AHB Swarming with Chip Taylor and Gard Otis (378)

AHB Swarming with Chip Taylor and Gard Otis (378)

Kathryn Schmidt
Hi, this is Kathryn Schmidt. Welcome to Beekeeping Today. I'm from Wabashaw, Minnesota.

Jeff Ott
Welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff.

Becky Masterman
And I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff Ott
Hey, a quick shout out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscribe. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over.

300 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at beekeepingtoday.com. Welcome Katherine Schmidt from Wabashaw, Minnesota. Becky, that's right near you, isn't it?

 Becky Masterman
It's about an hour and a half away, so I like that. I like listener openers. That are from Minnesota.

Jeff Ott
There you go. Well, thank you, Kathryn, for that opening. And that was recorded at the North American Honey Bee Expo in January. Excellent.

Speaking of listeners, we have a listener question for our Hive IQ, Hive Tool question of the week. And this is Ryan Lysel. Forgive me, Ryan, if I mispronounced your name. He has two questions really, and I'm not gonna read his email, but I will paraphrase him.

Basically, he has some nucs, nucleus colonies. And this spring he wants to change them out. How does he go about changing out old brood frames in the spring?

Becky Masterman
And it looks like his second question is, should he apply extra wax to the foundation in his new frames? Which is a great question.

Jeff Ott
It is a good question and this is a perfect time of year to be asking it too.

Becky Masterman
Sure, and actually it's a great time of year to think about rotating out old comb because a lot of times if you even if you winter in two deep boxes you your bees might not be occupying every single frame in those boxes. And so it's a great time to rotate out comb that is a little bit older, meaning over three, over five years. or anything with entombed pollen or if you buy nucleus colonies then it makes sense to mark those frames and rotate those out quickly because you don't know usually the age of those combs. So Now's the time.

I've heard interesting things as far as how people routinely rotate out comb and some do it making sure that they're basically rotating out a fourth of the box each year and putting those foundation frames in between the drawn frames and going ahead and also like I said it makes sense to put numbers on those frames so you know how old they are and you can keep track of your comb age.

Jeff Ott
That's pretty much how I do it. In the fall or in the summer, I'll start marking the frames as I'm pulling out, inspecting and saying, hey, you know, this is getting pretty dark. getting pretty old, I'll usually mark that frame so that the next spring I can pull it when it's typically been emptied of any pollen or honey from that frame and I can quickly pull it out And sometimes I mark it with just my hive tool. With the hive tool.

Yeah. I just I just scratch it up and uh say, yeah, that's the one I want. I was in the hives this week and identifying which of the hives I needed to start pulling frames from. So that's that's a typical standard thing to do.

 Becky Masterman
And honestly Ryan though what I do is I use deep foundation for my honey soupers for a lot of them and they draw out that new comb, I extract the honey, and then next year that's the new comb that I rotate into my brood chambers. So that's another way to do it.

Jeff Ott
Yeah, it's very cool. Oh, I was gonna mention that I also mark my frames. I use a sharpie and just mark one end of the frame with my often my initials or the last two dates of the year. So it like this year would be twenty six, last year is twenty-five and twenty-four.

And that way that helps me I always want to make sure I put the box on in the same direction that I took it off. So if I have all my numbers facing the front of the hive, then when I put the box back on, I can make sure I am putting the box on in the same direction and I'm not screwing up the brood nest. And the same thing is when I put the frame back in, I'm orienting it correctly as well.

Becky Masterman
That's very impressive. So Jeff, do you add extra beeswax to that foundation?

Jeff Ott
For the new foundation in an old frame or an even a new frame, in the last several years I've been paying the extra couple of dollars or I don't think it's that much, but the extra money for extra wax on the foundation. I used to never do that until it became available. I've never sat there and repainted a frame, nor have I taken a block of wax and scraped it across there. But I know beekeepers who do, and I think that's that's acceptable.

I think the bees, they say accepted. quicker with more wax on a foundation. Plastic foundation, I should say.

Becky Masterman
I've never I've never ordered extra or added extra and I've never had a problem. But it also could be that I'm asking them to build that comb during a next And so it literally is the best time to build comb. And so that might be why it's a successful strategy.

Jeff Ott
This is a great time of year, or we're coming into the time of year, depending where you are in the country, where the bees are going to start building out, building fast. And if you have to swap out frames, if you want to add new frames, now is the time to put those new frames, fresh foundation in those colonies. They will draw it out. I'm looking forward to our guests today.

They've been on with us before. Dr. Chip Taylor and Dr. Gard Otis will be back talking to us shortly about Africanized honey bees and swarming behaviors.

 Becky Masterman
And also just swarming in general. Well, they've got a lot of knowledge in their heads. We're going to get that information out of them too. So

 Jeff Ott
They have a lot of B information swarming in their heads. Is that what you said?

