very own with bee experts and Melatologist Amanda Mandy Shaw. What's going on with these bees? So what we're seeing is bees are being put into nest boxes that aren't ideal. And if you look at the industrial beekeeping complex, bees are being forced to pollinate and work outside of their normal cycle.

Oh, and so they're being pushed to these limits and it's weakening their immune systems. And when there's monoculture and pesticide use involved, it causes them to collapse. And I think that generally the wild honey bee population is doing okay. It's the managed hives. It's the ones that are used in agricultural practices that we're seeing the big issues with, the colony collapse.

But generally native bees are solitary and they don't make honey, but they do gather pollen to feed their young. What is their normal life cycle? Do they only work in certain months and we're like, yo, we got stuff to pollinate. Right, it's February. Got almond trees to pollinate. Get up, let's go.

So Portland is relatively temperate and Amanda says that the bees do survive over winter and then they're up and at them in late March, early April. And then by November, they start shutting down for winter again, living off the honey and they have smaller colony numbers. But the summer bees are the most extra they're out there. The summer bees only last about six weeks

because they literally work themselves to death. Yeah. And most of them are women anyway, right? Yes. They needed to take a break, right? It is like, because most of the workers, the workers are all women. The workers are all women.

Yeah. And so they work themselves to death. To death, yes. Good God. Yeah, in the scale of like zero to 10, like what can the average person do? I always tell people you don't have to be a beekeeper to help the cause.

The biggest thing that bees need right now, honey bees and native bees is food that's safe, providing plant seeds that haven't been pretreated with pesticides and check the labels because a lot of them are pretreated. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. And planting plants that haven't been pretreated

with systemic pesticides. That's one of the big issues. I didn't know what a systemic pesticide was because I live in LA and my garden is a parking lot. But they're the kind of pesticides that live in the tissues of the plant instead of just being misted over the leaves. Another thing that native pollinators

are struggling with is habitat. So if you can have a corner of your yard where you can have that compost pile on the ground for bumblebees to nest in, or there's lots of other ground nesting bees. So like having that awareness, you can make your yard its own little nature site. And the bees will come.

Can you tell me a little bit about the difference between honeybees and native bees? And should we be using honeybees in this environment? With native bees, they're actually more effective pollinators than honeybees are. But honeybees sort of get all of the attention. And they can be used in the agricultural industry.

They can be used as livestock to pollinate large crops. But native bees are more effective pollinators. And we have over 4,000 species of native bees in America. What? So there's a lot of them out there, but they sort of don't get the attention that they need because the honeybees are the star of the show. And they're the ones getting,

you know, the cry for help is for the honeybees. But really, it's the native bees that need the habitat. They need variety in their diet. So when you have like these giant fields of almonds, or cotton, or corn, or soybeans, that's not good for the native bee population because they need variety. You heard how shocked I was that there were over 4,000

species of native bees in America. And Apis malifera, the European honeybee you're so familiar with, is not one of them. That's right. They were brought over by settlers for wax and honey and pollination. And the native bees get edged out of territories and are more threatened.

And the native ones are the species who need saving. And I had to know more about these supporting but important native players in the bee show, which let me remind you is an ensemble piece. Have you ever seen those huge black bees buzzing around in the summer? So they're probably carpenter bees and they drill out these perfect little tunnels in wood to raise their young.

And the females are black and glossy and they rarely sting. And the males are this great golden blonde color. They don't even have stingers, of course, because they're dudes and a stinger is a modified egg laying part. So only females have them. Now, these facts are helpful, conversational distractions if you ever see a carpenter bee and everyone around you

is shrieking to say, hey, this is a native bee and it's our friend. Now another native bee friend, which you can keep and rear in your yard, mason bees. What's a mason bee? What's a mason bee? Mason bees are solitary bees. They're known as the gentle pollinator.

