Beekeeping Around the World: Thailand

- Okay, hello everyone.

Welcome to our second in our 2024 series about "Beekeeping Around the World." We're very excited today to have Jean Miller here to talk to us about bees in Thailand.

Gene graduated from Lehigh University with a degree in industrial engineering and she worked for a major international food manufacturer in her former life, meaning before she had kids.

She later became a substitute teacher in New Jersey and did that for 20 years and taught all grade levels.

She has been a world traveler.

She traveled to Kenya with Maryann Frazier, who's retired from Penn State, I dream of doing that trip someday, and Dr. Elliud Muli to study honeybees there.

He was a speaker last year in our series, so you can check out, "Beekeeping Around the World: East Africa." She spent a month in Thailand with Dr. Jamie Ellis and Dr. Cameron Jack from the University of Florida as part of their study abroad program, and is a lifelong naturalist and traveler, having hiked over 50 US national parks and traveled to all continents except Antarctica.

So we're really excited to have Jean here today, specifically talking about Thailand and the different bees there.

So, Jean, I'm gonna let you take it away.

- Okay, thank you. - Oh.

Sorry, one more thing, everyone in the audience, please put questions in the chat.

We're gonna collate them and save them for the end and then we'll ask Jean your questions.

So, thank you.

- Thanks, Robyn.

Let me share the screen.

Okay, and thank you very much for everybody attending.

I appreciate you taking some of your valuable time away to listen to me for a few minutes.

So, I entitled this presentation, "Giants, Dwarfs and Some Like Ours: "Honeybee Diversity and Beekeeping in Thailand." And I'd like to say "Sah-Wah-Dee Kaah," which is Thai for "greetings." And as Robyn mentioned, this is really kind of, it was like my final project for being a student with the University of Florida in May and June of 2022.

Quick thanks to the people who made that happen.

Dr. Jamie Ellis, on the left, Dr. Cameron Jack, on the right, were professors who helped us, you know, who guided us into Thailand.

Dr. Guntima Suwannapong, the second from the left, she was our main professor over there, as well as her PhD student who is now a doctor, Mr. Sanchai Naree.

So thanks to them, it was a great trip.

Before we specifically get to Thailand, I just wanted to show you the world distribution of honeybees overall.

Depending on the entomologists you speak with, honeybees species are divided into nine.

Some think there are 11, but I stick with nine here, it's just a little easier.

And if you look, the red zone is where Apis mellifera, the Western Honeybee is, which is pretty much everywhere except for the coasts, or excuse me, the poles.

The poles are way too cold for honeybees to live successfully, and the area right in the northern part of Africa.

Give you a minute, why do you think there are no honeybees there?

If you say Sahara Desert, you're right.

So there are really no substantial amount of honeybees that are gonna live in the desert areas so vast like that.

So, as you see, the Apis mellifera, or the Western Honeybee, is the only one we have in the United States, Central America, South America, Africa, Europe, well part of Africa, part of Northeast Africa has the florea.

Australia, New Zealand, which I recently came back from, that's all Apis mellifera.

And you're saying, "whoa, whoa, wait, Jean, wait, Jean, "I have Italians, but I know people that keep Carniolans." They're all Western Honeybees, those are different subspecies of honeybees, which can mate and produce hybrids like the Russian honeybees.

But they're all Western Honeybees.

So if you look at where the other ones live, a lot of overlap in Southeast Asia.

In fact, some scientists are now, they feel that that may have been the origin of the honeybee in the Southeast Asia area.

Specifically, this is where we went, Thailand.

You look where that little circle is, you'll see there are quite a few species overlap there.

So Thailand is really a hotspot for honeybee diversity, and that's really why I wanted to go.

I wanted to see other types of honeybees besides Apis mellifera.

As I mentioned of the nine to 11, depending on who you talk to, species of honeybee worldwide, five or found in Thailand, four are native and one is introduced, Apis mellifera, the one we have in the US.

So here's where where we visited.

We started out in south of Bangkok, in the Chon Buri Province.

That's where Dr. Suwannapong teaches, and we spent two weeks there, but we also went, did some field trips while we were there.

We did some labs, lectures and a couple field trips to look for different species of honeybee.

Then we went east towards Cambodia to the Khao Yai National Park, then north up to Chiang Mai.

Beautiful area.

More mountainous, a little more temperate, 'cause the other areas were much more hot, much hotter.

Then we flew down to an island off the, the southern coast in the Gulf of Thailand, called Samui, and finally, down to Phattalung at the very, one of the lower parts.

And Thailand is about twice the size of Wyoming, just to give you an idea, the the size of it, and shaped kind of like a lollipop.

It's kind of round or up on the top and then it extends down through the Malay Peninsula.

So it is a pretty big country.

Well, not compared to the United States, but it's not tiny.

So, as I mentioned earlier, there are four native Thai species.

Apis dorsata, which is referred to as the giant honeybee, Apis cerana, the Eastern Honeybee, the one that is the original host, or the host of Varroa destructor, destructor.

We all know that if we're beekeepers here in the US.

Then we have Apis florea, the Red Dwarf, and Apis andreniformis, the Black Dwarf honeybee.

That's a very rare species, and when we were going over, we weren't quite sure whether or not we're gonna see it, 'cause that would've been the hardest one to find.