Becky Masterman
Oh no, I don't think I said that, Jeff, but oh well, you did.

Jeff Ott
They'll be with us right after this short message from our sponsors.

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Jeff Ott
Hey everybody, welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual beekeeping today podcast table are two of our favorite guests, Drs Chip Taylor and Guard Otis. Welcome guys.

Becky Masterman
We are lucky, Jeff. We're lucky to have these two great experts join us again. How did we convince them to come back, Jeff?

Jeff Ott
We're lucky. Gentlemen, the last time that you were on the show, we are we got so caught up in DCAs and drone behavior and meeting behavior, honey bees. And we promised that we'd have you back to talk about your experience with Africanized honey bees and especially the swarming behaviors of Africanized honey bees. So I'm sure this is going to be a fun show before we go down that road because I'm excited to get there.

For those new listeners who have not heard you before, can you give us a brief background of who you are and your background with Bees?

Dr. Gard Otis
I'm Gard Otis and I had a pretty long career at the University of Guelph in Ontario, mostly studying honey bees, which I got started with back as a graduate student with Chip Taylor, who's here today with us as one of his earliest grad students, cut my teeth on African bee swarming behavior in South America in nineteen seventy five to seventy seven. Long time ago now.

Dr. Chip Taylor
I'm Chip Taylor. I'm from the uh University of Kansas, where I've been a long time professor, now an emeritus professor. I started working on butterflies at one particular time and became allergic to them and had to switch to something that was less dangerous, so I got involved with Killer beat some kind of logic there. I don't know what it is.

Well I became I became I became so allergic to the butterflies that I was taking prednisone every other day and that was not good for long term stability. So I cut my teeth on and B's early on and when I was fourteen and it develop some background and eventually convince the USDA that maybe I was the right person to send to the tropics to find out what was going on with African bees. And I chose that because I had some experience in the tropics, which was very important, and I was familiar with the environment there and familiar with honey bees and So I wove that into a part of my career and I had some really fine students like Marlis Bivek and Mark Winston and oh and there's this other guy here, uh Guard Otis. I remember him

 Jeff Ott
Sounds like he was a troublemaker is what it did.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Yeah, Dave Rubick and so on. Yeah. So we all had a had a good time. We had some wonderful adventures in French Guiana.

And then later on in Venezuela and Marla, she worked in uh Costa Rica mostly. And then there was Jose Villa, who's also worked in Colombia and other places. So it was quite a crew that we had working on the so-called African neotropical African bees and it was a wonderful experience and we learned a lot of things and That got me involved in honey bee mating behavior and uh got me involved with uh the projects that Mark and Gard and Dave Rubick all got involved with. And uh Marla too to a large extent.

So yeah, so uh this has been a wonderful experience working with all these students and they've all done extremely well professionally and they're good people too, in spite of what I say about Gard.

Dr. Gard Otis
Most of the time, I try.

Jeff Ott
Well, let's frame this up so for our listeners. Swarming is a natural reproductive strategy of honey bees Gard, can you just talk to us about what that's all about?

Dr. Gard Otis
As a little bit more background, just really briefly, I had absolutely zero experience with honey bees, but Chip decided that I was gonna be his go to boy to go to South America and study Swarming behavior, which is their reproduction, and this little godforsaken place called French Guiana that had almost nothing uh in terms of industry or but that was good for us because it meant there was lots of wide open spaces to stick some beehives. So off I went to South America with literally uh about four hours of experience on two different days in uh an AP area in Kansas. Yeah I and that was a real gamble But I can say and Shepard probably backed this up, but I went into it with no preconceived notions about what to expect and no very few biases. Because I didn't know anything.

I was learning on the on the fly And because of that, we were able to do things that like we were able to figure out how we could monitor swarming and chip had tried to f come up with I DIV's fancy swarm traps and these little drunk things on the fronts of hives that would catch the queen as she came out and And I just figured out that uh you could just open the hive and look at them. It sounded really ridiculously simple. But we were lucky because We never really saw any evidence that our opening up the hive to look at them affected them very much. Like I remember one time Mark Winston and I, we were in the field together doing our research.

And we were in the process of inspecting a hive while it swarmed while we were looking at them. Like we had the little smoker going and everything and poof they carried on like nothing had happened. So anyway, we started tracking we started catching swarms and hiving them in little boxes, which were close to what the natural size of wild colonies would be in South America We just started measuring brood areas and as soon as we'd start to see a queen cup in a colony, we'd make little maps of the frames, the combs, so we could keep track of where they were. and keep track of when eggs appeared, and when larvae appeared, and how many got torn down, and how many got sealed, and then when they swarmed and tracked it right through until most cases they would get a new mated queen.

