The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - A casual Interview with Dr. Thomas Seeley about his New Book, Piping Hot Bees & Boisterous Buzz-Runners.

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

This is the audio track from today's YouTube Video:  https://youtu.be/edPptNApQOE CHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction 01:54 Books by Dr. Seeley 02:29 Young Thomas meets his first honey bees in a walnut tree. 04:28 The first bee book that Tom owned. 06:20 Tom Seeley gets a job at the Dyce Lab, cutting the grass etc. 08:35 The First Master Beekeeper Program in the U.S. 10:35 Burning Hives! American Foul Brood 12:02 A Raccoon named Vega 14:32 Tom meets his future wife on Appledore Island. 18:26 Tom uses his woodworking and technical skills to build his own gear. 20:16 Detecting CO2 in Bee Hives. 25:15 How bees vent their hive. 26:30 How small entrances benefit honey bees. 28:50 The many benefits of Observation Hives. 30:39 Dyce Lab Observation Hives with long entrances. 31:41 Hive top ventilation. 34:04 How Tom selected his summer helpers at the Dyce Lab. 35:49 Radios helped with field reporting. 36:43 Various dances and associated frequencies. 37:11 How honey bees hear. 39:00 The Shaking Signal 39:50 Grooming Invitation 46:00 How video improves observation, and accurate measurements. 53:10 How fast does a swarm travel? 53:54 How does a swarm know what direction to go? 57:55 Swarm Collection Boxes. 58:56 Swarms prefer boxes with comb inside. 01:00:18 Water studies inside the Glass House. 01:04:20 Water spreading bees. 01:07:00 Bees don't want a top entrance. 01:10:10 How do comb builders determine cell wall thickness? 01:11:48 Tom and Robin encounter defensive bees while on their honeymoon. 01:18:13 How does Tom Seeley set up his own hives at home? 01:26:20 Closing Thoughts from Tom. 01:27:40 Nature Based Beekeeping, a better way of saying Darwinian Beekeeping.

Hello and welcome to another episode of interviews with experts. I'm Frederick Donne and this is the way to be. Today, my honored guest is Dr. Thomas Seeley. Dr. Seeley has authored many of my favorite books centered around the many complex behaviors of the familiar honeybee. Titles such as Honeybee Democracy Following the Wild Bees and The Lives of Bees are likely familiar to you. In this interview, you'll learn a little bit of about Dr. Seeley's personal life experiences, and then we delve into his newest book, Piping Hot Bees and boisterous buzz runners. 20 mysteries of honeybee behavior solved. Here's Tom. Good morning, Dr. Seeley. I want to welcome you and thank you for doing this interview with me for the way to be. And for those of you who are watching, you can also listen as a podcast so you can go about your

daily chores without wrecking your car or mowing over something that you shouldn't. So, you. So thank you, Dr. Zili, for being here. And, of course, we're going to talk about your brand new book that's out, piping hot bees and boisterous buzz runners. Yeah. And this is the cover of the book. For those you haven't seen it, brand new, you get it on Amazon. BetterBee.com has it. It's being carried everywhere. People care about real bee knowledge. So if you want to get that, the link is down in the video description. So thanks, Tom. Thanks for being here. My pleasure. Thanks for your interest in my new book. Oh, it goes beyond your book. It goes back to all the books that you've published because

I'm a fairly new beekeeper compared to someone like you who's a bee researcher and a behaviorist with a background in neurobiology, so all the easy stuff. And so I've been keeping bees since 2006. So I've been studying your books since your 1985 publication of honeybee ecology, then the wisdom of the hive in 95, and of course, Honeybee Democracy, which I think most people are familiar with that came out in 2010. So we're going to talk hopefully about a lot of things today, and I'm going to take you back into your past since that's the way that you started your new book. You took us kind of into your world a little bit in New York State, and I thought it was

really interesting how you first came across honeybees. Would you please share about the first bee tree that you discovered? Yeah, the first bee tree that I discovered was right along the road near my parents' house. It was a black walnut tree, massive black walnut tree. So it was a striking tree. And I'd like to walk around. Took a lot of hikes when I was a kid. And, you know, one day I went past that tree, and I heard and saw the bees going in and out of a not hole,

not on the lowest limb of the tree of all places. because it made it quite easy to observe the bees. And I was intrigued. I was also scared initially because, you know, I knew that bees sting. So I was cautious about getting too close. But eventually I brought my father's step ladder up there so I could get really close. And I learned I could really see a lot. And that I think I saw, for example, of course, the bees going in and out.

But I also saw bees fanning their wings. and I presumed for ventilating the nest. And I saw bees going in with loads of pollen. It was kind of a way to step into their world, not as a beekeeper, but as a bee watcher. So that's how I got started. So what year are we talking about? We're in the 70s?

That would have been, that's a good question, Fred. It was either the late 60s or early 70s. By 1970, I had a hive of bees, so it must have been in the, must have been before I graduated from high school in 1970. Wow. So, before social media, if you wanted to learn about bees back then, you had to go to a place little known today, a library.

Yeah, and I remember getting out all the books from a high school library on bees and just absorbing them, devouring them. And then your parents were pretty supportive. they got you a book on bees. Yeah, they did. I forgot which, I don't remember which book that was. Well, the good news is. Oh, yeah, now I do know, remember.

It was by a professor at Cornell, the makers of honey. The makers of honey, okay. And it was written for somebody, my speed. It wasn't technical. And Mary, she was the spouse of Phillips, who was the professor of apiculture at Cornell. And it was a, yeah, the makers of honey. Oh, I'm sorry. I can't, I don't remember the name.

That's okay. The good news is it's in the book. So it's in the opening of this book. So that's really cool. I didn't mean to put you on the spot for the title. Did you get to meet her eventually? or because you did later show up at Cornell? Yeah, no, she had,

both she and her husband had passed on by the time I became interested in the bees. I did, yeah, unfortunately. Okay, well, that's too bad because it's always great to be able to give feedback and tell people the impact they've had on your understanding of bees. And that's where I am today talking to you.

I'm giving you feedback. You've been my unknowing mentor. by the way. And inspiration, just the things that you've observed are extraordinary. And so the other thing was you lived not too far. You were in bicycle distance of the Dice Lab for Honeybee Studies there at Cornell. Yes, that's right. One of the ways that I, one of the great strokes of good fortune besides walking past that bee tree and sparking and having that spark my fascination with the honeybees was that Cornell has the Dice Laboratory for Honeybee's Studies. And that was within biking range.

And the professor who ran that laboratory when I was a boy, high school student, was Professor Roger A. Morse. And I knew of that lab. and I wondered if I could get a summer job there because I had always done summer, you know, lawn mowing and stuff like that. So I thought, yeah, maybe I could get a summer job. Maybe they need somebody like that. And it turned out that my mother was in a club with the wife of Roger Morse. And my father knew Roger Morse in, like, a rotary club. It's a it that goes a small city. It still is. And I think it was my mother putting in a good word

to Roger Morse's wife, Mary Lou Morse, that gave credibility to my request. And so, yeah, I started working there, just mowing the lawn and such. That was one of the main jobs. But I also scraped hives, cleaned up hives. And I would tag along, or I'd go along as the helper during the New York state bee inspections because back then every year every summer there was a new york state bee inspector that came around and checked for american fowl brood so i got a lot of experience lifting eight frame deep hive bodies full of honey off of hives so that the bee inspector could get down to the brood nest and that was that was uh yeah i'll never forget working with harry gravely the the bee inspector wow it's interesting that you remember the bee inspector's name and um that's one of my

favorite things here is to be visited by the PA state inspectors because there's such a wealth of knowledge they've seen so many colonies of bees and so many apiary managers and they can kind of inform us on what's working and what isn't but you're already at the dice lab so i would say you're at the apex of bee knowledge at the time the dice lab by the way had the first master beekeeper program cornell did in the united states yes in the mid 1970s i remember roger more than initiated that as a way to strengthen the outreach program, the education program. Yeah, that's really interesting. Now, can you remember any of the students that you made friendships with there, or do you stay in touch with anyone since that time? Yes, there's one

professor, Dr. Michael Burgett at Oregon State University. There are, that's the only one that I know that is still alive. The others have passed on. So, yeah. And they were all, John Harbo was another. He worked for the U.S. Department of Congressional bee breeding program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He may still be alive.