And then the ubiquitous Apis mellifera, the Western Honeybee that has been introduced.

The reason the Western Honeybee is all over is it tends to be the honeybee that usually produces the most yield compared to the other species.

But it comes with its set of problems as well.

I remember one of the first lectures we had by Dr. Ellis was to differentiate the species into three different branches.

The first one being our Cavity Nesters.

That's like our Western Honeybee, and the Eastern Honeybee.

They both like to make their nests in cavities, be they a hive body or between walls, that second picture kind of in the middle is, they were Apis cerana going in between some logs in the lodge that we stayed at at the national park, and they had hives in between the in and outer walls.

I remember one of the students, I was one of the elder students, most of them were all like 40 years younger than me, they're undergraduates, but she had a hive right behind where she slept.

And she was a beekeeper, so she loved the sound of the bees buzzing.

The species that are highlight, or in bold, are the ones we saw.

Other Cavity Nesters in the world are below that, but we saw Apis mellifera and Apis cerana, Western and Eastern Honeybee there.

A second branch are the Giants.

Now, unlike the Cavity Nesters which have multiple combs, sheets of beeswax comb in parallel, the Giants build one huge sheet of comb, and that's what the Giants do.

In fact, the picture that you see right there, is they're taking some soy powder, which is a pollen substitute, you'll see that later, and when our first, one of our first dorsata nests we came across is when we stopped to have lunch at a hotel restaurant, and we looked up at the roof line and we saw this thing hanging off of it.

It was a dorsata nest, not a large one, but it was one nonetheless.

That single sheet of comb is covered in a few layers of bees, because when you don't have a cavity, when you're not in a cavity and you're, and the bees are just having to defend a small opening, you have to defend the whole nest if it's just hanging out there.

So, that's what dorsatas do, they cover the sheet of honeycomb with like a few layers of bees and they are, they're guarding the whole thing.

Our third branch are our Dwarfs, Apis florea, the Red Dwarf, and Apis andreniformis is the Black Dwarf, and both of those species can be found in Thailand.

So this just gives you a general idea, the size difference.

Giant honeybees are indeed larger, but they're not humongous.

They almost look like flying queens of Apis mellifera.

If you had a whole bunch of flying queens around you, that's kind of what dorsata looks like.

The bottom rows there are the dorsatas.

One row up is Apis mellifera, our honeybee, the Western Honeybee that we keep in the US, primarily, well actually, exclusively.

Apis cerana is is the layer above that.

That's the Eastern Honeybee.

Note that they are very similar in size, but cerana is just slightly smaller.

And that's the bee that had evolved with Varroa mite, then it jumped ship to the Western Honeybee.

And on the top layer is Apis floreas, the Red Dwarf honeybee.

We don't have any samples here of the Black Dwarf.

Again, they're rather rare.

The Black Dwarf would be slightly smaller yet than the Red, but not significant.

Kind of like the difference between the Western and Eastern Honeybee.

Florea is just a little bit bigger than the Black Dwarf.

So here I'm gonna show you a little video of feeding station at the university in Chon Buri.

They had two apiaries that I recall on site.

One was at a ground level, and those were beehives that were housed Western Honeybees, and then they had some Eastern Honeybees up on a balcony.

So these were the Western Honeybees, but on top of that, excuse me, they would put these Petri dishes full of soy powder as a pollen substitute In the morning though, the wild dorsata bees, thought, "Whoa, free lunch or free breakfast," so they'd come in and at these feeding stations, you'd have lots of dorsata bees, some Western Honeybees, and a few florea, or Red Dwarfs.

So I'm gonna turn the video on and you can see the different, these are mostly dorsata.

The slightly smaller ones, I'm gonna put my cursor on this, those are Western Honeybees, Apis mellifera, and then we're going to swing over to another feeding station and you'll see a florea or two.

I'll try to put my cursor on it, or near it.

That's a florea.

Or "florea," the western, the Red Dwarf.

But those are primarily all giant workers.

So you could hand feed them, you could put a little soy powder on your hand and hand feed the bees, which was just kind of fun as a beekeeper, it was fun to do.

So then we had our trips into the field, and very exciting, as you could see.

The only bad thing is I lost my favorite Dollar Tree, bright yellow reading glasses somewhere in the jungles of Thailand, but it was great.

It wasn't like going into the woods of New Jersey.

Very tropical.

We were going in with a honey hunter, 'cause here we were looking for wild bees, not managed bees.

And the honey hunter had thrown branches over muddy creeks for us to traverse, and he didn't initially have these handholds, and he just pranced over them like a squirrel going across a tree branch.

And he's my age, I'm 61, and this was two years ago.

This guy was 59, you'll see some pictures of him.

So, we kinda looked him like, "Really?" So he made these handholds with this machete and we carefully got across.

Fortunately, nobody fell in, but that was exciting.

We had a few of those to traverse.

And if anyone here is eating lunch or a little squeamish, I recommend you maybe wait, turn your volume down to the next slide.

But if you're not and you think, this is just something wild that we came across, and I digress a little bit from bees, but this was just something I have to share.

They have land leaches in Thailand.

This was near Cambodia, and in Khao Yai National Park, they're not there year round.

But if you look closely at the center of the screen, you'll see what looks like a brown inchworm.

That is actually a land leach.

