in a world brimming with complexity few creatures
embody harmony like the honeybee with tireless
precision she dances from bloom to bloom each
motion guided by millennia upon millennia of
instinct each act in service to the whole and
then There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards
of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist,
part poet, they move along their hives with the
efficiency of mow, levy and curly, tending to
the bee's needs as best they can comprehend,
and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the
Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing
like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their
journey. Welcome, welcome to Be Love, Be Keep
being presented by our good friends over at Man
Lake. Today's show features the conclusion of
our discussion with the amazing Dr. Tom Seeley.
We'll learn about everything from the tremble
dance to drone congregation areas, Bee's various
jobs in the hive, even the proper pronunciation
of the word, I better just spell it, P -R -O
-P -O -L -I -S, and a whole ton more. We might
even find out if he has a wild and crazy story
to share. Now let's head back to Maine and our
discussion with Dr. Tom Seeley. Tell me how beekeeping
has changed over the years, since you've been
doing this for 56 years. And I don't mean to
pronounce it like that as, well, you must be
100 years old, but that's a long time. And people
I've talked to, old timers, are like, it used
to be so easy. Yeah, it used to be that the American
fowl brood was common and New York State had
a regular inspection. You're required to get
your colonies inspected every year. I haven't
seen an American fowl brood in decades. Maybe
that's unusual, but I think American fowl brood
has gone way down in its incidence. Chalk brood
was when that first came in. That used to be
a real problem. I don't know what the experience
of others is, but I haven't seen it in a long
time. And I think that's a good example of how
natural selection worked. There was very strong
selection in favor of colonies that could handle
chalkbrood, because we didn't really have any
treatment for it. Another key feature of this.
treatment -free beekeeping is letting colonies
swarm. That brood break is hugely valuable. And
I think for Kirk Webster in Vermont, he doesn't
have his colonies swarming, but he's making splits
of them all the time because he sells a lot of
three -frame or five -frame nucs. He rears his
own queens and he splits his colonies, so there's
brood breaks. Oh, we've talked a little bit about
swarming and swarm behavior, and this is something
that you are absolutely an expert on, and I loved
reading about some of your experiments on an
island, what were you, seven miles off the Atlantic
coast? Yep, a little treeless 100 -acre island,
no natural nest sites. And I assume that the
idea of that was you're far enough away that
you're not going to get bees out there that aren't
part of your experiment. and bees in your experiment
can't just leave. And yeah, without trees, when
you're learning swarming behavior, you were giving
them places to swarm to, and those were their
only options. What are some of the highlights
of things that you learned? Well, one of the
first things I wanted to do was figure out...
I knew that bees avoid cavities... nest cavities
that are too small. So in general, when I began
my work on this island, and it was just as you
said, it was an island where I controlled the
options of the bees, the home site options. I
would set up, instead of an observation hive,
I had set up an observation nest box so I could
see what the nest site scouts do when they go
inside a potential home site. And I knew that
the bees were very careful to avoid an a nest
cavity that was too small. So I knew, well, how
do they measure the volume of one of these cavities?
So one of the experiments I did on this island
was I built a nest box. It was a cylinder that
I could rotate. Because I could rotate the walls,
I could make it, I could shorten the amount of
walking a nest site scout had to do to walk around
to make us, to trip around inside the cavity,
or I could make it longer. The cylindrical nest
box that they walked into which was mounted on
a turntable thing so it could be rotated smoothly.
It was right on the threshold of being big enough.
So if I made the bees walk more, if walking was
how they measured it, then if I made it walk
more, then they should think it was good, really
good. If I made it so they had to walk less than
they normally had to walk to get around from
where the... light is, where the entrance is,
back to the entrance place, then they should
think it's too small. And that's in fact what
happened. If I made a nestsight scout not have
to walk much to circumnavigate the cylinder,
she didn't like it, she wouldn't go back and
dance. If I made her walk more, a longer distance
to walk to circumnavigate this cavity, she would
go back and she'd dance. She thought it was the
right size, it was big enough. So that was one
of the features of working on this island. There
was a downside, too, though, Eric. There were
two lobster fishermen. They had their houses
on this island. And my bees were pretty desperate.