But I know of several of the others who have, John worked at North Carolina, I don't remember the last name. But what a great opportunity for you. And did they let you inside also? Or did you have to stay out and care for the lawn and grounds? Oh, no, I did everything. Whatever they, whatever it's sort of,

I did a lot of data analysis because this was before there were computers. So all the calculations had to be made by hand with a calculator. So I did a lot of that. I did a lot of the Dice Lab was getting a lot of donations of beehives from elderly commercial beekeepers who wanted to do something good. So there was a lot of cleaning out those hives, scraping them. I also remember doing some big burns of the hives, the frames and scorching inside the hives that had American fowl rood. We had quite an incidence of American foul brood back then. I haven't seen it in years, in decades, really.

But back in the 60s, there was a lot of it. And I don't know why that was. It may be people weren't as vigilant for it. Not sure. But I remember, yeah, doing immense bonfires, bonfires in which maybe 20 or 30 or 40, five bodies full of frames would be thrown onto the fire and just burning it all up.

Wow. Well, I'm glad those days are almost gone. I've only seen one case in my years of beekeeping as well here in Pennsylvania, so maybe that method of destroying the equipment has been effective through the years. Yeah. Or the bees have built some resistance? I wouldn't be surprised that there is a lot of selection for resistance, because we now know there are as many in the United States.

I think that the latest survey shows that there are more wild colonies, free-living colonies of honeybees than there are managed colonies. But I guess you'd have to ask the big commercial folks about what their incidents of AFB is. But I know nobody that I know of has seen it in a while. Okay, I'm going to send you down another track since we're still in your youth. And I want to talk about, I think, you know, and I'm going to ask you about any other animals, species that you interacted with aside from the bees? Yes, there was one. I had a pet raccoon.

And this was a little pet raccoon that one of my older brothers found in the quarry, the limestone quarry that was near our family home. And he brought it home. And that was, that was such a wonderful experience. I didn't know about the books by Sterling North. about a boy having a raccoon, but we just had it. And it was a little fellow. And we just treated him like a family member. And my mother never let us have a cat or a dog because she didn't want to have pets. But she fell in love with this delightful little raccoon.

And so, yeah, that was a wonderful, I feel so fortunate to have been able to have been in touch with that piece of wildlife. And we didn't, we didn't cage her up. And, and I would, sometimes I would find her here up in the woods or there down in the woods, sometimes in a hollow tree down in the woods. And one time she, I learned she liked to go up to my tree house on the other side of the road. And so I was always a, that was always a special experience for, to go into the woods, climb up into my tree house and find a little friend there waiting. Wow.

That is very unusual. Did you name her? Yeah, her name was Vega. Vega is that one of my brothers was very interested in astronomy, and that's the name for a constellation. Oh, I thought you were going to say that he drove a Vega. Do you remember those? Vaguely, dimly.

So that was very interesting that your mother wouldn't allow any pets, but here's a wild raccoon in the house. And of course, they're very dexterous and capable, and it probably could get into anything it wanted to. Oh, yeah, yeah. It learned how to open the drawers in the kitchen, for example, by grabbing the handle and leaning back. That is really interesting.

And I'm really glad to share that story because that just makes me laugh. I like that story. Anyway, so now we're going to fast forward to, you're doing a field study and you meet Robin. Was that on Appledore? Where was that? Yeah, that's where I met my wife, Robin. I was doing my Ph.D. investigations of how the, about nest site selection by scout bees and honeybee swarms.

And to be able to do experimental analyses or even just watch the process closely, we had a prospective home site, I had to go to a location without any trees, or cavities or things like that. And the Cornell University, just by chance, had recently set up a marine station off the coast of Maine on an island that's about 100 acres. It's called Appledore Island, seven miles off. And it has, of course, no honeybees on it. And it has almost, it had some old buildings. And there was one lobster fisherman that's lived out there in the summer.

But for the most part, it was almost free of natural nest sites. So I could put out nest boxes and even ones, which I would call an observation nest box, which had one wall open into a little hut so I could look at the behavior of the nest sites of a nest site scout, as is expecting its box. And I guess that was also extremely fortunate. because that island at Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, I think it had been established just a few years before I realized, oh, I need an island to do what I want to do.

Yeah, what a great opportunity. I believe you also shared the story in some of your presentations about how one of your swarms got into that Lobsterman's chimney or something. Yeah, that's right. That's a sign of their desperation that they would accept a chimney as a potential home site. Yeah, that's right. Rodney was known to be a fierce fellow. Lobster fishermen tend to be because they have to kind of defend their territory, things like that, where they put their traps.

So I went over and I didn't go directly. I went with the director of the laboratory, John Kingsbury. We went over by boat because on the waterfront, you expect people, that's your front yard. You expect people to come to the front door. You don't go through the brush and get to the house. You go and come up, call up and see if they're home and then come up. So yeah, that was my introduction through the director. And we were both delighted, actually, that Rodney Sullivan was delighted that

somebody was coming to help him figure out where in the hell these honeybees had come from. Because I'll never forget what he said, never seen anything like it. Yeah, yeah, in that accent. Yeah. That's great. And it's great that you have those memories too, but that also means that they rejected the nest site that you had provided for the piece, right? Correct, correct. They chose a chimney. And he had to smoke them out by building a small fire in his place. Yeah. Our plan was, and it worked, he kindled a small fire in his stove.

And I had the trickier job of climbing up on his slippery roof and with some old wire screen and duct tape and screening off the, the, the front. of the chimney once the bees have been smoked down. I'll bet that that was a slate roof. No, no, I probably, if it were slate, I would never have gone up there. I was pretty sure it was the standard kind of. Asphalt shingles. Asphalt shing, asphalt shing. Well, now here's the other thing, often like you mentioned,

that building so that you could observe the bee scouts, and you were hoping that they would scout out the box that you had set up for them. And you have your own building skills and technical skills, I think, that help you out with some of your experiments, right? So are you, you're building these? Did you design and build that or did somebody else do it? Oh, yeah. No, I've built, I've always built all my equipment, Fred. And that's because when I was a boy, I liked to build stuff down cellar. And one birthday, I got my own workbench even and started assembling my own tools, which I still have. I still have. I still have that workbench in my house and I still have those tools. I like to build things out of

wood. Never became a machinist. Metal didn't appeal, but wood, yes, definitely. Yeah. So now, so you've kept some of those old, I like old woodworking tools, by the way, especially the hand-me-downs from grandparents and grand-grandparents. Yes, indeed. I'll bet you have a hand auger. Oh, yeah, yeah, if you're doing a large, yeah, if you're doing a large bore, large diameter bore, you have much more control doing. Yeah. And so how's your carpenter shop changed today? Anything new? Did you get a joiner, mitersaws? What did you add to that? Well, the main tools that I have still have, and I'm up in my barn in Maine and I build a little shop in here. I inherited a craftsman table saw for my father-in-law from the 60s. It's very basic, and I love it. And, yeah. And, yeah,

