This is a victory for the precautionary principle, which is supposed to underlie environmental regulation.– Dr Lynn Dicks

The EU has banned the nerve agent that has been contributing to honey bee decline around the world. The scientific evidence against these extremely toxic nicotine-based pesticides has grown steadily. Honey bees have contributed to our survival for the past 20,000 years and it’s time we showed them similar courtesy. These banned pesticides are still widely used on NZ crops (eg.corn) and sold to the public in garden centres (eg. the Confidor brand). Bee photo by Sophie Huber.

There are other way to deal with pests without harming bees:

It is high time we returned to Integrated Pest Management (IPM) – an approach focussed on minimising pesticide use, maximising the number of biological control agents, using cultural controls such as crop rotations, and monitoring pest numbers so that chemical controls only need be applied when there is a problem.– Prof David Goulson

A Bee in a Cathedral by Joel Levy is a fascinating book of science analogies and astonishing numbers. Suitable for all ages, only the physics section is a bit complex. A few of my favourites factoids:

• Every day 1 million meteoroids strike the Earth.
• Travelling in a rocket at 250,000km/h, it would take you 18,000 years to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.
• Most of the living cells in your body are less than a month old.
• About 50 million neutrinos are passing through you now.
• Every molecule in a glass of water is changing partners billions of times a second.
• How hard does your heart work? Empty a bathtub in 15 minutes using only a teacup —do this without stopping for the rest of your life.

If an atom were blown up to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be no larger than a bee buzzing about in the centre.

Saint Nicholas was born about 280 AD into a rich family. When his parents died he used his wealth to help the poor and sick, often giving gifts in secret. He became a Christian bishop and was imprisoned by the Roman Emperor, Diocletian. Nicholas is the Patron Saint of Greece and the model for Santa Claus. Saints were known as ‘Divine Bees’ because honey was a symbol of God’s grace – honey was often given as a gift to children on St. Nicholas’ Day.

Picture: a painting of St. Nicholas from 1294 AD

Bees and humans are partners: we can’t survive without their pollinating skill; bees can’t survive without a clean world. Keep the partnership alive by donating to:

1. Bees For Development: combats poverty through beekeeping.  Teaches beekeeping skills in poor communities; providing income and boosting the environment. Their patron is Sting, naturally (Photo: Paolo Roversi). Informative website too: Bees For Development.

2. Oxfam: Plan B helps struggling women in Ethiopia take up beekeeping and earn a living.

3. Tear Fund: The Bees Knees fund helps a family start a beekeeping business with a beehive and training.

Honey bees have six (girl) powers to beat any comic super hero, and a few super villains. Every decent super hero has only one weakness; for bees it’s also their only defence: when a bee stings, it dies.

1. Super Flyers
Like Superman, bees are great flyers. A bee flies about 1000 km in her life. If she was human sized, that’d be like going five times around the planet. And she can carry 122 times her own weight.

2. Super Attractors
Like Magneto, honey bees use magnetism and electricity. They have their own navigational GPS thanks to millions of magnetic crystals inside them to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. Bees also have a negative electrical charge (static) which attracts positively charged pollen to their furry bodies.

3. Super Therms
Like Torch and Mr Freeze, bees cope with extreme temperatures. In the heat, air- conditioner bees fan their wings to cool the hive – bees have even been found living on a lava field at 60 ̊C. In the freezing cold, bees huddle in a tight ball, disengage their wing-muscles, and shiver to keep warm.

4. Super Smarts
Like Professor X, bees are super intelligent communicators. They are the only other creatures we know that use a symbolic language. The bee dance indicates direction and distance to flowers, and the quality. Bees also use smell to talk: the queen controls her family with pheromones. Bee brains are tiny but their neuron density is 10x ours. Bees can count, tell time, measure, memorize, solve problems and make decisions.

5. Super Food
Like Wolverine, bees have healing powers. Honey is nutritious, lasts forever, and is a healer too; killing bacteria and fungi. In humans, Manuka honey fights infections, and heals burns. Bees use sticky propolis to keep their hives germ-free; it’s anti-bacterial, and probably anti-cancer.

