Meck BeesThe honey bee garden at the University of California, Davis, is not only bee friendly,...

Meck Bees Mecklenburg Beekeepers Association

Meets the 3rd Thursday of each month at 7 pm at

3100 Selwyn Avenue

(corner of Selwyn and Woodlawn)

Mailing address: 121 Hermitage Rd Charlotte NC 28207

704-358-8075

President -George McAllister

Vice President -Richard Flanagan

Treasurer -Libby Mack

Chaplain -Jimmy Odom

This Month’s Meeting/Program

Joe Smith will be our guest speaker. He will instruct us on the steps to prepare our jars of honey for judging in local and state competitions. He has vast knowledge and is willing to show us the proper way to present our honey for judging. Let’s take this opportunity to learn and hopefully enter this year’s State judging in Raleigh in October.

This months refreshments are provided by

Ralph Harlan

September 2011

Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. The liquid/paste is then applied to a surface—usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are often used. The simplest encaustic mixture can be made from adding pigments to beeswax, but there are several other recipes that can be used — some con-taining other types of waxes, damar resin, linseed oil, or other ingredients. Pure, powdered pigments can be purchased and used, though some mixtures use oil paints or other forms of pigment.

Metal tools and special brushes can be used to shape the paint before it cools, or heated metal tools can be used to manipulate the wax once it has cooled onto the surface. Today, tools such as heat lamps, heat guns, and other meth-ods of applying heat allow artists to extend the amount of time they have to work with the material. Because wax is used as the pigment binder, encaustics can be sculpted as well as painted. Other materials can be encased or collaged into the surface, or layered, using the encaustic medium to adhere it to the sur-face.

A 6th-century encaustic icon from Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai.

Mecklenburg County Beekeepers Association


Speakers for 2011

Sept Joe Smith Honey Judging Oct George McAllister Internet Resources for Beekeepers Nov Tyler Stout

Studies in Interactions between workers and drones

Dec Potluck Dinner

B e e ke e p e rs Ye a r ly Ma na gem e nt C a le nd a r for S e pte mb e r

Me d ic ate w ith Te rra myc in to t re at for Fou l B rood

Astonishing Bee Facts

Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell was so precise that it could differentiate hun-dreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from meters away


FSA Reminds Producers to Apply for ELAP Losses

Eligible producers who lost livestock, honeybees, farm-raised fish, or harvested and purchased feed due to adverse weather this year can sign up for the USDA Farm Service Agency's Livestock, Honey Bees, and Farm-Raised Fish Program by filing a notice of loss by the earlier of 30 days of the loss occurring or before October 31. Livestock losses due to wolf depredation and honeybee losses due to colony collapse disorder are also eligible. Producers with livestock, honeybee, or farm-raised fish losses that are not covered by the Livestock Indemnity Program, Livestock Feed Program, or the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Program may be eligible for ELAP. Eligibility provisions for ELAP also include honeybee and farm-raised fish producers, who did not replace their losses from natural disaster, to be eligible for ELAP payments based on the fair market value of the losses. In addition, documentation requirements of losses for honeybee producers who suffered losses due to CCD, al-low documentation by an independent third party for losses for 2011. ELAP applicants are eligible for payments based on 60 percent of the average fair market value, as deter-mined by FSA, of: lost farm-raised bait or game fish honeybees in excess of normal honeybee mortality, as established by FSA purchased or harvested feed lost. The payment rates, established by FSA, for 2011 honeybee colonies and hives are based on the average fair market values of honeybee colonies and/or hives. FSA has established the following average fair market val-ues for 2011 honeybee losses: $70 per honeybee colony $200 per honeybee hive. Feed loss payments are 60 percent of the cost of purchased or harvested feed stuff and grazing losses are 60 percent of value, as de-termined by FSA. Payments may be factored if national ELAP fund requests exceed $50 million for a calendar year. To qualify for the Emergency Livestock Assistance Program, producers must meet the risk management pur-chase requirement by either obtaining a policy or plan of insurance, under the Federal Crop Insurance Act or NAP coverage.


RoboBee speaks honeybee dance language

IT SMELLS, it buzzes, it even dances like a honeybee. In a field in Germany, RoboBee is making its first attempts at speaking to the insects in their own language.