Yeah, I wish I had a drill press because that's, but I don't have that yet. I guess I've got some other various hand, power hand tools, drill things like. Oh, yeah, drill press is very handy. I feel spoiled. Yeah, drill press is. But also you're technically capable because when you were trying to study the CO2 levels in the hive, so we're going to move forward to another experiment that you did, which was the bees stimulus for venting the hive and the buildup of,

carbon dioxide and you had to measure it. So would you please explain how you arrived at the ability to measure those levels inside the hive? Yeah, I was, when I was a college student, Fred, I didn't know I would go on to become a professor of biology and focused on bees. I thought I would, I thought I would become a physician. That's what the family expected of me. They're all even a doctor in the family and I was the last kid and the other ones hadn't done it. So that was my burden. So I went to, I went to college expecting it'd become a MD and somehow I got, oh, there was an old paper. Well, I just wondered how the bees dealt with carbon dioxide in their nests, and I was studying chemistry, so I knew that carbon dioxide was an interesting molecule. And so I wanted to build a CO2

analyzer and there was a gentleman at Cornell who had done his PhD studies on how insects breed. And I know he had a very, he had built a CO2 analyzer for working with small samples of gas to measure the CO2 level in them. And so I knew I needed to build a CO2 analyzer. So I wrote him and he said, he said, come down, visit me, and I will talk about it. And he was, he was at the University of Massachusetts in Massachusetts, of course, and I was at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. So it wasn't a great distance. So I hitched, I didn't have a car. So I hitchhiked down, met him, and he gave me the key unit of the CO2 analyzer. Just handed it to me. I guess he figured he would never use it again. I think cost, I don't know, several hundred dollars at the time.

And, but it was just the unit. You have to build. You had to build a circuit that went with it. You had to figure out a way of drawing the gas through it and things like that. But that was all familiar stuff to me, Fred, because that's how a gas chromatograph works. And so I was able to build the apparatus. It was a new challenge, but, yeah, it was doable. And it worked very, very well, actually. It gave me very good readings.

See, carbon dioxide is a very, it absorbs energy. very well. So it's easy to detect it in an air stream. I guess that's a simplest way to put it. And so what did you observe regarding the buildup of CO2, the bees reaction to it? This is, this is interesting to me because this is also one of the mysteries that you investigate in your book. The CO2 buildup and how bees manage that. Yeah. They basically what they do is First of all, they're adapted to live in a very stuffy environment. They don't start ventilating their nest until it gets above, you know, a half a percent CO2. And that doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 100 times.

That's way higher than the 0.04% that's in our atmosphere, what we normally live with, 0.04 times 10, 10 times the concentration or more. And that's very stuffy. If we were in a room with 0.5% CO2, we would get very drowsy. But they live in that. But there are times at night when they're not ventilating the nest well, if it's cool or rainy weather, or in the winter, it can go up to a couple of percent. And then they really kick in the ventilation. And that's that bees down near the entrance or on the edge of the winter cluster fan their wings and stir up the air and get it mixed and blown out. somewhat out of the hive.

That's what I learned. And that was my first scientific paper. It's called atmospheric carbon dioxide regulation by honeybee colonies. Wow. Yeah. There was. I was just going to say, I had no idea at the time that there had been a study done back in the 1940s on this topic in the Netherlands.

It was published in Dutch. I couldn't find the copy of the paper. And if I had, I wouldn't have, because it was published in a Dutch beekeeping magazine, 1941, I think. So Netherlands was being invaded by Germany then, I think. So things were tough there. Anyhow, that person had done a very good analysis. And so what I did was basically unintentionally repeated his investigation, that they are sensitive to that, that they can handle 0.5% CO2,

but if it gets above that, then they kick in and ventilate. And I believe you also measured the wind velocity, like the fanning speed of the bees, the air moving across with 6.9 or something miles per hour? Yeah, I think that's right. It gets up to about a little bit above 5 miles an hour, right at the entrance where the bees are fanning, team. And they're blowing out. I forget what the volume, the rate, the air expulsion rate is. It's

several, I don't know how many cubic feet per second. I'd have to look that up. It's not an I have on hand right now. And how did you measure that speed? You measure the speed by, you have to put little particles in the air and then you have a laser that registers those particles. What? That is way more sophisticated. I was thinking you were going to say, wire anemometer or something normal, but now you're talking about measuring particulates with lasers. Yeah, that wasn't right. That was work done by a postdoc in my lab rather recently. Wow.

So that was, yeah. And the bees have it, in some ways, having a small entrance really helps the bees achieve a high ventilation rate, because when you have a small opening and you put a bee, a set of bees at that opening, they can really, there's not much backflow. I mean, there is backflow, of course, but they can get a very directional airflow over one part of the opening. That's what makes it efficient. I am really glad you mentioned that, because that puts the airflow under the control of the bees, where if we have wide open screen bottom boards, for example, or a wide open entrance, the bees cannot funnel air and control it the way they do as you've just described.

Yeah, I just looked it up, Fred, it's 6.8 miles per hour, 11 kilometers per hour, that the air is passing out the entrance when there's a team of bees ventilating. And probably every beekeeper has seen this, a bunch of bees standing on one side of the entrance. Yeah. They're pooling their effort, and they're pushing air out one side of the entrance, and air is flowing back in the other side of the entrance. It's kind of the... Yeah. It's really interesting. That's really interesting. So the other thing is, have you done any studies on humidity levels or if that also impacted the ventilating stimulus for the bees or if it was just primarily the CO2 buildup?

Well, the CO2 is one they have to deal with because they will kill themselves if they don't keep that, get that down. It changes the, just as it would for us. It changes the pH in our blood and our brain, just the oxygen absorption. It messes up everything if your body fluids get too acidic. No, not to the best of my, I don't think there's any, I don't know of any investigations of humidity control. They wouldn't be trying to think if people have, I think there are many insects that have humidity receptors, and it wouldn't surprise me if worker honeybees have those, and they can use those to judge when they,

when it's just during a nectar flow that they really need to blow out, blow out the water in the air. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we'll talk about that later, too. The bees that are in the way that get out of the way so that it can ventilate or dry things out quicker. We'll talk about that in the water studies down the line. They have other questions first. So one of the things that you really promote is for those who really want to understand or directly observe

funny bee behavior on the frame is that observation hives are key to that learning. And when did you set up your first observation hive and what were you hoping to see? Well, I set up my first observation I've read for these carbon dioxide studies because I needed to count the number of bees ventilating, not just at the entrance, but throughout the hive. And that is how it works. The bees are, the bees are stirring up the air throughout the hive and pushing it down towards the entrance. So that was my first one. And that was just a one frame observation hive.

So it was, it was. But yeah, that was unintentionally or inadvertently, it made very clear to me firsthand experience how valuable that was. But at that time, too, Fred, I was reading the papers, the book by Carlven Frisch, the big one, published in 1967, I think,

the dance language and orientation of bees. And it was clear that the observation hive was the central tool of his investigations of the dance language of bees. Wow. Yeah. And so it, and that makes perfect sense a lot. If you want to see what anything that's going on inside the hive, you don't want to do it by pulling the, in the course of beekeeping,

where you're opening up the hive, disturbing it, pulling out the comb. You want it. Right. You make your observations with a colony that's undisper. And you don't feel bad looking in on the bees when it's an observation hype because they're carrying on business as usual. And at the Dice Lab, they have observation hives that I believe are, there's a photograph of those in your book. But yes, there, yes, there is, yeah. And what was really interesting to me about those is when we're looking at the counter next to the students that are where the hives are,

there's a really long entrance coming into the hives and I believe you said you put plate glass on top of those entrances right is what is the impact do you think of the long entrance run to the hive on the bees of their ability to control that climate I think it just makes a little harder for them to ventilate the nest those were just two-frame observation I've so they those were not colonies that would really be and the entrance the long entrance tunnel which is shown in one of those photographs

is it was a fairly good size had a good size cross section and that those hives were ventilated at the top. They had two holes in the top with a screen over them so they could get good air passage through there. Unlike in nature, there tends

not to be a top ventilation of port in the wild. They've just got one entrance to defend and it's just near the bottom. Now I'm curious about the screen. that were in the top of those, did they attempt to propolize those at all? Yeah, they do, they do. The reason I put those up there on the top of my observation is sometimes the, I want to make

sure the colony is well fed. If there's a dearth on, I don't want the colony to run out of food. Yeah, and that just looks like a great space. That's where I think I would want to be in that room all the time. They had comfortable seats sitting right there. If there were a coffee machine nearby, that's the perfect environment for me. There was a coffee machine. There it is.

