Bees! May 24, 2019, Part 2

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Natural Sciences, Wnyc, Science, Friday, Life Sciences

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🗓️ 24 May 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

For the hobby beekeeper, there’s much to consider when homing your first domestic honey bee colonies—what kind of hive to get, where to put them, where to get your bees, and how to help them survive the winter. But when left to their own devices, what do the bees themselves prefer? From smaller nests to higher openings, wild honey bees seem to prefer very different conditions from the closely clustered square boxes of traditional beekeeping. But there are ways to adapt! Seeley joins Ira to explain his theory of “Darwinian beekeeping” as a way to keep bees healthy even in the age of varroa mites and colony collapse. Plus, apiculturalist Elina L. Niño of the University of California Davis talks about the microbial world of bees, such as whether probiotics could benefit bee health, and how honey bees and bumblebees could be used to distribute beneficial microbes to plants, an idea called ‘apivectoring.’

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. I have been waiting months to open a discussion about our next topic.
0:07.6	You know how they say timing is everything? Well, it's spring and finally time to talk about one of my favorite subjects, bees.
0:15.4	Perhaps you've seen them swarming. Now, you may think you know about bees, but you would be surprised by what you don't know.
0:23.4	Certainly, I was and I am. And if you have any beekeeping questions or you want to know anything
0:29.1	about bees, our number is 844-724-825-8-4-Sy-Talk or tweet tweet us at SciFry and we will begin our discussion with a scientist who
0:43.3	has spent 40 years following wild honeybees to their trees and intricately noting how they live
0:50.2	their lives unfettered by human beekeepers not not living in confined and neatly stacked white boxes.
0:57.5	And he has some ideas about how understanding the wild bees better could help us cultivate the domestic ones.
1:04.0	So they survived the threats that seem to be imperiling their survival today.
1:09.0	Dr. Thomas Seeley, Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University,
1:14.0	author of the new book, The Lives of Bees, the Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild.
1:19.4	You can read an excerpt on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash wild bees.
1:25.3	Dr. Seeley joins us from Ithaca, New York, where he has spent most of his career,
1:29.5	learning about honeybees. Welcome back, Tom. Thank you back, Ira. Thank you for having me back.
1:34.2	It's very happy to have you. What got you interested 40 years ago in the lives of wild honeybees?
1:42.9	Oh, my goodness. I think it has something to do with admiring these
1:49.9	bees that normally we think of as having to live under our supervision, but seeing that, oh, no,
1:56.2	they actually can live in the wild. And of course, that makes sense. That's where they started out,
2:00.1	and that's where they are still, to a large extent, today. We talk a lot about the plight of bees and
2:06.5	pollinators right now. The varroa mites and other causes of colony collapse, are wild bees having
2:13.7	as tough a time as the kinds that we have in our hives?
2:18.5	The answer is no, they're not.
	...

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