So I developed these swarming histories for Probably about 90, something about 80 to 90 swarm histories of individual colonies that went through this process of swarming and built up a really good picture of what happens with swarming. And so working with African bees, again, I didn't know anything about bees, so I was going in blind. What we learned very quickly, working with Africanized bees compared to European bees, which I only got experience with later is kind of like driving a Ferrari versus a Ford station wagon. African bees are so responsive to the conditions that they're in.

So that when there's a burst of like flowering and nectar and pollen start coming in, boom, those colonies grow and next thing you know they're swarming. They're reproducing. And when the c when the rever the resources shut down and they start to uh have to use their stored food Boom, they quit any interest in swarming, next thing you know, they're leaving their colony and absconding. So they were very sensitive.

We started to pick up Mark Winston and I working in the field together, we started to pick up on cues that would help us to understand like what was the process, w where far we were in it and when they were going when the colony was going to swarm. So basically here's the story. You've got a colony that's fairly small, for example, resources, boom, they come on and the bees start rearing a bunch of new worker bees. And the population of worker bees starts to grow.

And as it grows, the brood nest where they're raising the young bees starts to get crowded And you've got a queen in there that's producing queen pheromone that little that messenger bees are coming, touching her with her their proboscis and also with their antennae. And they're picking up that queen pheromone and then they're moving out through the colony and distributing it to other workers. And the workers in that brood nest need most of them need to get enough of this queen pheromone to suppress their interest in reproduction and ovary development and all that kind of stuff. So as soon as this population gets big enough in the brood nest, it doesn't matter what's going on around the periphery, it's really a crowding in that brood nest and you start to get a traffic jam and they can't get that pheromone dispersed, well boom, they start to they start to put eggs into queen cups and the next thing you know they're raising larvae in those queen cups, developing them into queens And generally around the time between when the first queen cell was sealed and within two days after that, the bees somehow sense that queen cell is sealed, it's done, it doesn't need any more attention, feeding, or anything else.

It just needs to have its temperature regulated and it's going to produce a new queen. And so within that two day period generally then the old queen and the worker about half the worker bees in the in the nest pour out of the colony and this if you've never seen it before it's it's a most phenomenal experience to watch a swarm coming out of a colony. It's just like I don't know. It's like somebody flipped a switch and here they come.

And interestingly, the queen would often get pushed out by the worker bees and then would fight her way up and try to get back in the entrance. We had hives with uh about a one inch diameter. entrance hole on the center of the hive. So they were all coming and going through this one little hole.

And the queen would crawl up and try to get in, but all the bees coming out would just push her right out again. And so sometimes she'd get pushed out three, four, five times before finally she would leave and start to go up where the workers were starting to form a little cluster up in a tree nearby. And their pheromones would attract the queen, and once she would join the swarm, her pheromones would help to attract the other workers that were coming with the swarm. So now you've got a swarm, is this queen?

Bunch of worker bees, like fifteen, sixteen thousand worker bees, and it's gonna have to go off and find and it's the mated queen, the old queen, it's gonna have to go off and find a new place to build a nest, a new cavity of some sort. What's left behind are a whole bunch of queen cells. As I already said, usually one or more of them has already been sealed, almost always But there are also s queen cells in various stages with older larvae, younger larvae, right down to queen cups with eggs in them So the queens that they're still rearing in the colony are going to be developing toward maturing and getting sealed and then emerging over a period of about a one-week period of time. The old swarm left, went off, sitting in a tree, off it goes to go find a place to live.

The colony it's left behind is now queenless for a period of time because the only queens present are developing in queen cells, maturing in queen cells. And often during that period, I don't know if it's because of a lack of queen pheromone or what it is Often the colony becomes rather defensive. So we'd have colonies, these little teeny colonies, we could often work them with no protection whatsoever. But boy, I got driven out of the ape area a couple of times.

I had to go back and get my bee suit When they were in this queenless period between when a swarm left and when a new queen emerged. So then a new queen hatches. Usually the first one that gets sealed is the first one to hatch. At that point the colony has a choice.

If the conditions are still good, lots of food is coming in, they've already a bunch of sealed brood that was in the colony when the qu when the queen left with the swarm has now emerged. So the population of worker bees has actually grown again. They've become crowded again. And so if they perceive all those conditions, crowding, good food coming in, everything else.

Then that first queen that comes out will stay in the colony for a couple of days. She hardens up her cuticle so she can fly. And the worker bees in the colony usually hold the other queens that are developing in their queen cells. They sit right on the queen cell and they bounce their abdomen up and down on them, what we call dorsal ventral abdominal vibration, devalving.

And they kind of hold it in there. They'll actually feed the queen through little slits in the queen cap. She'll be trying to cut her way out of the cell, and they'll be resealing it to hold her in and feeding her while she's in there. So she's actually maturing inside the queen cell.

while she's being held in there. So after a couple of days, this queen is now her flight muscles are nice and uh or sorry, her cuticle is hardened up. She's ready to go. The colony is crowded.