There it is. Yeah, and you know, that was a bee lab that I did for probably, goodness, 30 years at Cornell because we were teaching a course in animal behavior. And the students had a field observation, an assignment to go out and observe behaviors. But they would usually end up watching squirrels on the campus, and they couldn't really see a lot because the squirrels are a little bit wary and things like that. Whereas with the bees in an observation, a student can get, you know, get your eyes within a few inches of what a bee is doing.

And it, they had to fill, they had to make a, fill out an answer, a worksheet where they had to first describe, they'd at choose a behavior, then describe it in words and a drawing. Then they had to answer questions about how does this behavior work? How does it develop during the lifetime of a bee? why is it doing this and what are its evolutionary origins? For example, the evolutionary origins of fanning are the wing movements that are used for flight. Those are co-opted for moving air to ventilate rather than generate lift for flight. So that was a really good exercise and we still have that. That's the highlight for a lot of the students in the course to go in and do the honeybee exercise.

I'll tell you a little secret that every summer I would need to hire two or three helpers. For a lot of the experiments, I needed helpers to do observe or tend to feeding station or watch an observation I've heard. So I would scan the 300 students that would turn in their answer sheets. I'd see the ones that were really good, the ones that had done a beautiful job. And those were the students, I would ask them, if. they would like if they would like to work for me during the summer. It was a brilliant, or a perfect way of getting in touch with people that were good observers and careful, careful watchers. Did you have any of those students turn you down? Every once a while,

yeah, they're not everybody. They had their other plans for the summer. If ever there was a time to cancel your other plans, that would be it. Yeah. The other thing is, okay, tell the truth. Have you ever fallen asleep watching your observation high. No, I don't think I've ever had that challenge. What? That happens to me all the time, especially in a building that's hot. It's like 85 degrees in there. You're watching your observation high. I just go to sleep right in front of the camera. Yeah, I think I didn't have that problem because I was usually there to collect data. I was waiting, sitting in my chair, waiting for red thorax to run down the entrance tunnel so I could see what she would do when she got home.

Okay. Well, so motivated by science, and you don't want to miss that. Also, I had somebody out at a feeding station or a nest box or something, and they had, they were active, and so they were keeping me on my toes, too.

And did you have, like, two-way radios or something? They would say a B was just here and departed, and like you would mark a time stamp or something. It was a big step up, Fred, in the 1980, I'd get these big Motorola walkie talkies.

They weighed, they were about the size and weight of a brick. But boy, they, before those, we didn't, we just had to, yeah, it was. And they had like a three-foot antenna on them. Yeah, the first ones, yeah, that's right. The earliest ones I got were from Radio Shack, and they had those Whopper antennas, those telescoping antenna on them. Yeah.

Okay. Well, we're of the same vintage, I can tell. Well, that was interesting. And so some of the observations, of course, are very well documented in your book. And we want to talk about those, like the waggle dancing, the things they waggled for, cycles of waggle dance. And what was really interesting to me was the distinction of frequency of vibrations and communications inside the hive, whether it's a grooming invitation. or if it's a queen piping or a worker doing a waggle dance and then the buzz runners. Would you just give us a quick rundown about how those frequencies are separated?

Bees, just to be clear, bees can't hear airborne sound? They can, there's one situation. Generally, the answer is no, they cannot hear airborne sound. The one exception is that because they don't have ears like ours that have drums that are can pick up, can sense the air pressure changes that are associated with sounds. The one situation where they can, you might say hear sound, is when they're next to a waggle dancer, and then their antennae, when a bee does a waggle dance, she's not only wagging her abdomen, she's also by making sound with her wings.

and those, that sound is the... I think they call that near-field sound, right? Yeah, that's right. It's near-field sound, and that means that when you, if you're very near to a sound source and you have something like a B's antenna that's very lightweight, it will be vibrated by the movements, the oscillation of the particles themselves,

not the pressure waves, but by the rocking of the air particles. to make those waves. And that's the one situation where it would be fair to say that a worker honey, worker honeybees are able to hear sounds when they're very close to them as when they're following a waggle dancer. The rest of the time, they depend upon sensing vibrations. Vibrations in the comb, for example, are very important in many of their signals. And there's one other case where they can sense a vibration. That's when another bee comes over and grabs a bee, the bee that's being vibrated or shaken, and that's about four cycle per second shaking. That one, they probably feel through their leg joints.

Their body is being shaking while their legs are anchored to the comb. And what term have you assigned to that, the bees that are, I call them cheerleaders, motivators, you have a name for the bees that goes through and kind of wake people up and put them back into action? Yeah, I call that behavior, the shaking signal. So I call the bees shaking signal. Oh, so they're shakers. So it's a religious group. Yeah, a little bit, yeah.

And probably, yeah. Go ahead. I was just going to say that that was probably why the, I think that's why the shakers had their, had their shaking was part of their religious performance or experience. It was to make you feel alive and alert. Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, it's very interesting. And then so I was really interested in your description of this grooming invitation. I believe that was observed by a Cornell student. Yeah, let me collect my thoughts on that, Fred. Yes, that was the honors project for a Cornell undergraduate student named Ben Land. And people had, this is a very conspicuous behavior. You'll see it when you're pulling frames of comb out of a hive. if you look closely. You'll see, very so often you'll see a bee, grab another, one bee,

grab another bee, usually by the thorax or the abdomen. And then the bee that's doing the grabbing shakes her body up and down, top to bottom. And it goes on for a few seconds, and then she walks on and she'll grab another bee and shake that other bee. And I think you were referring to the grooming invitation dance. That's what the bee that feels like she can't. She's got a part of her body. Usually it's the base of her wings or the petio region, the waist region. She's feeling some dirt which she wants removed.

And what she does is she grabs the comb very firmly with all six legs. and she shakes her body side to side quite violently. It's very conspicuous. And the nearby bee will feel that vibration, probably through the comb vibration, but maybe with the airborne, go over and clean up the pedial and wing hinges of the body of the bee that did the shaking signal. And that was, it's very, for the investigation done by the undergraduate student, he had an observation where he could take the glass off and then he could, using a little pipette,

he could either puff air onto a worker bee or as a control, or he could puff a bit of chalk dust onto a worker bee. And yes, if the bee got puffed with chalk dust, she would soon be performing the grooming invitation dance with air. No, not, doesn't do that. Yeah, that was really interesting because I like the puffing the bee and annoying it to make it think maybe something landed on it, but it didn't. And then if there was actually a particulate on the bee's body,

then they would do that grooming invitation. That was an interesting experiment. And what's the value of knowing that? I think one of the values of knowing that, well, I'd say there's two. One is a practical value. It tells you, as a beekeeper, if you see a bee doing that, it's not like she's experiencing some, oh, some damage from a pesticide or something like that. This is not an abnormal weirdo behavior, a sign of damage.