They're native. They're also called blue orchard mason bees and they nest in these little tubes and they're super easy. It's like beekeeping for anybody. Anybody could keep mason bees and they're just they're fuzzy and they're shiny and blue and cute. And, you know, when they're coming back to their nest, you can see little packs of pollen on their bellies

bringing it back and they're just they're really cute. So a non yellow non striped bee. Yes, they exist. There are a lot of them. So mason bees are this really beautiful kind of gunmetal blue color and in a lot of the one million photos I just scrolled through while turning into a living breathing heart-eyed emoji.

Mason bees appeared to be covered in pollen a lot. It's all over the place. I guess sloppy gatherers make really good pollinators. It's just like like confetti pollen everywhere. And now what do you keep? I plant a lot of oregano, mint, lavender and stuff that's really easy to grow. This kind of blooms long season.

A borage is a really great bee food and it's super easy to take care of. So maybe plant yourself a little garden or even a pot or two of flowers on a window box or a stoop. Those can be a wonderland for native bees or honey bees. Now, if you like, if that's just not enough bees, if you're like, I need 30,000 bees, maybe think about beekeeping like a man it does.

But before you go ordering a whole setup, which can set you back a few hundred bucks, you may want to check with a local beekeepers association first because they can sometimes rent or lend equipment which is handy or they can tell you which hive boxes or cool face nets attached to a hat or bunk and not to buy. Personally, I say buy a mattress. Link in the show notes.

But this brings us to stings. Why do they hurt? So bee venom contains a compound called melaton which makes red blood cells burst, which hurts. And there are other proteins that destroy cell membranes, cause pain, destroy nerve tissue. There's also histamine in bee venom which makes your capillaries leak and causes itchy welts.

So when bees sting, they release a pheromone that says, I'm in trubs. It's a last ditch defense. Bees don't want to sting you. They don't want to die. They would really, really rather very much not. So you prevent getting stung by just being really, really kind of cautious about where they are at all times

like just kind of watching your back. Yes. Okay. Yes. And now when they're swarming, tell me what is happening. So a swarm is like a birth of a new colony. And it happens in the springtime when bees are, you know, coming out of winter, the queen starts laying eggs, the colony starts brooding up. They start ramping up their, their population production.

And so they'll make new queens to prepare for the swarm. And so when the new queens emerge, the old queen leaves the hive with about half of the bees and they go off to find a new place to live. Oh, that's actually, that's fascinating because I always thought that it was a new queen that was like a bye, but really it's the old one. It's the old one. Yeah.

Side note, fun fact. When a bee colony is naturally occurring, it's called a nest. But when it's in a human made container, then it's a hive. Is that fun? So where do these old queens go after they bounce from their former colony? Well, apparently hollows and trees are like just ideal new digs.

And Amanda says hollows and trees are insulated. It's in a live ecosystem. It has a microbiome that's beneficial to them. So a great place to rear tens of thousands of babies. But how do they do that? What are they eating? The bee goes out and gathers some nectar and they use their tongue, their proboscis.

It's like a straw. And they suck that up and the honey goes in or the nectar goes into their honey stomach. So it's a secondary stomach that they have and they carry it in that and when they bring it back to the hive, they do this thing called tropholaxis and they're regurgitating the nectar

into another bee's mouth. And they pass it back and forth and each time they do this, they're adding enzymes to it. It reduces the moisture content of the nectar a little bit because the nectar is very high in moisture. And so before it can become true honey, they have to bring that moisture content down quite a bit.

So after they pass it back and forth, they'll put it into a little honeycomb cell and they fill that up and then they use their wings to sort of flap and get the air moving and reduce the moisture content. Ideally for harvested honey, 17% is the most moisture that you'd wanna have for it. And then they cover it with wax

and so it stays fresh forever really. What are they using the honey for? How do they using that honey to feed a brood? They feed their brood pollen. So when they're collecting pollen, they're bringing that back to the hive and they're adding enzymes to it to sort of ferment it and it's called bee bread.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yes, bee bread. That's cute. And so they'll feed that to their babies and it's a protein source. Got it, so then what's the honey used for? For the adults? They eat it, yeah.

