Beekeeping Around the World: Apimondia

- Okay, welcome, everyone.

Thank you for joining us for Beekeeping Around the World.

I'm really excited to have you here learning from, today, Jeff Pettis, the president of APIMONDIA, the International Federation of Beekeepers' Associations.

Just a little bit of housekeeping.

Please note that, for this seven-webinar series, there's an individual registration required for each one of those, so if you only signed up for the first one, of course, you're gonna wanna sign up for the rest because we're gonna be going around the world and seeing some really exciting things.

So today, to kick us off, we have Dr. Jeff Pettis.

He's an entomologist who specializes in apiculture and honeybee health.

As the former research director of USDA ARSB Research Lab in Beltsville, Maryland now an independent consultant, Dr. Pettis has focused on improving colony health by limiting the impacts of pest diseases and pesticides on honeybees.

His research areas include IPM techniques to reduce the impacts of parasitic mites and disease, effects of pesticides, pathogens, and temperature on queen health and longevity, post-parasite relationships and bee behavior.

As I said, Dr. Pettis is the current president of APIMONDIA, the International Federation of Beekeepers' Associations, and serves on several international committees, including the World Organization for Animal Health, and he has 35 years of research experience in 15 different countries.

So he is the best person in the world to introduce us to the world of beekeeping.

So I'm gonna let Dr. Pettis take it from there.

- Thank you, Robyn, and thank you to everyone out there who's tuning in.

Yeah, I'd like to start by thanking Penn State, Robyn and Margarita in particular for organizing this.

And I will apologize in advance if my video goes what I call Andy Warhol, and you'll see it, you'll notice it if it does it.

It does some kind of weird thing that I can't explain.

It only started about three days ago, so I haven't solved the technical issue.

Before we get started on the slides, which, of course I'll use slides, beekeeping around the world, what do we think of when we think of beekeeping?

We probably think of beekeeping and honey, and maybe we think of beekeeping with Apis mellifera or Apis cerana, the two major cavity nesting bees, and we'll talk a bit about that.

But other bees produce honey, and this is a jar of Apis dorsata honey, and I'll show you some pictures of that.

This is a jar of Apis dorsata, giant honeybee honey from Thailand.

And so other bees do produce honey, and in fact, there's some other bees that we normally don't think about.

This is stingless bee honey, and the reason it's in a small jar is it's highly valuable.

It's considered medicinal by most places in the world that it is produced.

So there's a lot of other things that produce honey, and I'll touch on some of that.

But if you're working with your local association or you're working politically, actively about pollinators, and why should we protect pollinators?

It's not this, it's not the honey, it's the pollination.

And actually, if you look at that apple, you'll see it's misshapen, it didn't actually get fully pollinated.

So really, this is how we sell the value of pollinators.

It's not about honey, but we're gonna focus today on beekeeping, and what types of beekeeping.

So I'm just gonna introduce you to some ideas about beekeeping across the globe, and you'll hear from a number of other people throughout this series about different aspects.

So let me share my screen.

There we go.

Okay, and again, I've already pointed out that many different things make honey, and we'll touch briefly on some of those.

But again, when I think about beekeeping, I'm a beekeeper myself.

I manage about a hundred colonies here on the eastern shore of Maryland, and honey's one of my primary things, but I do do some pollination.

So again, are we only talking about honey bees?

And so I'll touch briefly on the different types of bees, and I'll spend a little bit of time towards the end on colony defense and some issues about pesticides that I think, hopefully, you'll find this interesting about bees and how they defend against hornets and pesticides, et cetera.

So with that in mind, beekeeping or keeping bees is a really age-old tradition.

And this is a picture from the Jordan Valley, where they found these clay pots, or they were kind of fossilized clay pots, right within an ancient city.

So there was about 60 of these, three rows.

There's one row, two rows, here's the third row, and I believe I put the citation up there if you wanna read more about that.

You can see that even, what I would call, commercial beekeeping was present in the Jordan Valley many, many, many years ago.

So beekeeping has been around a long time.

And if you look at that type of hive, it was a clay pot and it was sealed on each end and had an opening for the bees to fly.

This same kind of beekeeping is still present today.

This is a picture from present-day Egypt, where, again, the beekeeper puts out these clay tubes, the swarms move in, they then close up the entrances on the front and the back and leave a small hole.

And this kind of beekeeping can still be profitable.

It's still very low input to start up.

And so we often think about beekeeping as only in these white boxes with movable frames, but beekeeping around the world is quite diverse.

All right, I'll briefly talk about some of these different things, and I'll talk about honeypot ants in Australia and stingless bees, but within the Apis, within the larger honeybee group, I'll talk about the multiple-comb-building bees, and then the open nesting, single-comb-building bees.

So I'll differentiate those two a bit, and just try to give you an overview of some of the things that are out there that produce honey.

So the first is these honeypot ants in Australia, and they're fascinating.

If you ever get a chance to go there, you might get a chance to taste them.

The aboriginal people, as you see that picture up in the top left-hand corner, that's a dream scene, and the actual honeypot ants are depicted, there we go, the honeypot answer depicted here with these nice two stripes on their abdomen.

So certain bees get selected to be the honeypots, and other foragers go out and bring in nectar, and they simply feed it to these honeypot ants, and they serve as storage vessels.

Most other bees use different kinds of comb to store the honey.

Here, they're using the actual body of the honeypot ant to store the nectar, and the aboriginal people of Australia have known about these ants for a long time.

They can detect where they are and find the nest and then get a slight sweet reward.

So these are not sold commercially, but they are hunted and gathered in Australia, a form of honey production.

I show you bumblebee colonies, and the opening of a stingless bee colony from the tropics.

Bumblebees we now manage.