Bees are famous for communicating using the waggle dance - walking forward while rapidly vibrating their rear. In the 1940s, biologist Karl von Frisch realised that the length and angle of the dance correlated with the distance and direction of the food source the bee had just visited. Since then, most apiologists have held that dancers tell their fellows where to find food (New Scientist, 19 September 2009, p 40) .

Now Tim Landgraf of the Free University of Berlin in Germany and colleagues have programmed their foam RoboBee, to mimic the dance. RoboBee is stuck to the end of a rod attached to a computer, which determines its "dance" moves. The rod is also connected to a belt which makes it vibrate. Like a real bee, it can spin, buzz its wings, carry scents and droplets of sugar water, and give off heat.

To program RoboBee, Landgraf took high-speed video of 108 real waggle dances, and put the footage through software that analysed the dances in detail (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0021354). The outcome is "the most detailed description so far of the waggle dance", says Christoph Grüter of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, who was not involved in the study.

What do real bees think of RoboBee's skills? In a field outside Berlin, Landgraf trained groups of honeybees to use a feeder, which he then closed. The bees stopped foraging and stayed in their hives. There they met RoboBee, which had been programmed with Landgraf's best guess at a waggle dance pointing to another feeder, which the bees had never visited.

The bees responded by leaving the hive, but returned to their old feeders. For now, it looks like RoboBee persuaded them to forage, but failed to communicate where to go. The team is confident RoboBee didn't just scare away the foragers, as honeybees respond to intruders by stinging, not fleeing.

Bees don't always pay attention to the waggle dance, says Grüter. He recently showed that bees become more responsive to other's waggle dances if their private food sources have dried up (Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.01.014). This suggests bee communication is even more sophisticated than von Frisch thought: the bees' responses depend on the circumstances.

Lars Chittka of Queen Mary, University of London says previous attempts to make waggle-dancing robots have not panned out, but he is keen to see how RoboBee's more sophisticated dancing fares. Its Achilles heel, though, may be a lack of legs: some studies suggest there is a tap-dance element to the dance.


I follow with the Rosemary: cinna-mon-infused rum, apple juice, lemon and toasted honeybees, three little guys balancing precariously on top of a pineapple leaf. This is much better. Nothing amazing but it is tart, light and elegant in its subtle nuances, and more importantly, I can actually finish this one. The bees themselves have almost no flavor but that would be to miss the point entirely.

A new drink from New York Scene The Honey Bee Cocktail

Honeybees under stress apparently become pessimistic, just like anxious mammals (including humans).

First, researchers trained honeybees to recog-nize two odors. One signaled the presence of tasty sucrose; the other was linked to the pres-ence of either a diluted sucrose solution or bit-ter quinine—50-50 odds. Half the bees were then shaken, for one minute, to simulate an attack by a predator. In the presence of the treat-implying scent, both groups extended their proboscises to sample it 70% of the time. As for the ambigu-ous odor, the unshaken bees attempted to sample it 40% of the time, but the shaken bees did so less than 10% of the time, apparently fearing a mouthful of bitter. Their levels of several neurotransmitters also dropped. Rats and dogs showing such behavior after stress are called anxious or depressed. Bees may have a similar state of mind, despite their tiny brains, the researchers


What the Signs Tell Us in the Honey Bee Garden at UC Davis The honey bee garden at UC Davis is "people friendly"

By Kathy Keatley Garvey

Special to Dixon Patch

The honey bee garden at the University of California, Davis, is not only bee friendly, it’s people friendly, thanks to a major volunteer effort by a visiting biologist from Boston.

Veteran biology teacher Sarah Huber researched, created and installed two dozen illustrated signs, which provide a self-guided tour of the half-acre Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, located next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road.

The haven is as a year-around food source for bees, a demonstration garden and a research site.

Huber described the bee garden as “an amazing resource for anyone designing their own garden, taking their kids on a new adventure, or just meeting a friend for a walk.”

The haven is “a lasting source of inspiration for the public,” she said.

The numbered signs welcome visitors to the garden, relate why bees are amazing, why they are in trouble, and what folks can do to help.