If you stand still in the jungle for more than 30 seconds, these little guys will sense you, your heat, your vibration and start crawling really quickly towards you, preferably to go up your pant leg and leach onto you.

Highly recommended, Dr. Jack is modeling the lech socks, which I did not buy the first day, I thought maybe it was a tourist thing.

I regret it because myself and many others got leached.

You don't feel them biting you, they have an analgesic when they bite you, they also put a little bit of an anticoagulant in you.

So, you are not supposed to pull them off.

You let them fill themselves up and drop off naturally.

It's kind of gross, it doesn't hurt, but I did buy them the next day.

And they've come in handy because they're great in the bee yard.

You put them on on top of your socks and then put your shoes on and pull them up and cinch them.

They're great to prevent any bees going up your leg, and I'm also a gardener, so it's good for prevent ticks.

So they've come in handy even after Thailand.

Okay, enough about, oh, the other things we had to worry about were Sandbar Deer.

Sandbar Deer are in this national park, and they're about twice the size of a White-tailed Deer.

A good size White- tailed Deer might be 200 pounds, a buck.

These guys are four to 500 pounds, and if provoked, they could be a problem.

Crocodiles in the water.

We didn't go swimming.

And monkeys.

Monkeys were the ones that really gave us a hard time, if you weren't careful.

They will go into open buildings to look for food, cars.

I personally saw one young guy on our trip, he came out of the convenience store with a bag of chips, was walking along, monkey came outta nowhere, grabbed his chips, ran away, sat down, opened up the bag and started munching away.

Nobody was hurt, neither monkey nor person, just a little startled.

Okay, I know you're here to see about bees.

So here we are, let's start at the largest one.

It's Apis dorsata, the Giant Honeybee.

They are a little less than an inch long, the workers, and they have that open nest of a single sheet of honeycomb.

It can be quite long.

It can get up to over six and a half feet long, and they will build them naturally on tree branches, or they can adapt to manmade structures.

You'll see examples of both.

Rather large colonies.

Up to 50,000 bees per colony.

And we're talking big bees, so it's pretty imposing looking.

And this honeybee also can produce a good amount of honey.

This is...

Like, per harvest, if a person went to harvest it, 20 to 50 pounds.

Interestingly, the worker drone and queen cells are rather similar in size.

There's not a big differential between the three.

They can be aggressive.

We came across at least half a dozen colonies.

And, unfortunately, the very first one was very aggressive.

The rest weren't, the rest were not.

And and our intention of seeing these colonies was not only to look at them, but there were samples taken from every colony we saw, no matter what species of honeybee, for the professors to take back to the University of Florida.

They do, as I mentioned earlier, form a curtain of protective bees around the entire comb, and I'll show you a video soon of what it looks like when they feel threatened, they do a wave, it's like throwing water, a pebble into some water and the waves radiate out, or like people doing a wave around the stadium, it's really kind of cool.

Excuse me, they migrate based on nectar availability, similar to the Apis scutellata, or Apis mellifera scutellata I saw in Kenya, which would also migrate.

And they'll often come back to the same spot each year.

Their comb hangs out in the open so it's not eaten up by Wax Moths, and as long as it stay there, they may come back and revisit that comb, same spot next year.

Usually the nests are solitary, but once in a while you'll see what they call a bee tree that has many, many nests on the same tree.

Scientists really don't know why that is.

Are are the colonies related?

Are the queens like sister queens?

Not quite sure.

This bee also has relatively large eyes and it can pollinate on moonlit nights, after sunset, which is kind of cool.

We didn't see that per se, but we did, we were in a city, I recall, and had some gardens and there were some overhead lights, and we were there at night, and sure enough we saw a dorsata on those flowers at night, because they were being illuminated by lights, which was kind of weird but interesting.

So here is a video of the shimmering.

We did not take it, we did not get a really good video of it, but this is what you see.

So the thought is, when they shimmer, whatever is threatening it, they want to convince it it's like one big creature instead of a bunch of little creatures.

Essentially, one bee will lift its abdomen and it just radiates out.

Pretty cool.

Okay, when we went to look for dorsata, since they are not a managed bee, they are a wild bee, we go with a honey hunter.

There really is no reason to wear a balaclava and ski masks in Thailand.

It's hot and humid, especially in this area, unless you're going to be approaching a dorsata nest that you know is aggressive.

This honey hunter I believe knew this particular, the nest site was full of aggressive ones, and he wore this outfit.

His other, the other ones he didn't, he went without gloves and facial protection.

But if you, he had his hand homemade smoker, and the smoker is made from dried vegetation.

If you look close, you'll see kind of some brownish sticks that are wound tight together, and that's what he will light up.

But to diffuse the smoke at each place we went to, he would put some fresh green trees from, it's called a lead tree, and that would help diffuse, you know, the smoke, make sure the flames weren't hitting the bees, and he would carry, and then he just replenish them whenever he went to a new one, but to keep the dried twigs together.

He also takes like a strap to wrap around the base of his feet, and you'll see this one we show a video of him climbing the tree.

Again, remember this guy's like in his late 50s.

Here's a nice picture of a dorsata nest.

Typically, the honey is on the sides, and when a honey hunter comes and harvests, he will cut off that side.

He'll like, you know, cut off chunks of honey and put them in a bucket and then crush and strain it.

So this, by the shape of this, instead of being a nice parabola, you could see us kind of cut out from the side, we knew that this nest had been harvested previously.