Boom! Here they go again. A whole bunch of bees pouring out the entrance, push the Virgin Queen out, off they go into the tree and go off to look for a new nest And then at that point, if they still perceive they're crowded, they can do it again. And we had a few colonies that did a prime swarm, the first qu first one with the mated queen And four of these afterswarms of virgin queens before they ended their reproductive cycle.

So one colony and a period of about 12 days. would send off five swarms. And it was very common to see four or three swarms. So they were reproducing like cr like so fast.

So then at the end of all this, eventually you get down. I remember one colony, it was really funny. Mark and I were at this colony and they I think it was one of the ones that just had sent off so many swarms And it got down to when the last swarm left, it was just a little cluster of worker bees left in the hive. And at that point there were still about six sealed queen cells.

But they all had queens ready to hatch out. They'd all been held in their cells. And as soon as all the worker bees were like the population was way down because this last swarm had left, queens were just popping out all over in the hive and they were Coming together and fighting with each other. And uh normally what will happen is those queens will uh fight with each other and eliminate one eliminates the other till you get down to where one is left.

I've never seen a colony where they all died. That somehow they always seem to leave one that survives. And eventually then she takes she matures, goes off, takes a mating flight, or two or three, comes back, starts laying eggs, and they start building up again

Jeff Ott
The development cycles for these swarming and for the honey bees themselves, the queens, the drones, workers, those are the standard as they are with European bees, right? African bees are a little bit faster, but not much.

Dr. Gard Otis
Maybe a half a day or a day faster for workers. That's about the same.

Becky Masterman
Are after swarms more common in Africanized honey bees? Because they are more sensitive to the conditions?

Dr. Chip Taylor
Yeah, there are lots of after swarms in African bees. That's what Gard was just saying. It's well over two afterswarms, I think, on average, when though when that population is really moving through I want to add a couple of things about what Gard was saying. One of which is that when looking at all of this, we realize that there's a concept here, and we can call the concept the effective brood nest And what that means is that there's a the bees define what their brood nest is.

They define the total space. They define what they're really primarily going to lay their eggs in, rear the brood in, store their honey and store their pollen in. So that all came about because we extracted a lot of African bee nests and the nests were always small irrespective of the size of the cavity. Whereas with European bees they tend to fill the cavity before they swarm.

And there's another thing that we could put in maybe a framework where people would understand it. Uh i if you look at European bees if they do not have a lot of resources coming in, and yet the colony is actually full of pollen and honey and what have you. Unless there are a lot of resources coming in, they will not swarm. So they can fill up a space, occupy the space, crowd the space, but unless there's a rate of harvest coming in, They're not going to swarm.

Whereas you African bees are really sensitive to that rate of harvest. They're really hyped up and they really turn on very, very fast. when resources start coming in. And to give you an idea of the habitat that they're dealing with that causes them to do this, when we were in Mexico working with African bees in northern Mexico, what we would see is that we would go through a dry period.

And the period would be would be very, very dry. And there was virtually no nectar and no pollen out there at all. But then we would get a half inch rain And all of a sudden swarms would start to arrive and all sorts of things would start to happen. But the bees would really change their behavior as soon as we got a rain, because within seven eight, nine days of a rainfall in that environment, we would have a lot of bloom.

They anticipated the bloom and w we had virtually no problem working with those bees when there was a dry period where very little was coming in But as soon as resources started to be harvested in great masses, we put on our bee suits. I mean their behavior changed. Quite the opposite from European bees. European bees when a lot of resources are coming in are pretty easy to deal with.

But with African bees it's just the opposite. And there are lots of stories in Africa when I was there about bees just going absolutely crazy when there was a strong flow that stopped abruptly. It was dangerous. I mean, people told me of really tragic a accidents that happened on really strong flows that abruptly stopped Because those bees get annoyed.

 Dr. Gard Otis
I had an interesting thing. That just brings up something. It's not really swarming, but it's quick. When we were working in Venezuela chip between the where we were living and where the washing machine was we had to walk outside about fifty yards and the people who ran the station had planted a couple rows of corn.

Well the corn came into flower, you know, the tasseling with the pollen being released from the plants, and African bees were all over those plants collecting pollen. for about thirty minutes. And as soon as the pollen gave up for the day, they started stinging us. I was walking back and forth to the laundry and it's like, holy, I'm getting stung by all these bees.

All I'm doing is walking along this path, you know, it's it was really interesting how when the food dried up, boy, they uh they switched

Jeff Ott
Was the frequency of swarming an issue or what caught Dr. Kerr off guard in Brazil with the original, what, 26, 28 swarms that had escaped? As the story goes.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Well, I d I don't know what he experienced or what he expected.

Dr. Gard Otis
I think he knew that they swarmed a lot in Africa. And the plan was to breed them and select them and try to eliminate that and get gentler bees.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Right. Yeah. I mean this the story goes that there was a beekeeper in South Africa who kept managed colonies on a hypescale by his beekeeping store and his enterprise. And on that hype scale he could show that those bees were producing a lot of honey.

