Honey bees have been in the news in recent months, with the arrival in the United States of the Asian giant hornet, which has been given the colorful and terrifying nickname “murder hornet.” The giant hornet grows up to 2 inches long, and a swarm of hornets can destroy a beehive in a few hours by decapitating the bees. The first giant hornets in the United States were detected in Washington in December, and entomologists are working to control the population before they do too much damage to the American bee population.
Agriculture relies on bees, not just in the United States, but around the world, and in honor of their contributions, May 20 is observed as World Bee Day.
Humans were collecting honey from wild bees as early as 10,000 years ago, and have been maintaining colonies of bees for almost as long. Archaeological finds in Israel from about 900 BCE show a set of 100 hives that probably housed about a million bees and generated 1,100 pounds of honey each year. The history of honey, and man’s relationship with it, is the subject of Holley Bishop’s Robbing the Bees; Stephanie Bruneau looks at other useful products we can get from beehives in The Benevolent Bee.
The Swiss entomologist Francois Huber (1750-1831) specialized in honeybees and was one of the first scientists to study beehives. Huber lost his sight as a young man and relied on his secretary, Francois Burnens, to make observations and take notes. Huber and Burnens were the first to confirm that the queen bee mates with drones outside the hive, and they were the first to dissect bees under a microscope.
It wasn’t until the late 18th century that beekeepers developed methods of harvesting honey from a hive without destroying it, and all of the bees who lived in it. This was a major advancement, allowing for a hive to be harvested for many years, and early experiments in selective breeding of bees.
More breakthroughs came in the mid-19th century, Lorenzo Langstroth, often called the “father of American beekeeping, developed the first movable comb hive, allowing combs to be removed and harvested individually.
Austrian/Italian beekeeper Franz Hruschka invented a method of extracting honey from combs via centrifugal force, something like a salad spinner for honeycombs. And in New York, Moses Quinby invented the first portable bee smoker; it had long been known that smoke had a calming, sedative effect on bees, and Quinby’s smoker made it possible to harvest honey with less risk of stinging.
There are several guides available for the would-be beekeeper. Bowe Packer’s Beekeeping, Kim Flottum’s The Backyard Beekeeper, and Malcolm T. Sanford & Richard E. Bonney’s Storey’s Guide to Keeping Honey Bees will help get you started. In A Book of Bees, Sue Hubbell offers a memoir and nature journal about the life of a beekeeper; James Dearsley provides a more light-hearted look at his first year of keeping bees in From A to Bee.
In the last quarter-century, entomologists have been baffled by the rise of a condition known as colony collapse disorder, in which the majority of worker bees in a hive disappear, leaving the queen behind. The reason for their disappearance is unknown. Colony collapse has been an occasional problem since the late 19th century but has become a major problem in Europe since the late 1990s, and the epidemic spread to North America about a decade later. Several short documentaries on the mystery of colony collapse are available for streaming at Kanopy: Queen of the Sun, Vanishing of the Bees, and More Than Honey. Hannah Nordhaus writes about colony collapse and other threats to American bees in The Beekeeper’s Lament.
Scientists estimate that more than 10,000,000 beehives were lost to colony collapse between 2007 and 2013, about twice the average rate of loss. Beekeepers have created more artificial hives to compensate for the loss, but there is still a severe bee shortage in some places. Even before the spread of colony collapse, some farmers needed to rent hives to pollinate their crops, and in some places, the cost of such rental has increased by 20%. In California, this has been a serious problem for almond growers, who rely heavily on rented hives for pollination.
If you’re a gardener who’d like to provide a more hospitable home for your local bee population, you might enjoy The Bee-Friendly Garden by Kate Frey & Gretchen LeBuhn, or the Xerces Society’s 100 Plants to Feed the Bees.
For more comprehensive reading about the lives and history of bees, you might enjoy Thor Hanson’s Buzz, Paige Embry’s Our Native Bees, or Thomas D. Seeley’s The Lives of Bees.
Music inspired by the bees includes Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s short orchestral piece “ Flight of the Bumblebee” and Michael Nyman’s concerto for soprano saxophone “Where the Bee Dances.” If rock’n’roll is more your style, you might prefer “Bumble Boogie” by B. Bumble and the Stingers (inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov) or The Hollywood Flames’ doo-wop classic “Buzz Buzz Buzz.”
Also This Week
May 23, 1910
Margaret Wise Brown was born. Brown was the author of more than 100 children’s books, including the classic Goodnight Moon. She also worked as an editor, and was responsible for publishing Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale and Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round. Amy Gary’s biography of Brown is called In the Great Green Room.
May 18, 1920
Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, was born. John Paul II was elected to the papacy in 1978, in the year’s second papal conclave, and adopted the papal name of his predecessor, John Paul I, who had died after only 33 days as Pope. John Paul II was a very active pope; he visited more than 125 countries during his 26 years in office, and canonized 483 people as saints, more than all popes combined in the previous 500 years. Tad Szulc is the author of Pope John Paul II: The Biography.
May 18, 1970
Tina Fey was born. Fey is an actress and writer who appeared for a decade on Saturday Night Live, where she was credited with revitalizing the show’s “Weekend Update” news segment. She went on to create the sitcoms 30 Rock, in which she also starred, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Fey’s collection of autobiographical comic essays is Bossypants.
May 18 is International Museum Day
The day provides an opportunity to raise awareness of the role museums play in our lives. The theme for this year’s observance is “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion.” While we may not be able to visit our local museums this year, some films give us the chance to visit some of the world’s finest institutions. The Museum takes us behind the scenes at The Israel Museum, introducing us to the people who keep it running; The New Rijksmuseum looks at the decade-long renovation of the Amsterdam museum.