I have to thank Bill Hesbach, he's the other senior student that came on the trip for many of these, pretty much all the videos, almost all the videos and many of the photos.

So here is...

a video of him accessing...

the nest up top.

Oops, sorry about that.

The nest is up here.

So, he has the smoker between his knees, his feet are bound together, and you can see how he climbs it.

And I have my pointer where the nest is, which, we'll get a closer view of it soon.

Couple times he has to stop and relight the smoker.

And, again, he's not gonna harvest honey, which is typically what he would do, but in this case he's going to collect some samples for the professors.

We were able to collect samples from other managed hives easily, either the professors or myself or other students, but they didn't feel it was wise for us to try to climb these trees and get it from the dorsata, which was wise, so that's why the honey hunters came with us.

He just used a BIC lighter to light it.

Now, at this point, you don't hear the audio, but Dr. Ellis is saying, "Don't panic." 'Cause a lot of the students had not, were not beekeepers.

This was the aggressive hive.

Every single one of the participants got stung, except for myself and Dr. Ellis.

I don't know why.

But one young student actually got about 15 stings.

He was a trooper though.

He was a beekeeper, so he was okay.

But it looks like this, basically you have flying queens just flying all around you, and you'll see a little more soon, and you'll start to see some of the capped brood.

Now, Bill is getting stung right now, our cameraman, so he just has to have a moment or two to compose himself, but he's a trooper too, and he will go right back up.

So you'll soon see a little paper bag, a little plastic bag, and now he doesn't have his gloves, any gloves on.

He's just taking a nice big sample for us.

He drops it.

And if you look closely on the right, you'll start seeing him scurry down.

And down he comes.

So there's one more video here, where you can see the comb a little better.

This is a different colony.

And, interestingly it, the bulk of the honey is not on the sides of the comb, but near the top, which you really see more in the Dwarf bees.

Different colony, same honey hunter.

He's already up there, he put some bark across, perpendicular to the branch for kind of to stand on better.

And look at that, look at all that comb, that capped comb, and the honey is at the top.

So here he is doing the same thing.

There's a lot of bees flying around us, but this was not really a aggressive colony.

Very tropical.

See this barefoot gentlemen.

He'll show us, he has a bag worth of stuff, bees, and we're going, "Yep, that's good." Drops it, and away you go.

So I've mentioned earlier, usually these colonies are solitary, but on occasion, you can see, we saw a few bee trees that had many.

Like, here's one here.

Here are two nests right beside each other.

And if you look on the right side of the tree, I mean, there could have been well more, more than a dozen active dorsata colonies all over this tree.

We don't know why, but it does occur.

And these bees are just as happy to make a home on a manmade structure.

This was up in Chiang Mai, at a Buddhist festival we went to, and I was looking up at the Buddha and I said, "Look, what's that above the Buddha?" It's four dorsata nests.

Now I don't think they were actively being used at the moment 'cause I see a lot of, kind of a light colored honeycomb, which is where the honey would be stored, but if there were bees on it, they'd be covering the whole comb.

But there were four dorsata nests right above the Buddha.

So now, let's go to our second bee, native bee species, and that is Apis cerana, or the Eastern Honeybee.

It's the one that's most like ours in size, and it is the one that Varroa destructor was the original host.

This is a Cavity Nester, and like the Western Honeybee, it can be managed but is also found in the wild.

Comparing this to our type, it tends to forge a little earlier and later in the day.

It's a little bit smaller and flies a little faster, but not quite as far.

When I first saw them, I couldn't tell the difference between Eastern and Western, but the longer you see them, then you can tell, because the bands are much more distinct and they're not as hairy.

You look at that, you can see the banding is very crisp compared to what you see in a lot of Western Honeybees.

Again, I mentioned it's a Cavity Nester.

It only has four to 10 combs, parallel combs.

And I never saw any comb stretch from edge to edge on a frame.

I never saw it fully completed.

It's always just partial.

In the wild, they're often found in hollow coconut tree trunks.

Something that's a little different is that when they, they fan their colony to cool it off, but they face it the opposite way of the Western Honeybee.

So they face a way to fan their colony to cool it off, where our, the Western, faces towards.

They do not make propolis.

So it quite easy to pull frames in and out of, you know, managed Apis cerana hives.

They do have a habit of putting a hole in their drone comb.

We're not sure why.

Could it help with reduced Varroa?

Remember, this bee has evolved with Varroa, so it can tolerate it much better than the Western Honeybee.

Does this hole desiccate the Varroa nymphs but allow the drone to continue growing?

Again, we're not sure, but they do have a a little more hygienic behavior.

They abscond more quickly.

There are small, have a smaller brood nest.

All of these are things that help them tolerate Varroa better than Apis mellifera.

Here's a typical wild nest in a coconut tree.

They will also nest in any other type of pet cavity.

In Thailand, many properties have what they call ghost houses, or spirit houses.

It's kind of a belief that you want to keep a protective spirit on your land, but in that one we had a, we found a cerana colony, which was neat.

And we've even found one in a used tire on the ground.

It was covered with a tarp, and there's Dr. Jack taking a sample of them.

So, as I mentioned, they are managed as well.

They are kept in at the universities, and there were two, I think one or two large regular honey producers that we went to.

They were in more traditional Langstroth.