We figured out how to grow them, and they're managed mostly commercially for greenhouse pollination and some open-field pollination.

They do produce honey, but it's not in a quantity that anyone would harvest.

So they do produce honey, they do store honey, and they use it internally.

Stingless bees, though, are something that some of you probably know about, but they are a source of a great variety of stingless bee honey, and it's quite unique.

Tends to be a little bit, have a little higher of moisture content, above 20%, but the diversity and taste in stingless bee honey is amazing.

So if you get a chance to travel to Southeast Asia or Brazil, or Mexico, stingless bee honey in Brazil, yeah, it's a beautiful thing.

It comes at a very high cost.

I mean, most beekeepers sell it at a very high cost in small jars, and it's thought to be medicinal.

And here's just a few examples of some of the diversity within stingless bees.

They build these beautiful tubes that come out of the trees or wherever they're nesting in, and they're built with propolis, and they serve as a defense against ants and things.

So they have these very unique entry tubes that are kind of diagnostic for the species that are involved.

Some produce a lot of resin.

There's a lot of different types of these bees, but all of them are considered stingless bees, and they come in a wide variety of species and types of nest.

One interesting thing, the way you harvest this honey that's so valuable, most stingless beekeepers use literally a large syringe and they go in and they put the syringe down in the little honeypot and they pull out small amounts of the honey, so they don't harvest it with an extractor.

All right, now I talked about this Apis dorsata honey that I have.

The Apis dorsata, or the large honeybee group is dominated by two species, Apis dorsata and Apis laboriosa, and they often nest communally.

Like, they'll nest communally on a cliff or on a building, or, in this case, in a tree.

This is from southern China.

And I went there in southern China, near Kunming, and there were over 40 nests in this one tree.

It's just amazing.

We don't understand why, probably something to do with protection, and I think a researcher from Australia said that there is some returning to the same tree, like some of the same bees, because these bees migrate, they migrate from the highlands to the lowlands and seasonally, and they do return to the same place to nest.

This is a single-comb building bee, and you've probably seen some of the footage of them, the people hunting them on the cliffs.

You harvest the honey and it is marketable, and they produce quite a bit of honey, but again, most of this beekeeping, most of this beekeeping is hunting and gathering beekeeping.

Although in Southern Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, they do, what they call, rafter beekeeping, and they put a very large stick, very large wooden pole on these stands, and the bees come and nest on those stands, so they're able to actually manage them, in a sense, on what we call rafter beekeeping.

So they are managed, but mostly they're hunted and gathered.

And here's just some other pictures.

They produce a nice curtain of bees that'll shimmer when you come up and disturb it.

I had the opportunity to be stung by a couple, and it's about the same as a normal European honeybee sting, but they tend to attack in mass, so it's not something, you don't wanna get them too agitated.

They also, in Southeast Asia, they sell the brood of these bees.

So they will go and they harvest the honey, but they also harvest, this is dorsata brood being sold in the market here.

You sell it by the kilo, and people consume the brood as food, something we're not taking enough advantage of around the world, the protein that bees can bring into our lives.

Again, just a few more pictures of them nesting.

And there, I was saying, one sting of there is Apis dorsata, and the other sting is Apis mellifera, and you can see that they're about the same.

Not a whole lot of difference, even though the bees are much larger.

The other single-cavity nesting bee is called the dwarf honey bee, and there's two main species, Apis florea and Apis andreniformis.

From a biological perspective, what's unusual about that is you've got these two small honey bees that build a small nest about the size of your hand, and they overlap in range, and that's not that common that they overlap in range, but we don't understand why there's not a separation of the niche between these two, but there's not.

You see some queen cells on the bottom on the left, and again, this is a very small dwarf honey bee.

This is me holding a complete nest in Thailand.

I've shaken the bees off and harvested the nest, not to be cruel, but I was looking for the Varroa-like mite that infests these bees is called uvarroa, so it's varroa miniaturized.

It's a very small varroa, and they do have it present in those combs.

You'll also notice the drone comb at the bottom of the picture.

So they build a drone comb when when times are good.

What's not pictured very well here is the top of the nest is where they store the honey.

Let's see if the next picture, that has it, yes.

So you notice that top bridge in that picture, that's where the dwarf honeybees store, the honey is above the brood comb, and they also come up here and they do their dance along the top of this honey platform.

So they dance up here for honey, and they store the honey, and then this is the brood area.

But a fascinating little bee, and they likewise are hunted and gathered primarily.

You sell the whole nest as food, or you sell just the honey or the brood.

So they're very common in Southeast Asia and other parts.

They reach all the way to Iran, I believe, and there's a few reports from parts of Africa where they've moved.

One interesting thing, I talked about the two different species, get a little too much into detail here, but look at these two diagrams.

It doesn't matter which is which.

This is the main comb for brood, but look at the difference in these two here, this configuration versus this.

One of these is Apis florea and the other is Apis andreniformis.

So they differ in their nest architecture, where these cells are kind of in a fan shape, and these cells go out side to side.

So this would be this one, apparently.

But in any case, that's one of the major differences in their comb building.

They're very similar in size, they're very similar in the overlap and range.

So it's a fascinating group of species that we don't totally understand, but they are hunted and gathered for food and for honey.

So now the two species of Apis that we're more familiar with, Apis mellifera, I'll just call the European honeybee, and I'll call Apis cerana the Asian honeybee.

They both build multiple combs.

They nest in rock cavities, they nest in trees, and they have moved from being outside and exposed in cavity nesting.

And both are managed by beekeepers, and both are managed a lot for honey production and pollination, so that they share in common.

This is just some Apis cerana colonies in a rustic-type of setting in either China or Thailand.