This is just a normal behavior. And the other advantage of knowing about that is that it just deepens your understanding or connection to the bees. Which is, I should confess my primary motivation for keeping bees is to understand things like this. And it also seems like when you're looking at an observation hive in these grooming areas, it seems like it's an area of the frame that they go to, almost like a car wash location. As that part of the observation, do they kind of go to an area where their opportunity to be groomed would be higher? That's a good question, Fred.

I don't know. I think you've picked up on something that I've missed. I haven't, I didn't, I don't think I plotted out. they usually I could sell I usually work with a two frame observation now that I think about it I do think there was more of this grooming invitation dance performed on the lower comb just because there's more crud falling down from the top

yeah yeah so I have all of my observation hives are three or four levels high and they're in groups of threes the frames are grouped in threes yeah and it is the lower near the entrance the lower frame where I see the most grooming happening happening. So I wasn't aware that they'd isolated the frequency or the invitation to be groomed. But it's all really interesting. It sounds like an area that could even use more study and observation. Oh, yeah. One thing that springs to my mind now that we're talking about is just a really careful description of how what the groomer, how the groomer operates on that other bee.

I bet, you know, just like when we go to a barber, the barber has a real technique for cutting the hair properly and carefully. I bet those groomers have similar rules or similar details of their behavior that are functional. Yeah, they see just as an undertaker B goes around and some perform that function very well and others almost not at all. there are groomers that are workers down there that seem to make that their primary function. Yeah, that's right. They finish grooming one and go to another. Yeah. And it's a real sweet coordination between the groomer and the groomee, because the groomer,

when the groomee, once it feels that the groomer is working on it, it will extend, it'll unfold one wing. It'll open up the one wing joint at a time so the groomer can work to that, clean out that joint. It's nice. Yeah, it's really, it's like, it looks like it feels good to them. Like you said, they're submitting to it, they're holding their position, they're spreading their wings out and allowing them full access to their body. It is very interesting to watch. Yeah, and it was one in that honeybee laboratory for the course, that was one that often

caught the student's eye because it is, it is fun to watch and it's conspicuous. So aside from the CO2 detector and the ability to measure, measure that, those gases, what other technology have you found to be most beneficial in your research? Oh, by far, it's the video technology. When you're looking at behavior, often you, in order to measure all the things you want to measure regarding a B as it's doing its behavior, you can only do that during a playback, a slow motion playback. And sometimes there's just, also, many times there's just so many bees simultaneously dancing, for example, if you really want to get good data information on how many bees are dancing and what locations they're advertising, you have to video record it. And of course,

initially we didn't have video recording. So we could all, if we wanted to map out where a colony's, the sites that were being advertised on the dance floor in a colony's hive, we could only, we just had to sample the dances. And that was, that's another way to approach that problem. But it is nice. For example, when I studied the house hunting, the decision-making process by the nest site scouts on swarms, it was critical that we could record every dance and have every be labeled for individual identification. Without those two abilities, labeling every B for individual ID and recording every dance, we wouldn't have a clear picture of the process. Oh, that's really interesting. So we're saying then that that would be one of those hives that had a building attached to it for

observation? This would be one where the, it was, we would set up the board on which we would mount the swarm, so it would have just one front, one didn't have a backside. It was plastered onto a board, basically. And that was put on a porch because we wanted it out in the open, as that the swarm would have in nature on a tree branch or something like that. So this, yeah, there was no hive just just aboard. And I think I have a picture of that in the book. Oh yeah. It's actually, oh, you do. Yeah. 7.1. Yeah. And so that is very interesting. And often we don't even know what's happened until we get back, get it up on screen, and do a slow motion playback. And then we really see what's going on. And those become aha moments, right?

Oh, yes, that's right. Yeah. The slow motion playback is handy. Is part of that story. And just the other thing, even if you're not doing slow motion playback, if you're looking at the, for example, the dancing by the nest site scouts on the side of the swarm, you can only watch, you can only follow one dancer at a time. So you just have to go back and forth. You're looking at the same time slice on the side of the swarm. or that you just have to play it many times to get the information from every nest site scout that is dancing. And for example, in my study of how they make the choice of a new home, how the nest site scouts make that choice, we did it for three swarms. And it only took a day or two to record the dancing activity of the nest site scouts during the decision-making process. but then it took it took about four months per swarm's video recording

to extract all the information from the video recordings so that just shows you how much information what the challenge was in analyzing that process and what just how much information is unfolding on the surface

of a swarm by the scout piece. Wow. And I hope that people realize how many hours, weeks, months, and years it takes to compile information that's presented so cleanly in a book. You know, to really think about the hours of observation that it takes, which is why it's so rare, you know,

to get that information. It's a time commitment. I think I'm glad you, I'm really glad you said that, Fred, because I don't think, Most people, yeah, it's, it takes a lot of time. You have to be really interested in it. It's often just very methodical,

just patiently have to go through things. But what makes it work or makes it appealing at the same time is that you have a sense that you're discovering something. You're describing something. analyzing something that the bees have been doing for millions of years, but nobody had ever really known exactly what they were doing. That is a tremendous thrill, and it keeps, and when you get the finished product,

like these diagrams which show the dancing patterns of the scout bees on a swarm, initially the scouts are dancing for sites in various directions and distances, but then bit by bit it consolidates to one. That's just a piece of beautiful bit of the natural world is represented there. Yeah, and I should add, for those that are still on the fence about getting the book, you should, because it's grapped out very clearly how the bees

and those doing the waggle dance, the arrows are very thin for the sparse sites that have very low representation, and then the big social influencers show up and now it's a big broad black arrow that shows that this is a consensus site that there are many more and eventually they all just do that waggle dance is that right so they abandon their previous positions and now they're all saying yeah this is good we agree yeah they have a very sophisticated way of building that complete consensus it's the basics of it are that every bee

stops eventually dancing um but if you come back from a really good site you dance longer than a V that comes back from a mediocre site. So there's a bit, that bias is the build-up, and eventually that bias overwhelms any of the poorer sites, and so they achieve agreement. Every once in a while, though, that scalpese find two good sites, and then they can, then they, then that,

then they're in a situation where there are two sites that are attractive enough for the swarm to go to them. And in one case, we watched the swarm take off and divide itself. Half the scouts leading half the swarm in one direction and half going in the other direction. But they didn't stay apart. They didn't split completely because they all had only one queen. And for whatever reason, in that case, the queen didn't fly off. Maybe because she wasn't getting a clear directions.

And so they came back and reassembled. And then they made a single choice. Now, have you measured the overland speed of a swarm on the move? Oh, yeah, yeah. I think it goes up to about 12 kilometers per hour, about seven miles per hour. That's the maximum that we recorded it in our flights. But it may go higher than that, because when we made those flight speed measurements, the new home that they were moving to was only, I think it was only 500 meters.

500 yards away, so they may not have reached what would be a terminal velocity they could achieve. I think you also describe, you call them streakers, I believe, that circle around that know the site they're headed to and they beeline through the swarm to redirect or head them towards their final destination. Yeah, that's right. It's only a few percent of the swarm that has visited the noon at home site so knows what its location is. And those are the nest site scouts. And so, in a swarm of 10,000 bees, there might be three or 500 only that know where the new home site is. So once those bees, those nest site scouts, they get the swarm, everybody to launch off. They're in a swirling cloud.