It gives them energy. It's to carbohydrate. It sustains them through the winter. Are they collecting it more in spring and summer and then living off of it in the winter? Yes, yeah. And before a swarming event, they fill up on it. Everybody fills up before they leave the hive

because they need that energy for when they get to their new home location to build comb because they don't have any comb where they're going unless they're moving into an old beehive. So they have to start from scratch. So now that I have heard the buzz about how honeybees eat, I needed to ask about their colony's social setup.

Who's overworked and bitter? Who's popular? Who's good with kids? It turns out every honeybee colony has roles that different bees inhabit, including her highness, queen bee. And there is a queen. There are the female workers

and then there are the drones, right? Yes. And so how do they determine who is the queen? The queen is made a queen when she's still an egg, three days old egg, and the change happens when they start feeding her. She's only fed royal jelly, so she doesn't get any bee bread.

She's deprived of protein during her development and that is what makes her a queen. Because she's deprived of protein. She's given a totally different diet and so that somehow changes her. She grows differently than the worker bee. And what's royal jelly exactly? Royal jelly is this enzyme that the bees,

they have these glands that they excrete it, yeah. So that comes from a bee face and not from a bee face. And so do a lot of different workers like contribute to that or is it like they're one nurse? So what happens is, you know, if a bee lives out its full life cycle, it will achieve all of the different jobs within a colony. Oh.

And they start out as nurse bees. So when they first are born, they come out and they start tending the young and the larvae. And then there's food processor bees, there's cleaning bees because they like to keep their hive really clean. And the last stage is the foraging bees. Those are the most experienced bees

and they go out and are the ones that we see in the gardens. And so let's say they make five queens and they all emerge around the same time. They will call each other out. They do this thing called piping. And so they kind of sounds like a kazoo. They'll call to each other and then they'll fight. Side note, so the first queen out starts roaming around

making this noise in G sharp. It's called piping or tooting. It's like me, me, me. Now a few of her sisters who have also been raised to be queens but are still sleeping in their little cells, they just snooze a little longer. They respond with a noise called quacking.

It sounds like a duck honk. It's kind of like Marco Polo, but with newborns. Now here's the thing. When the sleepy queens quack back at the first one, that first one's like, oh, there you are and then goes and kills them. And does she have a stinger? Or does she?

Because I know a stinger is an overpowering queen. So I'm like, oh, there you are. I'm like, oh, there you are. I'm like, oh, there you are. I'm like, oh, there you are. I'm like, oh, there you are. Because I know a stinger is an overpositor. We learned that, right?

Yeah, she does have a stinger, but it's not barbed like a worker stinger. So she can use it in battle. But it's not like the worker stinger with the venom sac. Also, fun fact, unlike honeybee workers who would sting and die to defend their colony, most native solitary bees are not quick to sting. So embrace your native bees,

but not literally. They don't need hugs, but they do need flowers to romp around and to shower themselves in pollen. Why are workers and drones fuzzy? It's my understanding that the workers have fuzz because it helps them to gather the pollen. It will stick to them.

They get a little bit staticky and sticky and it will stick to their fuzz and then they can clean it off and sort of push it into their little pollen packets. So imagine if your breakfast cereal just stuck to your clothes and then you just kind of swiped it into a couple of cargo pants pockets.

See, you're a bee. Now on to honeybee keeping. I am a little hazy on how smoke can calm down honeybees. Can Mandy clear the air for me? And now the smoke, you're essentially the smoke monster. You're like, they fall asleep, they get drowsy. So it confuses them. It masks their pheromones.

So if they're really feisty, you can put a little smoke on them and it it subdues their sense of smell. But it also tricks them into thinking, the hive is on fire. We got to load up on honey and get out of dodge. Oh, wow. How do they know where their new home is?

Do they have GPS? No, but they do get directions from their sisters via, yes, interpretive dance. That's not what you thought I was going to say, right? I know, it's shocking. So it's not some dance you do at weddings or on cruise ships or on TikTok. It's actually a form of physical communication

called a waggle dance. I am not making this up. So with the waggle dance, they're communicating locations of food, water or even a new place to live. And the orientation of the direction that they're doing the dance in correlates with where the sun is at.