But everybody else, like your small scale, or even medium scale beekeeper, one guy, kept them in, I call them Langstroth-esque hives.

They're pretty much "make your own." And one fellow we met had them in, well you'll see, I'm calling it a "log hive," but it's not a true log.

So basically these look like two nukes, one on top of the other.

And these, this fellow wrapped, had them on posts and wrapped oily rags around them to ward off ants, 'cause ants were one of the main pests.

Again, cerana will abscond a little more quicker, they don't deal with being agitated as well as maybe some Western.

And here, we opened up the side.

As you see, the comb is not going from edge to edge, is quite small.

And this had about seven frames in, and if you don't have frames in, it'll just build right off the top.

Easy to open, no propolis issues.

Down on the island of Samui, which is very tropical, this guy, his logs were made outta concrete pipes, and they were literally almost on the ground, they were just up on top of a few, his hive stand were rocks.

and he just had concrete pipes with end caps that had holes drilled in them.

And I love his smoker.

His smoker is basically an oil can filled with dried coconut husk.

It worked, we took samples from there.

In the southern part of Thailand, that's where they tend to keep more the cerana honeybee because they can withstand the really hot, humid environment better than the Western Honeybees.

Western Honeybees tend to fail more down in the hot, humid environments of of southern Thailand.

And the reason he didn't use real logs is because, again, it's hot and humid.

You know, unlike in Kenya where we saw a lot of log highs, these, the regular log hives would just decompose quickly.

So this fella used concrete, concrete logs.

Another gentleman here had a post, you can see it looks homemade, which it roughly is, he had one, some where on posts.

The one at the top was hung from a wire, and the picture on the right shows you what he did with that wire.

He covered it with rodenticide.

There's a lot of off-label use of stuff in Thailand, because it's not like they have a lot of delivery services that can, you know, supply, these people can't get stuff supplied from, you know, bee supply stores like we can around here, so there's a lot of creative use of stuff.

But there is another pest there that we don't have, it's a land snail.

Land snails will make homes in the hive bodies and they'll reproduce and the bees don't like it and they'll just up and leave.

So, this gentleman used rodenticide not just to deter the ants but to deter land snails.

You can see I was holding one there.

Not real big, but bees don't like them.

So here are two little videos of just some cerana honeybees going in and out of...

the two hive bodies I recently showed you.

The ones on the left are a double-decker.

We have the side open, normally it's not.

And the one on the right is just one of the concrete hives.

And it takes a practiced eye, but you can tell, eventually, that they are a little bit faster flying than...

the Western Honeybee.

Okay, onto what I would say, arguably, is the prettiest honeybee in my set we came across, and that's Thailand's Red Dwarf, Apis florea.

They are ubiquitous, they are found in the wild, they're found in the cities.

Their size is about, excuse me, a little more than half an inch to a little less than an inch.

They have a reddish segments on the upper part of their abdomen, kind of a rusty red, very pretty, and they are open nesters.

They're, again, dwarfs and giant honeybees are both open nesters, a single sheet of comb.

However, these honeybees don't, they're not wide out in the open like the dorsata.

They tend to build them on branches of small trees, in dense bushes, and they're a little more camouflaged.

They do produce, or collect, the resins to make a propolis in which they attach around the branch where their nest is to both protect it against ants and also a support too.

This is their comb size.

You'll get a better idea when I show some pictures of people holding them.

Not that big.

Easy to hold.

The caste, particularly between the drone and the workers, is very different compared to the other bee species.

If you look on the picture, I'm holding a worker on the upper right part of my palm, excuse me, upper left, sorry, and a drone on the lower part.

See how the drone is not only boxier but it's very dark, and when you look real close, you'll see it really on my next slide, they have a thumb on their hind legs.

Okay, these are the hind legs...

for the species.

The one that has the arrow is the florea drone, and he has a thumb on his hind leg, and andreniformis does as well, the Black Dwarf.

Scientists don't really know why.

Does it have something to do with mating?

They're, we're not really sure, but just an interesting observation.

Now here's a video, right in the middle of Bangkok, we're actually at the Grand Palace.

Beautiful place to visit.

And you will see florea just going to town on some lily pad, lilies on a lily pad in a big urn.

When I pan up, you'll see where we're at.

You'll also see Dr. Ramsey, we had the opportunity to hear from.

That's doctor, many of you know him, that's Dr. Gunn.

That's Mrs. Ellis who's also a doctor, and Jamie Ellis walking in the background, but here we are right in the middle of the Grand Palace, and we come across a whole bunch of Red Dwarf Honeybees, which is kind of fun.

Now, here's one of their nests.

Not very easy to see unless you're really looking for it.

It's hidden behind those leaves in a kind of a big bush.

Remove the leaves and there you go, there's a nest.

Now, you can kind of get a general idea how big they are based on looking at a nest that was held, and they are relatively gentle.

I did get stung.

In fact I got stung of four of the five species, just not the dorsata, which I tried to get stung but it didn't happen.

But they're relatively gentle.

Now here's a nice picture of of the nest.

They have four different size cells.

The first type is at the top where it says, "honey storage." Up along the top around the branch are very deep cells, much deeper than you know, regular brood cells.

That's where they store their honey.

The worker cells, you can see kind of in the center of the nest, they are, usually the queen lays the eggs in kind of a spiral pattern, because between those bands of capped worker cells is actually pollen...

to feed the larvae.