And this is something a beekeeper can actually see. What you will see then is if you look to the top of the cloud, you will see bees shooting through, shooting over the cloud, actually, and they're shooting in the direction of the new. home site, and thus they're pointing the way. And then when they, they of course start at the back of the swarm cloud and fly towards, fly over it in the direction they want the bees to move. And when they get to the front of the swarm cloud, they drop down, they fly below, and then they come back up and shoot over the top. And you might wonder, why are they going to the top and then below? It's because when they shoot over the top, they have a clear background against which they can be

seen as they streak towards the new home site. But when they drop down to the ground, they can't be seen. They're just, the background's too dark. So that's how the flight guidance work. And there was a very clever experiment done by an investigator in Australia to test that that flight guidance system, that streaking is how it works. She, she would have, this is Madalina Beekman, professor on the universities there. She set up a situation where she had swarms fly down a certain direction to go to their new home site. But then she also set up, she created a cross line, a cross line of flight by setting up an apiary where bees were visiting.

I think it was a big field of clover nearby. So there was a lot of cross flight. And those swarms, they would take off. They start flying to their new home. but then when they had to fly where there was a lot of cross flight from the foragers coming back from the clover field, they stalled out. They were just getting, the signals were getting too confused for them to know which way to go. That's really interesting, and I hadn't heard about that study before.

So that's also when things are flying directly over them, does that mean their simple eyes are picking up that movement? Because they pick up movement better than the compound eyes, or how does that play? I think they still need to use, I think they're still relying on the input of the compound eyes. Okay. Because the compound eye, compound eye is very, actually is very good for registering movement. It's movement and shape. Whereas the Asele, the simple eyes, those appear to be served two functions, measuring overall light level, and also for, they're really tuned for keeping,

keeping track of the B's role, they're good at detecting the horizon line. And so they seem to be functioning primarily as horizon detectors. So that's their leveling system? Yeah, I believe that's. And you know, you could sort of see how that would really work very well. Just put that bubble, those visuals on the very top of the head. And that'll tell you whether you're... And I did have another question.

This will be a practical question right now because we're in prime swarm season here in the Northeast. And I know that when we finish this interview, I'm going to go outside and there'll be a swarm-headed fir tree because it's going to be in the height. It's going to be the 80s today. Oh, yeah. Anyway, not where you are, but where I am for sure. But swarm boxes, you've done extensive studies on that. And people, I'm sure, are already familiar, but frames with drawn comb in the boxes, an empty box. I believe you said in this current book that they show a preference for drawn

comb being present in the box. Would you explain how we arrived at that? Yeah, it was, it was a, it was it's very it was very simple in all of these. I used the approach that I used to analyze all of the nest, the nest site preferences. I would put up a pair of boxes and the boxes, within a pair would be identical in all ways except for one, the size of the entrance, the height off the ground, and things like presence or absence of comb in the nest. And yes, presence of comb makes a site very, very attractive. And it's probably because building comb is energetically very expensive to be. So they can find a dwelling place that is partially or fully furnished.

that must be tremendously valuable to them. When they're walking off the interior of a box, which they do extensively, and all the scouts show up and they walk it off too, do they walk the surface of the comb as well, or are they just primarily sticking to the interior space? I don't, you know, I've never studied what their movements are like when there's combs in there.

I don't think they can use the measurement, the measuring technique that I found that they use when they are checking out the volume of an empty space. And I think they don't need to because they can, you might say, rely on the previous colony having gotten that decision made correctly. And so the presence of the Combs says. Oh, that's interesting. So it already has a mark of approval by the fact that Combs present demonstrating a previous colony occupied the space before. Right.

That is interesting. But, you know, we don't really have a firm answer to your question. They may walk around and make sure, well, there's enough comb here, something like that. They may get a sense that it's not a tiny little set of combs, that it's a good-sized set of combs. I'm not sure. And now I will move on to the glass house at Cornell's Dice Lab, where the water studies were done. Now, based on the picture alone, there's a young woman sitting there looking at an observation hive, and she's, you're stressing the bees with a heat lamp and she's counting their visits to there seems to be a barrier then they fly over it,

go to the water source and come back. That looked like a space I would like to have been assigned to. It's nice and clean. It's out of the weather. And would you please explain how bees respond to stress, heat stress in particular, and then the water gathering. And I believe you also said that that's one of the most frequent waggle dances or the longest waggle dance gets done once they find a good water source when it's needed. Yeah, that's right. Well, I'll just start by reminding us all that bees collect four things, nectar, pollen, propolis, and water. And they need water because like they're all, like all living things, they need water. Often they get their water need will be met by and the water coming in from nectar.

But there's times, for example, when a colony's nest is overheating, they don't cool the nest with nectar. They go out and have water collectors, go out and get water. That's a much more efficient way to cool us their home. And so that's what we were looking at in that greenhouse. We would set up an observation hive. We could overheat the colony's home by shining a lamp on it.

That's what that lamp was about. Or we could not heat it, so we could have time when they weren't water stressed and when they were water stressed. And then, yes, in that greenhouse, they had situation. We controlled the water source. We provided one little water source on a balance beam scale, which enabled us to measure very precisely the rate of which they were collecting water for their colony. And there were a little, a few hurdles in working inside that greenhouse.

because initially we would heat up the hive and the bees would not come to our water source. And we discovered by carefully searching that greenhouse room that those clever little bees, and I should say very daring water collector bees, they found some moss up along where there was a leak in the roof and the moss was damp and the bees were able to get water there. But even better and even more astounding was there's a sink in that, in that, room of the greenhouse and i didn't realize this but in this in the what is it called the tube were they going for the pea trap yeah that right the spout from the sink there's

oh okay down that spout it's when you shut off the valve it doesn't empty the spout completely of water there's a pool of it and they were very bravely i'd say going into that spout walking down it getting water and coming back out. So we just had to close that off. And then they had, then they were, then they had to go to our water source. And what we were trying to learn is, um, just how that water collection is regulated. And, uh, it is a little bit like the nectar collection, because the water collectors could just collect the water. There's another group, and those are the elderly, some of the elderly bees. There's another group of bees involved in the water. cooling and water use process. These are the water spreaders, and they go down near the entrance,

just like the middle-aged bees meet the nectar collectors. These water spreaders go down near the entrance, meet water collectors, and then get a load of water, and then they'll take it up to where the hive is too hot, and where they can smear it on the combs and give it to other bees that begging for water if they're very thirsty, things like that. So there's a whole separate economy of water collection. And both the water collectors and the water receivers are distinct bees from the nectar collectors and the nectar receivers. And even, and it's one example of that, and there's a nice graph at the beginning of that chapter called Colony Thirst, where for several days I just sat by a hive in the spring. And I would capture

one at a time they'd capture a bulging, whatever, one at a time I'd grab a bee that was going into the hive with a bulging abdomen. And most of them, it was a nectar, yeah, it was a honey. It's actually the free previous figure, Fred, figure 19.1. I feel like I'm in class. Let's turn to,

that's the one. That's the one. I was trying to figure out what the sugar concentrations were of the returning nectar foragers because I was going to do experiments or putting feeders with different sugar concentrations. I wanted to know the realistic ones. But even during this nectar flow, there were bees bringing in water.

And that struck me as, well, I had no idea that the water collection process was a separate operation from the nectar collection. Because, you know, nectar brings in a lot of water. But no, those bees, there are times when they, for purposes of, especially of cooling and making brood food, even if there's nectar coming, and they want water. They need water.

They use water. And the water collectors are, they're fun to watch because the colonies need for water goes up and down. But once you put a dot of paint on those water collectors, you can watch them and see how they just sit around if there's no need for water to be collected. And then they jump into action when they start getting begged for water. So. Yeah, that's very interesting. And, you know, I've seen it in the middle of winter. We get those days where it's 32 degrees and we get a sunny day and there's melt off on the landing board.