But again, they move in, they build multiple combs, and they can be managed in either a modern, more modern movable frame, but also in these rustics, as can Apis mellifera, our European bee.

These are some Apis mellifera bees in China.

And I use this slide to point out Apis mellifera should not be in China.

Why is Apis mellifera, European honeybee, in China is because we as humans think that we know better than the environment.

Apis cerana is the bee that should be managed in, they should be managed in China.

But Chinese beekeepers and other beekeepers around the globe have moved Apis mellifera in the belief that it produces more honey, and perhaps it does, but by moving Apis mellifera, or let's say Apis cerana, by moving different species to places where they shouldn't occur, we have an issue where we get things as host shifting, and so varroa is a good example.

Varroa attacks European honeybees in Asia and other parts of the world, but it does very little damage to Apis cerana, the native bee of Asia.

And I won't go into why.

There's a really nice paper on how Apis cerana fights off varroa mite, and I'll let you explore that on your own, but it highlights the fact that as we bring things together that shouldn't be in different areas of the world, we create our own problems.

And this is just to show that there's many different forms, from these movable frames to all different types of pots and skeps and things that people can manage bees in, these comb-nesting bees.

They'll nest in almost anything that provides a cavity.

Take a brief side trip to Japan.

I had opportunity to do a sabbatical there, and there they do Apis cerana and Apis mellifera, and again, mellifera's managed with the idea that it produces more honey.

Almost all of their beekeeping is done in a single box.

So this is a single deep box with moveable frames, and they tend to, Casey put on supers, but usually it's with a single brood box.

The other thing I wanted to point out about Japan, and maybe I've got some other slide, let's see what the, yeah.

Well, they have excellent bee trucks.

They really take care of their bee trucks.

But let's see, yes.

So they have problems with bears.

This is on the north island of a Hokkaido, which is very rural and very, it's a good ski area, but it's also excellent beekeeping area.

The Apis cerana, which is the bee that should be there, it is now suffering from a pest that we had in our European honeybees some years ago, and that is tracheal mites.

For some reason, in the past 10 years, the Apis cerana, especially around Japan, have been suffering from the effects of tracheal mites, which our European bees went through and probably developed resistance to some years ago, and that's rather interesting to me.

So I said I'd say a bit about colony defense.

If you read the paper in almost any area of the world you're in, if you're in Southeast Asia, you know many of these hornets that attack bee colonies.

If you're in Europe, you know that they had an introduction of a hornet, that velutina that started in France has now moved to several countries.

And if you're in North America, you know that British Columbia and Washington state had an introduction of mandarina, which is the large hornet that is in Japan.

I had a chance to see it in Japan.

But anyway, these hornets are an issue, and yet, I wanna tell you a quick story about bees' defense capabilities, and in this case, it's Apis cerana, it's the Asian honeybee that has this defense and not our European bees.

So yeah, this is a picture from Japan.

The Japanese beekeepers put up all types of screens and things to keep the hornets out, and they're effective, but they are costly in time.

The other thing that's very effective is a badminton, but that takes human power to work.

So they have different lures and they capture hornets.

They can become problematic through the mid-summer on, when their nests built up into large numbers and then they attack the honeybee colonies.

This is just a sidenote about what I was doing in Japan.

So I was there to look at the effect of neonicotinoids and the use in the farm patties and the rice patties and other things to try to understand if that's why beekeepers were losing bees, and we looked at these field margins.

You see clover going there, and that's rice in the background, and they were using neonics on the rice.

The bees were collecting rice pollen, and my thought was that there was movement of the pesticides out of the rice patties into the field margins, and we went through a whole study and found that no, we weren't correct.

The neonics were staying in the field.

They weren't getting in these sideline flowers, and so we were left scratching our heads about the role of neonics in this particular case, in bee health.

They were applying the neonics, you might find this interesting, by helicopter, small helicopter because you can't get into the rice patty, so they were spraying.

It was a topical application that they were doing with these remote, almost like drone helicopters.

And again, our finding was that no, in fact, the side vegetation was not that contaminated.

So the same species, I'm jumping up a little bit here, the same species, Apis mellifera, can be managed literally almost all over the globe because it's cavity nesting.

It can be in very, very cold environments, Alaska or Siberia, Norway.

It can also be managed all the way down into the tropics.

It's the same species, but then we have all these subspecies that have adapted locally to the climate, and I think of some of the North African jemenitica and some of the other subspecies that do well in dry Mediterranean climates, but wouldn't do so well as maybe Apis mellifera mellifera, which is the Northern European bee, would do in Norway.

But anyway, we manage this same bee, but we manage it in different ways, and we should respect the subspecies and not move what we think is a dominant or better species all over the globe.

And this is just some pictures of different styles of beekeeping.

This is in the Alps.

The one over here is in the Alps in Switzerland.

So a bee that might do well here is certainly not gonna do as well in the tropics.

Okay, and we tend to manage our bees in, tend to manage them in movable frame hives, although we do do some rustic beekeeping in log hives and places like all over the world, we still do that and it's still successful, but just remember where the bees came from.

The bees came from cavity nesting, and so they occupy a cavity, they build multiple combs, and then they have to defend that cavity.

And I think I'm gonna, I hope I'm gonna say a little bit more here about colony defense.

That's where I was going with this.

So here we are back to the hornet and back to bees challenging that hornet on the surface there.

Apis cerana, some of the Apis cerana have, what we call, heat balling.

So as this hornet comes in, they can grab the hornet, surround it in a bowling behavior with, you know, a couple of hundred workers, and generate heat and actually cook the hornet inside that heat ball 'cause they can generate enough heat to kill the hornet and not kill themselves.

