Honeybee clustering when it's cold is a distress behavior: study
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
> These man-made hives have very different thermal properties compared with their natural habitat of thick-walled (150mm) tree hollows.
Bees, including Apis mellifera will build hives anywhere where there is sufficient cover, space, and ventilation, not just "thick-walled (150mm) tree hollows".
> On cold days in these thin-walled hives, colonies form dense disks of bees, called a cluster, between the honeycombs.
The presumption is that the human made hives are less thermally protective because they are "thin-walled". This is just patently incorrect. There are many, many hive designs and many are made out of wood, but many are made out of plastics or even styrofoam. Their thermal protection can be significantly higher than 150mm wood (later noted in the article substantially insulating, such as 30mm of polystyrene".)
Bees do not form a dense "disks of bees". They form a ball, and rotate in and out with the queen around the center, just like the referenced penguins.
I could not identify the type of hives that were evaluated. From the picture, it appears to be a tiny apiary with Langstroth design, all with three full/deep/brood boxes. From the pictures in the paper, they evaluated eight hives.
I am willing to learn, but this single article provides insufficient details how the data was collected and in what context was done.
Most non-initiates think that beekeepers somehow control bee colonies like cows or chicken. Not so much. If a colony decides they want to leave, there is almost nothing you can do about it; they will leave. If they figure they did not like the winter, they will move. A hive will be just fine in a felled log, a hollow tree, or human made space for years without any interaction. It is more of a symbiotic relationship than a stewardship.
edit: spellingerating fixage
That in turn references supplementary material with a MATLAB folder containing csv and code.
https://rs.figshare.com/collections/Supplementary_material_f...
Ah see that's the trick, they didn't collect any data. This is a modeling exercise [1] by the author, with any real values they need cherry-picked from other papers. And having reached a conclusion with their model that doesn't agree with reality (that clustering reduces bees' temperature), they've decide the problem must be with reality.
My kingdom for a couple thermocouples stuck in a bee ball!
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2023.048...
I will say that this article together with one from earlier this year [1] put into question the benefit of cold storage.
This cold storage is a significant added cost and used only in hot areas . It minimizes varroa since the mites can only breed in hives with brood. It's done in spring when otherwise the bees might swarm. Failing to insulate hives in cold areas will require more feeding to maintain colony size over winter, and that would be financially dumb.
https://www.projectapism.org/indoor-storage-of-honey-bees-bl...
The writer seems like an expert, but makes weird assumptions. Commercial beekeepers are very different (and care much more about costs and output) than hobbyists. Some hobbyists are no doubt incompetent (but caring), and some commercial operations are completely uncaring (but rarely incompetent).
What I have heard is that they use less food when it it cooler due to their metabolism being lower.
It's a cost add in the warm climes so the only reason I can see to do it is for mite treatment.
Sometimes it seems that this kind of philosophical narratives are anchored in XVII century science. Everything with pain receptors feels pain. Period. Animals evolved this structures exclusively to feeling pain. Because this is a very positive trait if you want to survive.
Insects and other invertebrates are known to have pain receptors since the XX century (Yes, clams feel pain, and roundworms feel pain also). This is not new ground breaking science at all. What is new is using this to move forward the agenda of the cruelty animal crew.
I'm not against building better beehives, but we should focus, --laser focus--, our attention and most of all our scarce resources investing into much more urgent problems with insect species losing of habitat, being poisoned and facing extinction.
Because money is scarce on conservation and much more scarce on invertebrate conservation; and "give me money or this bee will die frozen two days before to just die of old age and be replaced by other bee" is a ridiculous problem.
XVII century -> 17th century -> years 1600 to 1699
XX century -> 20th century -> years 1900 to 1999
Yet they'll never know real pain like the devs in deadend or overworked jobs.
In such a scenario, deliberately causing stress generation after generation in a species crucial to our well-being and, perhaps, survival is not advisable. It raises the question: What could go wrong?
> This means that for hive walls to be effective, they have to be substantially insulating, such as 30mm of polystyrene.
There is an entire philosophy of beekeeping supported by a variety of studies conducted on remote islands around the UK that we should be positioning bees for minimal interference like you suggest (as well as interference via mite treatments, etc) in order to allow for evolutionary adaptations to create more robust bee populations.
As in aquaria, if you want something you can "set and forget", you need to let nature take over and provide a) a biome resembling a natural habitat and b) place the appropriate species and scape inside it. Then you can get away with no mechanical filtration, no heater, no air, etc. You can safely go on vacation because the system will clean itself, generate food, and so on. But that requires considerable knowledge and care at the outset and the willingness to let things be. In the case of beekeeping, this almost seems like you'd need to allow a hive to be inside of a log or stump or something where the bees are properly protected and secure. Barring that, you need to be cognizant of their needs and actually take care of them.
I'm not sure why people get the idea that animals should survive in conditions so wildly different from their natural conditions, and why they continue to try to make it work.