Whoa. So they're following the sun and they're using their waggle dance to tell you which direction, like if the sun is, you know, do east, they'll do their dance, do east. Wow. The intensity of the waggle tells you

how good of a source it is. I just want to say, I have been known to do a little dance at the first bite of a great sandwich. So I get it. It happens to the best of us. Now, really quick, speaking of the best of us,

each week a cause gets a donation and this week we are splitting it between the Xerxes Society and the Pollinator Partnership. And there will be links to those in the show notes and also Mandy's about to tell you a little bit about them.

And those donations are made possible by sponsors in the show who you may hear about now. Okay. On to your questions. Lightning round. This one is about native bees. Eric Blanc wants to know,

I want to help bees in the area. What's a good resource to find out the proper wild flowers to plant for them? I would go to the like local extension department at the university. Xerxes Society has a lot of resources. Pollinator Partnership also has

a lot of resources so you can find what's growing in your area. And John Worcester and Jesse Pio both had the same question. Will eating honey that's been harvested locally help if you have seasonal allergies?

Word on the street is that it does. So it gets your body used to maybe those pollens. Exactly. Okay. I'm not an allergist, but yes, it's like you're inoculating yourself

with the irritant and your immune system addressed to that rather than taking an antihistamine to just suppress any kind of response. Katie Grant wants to know, are bees actually more attracted to bright yellow clothing?

I wear a safety vest for work and was told that an orange vest won't attract bees like a yellow one does. Is this true? In my own personal experience, when I wear my bright yellow coat, I do have bees land on me. Wow.

Maybe it's because you look like pollen and I don't know. Okay. So we have learned a lot about honeybees and their homes, but what can they do if suddenly an intruder enters the nest? Well, this is bananas.

I've read that bee species will gather in a ball and increase the local temperature in order to cook wasps and other invaders. Yes. Japanese hornets. So what is that mechanism

and how do they not cook themselves in the process? It's called balling. Boom. Yeah. Appropriate. And so they will use their body heat to cook the predator.

That's hot. And what is your favorite thing about bees? I love this thing that they do called festooning. What? Yeah. What is it?

Festooning is when they're building new comb. So they have to work together to do this. And what they do is they join hands and they make this lovely little chain

and then bees gather together in the chain and they excrete the wax from their abdomen and they pass it up to the bees up top. So they are working together while in contact

with each other to make this comb. What? And they make the chain so that it's plumb to the earth. So it's straight. So they know. And it's just

and the comb when it's brand new is beautiful. It's very translucent. It's so delicate and perfect. Oh, they make it perfect. So wow.

Okay. We learned honey bees are not native to North America. Native bees are amazing to and need our help. Pollinator plants are the best and Queens don't get to eat bee bread.

Now to learn more about Mandy Shaw, you can follow her on Instagram and Twitter. She is being Mandy with two E's in being on both platforms. And to learn more

about her, you can go to bellabeak.com B-E-L-L-A-B-E-E-K.com. She sells very stylish netted beekeeper bonnets that she makes. And for all the sweet bee behind the scenes

on beekeeping, you can listen to her podcast. It's called Beekeeper Confidential. Those will all be linked in the show notes as well as the credits for all the great humans who work on the podcast.

The saucier non-smologies version of melatology is also linked to the show notes in case you do not have any kiddos around. You can find more Smologies episodes at alleyward.com

slash Smologies. Those are all cut down, condensed versions that are G rated for kids and cleaned up. You can follow the podcast on Twitter and Instagram at oligies.

I'm at alleyward with 1L on Twitter and Instagram. If you listen to the end of the episode, you know I share some advice like a cool uncle. And this week it is

if mornings ever feel too hectic, I totally understand. Try to do as much as you can to get ready the night before. Like pick out an outfit for school, maybe help make your lunch before you go to bed,

pack your book bag all up, and then getting out the door will be much easier when you don't have to make a bunch of decisions and gather your stuff when you still feel too sleepy. So I hope that helps.

It helps me sometimes. Okay, until next time, Smologites, bye-bye. Smologies. Smologies. Smologies. Smologies.

Smologies. Smologies. Hey, nice beekeeper suit.