More and more and more honey. Eventually it was found out that what he had been doing was taking supers that were partially filled with honey and putting them behind the store and the honey was being robbed out and transferred to the hot skill colony so he could show that they were producing a hundred pounds of honey. Well the any African colony that produces a hundred pounds of honey, I w I would give it a kiss. I really would, because they don't produce They don't produce that much honey.

They really don't. I mean their honey storage capacity is really pretty low. And you have to have some sort of hybrid between African and European bees to get a really good honey production.

Dr. Gard Otis
So so if I can just go back. So we've got this colony it's swarmed, now it has a new queen. And the other thing we've 'cause I was following these same colonies and keeping track of when they got their new queen and how much brood they had in them, they would start to build up again really, really quickly. We were in the dry season, the resources were good.

And they would start to build up again and chip is stuck on this fact that the record we had between one prime swarm and the next prime swarm or the next reproductive cycle was forty-five days And remember a brood cycle for bees is 21 days from egg to adult or worker bees. So they were swarming Going through that whole process of all the swarms leaving, getting a mated queen, and after they had a mated queen, about one and a half brood cycles later they were swarming again. And the numbers of swarms coupled with the hot the rapid turnover, rapid intergeneration. period between swarming events is those two things together led to this explosive population of bees that we saw all across Central and South America as the bees moved north

 Jeff Ott
Let's take this opportunity to take a quick break, hear from our sponsors, and we'll come back and continue our discussion about the Africanized honey bees, their swarming behaviors, and how it may be impacting North American bees today

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Becky Masterman
Welcome back everybody. I have to go back to the queens being held captive because I've never heard this before. I've never read the paper. Whose research was this?

Was it yours, Gard? And was it an observation hive?

Dr. Gard Otis
Again, we could open these hives and work around the bees and they acted like we weren't there. So we could pull a comb out gently that when we knew, because we had been keeping track of when the queen cup was produced and when the egg went in it and when they sealed it and everything else, we knew when that queen should emerge eight days later after sealing. So what you would see is if they sent off the prime swarm and then when the first Virgin Queen came out, if they didn't try to tear down all the queen cells and end the whole swarming cycle very, very quickly They were going to send another swarm out with a virgin queen. And as soon as they had, I don't know how I don't know how bees think.

I don't know what went through their little brains and through their antennae and everything else. But whatever they perceived They perceived that it they could swarm again and get away with it basically. They had enough bees and everything was good. The resources were good.

Let's let's do it again. And so that's when we would see the worker bees sitting on sitting, the queen cell is vertical, and at the bottom of the queen cell would be one or two bees, almost always, constantly there. And they'd be doing this bobbing of their abdomen up and down on the cell, and then you'd see the little tongue of the queen sticking out through a little slit, and they'd be feeding her. And I know they were helping to seal it back up again because she had the whole thing virtually cut off, but she never came out.

They were holding her in. But whatever it was, they almost always stayed in. Occasionally one would pop out and you'd have a switch of the queens or one would kill the other. But normally it wasn't until another after swarm took off and the Virgin Queen left.

that then they would allow one or more queens to pop out and then maybe do that again, do it again until it all ended.

Becky Masterman
But yeah, it was pretty cool. Is this in your PhD dissertation or is it in a paper? It's on my list of things to write, Chip.

Dr. Gard Otis
I'm still gonna write my SD.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Has this not been published? That'll be

Dr. Gard Otis
Any day now. Any day now, I think.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Well be su be sure to cite David Fletcher. David Fletcher was a South African who made some of these sip very similar observations. And I think he was the first one that talked about devabbing, dorsal ventral abdominal vibration that held the queens in. Somehow that drumming, I mean basically it's a drumming sort of behavior.

that drumming suppresses the tendency for those queens to come out of the cells. So w one of the things that you could have said about this forming guard was that in terms of timing, within one or two days after the first queen cell is sealed, You have a really nice record of how many times the swarm would come off on that day. In other words, weather allowing You could count on a cr swarm coming off one or two days after the first cell was sealed. And then eight days after that, you could count on the first version coming out after that.

So that would be on sixteen sixteenth day. And then after that, you could have one or two days, and then you would have the first after swarm. So the pr the timing on this is very precise if the weather allows. And it's very confusing with European bees because the weather doesn't always allow swarming to occur with that sort of timing period.

So people aren't really as time sensitive when they're working their bees as they say, Oh, we got a sealed queen cell that's gonna occur tomorrow I better watch out for the swarm the next day or the day after. Or I better do something now. So yeah, with African bees we had weather that was would allow very precise timing according to the biology, but with European bees, you know, you're dealing with more variable climates and you can you can have a virgin queen c you can have a queen cell sealed And the colony experiences weather that keeps the bees from swarming for four or five days.