That's one defense mechanism, and it's called heat balling, and we know it from, you know, Apis cerana.

But I wanna tell you what I think is a fascinating story.

A couple of colleagues of mine, Heather Mattila from Wesley in the US, and Gard Otis from Guelph University and some collaborators in Vietnam, and you might have read this paper, you might not have.

It made a splash a couple of years ago now.

It's not an old story, but...

So Gard and his colleagues were doing work in Vietnam, and the beekeepers, he kept asking, "What is this?

Why do we have this spotting, these little spots?" Here's some spotting here, here, "What is this spotting on the front of the hive?" And the beekeeper said, "Well, that's what happens when the hornets arrive." It's somehow related to the hornets.

So here you see all these hornets, and this is an Apis cerana colony, and you have this spotting that starts, we don't see it unless the hornets are present.

So they got the idea that maybe the bees were doing something, and so they set up a nice experiment where they had a bunch of clean front hives, they cleaned the front of the hives and they assigned them a number and they quantified that, in fact, they're nice and clean, and then they just waited until the season when the hornets arrive to see what would happen.

And sure enough, when the hornets arrived, this spotting began.

So here's the spotting.

I mean, this is massive spotting all over the entrance, all over the landing board.

And this is, I don't if you can tell, this is slightly different, this is Apis cerana.

The abdomen and thorax look slightly different, especially the abdomen looks a bit different.

So the spotting increased, and Gard and the colleagues from Vietnam, they went out and they observed what the bees were doing, and what were they doing?

They were going out to manure piles and collecting chicken manure, cow manure, all types of dung, or shit, if you will, and bringing it back and plastering it on the front of the hives.

So they, in the paper, claim that this is evidence for use of tools.

I don't know if it's use of an actual tool, but I'll tell you what, it's very, very fascinating that the bees' response, somehow, trial and error, whatever, they figured out that if they bring the dung back and plaster it all over the entrance, the hornets get confused, they can't find the entrance as well or they're repelled or whatever, and so they're using feces from different animals in the area, they bring it back and they pass to the front and it helps offer protection.

And so now Gard and Heather have published several publications on this, and it's just a fascinating story about bee defense.

That was Apis cerana.

Apis mellifera evidently doesn't do that.

You will notice, if you work with Apis mellifera, European honeybees, that they will go to mud and to dung piles.

Most of us think that that's related to nutrients.

They're getting salts or other nutrients out of the water, the puddles, but to our knowledge, none of the Apis mellifera are using dung as a defense mechanism.

Not to say they can't learn.

One other quick story about defense is something that I was involved with with a colleague of mine, Dennis vanEngelsdorp, he was at Penn State at the time, another Penn State connection.

We called it entombed pollen.

You see these dark patches, the dark patches here.

This is actually pollen that's been sealed up with propolis.

So here's the pollen, it's been sealed with propolis.

This is other pollen cells that aren't sealed up.

There's the sealed up when they're entombed.

So what we did is we simply sampled these normal pollen cells, and we sampled these entombed pollen cells from the same combs, and we analyzed the pesticides in there to see, we suspected that maybe that pollen was contaminated.

And sure enough, what we found was that, and I'll walk you through this, this is a control, the pollen that wasn't entombed.

This is the pollen that was entombed, covered up with propolis, and these are four compounds: fluvalinate, coumaphos, chlorpyrifos, and chlorothalonil.

And you can see these bars are higher than over here.

So on the same combs, almost no pesticide in the control, and yet a fair bit in these combs and this pollen.

This is a fungicide that was the highest level, followed by coumaphos, which is in the beeswax, the beekeepers use coumaphos, and they use fluvalinate.

And what we think, because these samples were taken really close together, the samples were taken very close together that, in fact, somehow the action of the chlorothalonil on the pollen caused some changes that pulled the coumaphos and fluvalinate out of the beeswax.

We don't know that, but in any case, we know that the bees were detecting some contamination in the entombed cells and covering it up with propolis, so not using it.

So again, it's kind of an active defense against, in this case, a contaminant.

So again, and this is with European honeybees.

So bees are smart.

They can do a lot of things.

You know from your own experience or from some of the publications that they use propolis in a number of ways to fight off infection.

So honeybees have, again, varied ways of defending their colony, one of which you'll know if you're a beekeeper at all.

Let's see if, every time I was touching my cursor, you know this defense, right?

I mean, that's a defense mechanism, but again, I've told you about at least this with entombed pollen, and then the use of Apis cerana using dung, and even heat balling to fight off wasps.

So bees are very good at defending themselves if we let them.

One thing we've done as beekeepers around the globe is we've selected for gentleness, which is a great trait, but it also might be that we're selecting against some of their survival skills.

Yeah, so bees of many types are managed, it's not just one type of bee that's managed around the globe.

I've talked about stingless bees and giant honey bees and dwarf honey bees and things like that, and primarily, we do think about the two dominant cavity nesting, the European bee and the Asian honey bee.

But again, if we are talking about beekeepers, and I represent APIMONDIA, we include, in our umbrella, we include the stingless beekeepers and the other beekeepers, so yeah.

And because we're moving things around the globe, some of our problems, we're gonna continue to, we as humans, are gonna continue to cause some of those problems because of what we think we're doing by moving bees around the globe.

So if you're a beekeeper, what I would encourage you to do is to select locally.

Now if you're managing honeybees in North America or South America, you're managing an invasive species, if you will.

You're managing something that's been introduced, but we've also introduced apples and wheat and other things to grow, so they're part of our agricultural production system, but if you're managing a bee anywhere in the world, select locally the best stock that's working in your area.

Don't think that something from Italy or something from Germany or whatever is gonna perform better than whatever your stock is locally.