6. Super Transformers
Like Spiderman, bees can change their genetic structure. A queen bee is not born that way – any girl bee can become a queen. The worker bees prepare a royal baby by feeding it on royal jelly. This ‘genetic jelly’ triggers DNA which transforms the baby into a queen.

Hand-made beehives date back 3000 years (to Israel) and early hives were made of clay or straw. Bees and humans helped each other expand into new lands as settlers transported the bees with them for crop pollination. For centuries beekeepers melted the wax comb to get the honey out, forcing the poor bees to rebuild it every time. Then in 1851 pastor Lorenzo Langstroth designed a hive like a filing cabinet that could be used over and over.

Young Mary Bumby introduced honey bees to NZ in 1839, bringing them on a ship from England in straw hives. Today  about 3,251 New Zealanders are beekeepers, most of them hobbyists. Our government’s ‘Beehive’ building is shaped like a straw hive called a skep. Skeps were enlarged by adding layers called ‘ekes’ – hence the saying ‘to eke things out’ (is there a National Party joke here?). Bees thrive  in human cities but NZ City Council rules say that bees are ‘inappropriate in residential areas’. However, increasingly, beehives are kept in city parks in many countries and with almost zero feral (wild) bee numbers we need bees to pollinate our home gardens. Honour the bee partnership by planting flowers. (Photo: apiary in central Paris public park.)

It’s the most important relationship on Earth. Everything you taste and smell in Nature depends on pollinators who carry the essence of life.

Pollination is ‘a love story that feeds the Earth.’ – Louie Schwartzberg.

For a flower to reproduce, its pollen (male) must get to an egg (female) in another flower – and bees do most of the moving. The result is a cornucopia of foods from cherries to cashews, and courgettes to coffee. Our relationship with the pollinators is equally important: it’s honey bee season now so give them fresh water, flowers, and spray-free gardens.  Watch a clip from Louie Schwatzberg’s dazzling new movie, Wings of Life.

Nature is what we see -
The Hill – the Afternoon -
Squirrel – Eclipse – the Bumble bee -
Nay – Nature is Heaven -
Nature is what we hear -
The Bobolink – the Sea -
Thunder – the Cricket -
Nay – Nature is Harmony -
Nature is what we know -
Yet have no art to say -
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.
– Emily Dickinson

Things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. – Wittgenstein

It’s Love Our Kiwi Bees Week. We can’t survive without bees and bees can’t survive without us. They give us fruit, flowers, vegetables, and herbs – let’s return the love by giving them clean habitats (Eg. avoid bee-toxic home garden sprays).

Honey bees have a body clock to keep track of time – this is vital because flowers produce nectar at different hours of the day – dandelions at 9am, for example. We have a similar inner clock but most of us rely on outer clocks to tell the time. If our devices were removed we’d probably learn to use our body clock too. Bees learn very quickly. Scientists trained some bees to feed (on sugar water) at 10.30am, and after that the bees turned up at exactly that time to be fed.

It’s autumn for the honey bees and soon the drones will be pushed out of the beehive to die. Male bees have a high life in summer: eating and sleeping – the females even clean up their droppings – but then they’re executed. Why have drones? To mate with a new queen. Several drones will mate with her and die gruesomely in the act. Drones themselves have no father; they hatch from unfertilised eggs. It was once thought all bees came from virgin queen births, until in 1788 a blind Swiss naturalist, Francois Huber (I’m not making this up), proved that queens mated – the event is nicely novelized in The Beekeeper’s Pupil by Sara George.

Photo: what big eyes the drones have, all the better to find the queen.

This beautiful poem by Carol Ann Duffy (extract from The Bees) reminded me of a beautiful photo by Sarah Anderson:

Here are my bees,

brazen, blurs on paper,

besotted; buzzwords, dancing

their flawless, airy maps.

After reading Wolfram’s dramatic story I discovered his daughter’s wonderful art. Alexandra Milton is an animal artist and children’s book illustrator. She creates her creatures by collage, using hand-made papers with mysterious names: Korean mingeishi, Thai silk thread, Himalayan khadi, and Payhembury marbled paper. Her honey bee illustration below is warm and characterful (like bees).