Becky Masterman
A lot of times I've heard that you'll see sealed queen cells, but then you won't see eggs in the colony because they were slimming down the queen for flight. But I've definitely seen in a s post swarm both. Could you talk about that a little bit

Dr. Gard Otis
Yes, the queen is being fed less, I presume, as they're approaching the date of swarming, and that results in her gradually Slimming down and presumably resorbing a lot of the eggs that are in her abdomen, in her ovary. But nevertheless, she keeps laying eggs right up almost to the point when she leaves in a swarm. So that's why I said when she leaves in a swarm, the primary swarm, the mated queen, you you almost always have at least one sealed queen cell But you also still have cups with eggs in them because the queen has continued to lay. That's partly how she slims down, or she keeps laying eggs.

At the same time I think they're feeding her less and her egg production is redu is declining. Yeah, I don't know if Chip you have anything you want to add or if that's good enough.

Dr. Chip Taylor
They definitely slim her down and prepare her. And the reason she's being slimmed down really is that she has very few yeah, very few places to lay eggs I mean on this whole effective broods nest thing is, you know, you're basically limiting a queen who was laying a thousand eggs a day is now laying seventy-five. Because there just isn't any space. You know, that's part of the trigger in this whole thing.

It it gets warmer, there's less pheromone distribution. They have problems with making maintaining the temperature in the colony, they have to harvest more water. I mean, a lot of things are going on and simultaneously and everybody, you know, everybody's looked at this saying, oh, the big cause of swarming is that they're overheating. Well Overheating is only one of the things that's happening at the same time.

And so that's yeah, it's it's a really complicated process and i if you look at all of these things you have to look at a sequelae we call it a sequence of events. It starts with the harvest and then it starts with then it leads to crowding and then it leads to less and less egg production, less and less pheromone production and so on and so forth. It's kind of a review of the whole thing, but that's really what goes on. There's a there's a dynamic here that follows a sequence of events that build up to accelerate this process.

 Jeff Ott
You referred to the size of the brood nest a couple times. Can you compare the size of a standard Africanized honey bee or an African bee nest brood nest to the European Honey bee brood nest.

Dr. Gard Otis
I would say African bee brood nest is about a third of a Langstroth hive body.

Dr. Chip Taylor
I would say you know, all the things that we worked with in French Guiana were about The equivalent of about a five frame box.

Dr. Gard Otis
But they didn't fill that usually. It was usually the effective brood area was about a third of a length draw

Dr. Chip Taylor
Quite a bit smaller. Quite a bit smaller, yeah. Yeah, and it was very interesting when Mark and I were in Peru going through we harvested about thirty nests and logs and things of that sort, uh natural nests. And n none of them were big and uh virtually none of them filled the capacity of the cavity.

 Dr. Gard Otis
And the luckiest thing ever was that the average size of those colonies was almost exactly what we just kind of came up with by accident in French Guiana. Not complete accident, but it was so close to being the average it was amazing. And in European bees, the cavity size can make quite a big difference in terms of swarming. I could get back to that if you want to later, but I was gonna add something.

Mark and I, Mark Winston and I, we were living in the same house there in French Guiana and We would get up in the morning and have our breakfast and get all ready about, you know, like w it's a work day, right? About eight in the morning we'd get in the car, we'd head out to check the bees. And we get out there to the apiary in this colony that we are expecting to swarm. It had already swarmed.

It's like there's no swarm here. What's going on And this happens several times and then we wrote we wrote a letter to Chip 'cause this was in a we couldn't afford the phone. I don't even know if there were phones. And certainly there was no internet in 1976.

So um we wrote a letter to Chip and he writes back and he says, get your butts out there earlier in the morning. The bees, African bees there with this nice warm, sunny climate, they hadn't read the book that they were supposed to wait till like one or two in the afternoon to swarm like European bees do. They were like, bam, 738 in the morning, swarm, and then You read the books, what happens? The swarm goes up, sits on a tree, and then a couple of days go by while they're looking for a new nest site, right But our storms were gone.

So when we finally started getting out there earlier in the morning, we'd see this mass of bees pour out and they go up and they cluster in a tree for about twenty minutes. And then off they'd go and they'd fly off across the savannah. And it's like, oh my goodness, they're gone. They haven't even looked for a new place to live yet.

And that was uh that was different. And it was a fundamental aspect of a good part of African B biology that helps to explain how they're able to migrate and move and travel so far in a short period of time.

Becky Masterman
They were swarming to another intermediate site? Or flying to another im intermediate site?

Dr. Gard Otis
Yeah, they must have gone someplace and then uh Chip has some ideas, I think, that they assess the resources when they land. If there are very poor resources, they keep going. If it's a good place to live, they hunker down and find a place to live. I think that would Kinda be what you'd say.