Near the bottom are larger cells for drones.

And there is no picture of it, but if they do need to, you know, have a new, make a new queen, 'cause say the colony went queenless, then they have a pear-shaped cells that they will build at the bottom.

This one does collect resins to make a propolis to protect from ants and also support the nest.

And the waggle dance, unlike our Western Honeybee that does the waggle dance in the dark on the face of the comb, the forgers here will do a waggle dance on the upper horizontal surface of the comb, kind of on top, they have like a long thin dance floor up here, and they will do the waggle.

It will be, they will aim it directly at the desired source, whether it be pollen or nectar, or whatever, or water.

It doesn't have a anything to do with the angle of the sun, like ours does.

They dance directly and align towards the source that they wanna point out to their sisters.

Alas, this is the last one, the Black Dwarf.

And it is close related to the Red Dwarf, but its segments are black, and it's slightly smaller.

It is also a single comb nester, and it's even in a darker, more shady places, and harder to find because they are rare.

We were keeping our fingers crossed we would see some.

We were told that the drones have been observed to dance.

We didn't see this, but that is something that has been observed, and overall there's just not a lot known about this species.

We did get to see some!

A honey hunter brought in some samples for us.

We could not actually go out and find them because it was way off the beaten track.

It was probably too dangerous for us to go as a group.

But a honey hunter brought some in, and this was Dr. Jack's reaction to seeing this.

Even one went on his head, which was fun.

But yeah, I got stung by these and it was really a tiny, intense sting.

Pain did not last long at all but you felt it.

We did spend some brief time with a gentleman who kept stingless honeybees, the Trigona species, there are dozens of Trigona species.

I can't tell the difference, but they're used mainly for pollination.

That honey that is made from, that can have a bit of a sour taste, it's very wet.

I brought some home and it is like 25% moisture and it is rather expensive, it also is used in medicinal purposes over there, just briefly making a split is a piece of cake.

The gentleman on the left is showing Dr. Jack how to do that.

Dr. Jack's holding the regular, a new hive body for it.

He basically takes his knife, cuts the brood section in half, cuts some of the honey portion out, and that middle picture shows you what the honey looks like.

It's like in encapsulated in the little honey pots, and he just plops half of the honey, half of the brood over there, closes it up, checks it in a few weeks, doesn't look for a queen, doesn't, you know, it's simple.

He stacks them on a bunch of shelves, or he puts them on a buster shelves, that you see on the upper right and away they go.

They pretty much take care of themselves.

The lower right is, we opened up some bee honey, and that just shoot ferments really quickly.

Okay, quickly, let's talk about Tropilaelaps species.

They are there.

They parasitize all five honeybee species in Thailand, including Apis mellifera, the Western Honeybee.

Very tiny, very fast compared to the Varroa destructor.

We did see them in the labs.

Now this is a big point, both the adult and nymphs feed only on capped brood.

The adults cannot feed on adult honeybees, unlike Varroa, their little mouth parts can't pierce them, so they can only feed on capped brood, and if there is no capped brood, they can only last about two days.

That's important, keep that in mind.

Here we are with Dr. Ramsey, we were doing a lab, pulling out mites, looking for Varroa and Tropilaelaps.

It's kind of a competition, who could find the first Tropilaelaps.

And it was Dr. Ellis, himself.

So he's proudly showing his Tropilaelaps.

As of June of that time, it hasn't been found in the US and I don't think it has, I don't think it's here still.

Populations, if we did get it, would be more successful in warm climates, where you don't really have a brood break.

That's kind of a benefit of living in New Jersey or the northern climates.

We tend to have a natural brood break in the winter.

Unfortunately there's no easy field tests to determine if you have them.

You know, there's no like alcohol tests like we have for the Varroa mite.

There's a test called the bump method, where you basically take a a frame of capped brood, bump it against some black newspaper, black paper, hoping to find these, 'cause they do scurry quickly.

It's not a great test but it's the only one we have at the moment.

The best ways to mitigate it.

Remember, the adults can only live two days without feeding and they only feed on capped brood, so if you have a brood break, excellent way to kill off any Tropi.

Formic acid has worked.

Dr. Ramsey was working on different ways to apply formic acid in a hot and humid environment.

Nothing that we are allowed to use here, and that was all done with research.

And he also was looking at heat treatments too, solar and heating pads, but those heat treatments were less effective.

So, and what I took away from it, if you you're on top of your Varroa destructor, you should be able to combat Tropi because Tropi tend to be more susceptible to treatments than we have, that we use for Varroa destructor, particularly brood breaks and some formic acid.

Other mites!

Okay, Varroa destructor was actually lumped together with Varroa jacobsoni, until they were found that they were really two distinct different Varroa mites by genetic testing.

So something I'm gonna show you later has Varroa jacobsoni, but it's really both.

Yep.

And then we have the Euvarroa sinhai, it's usually on the Red Dwarf, but I'm bringing this up because it has been found on Western Honeybees as well.

Look at the bottom line, that's the Western Honeybee.

First one is a trope mite, then Euvarroa sinhai is the lump that in with disruptor, then the one I just mentioned, 'cause there's a possibility that could jump to ours, but don't worry about that yet.

But that's something that Dr. Ramsey was looking at.