So one of my early swarms, I think it was my
first swarm, they found the chimney of one of
the lobster fishermen. And they liked that. They
liked that place a lot. And I had been told to
never go over to Rodney Sullivan's place because
he He didn't like people poking around his house.
But I had to, and introduced myself. And the
fierce Rodney Sullivan, once he learned that
I knew about bees and could get rid of them out
of his chimney, he was a very accommodating gentleman.
So it just involved getting a ladder up on the
side of his house and sealing off his chimney,
putting some screen over his chimney. That's
the kind of stuff on the island. The island became
a laboratory, because I... I controlled the options
of what the nest site scouts could look at. Any
other interesting tidbits that you learned that
beekeepers can use? You mean from the island
or in general? Yeah, from the island. I mean,
you learned about the size of a box that swarms
light, right? Yeah, and the main thing I learned
on the island with respect to that was how they
assess the volume of the box. I already knew
that they wanted They were avoiding really small
cavities and really large cavities. They had
a size around one deep hive body that was the
sweet spot for them. A lot of the other things
we learned on the island, and here's one that's
again useful. We learned, we studied a lot how
the swarms organized their movement once they
finished their decision making. We could take
a swarm out to the island. We could watch, again,
we could watch what the scouts are doing at a
prospective home site. And we could also watch
what they're doing, of course, back at the swarm.
One of the things that we studied really closely
was once the nestsite scouts have finished making
a choice, they've built up, they've reached,
found a site that's become popular enough, how
do they then tell all the other bees in the swarm
cluster to get ready to take flight? And so we
learned that they make a special sound. It's
called piping. It sounds like... We learned that
that's the warm -up signal. And then we learned
that they have another signal. Once the nest
site scouts have gotten all of the other bees
in the swarm cluster warm enough, they have a
takeoff signal. It's called the buzz run, where
a bee runs across the surface and burrows into
the swarm cluster while buzzing her wings. So
we learned a lot about how they... organize the
takeoff of the swarm. And we also studied how
they steer the swarm to its new home site. Again,
because we had control of all these things. We
knew we could set up a swarm on one side of the
island. We could put up the nest box down a road
on the island and follow the movement of the
swarm during its flight and video record it.
The video recording was very tricky because you
have to have the swarm fly right over your video
camera. So it's looking straight up. And I worked
with an engineer from Ohio State who was a whiz
at this kind of thing. It became very clear how
the scout bees steer a swarm. They do it by shooting
through the top of the swarm in the direction
that they want the swarm to move. And when a
scout bee shoots through it, she gets to the
front of the swarm, then she flies back slowly
and underneath the swarm until she's in the back
again and then she'll shoot through it again.
So they keep pointing the way. So those are some
of the things, how the swarms move. So much of
the biology of swarms is hard to study unless
you know where the swarm is. You can watch the
swarm and you know where it's going. And then
we learned how they organized the move into the
home site. And when these scout bees go out and
they come back and they're somehow communicating
with the swarm and they're doing it by dancing
and pointing and And you can explain it much
more scientifically than I can. But I don't get
how a collective decision is made. I mean, we
use human terms and you even use the human term
democracy and voting. But is it really like voting
or is it more like convincing or is it, I don't
know, how does it really happen? Let me begin
to answer that, Eric, by saying why I use the
word democracy. I use that term because it is
a collective decision -making process. There's
no one individual that gets to, there's no, there's
nobody that's the supreme decider in this thing.
It's dispersed among all the Nessite scouts.
Including the queen, by the way. She's not the
supreme decider. She's not the supreme leader.