The rush out onto the landing board to drink up that melting, you know, the water from the melting snow, it seems to be a very high priority even in winter. Yeah, that is very telling, Fred, because we hear so much about, and this is something I don't know, answer to, but beekeepers are often advised to give a top entrance to avoid condensation in the hive. But what you've seen and what I've seen about bees being extremely thirsty in winter and going out and going under desperate conditions sometimes, marginal conditions to get water, that tells me that they may actually benefit from having condensation on the walls of their hive, not on themselves, but on the wall, someplace in the hive where they can get water.

And I bet those your colonies, I bet those bees from your colonies had used up whatever condensation they had found inside their hives. And it makes me wonder, I know from my studies of the bees nest site selection process that they don't want a top entrance. They want a bottom entrance. They don't want a top entrance. And I wonder if it's because they don't want the humid air to go out. the top of the top of their hive, their home and in the winter. And they want it to, they want it to stay in there and condense on the wall so they have a handy water source even on, even on any day in the winter. So many, many, lots of interesting. Yeah, I often use the logic with fellow beekeepers

that if they want an upper entrance or an upper vent, then make that a part of, of your swarm trap hive and see if they'll move into it. If they avoid the one with the upper entrance and the upper vent, then they've cast their vote. We seem to want to catch them in the single lower entrance swarm trap, but then once we have them, now we add that upper entrance because they're a captive audience and there's nothing they can do about it.

So if they were selecting on their own, they would avoid it, I think. I'd say there's no question about it, because every beekeeper knows just how tightly the bees put propolis to seal down the inner cover and the outer cover. They're really working hard to seal up that top part of their home. Yep. I agree. Now, my other question is, have you considered this is not in the book, but when it comes to observation hives and things like that,

how about lighting spectrums? Are there any experiments going on where it would better show eggs? pupa and larvae and things like that or does that matter at all just regular white light is fine i haven't investigated that at all and i've just used regular white light i usually use a flashlight so that i can look down into the cells easily and i usually rig up a light above so i have general good illumination but i almost always depend upon a small flashlight to be able to look closely. Because I don't want to hit every bee in the side of the hive either.

I just want to put the beam on bees of interest. So, okay, that's interesting. And I had a question, it just skipped my mind completely. Oh, that happens to you too? Oh, yeah, here we go. When it comes to the comb that they're constructing, we know that the physical dimensions of the bees that are constructing comb have to do with that.

What about the thickness of the beeswax walls of each cell? How is that thickness determined? I think I read something about it has to do with their antennae. Do you know what dictates the thickness of the comb? Well, I know of one study that it looked at this. And this was done by a German investigator named Martin Lindauer, who I respect greatly. So I'm pretty sure this is correct.

What he would find is that the bees appear to judge the thickness of a cell wall, the wall of a cell that they're building by pressing on it with their mandible and thus pushing it and then feeling with, but then at the same time having the tips of their antennae pressed to that wall and judging its speed of rebound. If it's too thick, it won't rebound. It won't have that drum-like nature. So that appears to be how they get the right thickness, not leaving it too thick,

probably also not getting it too thin, having it flexed back in response to being pushed with the mandibles. That is very interesting. I want to backtrack again because I want to tell a story that's fun. for me to hear personally. I want to know about your honeymoon adventures and specifically your interaction with Apis Dorsada. Yeah, Apis dorsada, the large,

the second largest honeybee we know. The largest is Apis laboriosa, which is that lives in the Himalayas. Apis dorsada lives in the lowlands of Southeast East Asia, along with Apis Serana and Apis Florea. And Apis Dorsata is known to be, well, it builds its combs in the open. They're very large combs. The bees are, they're about, it could be a yard side to side.

It's a single comb hangs down. And they build at the top of these combs, these very deep, deep cells. They might be three or four or five inches. deep. And those are where they store the honey. And there are many animals that like to get their honey and their brood. They're brood even more. One is, these are some birds, the Pernus Epivorous, the honey buzzard of South Asia. And so these bees, they're building their nest out in the open, they're covering their nest with a blanket of bees that can be several layers thick. And And they have been described as the most ferocious stinging insect on earth.

I don't know if that's completely true, but they sure are voracious. And I say that, Fred, because I once wanted to experience firsthand their ferocity. And I found in northern Thailand a water tower where a colony had built its nest on the underside, the bowl-shaped underside of the water tank. It was a concrete water tank, so it had good at heat. They could attach their combs very well to that. So I climbed up the ladder, up to the, get close to the nest, and I took my black binoculars case box, and I swung it past the nest, simulating a Pernus apivorous, a honey buzzard, a black, a big dark object flying past the comb.

And the bees exploded off it. I was, I had the foresight to wear a bee suit. and the bees were all over me but they were mostly on that dark black black, leather binoculars case and they were attacking me they were attacking the binoculars case and they were even going off a couple hundred yards

to attack people in a village that was nearby that was serviced by this water tower so I had to call quits on that pretty quickly and then when I got down that evening, I went back over the black binoculars case and I can't remember the exact number of stings that were implanted in that binoculars case.

Was it 70, 80? I don't remember. I think it's 90. 90, yeah. I mean, it's in the book. It is. It's in the book. By the way, the chapter is the tale of four species.

Yeah. Four species of honeybees, apis. 91, 93 stings. It was a lot. And it was, and those, those stings are not small stings. They're the giant, they're giant stings just because they're, because they're coming from that giant honeybee. And yeah, that makes our colonies of apis,

malephra seem like child's play. They're like kittens. You like kittens. And so your brand new wife was not thinking she'd a bad decision after that experience with you there i don't think that was that was part of your honey so yeah yeah she was she she she was what you might say she was game but i think she also she told me that she's a main girl she grew up on the main coast and there were times that part of the world has a wet season and a dry season and we were that during the dry season

she was really hungry to go just go down to the shore and there was no shore go down to the shore and feel the coolness of the air coming off the water and things like that so that yeah that she was pretty homesick for that so that was a yeah she was I'm glad she came along there was a lot of times it's much safer to work as it as a pair than an individual yeah did you give her a B-suit as well or did you just take care of yourself? Oh, no, no. She had a B-suit. Okay. Okay. Because, yeah, it wasn't just me up at the water tower that's being stung.

It was people, anybody in the area was being stung. I didn't, I had no idea that it would be so that I was sparking such a ferocious counter-attack. And you did not have a video camera? No, I didn't get a video camera until I was, the first, the first, first video camera I got was in, it was about, I don't know, eight years later and it was just this big hunky thing. Yep. Big black box and, yeah.

Yep. I bought my first video camera in 1985 at the Expo in Tokyo, and it was a Panasonic. I carried the VHS unit on my shoulder, and then the camera was on my other shoulder. That's it. That's it. That's the separate one. Right. That was so much weight.

And we thought that was so great. That's like the best. And it's such a low-resolution video. It was 300 lines, I think vertical or something like that? 720 by 480 was the size. Yeah, we just thought that was it. We arrived. That was perfect.

Well, and in some ways we've certainly had arrived. Now we could look at something, play it back in slow motion, make house. It really was a huge leap in being able to describe and observe a behavior. Oh, sure. Behavior. It's here and there. It's come and goes, yeah. Yep.

