Hon. Newsletter Editor:
Peter Edwards
E-mail: beekeepers@stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk

A very warm welcome to three new members: Mary Mills of Stratford, Rajbir Singh of Leamington and John Hathaway-Collins of, appropriately, Honeybourne. Our now almost traditional wish of 'full supers' to you all.

Sadly, members do give up beekeeping or move away. We are sorry to lose Roger Rippin of Pillerton Priors, Liv-Marie Lewis of Stratford, Charles Holland of Pillerton Priors, John Hadley of Stratford, Oliver Elston of Ilmington and Verity Bourne of Ettington.
Peter Edwards

It is not unusual to hear beekeepers advocating the use of honey as a winter feed, often to top up a colony that is short of stores. Clearly the best way to feed bees honey is not to remove it in the first place, but if you do want to feed some back then it is essential only to return honey to the colony from which it was originally extracted. Feeding honey from other colonies in the same apiary is risky, from your other apiaries is foolish and from other beekeepers is madness. The use of imported honey is criminally insane! To re-inforce the point, I found the following statistics in a recent Journal of Apicultural Research:

A recent analysis of honey for AFB spores in Buenos Aires province found contamination in 219 out of 394 samples (55.6%).

If your bees need feeding, then stick to fondant or sugar.
Peter Edwards

First, a brief note for those for whom the word pheromone means nothing!

The word was coined by German biochemist Peter Karlson and Swiss entomologist Martin Lüscher in 1959, is derived from the Greek 'phero' (to carry) and hormone. It can be defined as being a hormone secreted by a gland and released externally to have an effect on another member of the same or a closely related species.

Pheromones are of critical importance to bees because they are the chemical signals that control the very life of the colony, e.g. keeping it together as a cohesive and coherent unit, telling members whether they are queenright and so on. Perhaps the most well-known is the Nasonov pheromone which can easily be detected from scenting bees when a swarm is hived; another familiar one to those with defensive bees will be the alarm pheromone, iso-pentyl acetate, which smells like pear drops. John Free's 'Pheromones of Social Bees' gives a fascinating insight into the subject for anyone wishing to learn more. The discovery of a new pheromone is a very rare event and the following is a report of one of those events:

A recent discovery by Zachary Huang, of Michigan State University, has found the chemical secret, a hard-to-detect pheromone, that explains a phenomenon that Huang published 12 years ago: that somehow older forager bees exert influence over the younger nurse bees in a hive, keeping them at home until they are more mature and thus more ready to handle the demands of life outside the hive.

"If the older ones don't keep them in check, the young ones can mature too quickly," Huang said. "It's kind of the same thing as with people, you need the elders to check on the young, even if the young are physically able to go out on their own, it's not the best situation for anybody and now we know how it works."

Huang worked with team members from the United States, France and Canada to explain how the bees kept an exquisitely consistent balance between the ones that go out to collect nectar and pollen and defend the hive, and those that stay home and nurture the larvae. Huang had documented that this balance is controlled by the elder bees, those that typically spend the final one to three weeks of their five-week lifespan out in the field.

Experiments showed that if a significant number of forager bees didn't come home, the young nurse bees would mature ahead of schedule and head out to become foragers themselves. If the older bees were kept inside more than usual – as in an extended rain shower – fewer young bees would mature, but instead stick to brood care.

But the question was always, why? Some pheromones, called releaser pheromones, are like a quick conversation that changes behaviour, such as those that inspire sexual attraction. Since releasers change behaviours immediately, they historically have been easier to identify. Hundreds of releaser pheromones have been chemically identified, whereas only four (including this new one) have been identified as primer pheromones. Primer pheromones are more difficult to work with because they impart behavioural changes in a much longer time scale, taking days or sometimes weeks to see an effect.

Huang and his associates spent years futilely searching for a primer pheromone. After many dead ends, the group came upon a crucial difference between forager bees and nurse bees: forager bees carry a mother load of a chemical called ethyl oleate in the abdominal reservoir in which they store nectar. That, Huang said, led them to identify ethyl oleate as another kind of pheromone – called primer pheromone. Forager bees load up on ethyl oleate when they forage, but they do not digest it. The forager bees feed the chemical to the nurse bees and the ethyl oleate keeps them in a 'young' state. As the older bees die off, the chemical no longer is fed to nurse bees and they mature into foragers.

Huang said the system makes sense for the health of the hive. Young bees – those in the first two to three weeks of life – are biologically better suited for brood care, thanks to some boosted blood protein. Bees forced out too early aren't great navigators and, since foraging is dangerous, they risk dying before their time.

"Our idea has never been disproved, but the lack of mechanism drove me crazy," said Huang. "Now we know the specific chemical that controls the behaviour of honey bees for the good of the whole population."

After reading the report I wondered if ethyl oleate (EO) was really a pheromone or whether it was simply a component of nectar. However, an email to Zach confirmed that the foragers synthesise the EO in their honey stomachs - so it is a true pheromone. This raises some interesting questions about the impact on colonies of feeding sugar (in any form), as this will simulate a flow - but without the EO that would be present if the flow was nectar brought in by foragers. Presumably, this feeding of sugar will cause more nurse bees to become foragers prematurely and this might have a number of implications, e.g. for pollination, colony build up in the spring and the appearance of EFB. This could be a very important discovery.
Peter Edwards

Some labourers were working at the property of one Anthony Pereira at Ouzra Guddar on the banks of the Khushavati River in Quepem (Goa, India. PE) on November 8. At around 4 pm, stirred by strong winds a large beehive (Apis dorsata comb, PE), which was hanging on a coconut tree, came crashing down metres away from the labourers. When the bees stung four labourers, they ran helter-skelter to avoid the bee stings. Moments later, a bolt of lightning coincidentally struck the very same coconut tree. The labourers claim they were lucky to have escaped from the jaws of death, primarily because of the honeybees.
Seen in Goacom daily news clippings 12 Nov 2003.
Peter Edwards

Have you booked your places yet? If not, please do it now to avoid disappointment! Ring the Arrow Mill on 01789 762419. See the November newsletter for details.
Peter Edwards

The unhappy saga of the BBKA database reported in the October Newsletter continues. Although the situation does seem to have improved, the latest printout - which I checked just before Christmas - had a number of previously notified errors that had not been corrected, new members not included and lapsed members who had not been removed.

I have again sent in corrections, but could I ask you all to check your address details carefully when you receive the next BBKA News and your BBKA membership cards - let me know if there are any errors. (I will check with recent new members personally when the cards are sent out to ensure that they have been included).
Peter Edwards

Following my call for team members in the October Newsletter, only four Stratford members volunteered to form a team for the biennial County Quiz to which the Warwickshire Association had generously invited us. So Denis Keyte, Mike Osborne, Will Spencer and I had the task of defending our Association's reputation at the Old Leamingtonians Rugby Club on 10 December.

The evening was a very pleasant one. Celia produced an excellent, well-organised quiz and there was a very good buffet, with the opportunity to chat and catch up with the latest news from friends.

We did feel rather bad about walking off with their trophy after the last quiz two years ago and there were some suggestions that we should go for a strategic second place this year; however, once the quiz started our worst killer instincts seemed to take over!

The final result was: Stratford 114, Warwick 106, Solihull 102.

I wonder if we will be invited back again!
Peter Edwards