Local adaptation is real, and it really is important that we promote locally adapted bees in our beekeeping.

So yeah, now spelled it out in words, yeah.

"Enjoy the bees you have," because they are locally adapted.

I know in my own operation here, I've taken different stock in over about three or four year period.

I just keep selecting from the best, and that tends to work, it tends to get you a bee that performs well in the spring and summer, but also over winters well, in your particular environment.

So I think that might be the end of my talk.

Just enjoy your bees, enjoy beekeeping, and you'll learn a lot more in the rest of this series about different types of bees and beekeeping around the globe.

Oh, this is the shameless commerce part, those of you who ever watch "Car Talk." APIMONDIA, we move around the globe every two years.

Every two years we have a big meeting, and if you've never been, I encourage you to come.

We're gonna be in 2023, this fall, September, we'll be in Santiago, Chile, and you can see some of the earlier versions.

And then we go to 2025, we go to Copenhagen, Denmark.

2022, we almost went to Russia.

We had to hold it in Istanbul, Turkey, but it's a chance for beekeepers all over the globe to come together to talk beekeeping and talk bee science, so I'd invite you, as APIMONDIA president, to join us at APIMONDIA one year when you can.

And with that, I do thank you for your attention.

Okay, and I can tell my video picture is, ooh, it's really poor.

I'm gonna stop sharing.

I'll try to stop sharing, and I'll try to clear up my...

Oh yeah, look at that.

- That's okay, we can hear you just fine and we could see your slides.

So really fun presentation.

You got me all excited for all learning about bees around the world.

And I do have quite a number of questions that I'd like to ask you for the audience.

- Sure.

- I'm just gonna go from the top to the bottom.

So Adele said, "I have a native stingless beehive at a home in Costa Rica.

The tradition is to boil the honey once harvested.

That seems odd to me.

Have you ever heard this?" - I'm not a stingless bee expert, but that, well, I can sort of understand it, and I'll tell you why, because the moisture content is really high, so by heating it, and I'm not sure the temperature, but boiling seems extreme, by heating it, you're gonna kill some of the bacteria.

It may prolong the shelf life, if you will, but to my knowledge, it's not common practice.

But that's, I would have to defer to someone who's a better stingless bee expert.

I've consumed it in Brazil, I've consumed it in Asia in places, and I thought it was always just harvested fresh.

It doesn't have the best shelf life because of the high moisture content, yeah.

- May I add something?

So I think there is a lot of variation in the type of honey that the stingless bees produce.

Like, there are hundreds of species, and I do think that some honeys tend to ferment, so, you know, I think it's, you know, like, boiling reduces the water content.

I was just actually reading about, you know, like, some new protocols to help with that without boiling it, and it may reduce the fermentation.

Yeah, it's just- - Well, I mean, you kill the bacteria, and if you boil it long enough, you reduce some moisture, so now it's more stable.

But to me, that'd be killing all the goodness in it.

I'd rather just consume it fresh, but yeah, but again, you'd almost have to refrigerate it because you're right, Margarita, it's gonna ferment.

They're known to ferment rapidly, stingless bee honey.

- Thank you, yes, and I had the pleasure of tasting it because Margarita brought some for me to taste.

I don't know what species it was, but it was so sweet like a lollipop.

- So, okay, sweet like a lollipop.

We talk about all the different species, some of it tastes like vinegar.

I mean, I'm serious, vinegar, or some of it tastes very acidic in different ways, so it can, it can run the gamut, and there's many, many species and many, many types of stingless bee honey.

So yeah, I've had good ones, and some that weren't, to our tastes, weren't as agreeable, but yeah.

- Okay, Angela asked, "What makes honey crystallize, and does it have to do with the moisture content?" - Yeah, good question.

Nothing about the moisture content.

So this is not Tupelo honey.

I happen to come from the state of Georgia in the US, and we produce the best honey in the world.

It's called Tupelo honey.

So it has a high fructose content, and Tupelo honey will never crystallize if it's good Tupelo honey.

It has a high fructose to glucose ratio.

That's one characteristic.

The main characteristic is that, if you heat honey to a certain degree and then you filter it and get out all the pollen and the little small sugar crystals, it'll almost never crystallize, and that's what packers do to prolong the shelf life.

So a lot of the honey you see on the shelf, apologize for the, a lot of the honey you see on the shelf, a lot of that honey has been filtered and heated, and that reduces their small amounts of small crystals in normal honey, raw honey, that cause it to crystallize.

So when I tell the consumer crystallization is natural, it's a natural effect of good honey that's raw honey, and all you have to do is put it back in a warm water bath to re-liquify it.

So actually, the fact that it's crystallizing is you're guaranteed that it's pure raw honey, yeah.

- Yes, always buy from someone that you know.

- Buy locally, buy locally, yeah.

- Okay, so Christine says, "I am a linguist who does language documentation field work in Nepal.

I work with communities in Central Nepal who are honey hunters.

They have rich cultural histories of their hunting expeditions.

The practices and the tools are traditional and passed from one generation to the next, but the practices are becoming endangered as European honeybees and those Langstroth hive practices take over.

Honey hunting is a dangerous job, and although the honey fetch is a high price, it's often not worth the risk for younger generations." So I guess it's not a question, but what do you think of that?

- I've got, well, no, I don't have a solution.

I've never been to Nepal and seen, but I know that, yeah, it comes at great physical cost and everything else to get there.

What you need is traceability.

You need to sell that story, the story of those people hunting and gathering and collecting small amounts of this very valuable, this is Apis dorsata, and they're a doing Apis dorsata, or Apis laboriosa.

This is that honey.

And the fact that it is sustainably gathered, it's sustainably gathered by people who are going out and hunting and gathering it, if you can tell that story, you can command a major price in other parts of the world, in, let's say, Europe or the Americas.