I aim to celebrate all that is to be marvelled at in nature; to catch, in colour and form, a glimpse of the miracle of creation Alexandra Milton

The latest on the pesticide threat to bees (see Nicotine Bees) is a small victory: a garden supplier has removed the words ‘low toxic to beneficial insects’ from an advertisement for  Confidor. This pesticide is extremely toxic to the world’s most beneficial insect, the honey bee. These nicotine-based pesticides are banned in Europe because of links to bee deaths. They stay in the plant right through to flowering – so bees are poisoned by pollen, nectar, dust, and water. Latest research shows how the pesticides contribute to the bee crisis by exposing bees from multiple sources. Photo: Sarah Anderson.

5 Ways to Save the Bees:

1. Avoid chemicals such as Confidor,  Poncho, Advantage, Marathon, Merit and Admire (grotesque names).
2. Buy local honey.
3. Grow bee-friendly plants, such as lavender.
4. Let there be weeds; let the broccoli go to seed.
5. Put out clean water in a shallow dish.

Alone we are one drop, together we are an ocean Ryunosuke Satoro

Honey bees are a super-organism: each one working for the health of the whole. In the same way many people contribute to a book. At the writer’s end: family, friends, writing group, experts, research subjects. At the publishers: editor, proof-reader, designer, publicist, education coordinator, accountant. In the world: distributors, retailers, reviewers, website designer, media, networkers and most importantly, readers. Readers are the book’s power — an unread book will wither like a hive without a queen.

Photo: Swarm by Sarah Anderson

My new honey bee novel  for children, Wings, is launched today. It grew from a couple of seeds: the pesticide threat to bees and a fascination with giant hornets (it was almost titled ‘Hornet’). While writing, I learned a lot about character ‘balance’ – they do take on their own life, but you need to nudge them now and them. I had fun with the nasty hornet (Torgo), the loopy acid-bee (Ash), and a puzzle snake (Fang). Hardest part was deciding about the death of a character. I’ve tried to create a gripping tale; and trusting in the power of story (okay, and a good editor) I hope readers will see bees in a new light.

…when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually. Maryanne Wolf

The home garden supplier, Yates, advertises a handy spray-can of pesticide as ‘low toxic to beneficial insects’ and ‘soft on beneficial insects’. Lies. The pesticide is extremely toxic to the world’s most beneficial insect, the honey bee – a nerve poison 7000 times more lethal than DDT. The pesticide (Confidor) contains nicotine-based poisons which are now banned in France, Italy, Germany, and Slovenia, because of links to massive bee deaths.

These nicotine pesticides (‘neonicotinoids’) are widely used on NZ crops and are now available to the public. Labelling them ‘soft’ on pollinators is biting the hand the feeds us. Bees have been our partners for ages– our important foods need bee pollination. Neonicotinoid pesticides are systemic – the whole plant remains toxic right through to flowering. If spray drift doesn’t kill them, bees could be poisoned by pollen, nectar, and drinking water. Even sub-lethal doses weaken bees’ reproduction, immune systems, navigation, and memory.

Government agencies are not restricting neonicotinoids, so we all need to act: suppliers can label honestly; garden shops can warn customers; and gardeners can avoid ‘handy’ poisons.  Neonicotinoids are in these products: Confidor, Advantage, Merit and Admire (what shameless names).

Evidence: Scientific studies/reports; Nicotine Bees (movie); UN Bee Report; EPA Memo;  student journalist challenges Yates.

ERMA  is the authority that manages the poisons sprayed on our food crops. ‘Manages’ is the weasel word – meaning ‘we tell you the risk, but the choice is yours’. A powerful chemical (clothianidin) that ERMA approves for NZ crops is banned in Europe, and even the US authority was recently warned – by its own scientists – that the chemical is ‘highly toxic to beneficial insects such as honey bees’. Problem is, it’s so persistent it remains in plants through to the pollen stage (especially corn), and in meat and milk.

When I asked ERMA if they would review the chemical in NZ they said they already ‘managed’ the use of it (they tend to be slow to ban poisons). In the end it’s up to us whether we accept pesticide residues in our food (yes, clothianidin is there). But while we have some choice to eat organic, honey bees don’t, and they are already in decline.

Full article: The authority that kicked the beehive (download – pdf)

Bee photo by Sarah Anderson who also writes a beautiful blog.