You could argue against me if you want to.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Well there's a seasonal effect in terms of how these bees move And you know, if there's good resources for a long distance, they'll probably keep moving for a long distance. If there are no resources for a long distance, they'll probably keep moving for a long distance I mean there's a lot of absconding behavior that goes on with this. I mean th these bees were moving advancing across South America and Central America at a rate of about three hundred miles a year. You don't do that by just sitting around.

You gotta get up and move and you gotta move several hours a day. I mean how fast are these bees moving? Ten, twelve, fourteen miles a an hour, and you would hear swarms go overhead. And very f fast moving swarm fast moving swarms going overhead with these comets of bees going by you and Yeah, and sometimes it was uh just a an amazing experience.

But you know, what's uh kind of interesting about all of this that nobody has really been able to get a handle on is that uh the a lot of the things that we saw in the front of this distribution you don't see now. In other words, th you're not seeing the swarming rate in these African bees now that you saw that we saw We were at the front of a distribution where the priority was reproduction, reproduction, reproduction, reproduction. Now things have settled down and the priority seems to be stay in place, be secure, don't do excessive swarming. I I don't have any other way of s saying that But nobody has really studied what's going on now.

But it isn't what was g going what it isn't what was going on when we were down there. We were on the front of a distribution that was rapidly reproducing and expanding, that was emphasizing the priorities that f that fit that sort of colonization mantra or rhetoric or whatever it is that biology has. I mean the mission for every organism is to replace itself And replacing yourself at that particular time at the front of that distribution meant reproducing at the maximum possible rate that you could. Now, as with European bees, reproducing at that sort of a rate would be disastrous because your colonies would be too small to go into winter.

So European bees have always had a more conservative approach to reproduction than African bees have. But African bees now are getting a more conservative approach to reproducing too. And and I don't know exactly why. Nobody's really looked at it.

But you don't hear of the stories that we used to hear. We don't see people talking about the phenomena that we used to see So it's different now. And that's real curious.

Jeff Ott
Well, I've wondered if that's because no one's looking at it. They're engrossed in other studies, other research.

Dr. Chip Taylor
That's possibly true. That's it's possibly true, but I really doubt that the conditions are the same anywhere now that they were when we were down there in the early seventies.

Dr. Gard Otis
The density of bees probably makes a difference too. You got massive numbers of y African bees now in areas where when we were working they were just arriving.

Jeff Ott
Well that poses a interesting question as you had this big event going on with the Africanized bees rolling across the countryside as you're saying. What was the effect on the landscape and maybe other native pollinators in the area as this wave of African bees came through?

Dr. Chip Taylor
Yeah, that's a that's a contentious sort of thing. I mean it's it's logical to think that they would have a really strong impact and there have been stories along those lines that there have been an impact, but you know, as in terms of a comfra comprehensive review and a comprehensive study of the dynamics of African bees and native bees. I mean, that's lacking. We d we haven't had that.

We have bits and pieces of information to suggest that there was a strong negative impact on uh stingless bees, for example.

Dr. Gard Otis
Some species of stingless bees much more than other species, because there are huge size range in stingless bees.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Yeah, and then probably the stingless bees that were more similar to African bees in size. And there are some stingless bees that are about the average size of the average honey bee.

Becky Masterman
Chip, I have to ask, Jeff and I keep saying Africanized bees and you and Gard keep saying African honey bees.

Dr. Chip Taylor
I call them neotropical African bees, and the reason for that is that when we were studying them, the mitochondrial DNA was all African In fact, that was a big surprise. We thought that there would be enough hybridization so that there would be European lineages represented in the mitochondrial DNA, and there weren't any. I mean, that was determined when we got bee samples from southern Mexico just after they crossed in across the border in southern Mexico. I got the thirty samples from bee traps down there.

Bait hives down there. I got thirty samples. Every single one of them had African mitochondrial DNA. They looked like African bees.

They were genetically like African bees. The infusion of nuclear DNA from those crossings wherever there occurred from European bees appeared to have been s selected out so that there was very little European in any of those bees. I went to South Africa and I said Holy crap, these bees in South Africa are the same bees I'm seeing in South America. I couldn't see any difference between the bees I saw in many places in South Africa from the stuff that I was working on in French Guiana, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and even in Mexico.

And so I call them neotropical African bees. Now that and everybody wanted to call them Africanized bees. Well, if you use Africanized bees, what does that mean? I mean, that's kind of a pejorative Right?

And it applies it implies hybridization. And what we were saying is that the effects of hybridization were lost because there was a negative aspect to this, so that when you got the back crosses, in other words you got a first generation hybrid and it back crossed to either African bees or European bees. This back cross hives had low survivorship. There was hybrid dysfunction So you would eliminate most of the second generation hybrids.