And then you have your tracheal mites.

All of the bees there have viruses.

We show nothing on the Black Dwarf.

That's simply because we don't know enough about it.

But, and there's probably more viruses that are mentioned there.

Other diseases and pests.

Foul Brood is present wherever the Western Honeybees are kept.

Nosema can be found in all five species, and also Wax Moths and small Hive Beetles can affect several of the hives, honeybee species.

So to kind of wrap it up, this was a stand alongside the road where you could buy, in bottles, giant honeybee honey.

That's the dorsata as well as the Red Dwarf nests.

People buy the entire nest.

Most of beekeepers are males between the ages of 41 and 67, and they're usually farmers.

Most beekeepers keep mellifera, the Western Honeybee.

Those are some of the numbers.

Although we do have some that keep cerana, but that's mainly in southern Thailand, where it's hot and humid, 'cause the mellifera is not as hardy down there.

And there's an unknown number of wild honey hunters that harvest honey and brood from both the dorsata and florea.

Here's the reason why dorsata is more popular.

Look at the comparison of the estimated honey production between Western Honeybee and the Eastern Honeybee, the first two, it's about double.

Now granted, you can get a lot off your giant honeybee, the Apis dorsata, but you're gonna have to climb a tree to get it.

And then florea and andreniformis really don't produce a lot of honey.

It's really more the brood that people buy and eat.

They also sell propolis.

The larger companies will sell propolis and venom, and there's very little pollination services done, unlike the the US.

If any pollination is really just done for their own farmer, they don't have like truckloads of bees going around pollinating crops like we do here.

So I'd like to thank you for your attention, "Kop-Kuhn Kaah," which means, "Thank you from the Land of a Thousand Smiles." And that's all I have.

Those are my references.

And I'll stop sharing. - Wonderful.

Thank you so much, it's so nice to see warm and sunny Thailand on a cold day here.

- You're welcome.

- Okay.

Thanks to Tom Busler, who was behind the scenes, collating questions.

We got many, many, many questions, so, of course- - Oh boy.

- We'll not get to them all, but I will try to represent the general themes.

- [Jean] Thank You.

- So, throughout your talk you talked about lots of different species of bees, and I'm wondering if, like lots of people ask questions about whether they compete with each other, rob from each other, share diseases and pests, which you did answer toward the end.

So could you comment on that, generally?

- Yeah, I don't, robbing will probably happen anywhere if the resources get low.

But a lot of these bees, if the resources get low, now not the managed bees but the wild bees, they'll just migrate onto another place.

So, it's not like they're gonna have a store of honey to go after.

They do have hornets over there and they will affect, but the managed honey, managed honeybees, yeah they, that's just something that beekeeper has to keep an eye on.

Oops.

To see if there's an issue.

I hadn't heard a lot about robbing, to be honest.

- Okay, well since you mentioned hornets, do they have the Asian giant hornet there? - Yes.

- [Robyn] Is it a problem?

- It can be.

But, you know, just like here it could be too.

I didn't hear people saying, "Oh, they're taking out hives." They probably just take measures.

They might close them up or whatever, but yes, they do have them, but they, again, the beekeepers there have evolved with them more, they've dealt with them longer than we have, so.

- Okay.

Do any of the other species, like for example Apis dorsata, is there a way for someone to like have bait hives and encourage them, or is any of that done?

- Hmm.

That's a good question, these are all good questions.

I would think the only way to, see they will only come, they will migrate into an area when it gets nectar rich, so, see the dorsata leaves their comb there, and I haven't heard of anybody baiting, but I would think if they wanted to bait them, they would get some maybe some old dorsata comb and try to put it onto a branch.

I haven't heard that, but just like we would try to do with swarm traps, I think they just kind of hope that they come back, and then watch them. - So they would reuse their comb?

- Yes.

They would reuse the old, as long as it doesn't get destroyed for, like in a storm or whatever.

Wax Moths aren't gonna go after dorsata, 'cause they're wide out in the open.

Wax Moths will go after the Cavity Nesters, and they'll also go after some of the dwarfs, especially dwarf nest if they're in a kind of shaded area, 'cause as you know, Wax Moths don't like light, but if it's a shaded area they will also go after some of the dwarf nests.

But they don't seem to go after dorsata, as long as it's like wide out in the open, which most of them are.

- So it seems to me that the different species have different comb sizes and things, so they wouldn't like reuse each other's?

- Probably not.

No, probably not.

Probably not.

Again, this is an educated guess, 'cause those only, but I don't think so.

I didn't hear about people having the same, two different species, like say Western and Eastern in the same colony with the same comb.

- Right.

Okay, so you showed us a picture of sort of a harvest, sorry- - Mm-hmm.

- [Robyn] Where they had harvested the left side. - Yes.

- Would the bees then rebuild that and fix the shape?

- They could.

I would think so, they could, 'cause they go back, you know, and they don't take it all, which is smart.

Like, we, as beekeepers, don't wanna take all the honey.

They'll take some and then wait till it builds back up, they might take the other half side.

Yep.

- I see.

And do they ever harvest and eat any brood?

- Oh yeah.

Yeah.

The brood, that one of those last slides you saw, the roadside stand, had the bottles of honey and then had the Red Dwarf nests.

Yeah, people will buy the whole nest, eat the honey, like I ate some honey on top, and they'll eat the brood.