Visitors can learn why beekeepers don’t eat bananas before they tend their hives (“A bee in danger releases an alarm pheromone which is also a chemical found in bananas”) how many flowers a colony must visit to make one pound of honey (“two million flowers”), and how fast a bee’s wings can beat (“12,000 times a minute”).

Huber’s signs also point out why the honey bee is considered both an immigrant and migrant worker. European colonists brought the honey bee (Apis mellifera) to America in 1662. Today U.S. farmers rent 2 million colonies a year to pollinate their crops.


It’s Harvest Time!

We have the following equipment available for extracting honey:

9 Frame Extractor (manual) • Uncapping tank • Bucket with valve

Electric uncapping knife Capping Scratcher

The charge is $5 per day to borrow the extractor with 2 day minimum

You will want to use your own filters and food-grade plastic buckets.

To reserve the equipment:

Go to the club’s website www.meckbees.org and under the “Beekeeping Resources” tab select “MCBA Extractor Reservations”. If you have any questions contact George McAllister at [email protected] or call 704-579-1169 When you pick up the equipment, take an envelope and card to mail in your payment. Return the equipment promptly, clean and dry. Mail your payment in the envelope provided.

With the growth of the club, there is heavy demand for the extractor in the sum-mer months. When you get the equipment, please return it promptly so the next person on the list can get it. Thanks!

Mecklenburg County Beekeepers Association President's Buzzz

Several weeks ago I was diagnosed with a detached retina. After surgery I had to hold my head horizontal for two weeks so the retina could reattach itself. During the recovery process I temporarily lost most of the vision in my left eye leaving me with no depth perception. The world looks a lot different in one dimension and tilted 90 degrees. After knocking over several cups and bumping into numerous objects, I quickly discovered it’s not easy to move around without your depth perception and a tilted view of the world. The altered view of my surroundings made me wonder how bees see the world. Do bees have depth percep-tion? With time on my hands, here is what I discovered. As we all learned in elementary school, bees have 2 compound eyes made up of hundreds of individual eyes called ommatidia. Each ommatidia has its own lens and is pointed in a slightly different direction. Each om-matidia sees a portion of a scene and all together a mosaic of what the bee is looking at is formed. Besides the 2 compound eyes, bees have 3 ocelli at the top of their head. These eyes detect light not visual images. It is believed the ocelli help bees identify the sun’s location. Bees see things around them 5 times faster than us. Bumble bees actually see faster than any animal based on a study done by Queen Mary, University of London. This is important because when bees fly around they need to process their surroundings fast so they can safely navigate and avoid predators. This quick vision also comes in handy during mating since bees mate in flight. To us, a bee in flight looks like a fuzzy blur but not to other bees. Having multiple lenses and being able to see things quickly allows bees to recognize movements that you and I might miss. Bees see a somewhat different portion of the light spectrum than we do. Bees can see the ultraviolet or UV portion of the light spectrum and polarized light which we cannot. However, bees cannot see the color red. When a bee sees a flower, it sees colors that are invisible to us. The UV colors on flowers direct bees to where the nectar is like landing strips pointing the way. A flower does not need to have a multitude of colors to attract a bee because bees can only distinguish four colors whereas humans can recognize about sixty distinct col-ors. Recently research was done showing that bees recognize faces. I don’t know if I want my bees to recognize me walking around the backyard, especially after harvesting their honey. I prefer they go about their daily ac-tivity and act as if I don’t exist. Adrian Horridge, at Australian National University, recently conducted a series of experiments to determine what bees “see”. He concluded bees don’t necessarily see shapes like triangles, circles or faces. Instead they see certain components or cues that make up the shape. The combination of several small cues within the shape identifies the shape rather than the shape itself. This allows a bee to proc-ess its surroundings much quicker because it does not comprehend every aspect of what it sees, only small portions. So, what about depth perception? It turns out bees don’t have depth perception as we know it. Instead, bees measure distance using optic flow. Bees analyze how fast imagines move around them as they move. For ex-ample, when you ride in a car, the images a block away move much slower than the telephone poles next to your car. I never lost my sense of optic flow but it’s certainly no substitute for depth perception. It was a happy day when I regained full use of both eyes. Have fun with the bees, -George

Meck BeesThe honey bee garden at the University of California, Davis, is not only bee friendly,...

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