She's passive in the decision -making of the
new home site. You might say it's... It's a form
of democracy where it's like, you know, in our
own election system, we vote, but it ultimately
comes down to the electoral college that actually
makes the votes that get counted. So in other
words, you don't have 20 ,000 bees in a swarm
all raising their left wing and saying, yeah,
we want to go that way. You have an electoral
college of all these scouts that are saying,
Hey, together we have found the best spot. Let's
go everybody. Yeah, it's about 5 % of the swarm.
This are the nest site scouts. They're the oldest
bees, elderly bees in the swarm. And they do
have a real debate on the swarm because different
bees will come back from different sites. The
way the best site wins in this competition is
that the nest site scouts adjust how long a waggle
dance they perform, how many dance circuits they
will perform in relation to the goodness of their
site. If a bee comes back from a humdinger of
a nest site, she might do 200 dance circuits.
If she comes back from one that's okay but not
great, she might do 20. And if it's a poor site,
she won't do any. Different strength of the advertising
of the different sites means that the best site
gets the most additional scout bees recruited
to it. This decision -making process goes on
with this differential buildup of nest site scouts
here versus there. But whichever site first gains
what I call a quorum of nest site scouts, and
I don't know quite how the bees sense a quorum,
but it means there's enough bees going to that
site. Enough bees are encountered at that site.
That tells the nest site scouts who are having
these high encounter rates with fellow nest site
scouts at a site. That tells those bees, our
site has attracted enough popularity that we
consider it the winner. And then those bees,
those nest site scouts come back to the swarm.
They just shut down the debate by switching from
doing waggle dances to doing these piping signals,
which basically tells the other bees, we figured
this out. Let's get ready to take off. Once everybody's
launched into the air, those nest site scouts
point the way, steer the other bees by pointing
the way to fly to the new home site, the chosen
site. It's absolutely amazing. It just is mind
-boggling. I agree. I agree. This is a complexity
of behavior by insects that is absolutely astonishing.
And I think of all of the different behaviors
that worker honeybees do, I think these nest
site scouts are, they are doing the most complicated
task, performing the most complex task. Finding
the sites, differentially recruiting to the site.
sensing whether the site is a winner or not.
If it is the winner, then going back and moving
the process from the decision -making stage to
taking the action to make the flight to the new
home site, and then guiding the flight and then
marking the site when the swarm cloud gets there
by releasing the assembly pheromone. Yeah, it
is... It is breathtaking. And that is why I wrote
a whole book on this subject. You know, you might
think, how can you write a whole book on swarming?
Well, you can't because that decision -making
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There's no other animal on the planet other than
honeybees that have this kind of, where anybody's
found anything like this ability to perform collective
decision making. We are it. None of the ants,
none of the primates, none of the birds. I mean,
there are many social birds. The ants are all
social. It's just humans and honeybees that can
do this kind of thing. And that's pretty cool.
I think that's really cool. It is really cool.
Your book... piping hot bees, you talk about
20 mysteries of bee behavior solved. We don't
have time to go into all 20. You want to pick
a favorite one of those to talk about? That's
like asking which is your favorite child. You
mean you don't have a favorite? I tell each of
my kids they're the favorite. Okay, well, let
me collect my thoughts a little bit about that.
What I'm thinking the way I'm going to answer
your question, Eric, is I might emphasize one
that is a behavior that is not much discussed
in any of the beekeeping books. Well, there's
several chapters in there devoted to this house
hunting process. That's fun. I'm proud of the
first chapter because it was the very first scientific
study I did. It was how the bees are sensitive
to carbon dioxide, the carbon dioxide level inside
their nest, and they will ventilate the nest
carefully if the CO2 level gets too high. One
of those jumps out is the chapter about resin
work. That's something that is pretty obscure
when you're doing your beekeeping, because it's
only a small number of bees, but they're bees
that are dedicated to go out and collecting resin,
and it's really cool how they organize their
work. I admire those resin collectors, because
they're special. There aren't very many of them,
but they do a very important task of getting
that antiseptic material into the nest. And we're
talking about propolis now. Yeah, that's right.