So I know it's complicated, but find a way, because the other beekeepers in Nepal are using, you're right, movable frame Apis mellifera hives to produce a lot of honey, and that's fine, but it's just honey.

Find a way to tell that story about Apis dorsata cliff hunting for this honey.

And you're right, it's, hey, the problem of people not wanting to get into it because it's work is a problem that's actually worldwide.

If you look at an average beekeeper meeting, the average age is often over 60, and the average gender is heavily male biased.

It's getting better.

It's getting much better.

There's many more young people coming in, but we have the same problem, so it's not unique to Nepal, but I would say if you can find a way to tell that story and create a co-op that's producing this highly valuable dorsata honey, mountain honey, sustainably harvested, you've got a chance because then it's just economics.

I mean, there's beauty in the honey hunting, but you have to have a marketable product too that, yeah, that people are willing to pay extra for.

- It's always about marketing, isn't it?

And okay, so I think some people are starting to realize that honeybees are not native to North America, and they're wondering why don't we call it the Western honeybee?

- The Western honeybee.

- Apis cerana would be the Eastern honeybee, maybe- - It could be the Western, it can be called the Western honeybee.

I actually, I don't know, the committee on common names, actually, I should know that.

I think Asian honeybee is accepted for Apis cerana.

I don't know which is more appropriate or which is actually proper, Western honeybee or European honeybee.

That I don't know.

I should know that, I apologize.

There's a committee on common names, and it's probably already been decided, but I don't know what it is, yeah.

- Jeff, I am going to look it up.

- Yeah, do that, do that.

Yeah, yeah, ESA and SOC should have, yeah.

I bet it's the Western.

I bet it is called the Western honeybee.

- Okay, in the spirit of going in order, "Dear Jeff, hornets are emerging as a major issue in Apis cerana colonies in the Himalaya regions of Kashmir, Pakistan.

Local beekeepers are in much trouble due to them.

Do you have any advice?" - I mean, I know this sounds a little simplistic, but the easiest defense is early on in the season, whatever, the early part of the season, when they first start showing up, if your apiaries are consolidated, is a badminton racket, and you can just, you kill them out front, and I was doing that in France.

Just swat them hard and kill them.

Beyond that, I'm sure some of these traps are effective, I just have not used them, the traps that fit on the front that protect them.

Yeah, they're becoming problematic all over the globe in a lot of different settings.

Yeah, but I don't have a single great answer, yeah.

- Okay, thank you.

D.M. is interested in studying beekeeping practices in those parts of the world that are 7,000 feet plus in elevation, with relatively short growing seasons.

"What areas of the world should I focus on?

Are there any references that come to mind that discuss beekeeping practices in high elevation with short growing season areas?" - I can think of one that's, they have excellent beekeeping, but terribly expensive.

Probably the most expensive place in the world is Switzerland.

I had the opportunity to work there for almost a year.

Switzerland has some very good beekeeping.

They keep them in these high Alpine valleys and it's very short season.

- And that will be our seventh webinar of the series.

We will be going to Switzerland.

- Lars Straub, I know Lars quite well, so yeah, so whoever asked the question, tune in.

But there's other places probably around the globe that would be cheaper.

Switzerland is very expensive.

Yeah, Alaska comes to mind in North America because the season in Alaska is super short.

Even Minnesota, Marla Spivak and her crew there in Minnesota, they know that they have a window of about three months to do everything, and it's really tight.

Whereas in the south, in the US, we keep these year-round, and we can be out in the apiary.

So I don't know, look close to home, wherever this person's from, but I don't know of any particular programs that, high-altitude beekeeping, doesn't ring any bells in particular, yeah.

- Okay, so we have an American who says that they have a picture of bees on cow manure, and they wanted to follow up with that study with using the manure, and they wondered if the bees put it inside the hive at all.

- That picture I had was cow manure, I think, and it was from North Dakota, let's say.

And after a rain, the bees are on the cow manure.

I'm pretty convinced they're just getting the water, which is rich in different nutrients coming out of the cow manure.

I don't know that they're not putting it inside, but yeah, set up an observation hive near the, no, I just, we don't have any evidence that our bee, the Western bee, Western honeybee is using manure in any way.

And actually what's odd, I worked a lot in Thailand and in China, and the Apis cerana there don't seem to...

So the Vietnamese Apis cerana are the smartest Apis cerana in the world.

How about that for starting a fight?

No, Gard said he's never seen it anywhere else either.

He's seen it in Vietnam.

I've never seen it in China, I've never seen it in Thailand.

I've never seen the use of dung there by Apis cerana, so I don't know, yeah.

- Super fascinating. - [Jeff] Yeah.

- Okay, so the next question I'm gonna have Margarita answer, and because of the captioning issues, we didn't have her introduce herself at the beginning, and I didn't even introduce myself either, sorry.

So I'm Robyn Underwood.

I'm Penn State Extension educator, so I teach about beekeeping in Pennsylvania, and I put this webinar series together, but it was actually Margarita's great idea, and she was behind the scenes helping, you know, to get people on board with speaking, so she's part of the team, and her specialty is non-native bees, so this question next is perfect for her.

Go ahead, Margarita.

- (indistinct) native bees.

- Yes, you're right.

Not non-native bees, native.

- So I guess, Robyn, do you wanna read the question?

- Introduce yourself first?

- Oh yeah, yeah.

Hi, sorry, I'm like, yeah, it's one of those days.

My name is Margarita M López-Uribe, and I also work at Penn State, and yeah, I'm a co-organizer of the series.

Very excited to have all the speakers joining us, and thank you, Jeff, for, you know, starting big for us.