Yep. Okay, so I'm going to ask you a question that I'm sure lots of listeners and viewers want to know. With all of your experience, all of your research, all of your years of understanding of the bees, what is your personal hive configuration at home? My personal configuration from my hives is the following. I give the basic home to the bees is two deep eight-frame hive bodies and I insulate both of those hive bodies have a complete wall of insulation on all their sides of two inches of extruded polystyrene foam and then I cover that with plywood so that doesn't get banged up

and doesn't degrade in sunlight. And then I put, if I want to make honey, if I want to get some honey from the bees, I'll just, I'll put normal honey supers on top of that. But the part of the world where I live, we have very long cold winters. And I know that those bees do much better in a well-insulated hive than in the conventional hive, which has just got three-quarter-inch pine lumber for its walls. And I don't know why I didn't realize that for so many years because I'd seen bee trees. They have six or eight inches of wood for insulation around their hives. But it was just that was the convention and I didn't think, didn't think carefully about it. And then I started drying out some of the polystyrene hives.

And the bees do, they eat so much less honey in the winter in those hives. And they look so much better in the spring. that's when I switched. I realized I wanted to switch over to well-insulated wooden hives. And so do you change that? You leave that insulation and everything the same summer and winter? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm always wondering why someone wants to insulate for winter, but then when the hot summer comes along, they want to pull all their insulation off and put it into storage. That's a really good question. And if you ever, if you have a hive, hive body that's painted anything other than white. And when you open your hive, just feel what

the inside surface of that hive feels like on a sunny day. It's, it's radiating heat. It's like an oven. It's like it's the heating element. That heat is just going through that pine board right into the nest and those poor bees are dealing with it. Right. Yeah. It makes perfect sense. insulation work summer and winter both you know for retaining heat and deflecting heat yeah and i didn't say this but yeah i i insulate the walls and i don't insulate the bottom but i insulate the walls and i put a good good slab of of two inch insulation above the inner cover on top of the inner cover so you have to build it's a lot of work because you have to build different covers yeah it's i hope some i hope there will be some company that will some day will someday

they make wood that's well insulated. So basically what you're describing is insulation clad by wood. Yeah, that's right. Insulation is clad by wood because I know it would just bang up and get dented and probably fall off, fall apart if I didn't clad it with a wood. And you also mentioned before that the eight frame deeps are better utilized by the bees than the 10 frames. That's been my experience.

It's like, I know with my 10 frames, they would sometimes use those outer two frames, but usually not. Whereas the 10 frame, they go right. They do use all of those combs. And I never saw in a while the nest that had 10 frames, 10 layers of comb in it. They were usually six to eight, five to five. That's interesting, too, how many loads of, yeah, that's very interesting. And so are you putting them well off the ground? What is your, how high, do you put them on?

stands, how do you situate them? I just put them on hive stands that are made out of two by six pressure treated lumber. And yeah, that's what I use. It's too dangerous to go to, for me at least, to go up in the air and try to manipulate, open up hives, manipulate them, check them, take off, and remove honey supers, things like that. What I do, though, is I do try to spread them out. I'm in a part of the world where there are not many black bears. So I can put, I try to spread my hives around. Sometimes, some are in an apiary, but when I can, I like to spread them out across the

countryside. So I don't, so I just know that the bees aren't mixing and potentially spreading disease. And I'm just going to guess that you practice the Darwinian approach? or are you managing, how are you managing diseases and things like that, if at all? Yeah, the main thing that I do is I give them a well-insulated home, because I know that really helps them fight chalkbrood. They don't get chalk brood when they have a well-insulated nest. The other thing is, we've had the luxury of not seen, not seen any American foul brood for about 20 years, maybe 30 years. So I don't, I don't worry about that. What I do, what I

worry about most is just robbing. And so I want, that's why I give them a small entrance so they can defend that easily. It's only about three inches wide. It's a conventional height, but it's, it's about three inches wide, maybe four inches in some of them. It's pretty much, it's, yeah, it is Darwinian beekeeping. An important thing, which I haven't mentioned at all, is where do I get my bees? I get my bees out of the wild by putting up bait hives. And those are just, those aren't very fancy. They're just, they're five frame and six frame nukes. I put some combs in them. I'll put a swarm lure in them. I don't put them high up off the ground. I used to do that, but I've fallen off a ladder once, trying to pull, taking down a hive and that was not good, a bait hive that

had been occupied. So now I just put them on top of a porch or on top of I found an old hive someplace. I'll just stick it on top of the old hive, something to get some a little bit off the ground or a couple of cement blocks, something like that. Oh, that is very practical advice. That's really interesting. Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say, you know, it's going to be location dependent, but I get, it's probably about 40 or 50% of my bait hives get occupied each year. So if I put out, put out eight, I'll get four new colonies. And that pretty much, my winter survival rate is about 70%. Somewhere's between 70 and 80%. It was better this last winter. So I don't need a lot of, and I don't even keep 10 colonies now. So I capture forest swarms that

more than replaces what I have lost in winter. So is that your goal, the spring of each year, just to cycle back in what you've lost? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And you might wonder, why do I keep the bees. It's partly for fun, but partly, I just have a lot of people that really appreciate good honey. And so I just, I like to give the honey away. It's fun. I can tell when a beekeeper keeps bees for fun by the look of the seating that they have around their aviary. If they have really good comfortable chairs, you know that somebody that just wants to be out in the company of bees. Do you have an Adirondack chair or something out there? I just sit on the grass. I try to, minimize the stuff I have in my life. But I will, if I wanted to take, go and sit someplace for a while,

I'd probably just take a hive body, an empty hive body. Okay. Maybe a cushion to go with it. Okay. Here's your chance to words of wisdom for anybody who's listening or watching anything you'd like to share. I know that you, you have a phrase that you like to say, what would the bees be doing if we were doing nothing at all? Yeah. That's, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, mindset that I encourage that I think is a good pathway towards being a good beekeeper is asking yourself, yeah, what would the bees be doing on their own? What's their natural way of life? Because you want to work with them as much as possible. We do that all the time. I mean, where do we put the honey soupers? We put them on top. That's because the bees stick their honey up top and the brood

is below. So I think we just need to, the more we can do that, the more we're in, we're, we're we're rowing in the same direction as the bees. And so that's, and that's what, that's why I give them a well insulated home. It's why I spread them out. It's why I keep the entrance small easily to defend. It's why I keep the nest, use the eight frame set up rather than the 10 frame set up. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's what I call this, Darwin. beekeeping or what it's a term that's probably a better more easily understood term is nature-based beekeeping i always asking myself what would the what's go how do the bees do it when they're when they're when they're in control because then you're then you're not working against them you're you and the bees are working together that sounds great i'm sure people have lots of good information going right now i hope that some people buy the book and uh i want to thank you tom for giving me all your time. You've been extremely generous with your time and information, and you've had a profound impact on, I'm sure, thousands of beekeepers around the world,

and I really appreciate it. Thank you, Fred. Yeah, and it's, it's, I really appreciate this, because writing a book is a lot of work, and it, I think there are not many people that know the behavior of the bees. Most people that study honeybees, most researchers, are looking at at the colony level, how to manage it best, how to do this or that, deal with disease. I think the one thing that I can offer that may be special is I've always focused, almost always focused on the behavior of individual bees. And this latest book is the first time where I just said, I'm going to stay at that level and I'm going to tell 20 stories at that level. And so I think it's not just special to me. I think it's a pretty special to me. I think it's a pretty

special book in that regard. Well, I agree. Absolutely. And I've read it so I can attest to that. It's excellent. So thanks again for your time, Tom. I appreciate it. My pleasure, through and through. Before we close, Fred, I just want to tell you that this is the best interview I've ever experienced. So I really thank you for doing this with me. Wow, Tom, I really, really appreciate that. And thank you again, so much. You're welcome. And that draws to a close, another episode of interviews with experts. I want to thank you for watching and listening. You'll find useful links in the video description or you can just Google Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz Runners, 20 Mysteries of Honeybee Behavior Solve. You can do that to get Dr. Seeley's latest book.

I'm Frederick Dunn and this is the way to be.