Some Bee Buzz

Season 1 Episode 5: About Bees, Culture & Curiosity Podcast – Some Bee Buzz

In this episode, we jump from moving bees from Alberta to British Columbia to examining a recent paper about the ecology of disappearing bee species. Then, of course, we chat about Beyonce and Hex Art.

Bidzina describes conditions in British Columbia and why he avoided going farther into the mountains to make fireweed honey but instead split his colonies, doubling their number. He tells us a little about moving his bees back to Alberta, driving through the night with a trailer through the Rocky Mountains. In Alberta, he loses most of those hives over the next winter. But two survivor colonies are resilient and develop into strong colonies.

We discuss removing honey by letting the supers stay in the apiary, separated from the hives, allowing the bees to drift out of the honey supers and back to their homes, abandoning the honey. Bidzina also mentions nuisance bees at a wedding held where he was extracting.

Then, Ron talks about his two backyard hives. Both were replacements for colonies that died over winter. One was a package, the other a nuc. It was surprising to see that there was very little difference in strength between them by mid-July.

We drift to talking about trains and the enormous size of Canada. It's a 7,500-kilometre road trip from Pacific to Atlantic. Maybe it should be tackled by train, not car or plane. Trains are good.

We explore a recent paper about land use changes (farming, urbanization) that are related to declining populations of native and imported bees. Across a huge temperate area, scientists broadly divided landscapes into forested, herbaceous, agricultural, and urban. One of those areas were better for bee health and survival. The results surprised me a little. See: “Land use changes associated with declining honey bee health across temperate North America”   https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acd867

Other news bits include the collapse of insect species diversity, which leads us to wonder about the 2024 reversal of a ban on neonicotinoids in England and the implications for bee survival. Then we lighten up with a visit to Beyonce (the Queen Bey) and a glance at a paper on the prevalence of bees throughout the history of art - have you noticed that hexagons seem to be everywhere we look these day? Let's go!

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