Reptiles are notorious for this as well. I am an avid fan of snakes, and it's depressing to see how often they are kept very poorly. So little humidity that they have multiple layers of stuck eyecaps - potentially losing their vision. Serious infections from bites from live-feeding. Tiny cramped enclosures with nowhere for the snake to hide. Poor heat management that either leaves it freezing or with serious burns. Overfeeding to the point of obesity. Buying wild-caught animals. Buying snakes with severe genetic problems.
It's very frustrating. Some owners are responsive to advice and will quickly do what they can to improve their care - but some are stubborn and won't accept any at all.
You're aware of what animal we are, yes? Our natural habitat is the savanna. We're grassland, running monkeys. We've spread across the entire globe and put our own kind into situations we'd never ask an animal to excel.
It's practically in our own nature to try to defy nature itself, in a stroke of irony.
You're correct, for the record. People get into things they have no clue about and then animals suffer for it. But this stood out to me because we even expect ourselves to make it outside of good conditions.
It's not unreasonable to think people might just forget how much we actually do to adapt that other animals simply can't.
I’m sorry but what?? On what basis are you making this remark? Do you really think the generations of people who have researched and kept bees are all doing so neglectfully? Look - you may not like the way bees are transported for the almond harvest (which could be a reasonable argument), but that’s not what your comment indicated. Instead you painted our entire field - which is quite broad in itself - with a massive brush as though we are all neglectful by default. So as a beekeeper, I would challenge that your statement above is seriously out of line, especially as the rest of your argument is about an entirely separate field with no examples given from beekeeper - commercial or otherwise.
If this was the default, beekeeping couldn’t really exist.
I’ve known a few people to keep hives and have them collapse over what likely amounts to negligence. It’s not evil negligence so much as the result of wanting it to be easier and less hands on than it is. The reason I don’t have hives (despite years of wanting to explore the practice) is that I recognize there are challenges I’m not equipped to face and special knowledge to care for the bees properly that I don’t yet have. I’ll hold off until I’ve got the right time, space, preparedness, and other factors sorted out.
Some people charge into it and kill a ton of bees, over and over, not seeming to realize how crucial their role as a caretaker is. This is true of many roles as caretakers of animals. Even people with dogs sometimes fail miserably, expecting amazing results with totally inadequate inputs.
My point isn’t that there’s anything wrong with beekeeping. Or aquaria for that matter. I love keeping fish. My point is that many people get into these things and cause a ton of suffering and seem oblivious to or inconvenienced by proper caretaking practices.
This is such a bold statement given the variety of climates in which bees are kept, and simultaneously overlooks research that indicates starvation is an even bigger issue than cold in many places.
> Honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies don’t hibernate. In the wild they overwinter in tree cavities that keep at least some of their numbers above 18°C in a wide range of climates, including -40°C winters. But popular understanding of their overwintering behaviour is dominated by observation of their behaviour in thin (19mm) wooden hives. These man-made hives have very different thermal properties compared with their natural habitat of thick-walled (150mm) tree hollows.
There is a very nice paralel to this. There was a study which suggested that the temperature of lab mice housing (which is roughly room temp) is too cold for mice. If they could they would turn the thermostate up. So they are in a constant state of low-key hypothermia, which might affect all kind of immunology and stress experiments.
Cold animals is the most obvious paralel in these two stories, but if we squint at it we can see that the paralel is that something which is done for the experimenter’s convenience might have unexpected distorting effect on results.
Highly recommended for more information on bees and their hives.
[1]https://www.nrdc.org/stories/colony-collapse-disorder-why-ar...
But perhaps it's the web where the human collective thinks its super-thoughts. Or, we have no collective at all, just a bunch of individuals behaving selfishly. ..Or both, the selfish behavior adds up to our collective behavior, in which case, the human super-organism seems only dimly aware of itself.
If you are ethically a vegetarian, just tell me that, don't tell me how unhealthy meat is, it's a waste of time (=a portion of both our precious lives), it's a lie, and it's bad science (as in it's motivated to a goal, not that it's necessarily wrong; if it turns out to be right, the boy-who-cried-wolf is not the right messenger).
we used to think that bees cluster to keep warm, didn't we? this person says clustering is a stress response... well, being cold can be stressful, so can taking the GREs, that doesn't mean it's not good for you. So then I read this shit:
> Deliberately inducing clustering by practice or poor hive design may be considered poor welfare or even cruelty, in light of these findings. There are almost no ethics standards for insects. But there is growing evidence that insects feel pain. A 2022 study found that bumblebees react to potentially harmful stimuli in a way that is similar to pain responses in humans. We urgently need to change beekeeping practice to reduce the frequency and duration of clustering
Nothing wrong with thinking we need to stress over reducing bee stress, but you're stressing me when I discover that I'm listening to a person obsessed with a fairly narrow slice of what it means to be a human, or what it means to be a bee.
And I don't agree with your point either. Auxillary arguments are good. If the bees' housing needs don't concern you. Maybe a claim that they make better honey while not stressed would.
I don't dismiss the ideas of a pacifist or a vegan, I would just prefer not to hear lots of repetition, especially when it's disguised.