I actually ate fried hornets over there.

I didn't have bees but I had, we were served fried hornets.

They were kind of nutty.

They were okay, I'll try anything once.

- Oh, that sounds fun.

- It was fun.

It was a lot of fun.

I felt lucky to go.

- So when you showed a natural Apis cerana nest, it seemed to me that the parallel combs looked kind of far apart.

Was that just an optical illusion or did they have like the same bee space requirements?

- Good question.

I don't know.

But they weren't, if they were far apart, I think that was more of an optical illusion.

I'm not sure what the bee space is with cerana.

If it's anything, it's a slightly smaller bee, so you would think it would be a slightly smaller bee space.

But that was, that's a good question, Robyn, not sure.

- Okay.

Did you get to see the Apis cerana putting, you know, dung on their hives?

Have you heard about that? - I've heard about that.

Yes, I have heard about that.

I did not see any, did not see any cerana hives with dung on their doorstep.

No, I have not.

- That's disappointing. - I've heard of it.

- [Jean] What's that?

- That's disappointing.

- Yeah, well they seem to be okay without putting dung on their doorstep.

- Yeah, I guess it's a positive for the bees to not need it.

- Yeah.

- It was really neat that you did do that little dive into other pests and things.

In particular, I would love to see a monkey in the wild.

- Oh my gosh.

You'll see more than you wanna see if you go to Thailand.

They're like squirrels - So, did the monkeys, do they like go and steal honey and brood and stuff?

- You know, that's a good question too, 'cause here we have bear.

I have not heard of monkeys going into hives.

I will have to, I would like to ask my expert over there.

I'm gonna, and I will let you know, I have not heard of monkeys.

I'm not sure if they like getting stung.

But I well inquire. - Does anyone?

- Does anyone like getting stung?

- Or tolerate it.

Like bears will tolerate it.

Okay, I will find that one out for you.

- Okay.

Are there any other species that get sort of exported?

Like, do you know if any other species have tried, been tried here in the US, and then if they are getting moved around, could they be bringing Tropilaelaps?

- Well, that would definitely be a problem if they were.

I have not heard of any other species in the US besides the Western, and I think the Western is really the favorite because of the high yield.

Granted, it comes with problems, being that, since we have, since the other Eastern Honeybee has evolved with Varroa, the Western still hasn't had it long enough to evolve with it.

But I have not heard of any other species being brought over here alive.

Now, Dr. Jack and Dr. Ellis brought dead.

Well, the samples that they took were then put in alcohol and they were dead, but I have not heard of ones brought alive, at least in the US.

Have you?

- No, and I just figured I'd ask you that question because someone asked, but I do know, you know, in reviewing our Pennsylvania bee law, it specifically says that you cannot keep any other bee species.

- Yeah. - Any other Apis species, so, I hope nobody wants to try it.

I don't think that would be a positive for us.

- I don't think it would be a good idea.

No.

- Wow, we're really getting through a lot of questions, 'cause some of them were kind of connected.

So, I assume there's a market for honey there and then probably wax, and all the different high products just like you have. - Absolutely.

Absolutely, I mean, what you saw were roadside stands, but there are some large honey producers, and they have varietal honeys.

They have a Lychee honey, which is really good, and Logan honey, like, you know, we might have citrus honey, whatever.

They have a lot of different tropical fruits there that we don't.

Like, I got to eat durian fruit, supposedly the stinkiest fruit in the world.

It wasn't that bad.

It wasn't, it was okay.

Jackfruit, but I know, I remember Lychee and Logan were two varietal honeys there.

They do, the larger firms also produce Royal Jelly for the Asian market, that's very popular in the Asian market.

In fact, one of the young undergrads bought some, like anti-aging cream made with Royal Jelly.

I said, "Why do you buy, you're 20 years old!

"Let me try that!" So I put it on to see if I would wake up the next day as a 20-year-old.

Didn't work, but it was still fun to try.

So there's, yeah, they have a lot of bee affiliated stuff, venom, propolis spray, throat sprays, a lot more, toothpaste that had propolis in, a lot more bee products there than we usually see here.

It's not as regulated as well as, too, for for good or bad, whatever your position is there.

But, yes, lots of bee products.

- Okay, and one last question 'cause they're out of time.

Do the different bee species have different venom, and also do they all lose their stinger when they sting?

- Yes and yes.

- Okay, great, short answer. (Jean laughing)

- [Jean] You wanted a brief, yes and yes.

- Okay, thank you, everyone, for coming.

Thank you so much, Jean, for a really great presentation.

Are you willing to share your contact information to answer questions?

- Yes, and I'm not a doctor but thank you.

I'm master beekeeper.

- Okay. - Sure.

And if I don't know it, I'll try to find the answer, 'cause I'm really not the expert.

- Excellent.

Could you type your email in the chat?

- Oh, sure, hold on.

Let me get- - I just wanted to let everybody know that, yes, this was recorded and the recordings will be made available, including the one from last week.

It just takes extension about a week to process the videos and get them put online.

But the same place you went to register, instead of saying "register," it will say "watch now." So you can go ahead and watch the extension website for when the recordings are available.

And next week we're going to have a presentation from Lesotho, which is in Africa, and so, we're very excited to be traveling around the world, and we'll see you next time.

Thanks, again.

- Thank you, Robyn.