Well, I call it resin, but when the bees mix
it with beeswax, then it becomes propolis. Yeah.
Okay, and did I pronounce that correctly? Because
I've heard it pronounced three different ways.
Propolis, propolis. I think if you looked up
in the dictionary, but you'd say that you'd probably
find both ways are valid. I say pro because pro
means in front. Polis means city. So it's in
front of the city. That's a very old name. It
goes back to the Greeks, I think. Propolis. Okay,
go ahead and talk about the resin collectors.
Well, the resin collectors are really special.
They have to find these resin sources, which
are usually coniferous trees, and they're not
marked the way nectar and pollen sources are,
with bright colors and bright smells. They may
orient to the resin -y smell, but somehow they
find these sources and then they have to pack
it into their pollen baskets on their hind legs,
and then they come into the nest And they can't
offload it themselves. Whereas all of the nectar
collectors and the pollen collectors and the
water collectors, they usually unload their materials
in the bottom of the nest. That's where those
materials are needed. The propolis bees, they
go up to wherever the propolis work is being
done. And it's often near the top of the nest.
And then they stand around until one of the propolis
handlers choose off the propolis off of their
body. So they have to be pretty patient. It's
kind of you might think of it as somewhat nasty
work because you're dealing with this gooey stuff.
And then you have to be patient. You have to
go to part of the nest that's unusual wherever
the propolis work is being done. And so I admire
those little bees. Once I watched I was following
one of these resin collectors or propolis collectors.
It seemed like she got fed up with not getting
unloaded for like an hour and so she somehow
she got started to get the resin off her hind
legs and stick it on the gooey surface where
it needed to be used. So that's the kind of little
observation that I think is very endearing and
also very revealing about the behavioral flexibility
of a worker honeybee. They have jobs and they
focus on one thing at a time, but sometimes they
have to show some enterprising, some ingenuity
in completing their job, their work. Do those
jobs change a lot during their lifetime? I know
most bees start off as nurse bees and then they
move on to something else but are you gonna have
a resin collector the next day be a guard bee
and the next day be something else? I don't have
a firm answer on that Eric but what I did what
I can say is I think once you're a resin collector
you're a resin collector and I know the bees
that are water collectors They tend to also be
specialists. These are forager HBs. And I think
maybe the logic there, why they've organized
it this way, is that resin is a material. They
don't need a lot of it, but they need kind of
a trickle of it to get the nest all coated in
the right places and snugged up, sealed up. I
think that's part of the logic. If you get working
on collecting resin, you stay a resin collector.
With respect to water, Again, in our studies,
it looked like the water collectors are specialists.
And I think, again, it's because when there's
a need for water, you really have to have bees
that are ready to dive in and start the water
collection, lest the nests overheat. Those two
are a little different. That's my sense of the
situation for those two materials, resin and
water. You're the expert on behavior, and I'm
curious about all of it. I also, I can't help
it, I just realized I'm trying to come up with
something to stump you. So here's another one.
It shouldn't be too hard. How do they decide
who does what? And so that they have just the
right amount of water collectors and just the
right amount of resin collectors and we don't
need 5 ,000 guard bees, we need a handful of
guard bees. Is there just something innate in
them that says, oh, we need more guard bees,
I'm going to do that now? Or do you think there
is actually some sort of collective decision
-making on this? Yeah, that's a question that
I don't think anybody has a good answer to. What
I can say is that there's a lot of work, not
done by me, but by a gentleman named Rob Page
and Gene Robinson, and they find workers that
are in different patrilines. That is to say,
that have different fathers. And you may know
that a queen bee tends to mate with 10 to 20
different males. So there's a lot of genetic
variation among the worker bees. Rob Page and
Gene Robinson find that the bees that are involved
in water collecting are from some patrilines.
