Cheshire

Bug girl has a post about all the different crops that are brought to you by insects.

I figured I’d give you an inside scoop as to how crop pollination works, since I’ve dealt with bees before.

One of the most common misconceptions about beekeeping is that they mostly produce honey. A lot of beekeepers certianly do this, but most of the money involved in beekeeping actually comes from the pollination service they provide. About 80% of the fruits and vegetables on your table are the product of bees and if we include other pollinators the total probably climbs.

The actual pollination part is relatively simple…a beekeeper simply loads up one of his colonies early in the morning and drops it off in the proper field for awhile. The bees have about a two mile radius where they forage, and they’ll most likely utilize the closest food source first. They’ll forage at other flowers, but they’ll hit everything in the area eventually. Depending on the operation, cages might be used to cover the crops to contain the bees or prevent the introduction of foreign genetic material.

However, the real work in beekeeping is in the upkeep. You have to know a lot about insects to keep bees. You need to know about their diets, their social structure and even their commensals.

Bees are interesting insects. They’re social and have a reproductive division of labor. They have sterile workers, a reproductive queen and, of course, the boy bees…the drones.

The sterile workers and the queen are both female. All the bees in the colony start out bathed in something called ‘royal jelly’ as a food source…it’s essentially a mix of pollen and nectar. It has a high protein content. After a few days, the workers are switched to nectar or honey as a food source and as a result their reproductive organs instead develop into venom sacs. The end result: the queen can lay eggs, but can’t inject venom when she stings. The workers can sting but generally can’t lay eggs (as always in biology, there are exceptions…but that’s another post).

How the boys are formed is actually quite interesting, as well. Bees reproduce through haplodiploidy…the males are haploid (n) whereas the females are diploid (2n). Their sex lives…well, I’ll just let Isabella Rosellini explain it through green porn:

A beekeeper can tell what’s in each cell by the size and shape of the cell. Queen cells and drone cells are enlarged, but only the queen cells point down. If a colony gets too large, the workers will build a queen cell around a young larva and they’ll swarm-the virgin queen will fly off to mate and will take a bunch of workers with her to start a new colony. After she starts developing eggs, she becomes too big to fly.

To prevent losing a lot of bees, beekeepers try to will split the colonies apart before the new queen hatches and move them to a new location where she can mate with another male. There are also ways to fool the colony into thinking it’s time to swarm that require artificial manipulation of the colony.

As I said earlier, there are also commensals in bee colonies you need to occasionally watch out for. Ants and dermestid beetles will scavenge dead workers and cockroaches will use colonies as shelter. However, there are some critters which pose a danger to bee colonies.

There are occasional pests like small hive beetles, which eat the bees out of house and home by boring through the wax. There are also wax moths which will burrow through your backup wax frames if you’re not careful. Small hive beetles can be very serious, but I don’t think we’ve seen them much in Iowa.

Varroa mites are probably the biggest problem posed to the beekeeping industry right now. They’re small mites that suck hemolymph (~blood) from bees and can deform workers when they feed on pupae. Workers can hatch with deformed limbs and wings, rendering them unable to fly. If workers can’t fly, they can’t gather food for the colony and the colony ends up starving. They’re also thought to vector Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), which is strongly correlated with Colony Collapse Disorder and is considered one of the most likely culprits.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

There’s a lot of complexities with this problem, however and we probably won’t know for a few years. There’s a mad scramble to study the virus and it seems they’re starting with figuring out the evolutionary history. There’s not a whole lot known about it yet…we know it’s been here for awhile, but we’re not sure exactly when it got here or exactly what it’s role is. A lot of entomologists think that the mites weaken the bee’s immune systems to reduce rejection by their host. Hypothetically, the virus could take advantage of the bee’s weakened state.

However, I’d like to stress that there’s still a lot of ongoing research and the story continues to unfold.

So, yeah…there’s a brief introduction to apiculture.