I really love your presentation, so cool.

- Okay, so the question is, "Aren't honeybees that we currently manage from Italy or Russia, et cetera, non-native?

So should we be raising them or concentrating on supporting native pollinators?" And I'm assuming that's someone in North or South America asking the question.

- Yeah, so I think this is kind of, there are lots of questions there, I believe.

So yes, the honeybees that we are managing in North America are not from North America.

That's what Jeff mentioned earlier during his talk.

They were brought centuries ago with European settlers, right?

So they have been basically naturalized in the Americas for at least 500 years.

That being said, they are integral to pollination systems in agriculture.

So one of the things that we know is that demands for crop, for crops that are pollination dependent is increasing, and so honeybees play a critical role in, you know, how we produce food in North America, right?

So we cannot get rid of honeys.

That being said, because honeybees have been in trouble for a lot of different reasons and environmental stressors, right, like, there has been an increasing campaigning for saving honeybees, and so I think beekeeping has become a lot more popular because people have this idea that by, you know, keeping bees, they are helping the bees, right?

And so I think this is where the question is very relevant, right?

So if your motivation is really to help save the bees, right, beekeeping may not be the best activity to engage into.

The reason for that is that keeping bees in very hard.

It's almost a full-time job.

And you know, we work with a lot of beekeepers, and it's really hard to, you know, keep them alive, you know, make a profit out of them.

So if your motivation is to help bees, the suggestion is, yeah, you just plant more flowers and, you know, create habitat for native pollinators and you will be doing your part to, you know, like, kind of like solve the problem.

I don't if that's a complete answer.

- I have to add to what Margarita said, and I fully agree with her.

Honeybees in North America and South America are part of the agricultural production system over here, and they're vital because we grow big crops in big ways, but if you really wanna help all pollinators, then you have to think about these other, the native ones, and think about habitat and increasing habitat 'cause it'll be good for both.

So they're both vital, but yeah, and you're right about the popularity of beekeeping.

A lot of people get into it, and we don't wanna discourage it totally, but some places, there're too many honey beekeepers, yeah.

The president of APIMONDIA didn't say that.

I didn't just say that.

- This is being recorded.

- No, but Jeff, I think I totally agree with that, and I think it's an important message, right?

So again, it's not to disincentivize beekeeping, right?

If you wanna become a beekeeper, it's super fun, but I think a lot of people get into it kind of like with this motivation that may not be, you know, like, the right one, but well, we can have another webinar about that.

- [Jeff] Yeah, yeah.

- So someone is writing that, "Isn't there fossil evidence of honeybees being here 11 million years ago?

So they were kind of already here, so doesn't that make them native?" - I know who wrote that in.

I know this person.

- It says anonymous. (laughs)

- I know, no, this has been raised before.

They might have been.

They might have been here in some form in the past.

It's really, yeah, it's hard to say, and yeah, but for me, it's mostly about the current situation.

Our agricultural production, if you think about what we grow that we eat, probably two-thirds of it is exotic species of plants.

So agricultural food production, in, let's just say, North America, a lot of it is non-native plants, and so having a non-native honeybee in there to pollinate is not a big issue.

The question about whether they here pre-historically, I really can't answer that, but there's probably some evidence to that effect, yes.

- Thank you.

I hope everyone doesn't mind, I'm just gonna keep going, even if we go a little over time because this is being recorded.

Everyone will receive a link when the recording is ready to re-watch this 'cause I know you're gonna want to, and share it with your friends.

Okay, Colton is asking the age old question, "What do you mean by local?

What is the distance?" - I've got a friend, a colleague in California, and he swears that his bees adapt from the valley to the sides of the mountain.

Like, he has certain bees that he keeps in one area that he doesn't even cross over and keep down in the valley.

I think it's just a region.

I would say, like, for me, a bee that does well in the mid-Atlantic is gonna be different than a bee from New York State, and it's gonna be different from a bee from South Georgia and Florida.

So to me, that's a good, yeah, the bees in southern US are gonna build up and have certain characteristics.

Mid-Atlantic, they have to get through a winter, but they don't have to get through a New York State winter, so again, I think, I wouldn't put exact miles on it, just that something that's working in your area of the world, yeah.

- Okay, very political answer, very politically correct.

So Christopher is asking, "Does the Australian honeypot ant produce honey in the same way as bees?" - Well, the forager ants go out and collect nectar out of the flowers, and they bring it back, but I don't know the exact biology.

I don't think they do much to it.

I think they regurgitate it.

The receiver honeypot ant, the one that's sitting there, just takes it and takes it down and stores it in her abdomen.

I'm sure it's a crop.

I mean, I think I'd be correct.

It must be a crop or the fact that part of their intestine just get enlarged and they don't let it pass on.

Like, honeybees add enzymes and things to it, and then they actively reduce the moisture.

To my knowledge, the honeypot ant does not.

It's probably more like they're, it's not honey, they're probably nectar pot ants, I think, but I don't know that.

I really don't know, I really don't know.

- Okay, Fred is asking, "You mentioned that in Vietnam they put out sticks to attract the bees to build comb on.

What kind of lure or preparation do they use?" - They probably put some bees wax and stuff on it.

They use rafters, like big poles about this big around because the dorsata, the nest is pretty, even though it's a single comb, it's pretty broad, and they put them, let's say, 10 feet off the ground on a stand, and so there's these different rafters set a little bit apart, and as I showed in that picture, they don't mind nesting close together, but they need something to attach to.

I think it has to do with just that they learned that they could put these things out, and the bees come in looking for an appropriate tree, and not finding an appropriate tree or branch, they'll nest on these rafters.