The resin collectors primarily come from some
other patrilines. So some of it is genetics.
But some of it may also be experience. If you
grow up in a hot hive that might predispose you
to be a water collector, something like that.
Or a hive that's getting into the fall and then
that's when they start to really seal up their
nest. If you're born in the fall, maybe that
some way that timing and the need for the resin
somehow gets into the brain of a worker bee and
steers her to take up that task. You know, these
are just speculations, of course. So based on
that speculation, I'm going to further speculate.
Can we speculate that a queen bee is choosing
drones to mate with based on, well, I need genetics
of a couple of water collectors and I need genetics
of a couple of resin collectors and I need these
other genetics? Am I going way too far now? Yeah,
I'd say, Eric, there's no evidence that especially
with respect to the characteristics of the offspring
of a male, probably most beekeepers have never
watched had the very special experience of going
to a drone congregation area or a mating area
and seeing what goes on up there. The queen comes
in and a bunch of males, there's a comet of males,
maybe 50 or 100 that chase after the queen. One
grabs her, they mate, and then she flies on,
circles around, comes back, mates again. It's
just, it seems very clear that she has no selection
process, no ability to assess. the different
drones with their behaviors, quality of their
offspring or anything like that. It's just bang,
bang, bang, bang, bang. So much more random.
And we do know this is probably why the honeybees
are, well, you probably know this, they're remarkable
for their multiple mating. There aren't many
insects that mate with, where the female will
mate with 10 to 20 different males and then mix
up the sperm to get a... to get a blend of offspring,
but honeybees do that. And only one time in their
life and then be done. Yeah, that's right. That's
incredible. Maybe that a queen might go out on
multiple flights and if she doesn't get, if the
weather is bad, she has to turn around, she might
make another flight. But yeah, it is a remarkable
sight. Once I was lying on the grass underneath
the drone congregation area, it's in a little
valley on the Cornell campus and a queen crashed
on the ground. Somehow she just crashed on the
ground. But I went over and grabbed her, and
I was a beginning beekeeper. I thought, oh boy,
now I got a queen. I can make a split and make
a new colony. And then I realized, no, if I don't
let this queen fly home, there's going to be
a queenless colony. So I let her go. It is amazing
to see the frenzy of drones chasing a queen and
sometimes. How would one find a drone congregation
area? I've never seen one. Yeah, I think the
only way that people have found them is to walk
around with a helium or hydrogen balloon on the
end of a fishing line or fishing pole and with
a queen and a little cage, queen cage. And just,
yeah, just, they're not, they're fairly abundant.
They're not really rare, at least in hilly country.
I think it's just hit and miss. It's just poking
around. Did you say a queen in a cage on a helium
balloon and a fishing pole? Yeah, the fishing
pole. So you can raise and lower your helium
balloon. And you just have the queen hanging
down below the helium balloon. It's remarkable,
Eric, just how sharp the boundaries are. These
drone congregation areas, they're maybe about
100 yards in diameter. But when you get to the
edge, the drones just stop coming. I don't know
what it is. It's a great mystery. What's going
on there? And it's fun to lie beneath one and
see the queen come in in a comet form. All right.
I have so much appreciated all of your time today.
We're going to wind down here. I did forewarn
you of one thing, and that is that I wanted to
hear some kind of a wild and crazy beekeeping
story from Dr. Seeley, and I loved your comeback.
You want to tell everybody what you said? My
memory is not very good, Eric. What did I say?
It was something like, I am a scientist. I control
things. There shouldn't be anything wild and
crazy. Oh, that's it. Oh, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, that is the nature of my work with the
bees. It's usually trying to set something up
so I can get the bees to give me an answer. But
also personally, you're a beekeeper and you love
bees. So tell us something fun. Well, one of
the things that I really enjoy is extracting
honey. I just and I remember doing that with
my daughters when they were little and they were
just so Well, fascinated that you could see that
they were used to jars of honey But here there's
an extractor and there's a gate and you open
that up and that just is this gush of honey that
comes out I think that's not about bee biology.
That's about beekeeping and it's it's always
I always thought that was pretty thrilling pretty
sweet It's definitely part of the joy is seeing
that Yeah, and maybe dip a little finger in oh,
yeah, you have to test the quality, don't you?
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we get a big goldenrod
flow and it tastes a little weird. Other times
we harvest it in the summer and it tastes a little
better. I guess I would come back and stress
that deciphering the tremble dance was like a
very special thing for me because my hero, Carl
von Frisch, who deciphered the waggle dance,
he once wrote I think it tells the other bees
nothing. I've never been able to figure out any
meaning to it. And he observed it and described
it back in the 1910s, 1910s. And for 50 years,
he wondered, why do these bees, why do some of
the foragers that come back from his feeding
station, why didn't they do it? Why do they do
this trembling movement instead of a waggle dance?
And it was frustrating to him. So I'm very proud
of being the person that figured out what the
tremble dance is. And it's basically a call.
It's when a returning nectar collector comes
in, can't find a bee that will receive her load
of nectar, and so she does a trumble dance to
call for more of the middle -aged bees to work
as nectar receivers. I'm very proud of that.
That's a special, shiny discovery in my mind.
That is really cool. There's so many ways they
communicate. Yeah. I mean, dancing, trembling,
pheromones. Shaking. Yeah. Yeah. The mechanical
ones, like the tremble dancing, the waggle dancing,
the shaking signals, the piping signals, all
of those, those are the, we call those mechanical
and we can see them. We're really good at, we
humans are really good at detecting those. It's
the pheromone, the chemical side, that's all
invisible. That's really hard. And I haven't,
I haven't, I didn't go down that route at all
because I knew, even though I studied chemistry,
I was smart enough from what I knew of chemistry
that that stuff's hard. And so there's a lot.
There's a lot of room there for the next generations
to decipher the clinical signals. All right.
Last thing, Tom, would you like to impart some
wisdom on us? Just any last thoughts that could
help us be better beekeepers? Yeah, I'd say that
it's like any any craft. The more you know about
it, the better you'll you'll be in pursuing it.
A lot of beekeepers are very bookish. It's fascinating.
If you look at the number of books that have
been written about bees and beekeeping compared
to, say, the number of books written about other
activities, fishing or things like that, it's
like night and day. So I guess what I would suggest
is just enjoy reading about the bees. There's
a lot to learn about them, but there are many
very good books about them. So that's what I
would say. On a personal note I do have one last
question. I can read all the books. I can talk
to a hundred other beekeepers and as you know
I'm going to get 500 different answers. Now you're
a scientist so you're all about the books. Tell
me if you agree with my philosophy at all and
that is that it's our job to learn as much as
we can from as many different places analyze
the sources, there still is often not one clear
-cut answer. And so we need some intuition. We
need to be in tune in some way with our Bs, sometimes
to know what is going to be best for them, how
we can best help them. Does a scientist agree
with me on that one? I do, I do. Because yeah,
it's the difference between Learning about beekeeping
versus learning about the bee's biology. The
bee's biology is what it is. It's either this
or it's that. With beekeeping, every colony is
different. Weather conditions change. The colony's
strength changes. What's available for them to
forage? That's a much harder one. And that's
harder to communicate with the books. I'd say
read the books, but also just work with an experienced
beekeeper and keep good notes and study your
colonies. Dr. Tom Seeley, I appreciate you so
much and all the work that you've done and how
much I've learned from you over the years from
your books and things and what a pleasure to
finally get to meet you and talk with you and
I hope we can do it again someday. Please keep
in touch. Thank you Eric and it's really been
my pleasure and I feel honored to be invited
and share this information. Thanks for joining
us on Be Love Beekeeping presented by Man Lake.
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