So I don't know, I've never physically visited that particular part to know if they rub them with beeswax or something, but that would be a likely scenario, rub them with some beeswax to act as a attractant to those raft rafters.

- Okay, so this is partly maybe for Margarita.

I'm not sure if you're familiar, but, "Are there any native honeybees in southern southeast Alaska, close to the northwestern coast of British Columbia?" I think they're thinking about where the islands make everything seem close together, right?

Right.

- Humans manage honeybees there, 'cause they manage them further up into Alaska, but there's nothing, none of them would be native.

And there's plenty of native bees of different types that go up in, you know, well up into Alaska, but not honey bees.

- Gotcha, right.

Okay, this next one is a little bit of a tidbit of advice from Anthony.

"Do not buy stingless bee honey on a trip and put it in your suitcase because it will explode." That's very good advice.

Thank you very much.

I also have tried to take honey as a carry-on and very sadly had to throw it away because it was too big of a container, so don't do that either.

- So I'll give you, 'cause I used to work with the US Department of Ag.

I only worked on the research side, but here's my, I'm wearing this APHIS hat.

No, because it's actually kind of important, when you come back into the country, you shouldn't have any bees wax or anything else, or used bee equipment, but you can bring liquid honey, and I actually had a couple of inspectors ask me, I said, "I'm bringing honey," and they said, "Liquid honey?" And I said, "Yes," and they said, "No comb honey?

And I said "No." So comb honey's forbidden, liquid honey is permitted from anywhere, but no used equipment, things like that.

So yeah, and I didn't know, I've never had my stingless bee honey explode, but that's good advice, yeah.

- I mean, I also tried to make a cold medicine with honey and water and stuff, and that exploded because, of course, I added water and it fermented and it was glass and yeah.

- Yeah, hey, bees know, well, below 20%, but below 18% moisture is honey, is really good honey.

It won't ferment on you.

- Right, exactly.

Okay, I'm gonna try to have you answer all the questions that were written in before one o'clock, and then I'm gonna have to end.

So, "In my visit to Bhutan in 2008, I identified the potential for the selection and breeding of Apis cerana.

Could you comment on the opportunity for a selection program with Apis cerana, and do you know of any breeding projects with this species?" - So I think there's huge opportunity because it, first of all, it's the bee that should be there, but the ones I know of are in Thailand and in Japan, and my experience was that certain ones would abscond readily, and so one of the things they were selecting against was absconding behavior in Apis cerana, and beyond that, just a bee that works well in the boxes, you know, because they put them in different type boxes.

But yeah, the other thing is to convince whoever the beekeepers are that this Apis cerana is a very good bee.

It takes less management, it fights off pest and diseases better, fights off hornets, it fights off varroa, so convincing them that you don't have to work as hard to manage Apis cerana.

So there's huge opportunity to select good Apis cerana bees for management, yeah.

And the ones I know of are in Thailand and in Japan, but I wouldn't encourage anything that import that selection.

I would select locally, try to select locally.

- Right.

So there's some question about honey processing.

"I have 60 kilograms of a species of tree honey from India, and it crystallized, so I put it in hot water and then mix it." They're correct to not wanna heat it up too much.

- Not too hot, yeah.

- Yeah, okay.

"Do Asians use Langstroth hives to manage Apis cerana?" - The ones I've seen, most of the Apis cerana has been managed in just boxes almost without frames.

A few with frames, but not necessarily the Langstroth.

They don't use the larger Langstroth hive like Apis mellifera.

- Okay, and definitely tune in for our webinar from China, which is one of our speakers, Zach Huang, will talk about China.

So he will be able to answer that much better, I think.

So I'm gonna not talk about crystallization anymore.

Everyone is saying very nice things.

Someone is seeing bees at their bird feeders.

Of course, I am guessing you're living near us in Pennsylvania and your bees are just plain hungry and looking for protein and whatever they can get because we haven't had winter, so it's been a problem, but it's pretty common in spring to see the bees going to the dust in a bird feeder.

So Jeff, we do, here where we are, have some hornets that seem to be a bit of a problem for honeybees, but they're not the same, right?

- There's another invasive species, Vespa crabro, the giant European hornet, I think it is, yeah.

So they're as big as the end of my finger, so that can be a problem.

But the other one is many of the species of yellow jackets, Vespula germanica and some of the others, in the fall, they can build up in numbers that will attack honeybee colonies and become a problem.

So yeah, so yellow jackets, to me, in the fall, can attack a weak colony and take it out.

And the other one I think of is this large, yeah, European hornet.

Oh, and the other is bald-faced hornet, I'm using the common name, the black and white bald-faced hornets that create the basketball-looking nest in paper in trees.

Those hornets can be problematic.

So any of them, you gotta keep a strong hive, keep strong hives, keep small entrances, and let them defend themselves, yeah.

- Let's just end with, "Should the beekeeper spread manure at the entrance?" - Yes, no. (laughs)

No, no, no, no, but you know why?

Because it might give the public a bad image of, yeah- - Of honey, yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think let, yeah, but there's a research opportunity.

Maybe we can isolate the active compounds, and you spray it on the front of the hive, you know, so there you go.

- That's why they call it research, always more to do, always more to do.

- [Jeff] Exactly, yeah, yeah.

- Well, Jeff, thank you so much for, you know, kicking off our webinar series.

We had a really fun time with you today, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone next Thursday at noon when we hear from the Canadian Prairies where they make a lot of honey in a very short amount of time, and often indoor winter their bees, so that's different from what we do here, so we're really excited to learn about Canada next, and many other countries on many other continents throughout the series.

So I hope I'll see everybody there.

Thanks for coming.

- [Jeff] It's been a pleasure, Robyn.

Thank you, Margarita, as well, yeah.