And eliminating most of the second generation hybrids was sufficient to eliminate most of the European traits in these bees that were moving north Now, as we discussed in a recent discussion, there are a few places in the United States where that has changed. In Southern California, for example, there seems to be some hybridization that has survived that hybrid dysfunction.

Dr. Gard Otis
In coastal Texas also. Coastal Texas also.

Dr. Chip Taylor
Yeah, probably in coastal Texas. But I would watch out for any bees in the in the wildlands of southern Arizona. Those those bees are gonna be bitchy. They're not gonna be friendly bees.

Be careful if you be careful if you're out there walking in southern Arizona, especially in the wildlands area. Yeah, you get south of Tucson, get south of Tucson and you're you're not gonna be in bee friendly per territory. So yeah, this things are things have changed a little bit, but not always. It kinda depends upon the number of European bee colonies in the area and the people the fact that people keep bringing them in, bringing them in, bringing them in.

You know, you look at what was happening in the Americas and there were very few European bees. I mean th there was European bees in uh parts of Mexico and parts of Costa Rica, fewer of the drier parts of Panama and a few of the other Central American States countries, but that's a small part of the total area. So the influence of European bees on this dynamic w was very, very light until they got into the United States.

Becky Masterman
I also I want to make sure we touch on this because I think it's it's really interesting to be keepers, but can we talk swarm lures

Dr. Chip Taylor
Oh, you want to know how that happened? Yes. That's one of my fav one of my favorite stories, okay. So there here we go.

I was in French Guiana and I was in French Guiana. And I've I somehow I met Mark Winston in Peru and we stayed with a guy by the name of Charlie Phillips who had been in the Peace Corps and he had worked in Africa. And Charlie w invited us to his place in Peru, near Pucalpa, Peru, because he said there was a lot of trees down in that area and there were a lot of bee colonies in there and we could go look at wild bee colonies in the Peru area. So we went to Charlie's place and one of the things that Charlie told us was that when he was in Africa, people used lemongrass and they mixed it with beeswax and they put that in bait hives to to attract bees And I and then I sh he showed me some lemongrass.

He had lemongrass in his place somewhere. Well anyway, I came back from Peru and I went to French Guiana where we were all working. And one day I spotted some lemongrass in somebody's backyard and there was nobody home. So I jumped over the fence.

I jumped over the fence and I grabbed a handful of lemongrass And jumped back in the car and went to have lunch with all the the crew. And I kept going I kept taking this lemongrass and I think, damn, you know, this stuff smells like lemon pledge. It really smells like lemon plids. And so I kept sniffing it and sniffing it and it we got the lunch got the lunch and I kept passing it around and I said, Sniff this.

This is this amazing. This is a plant that smells like a commercial product. I mean, damn, I mean this is really You know, if this is a swarm alure, this is really neat. Anyway, right after lunch, I went to see one of these colonies that hadn't been doing what Guard was saying.

God was saying they all leave at 7 30 in the morning. Well this colony hadn't been leaving and it was about ready it was about ready to swarm. So I'm walking up to this colony after lunch, probably one o'clock And just as I'm walking up to it I can see the bees coming out of the entrance to the colony like coffee beans out of a barrel. I mean they just shooting out like a coming out of a cannon.

I mean they were just coming out. Well, I had a few experiences with this colony, so I had a veil with me and I threw it over my head and I didn't tie it down. And I walked toward the colony and the bees kept getting louder. And in the meantime I had all these lures put up on the trees.

I put all these lures up there and hoping to attract the bees to one of my lures. because one of my lemongrass sort of lures, but they weren't lemongrass. I was using chemicals. I kept walking toward that colony and all of a sudden I heard a lot of bees.

 Becky Masterman
Oh.

Dr. Chip Taylor
And they were coming right at me and I'm and I looked down and I had bees crawling up my chest and underneath my veil and getting into my front into my face and crawling up into my mustache. Oh. And I thought, oh my God, it's lemongrass. I've got to figure out how to do something that's like lemongrass.

And that was the birth of the lure because after that everything was designed to smell like lemongrass And it's a simple chemical formula that uh we still haven't revealed, but it's uh it's one that's been mimicked by a lot of other people and they don't quite know what we're doing, so These chemicals degrade at a certain rate, and we took advantage of that as well, so to make this thing a long-lasting lure. And I've Well, I've distributed these lures to quite a few people and the a couple of years ago went out to California and ran into somebody that apparently I'd sent them a mixture of this lure this compound or compounds into Vaseline. And they said, well, we've been holding on to this thing for about five or ten years. We don't know how long it was that you sent it to us, but it still works.

 Becky Masterman
Wait, are you is this sold anywhere commercially?

Dr. Chip Taylor
Not the Vaseline prep, but uh we But but we've we've we've distributed a lot of these things and you can still buy lures and they're they're kind of mimics of our lures and for a while we've supplied them to people who are commercial resellers. But if I go to a B meeting everybody mobs me for the lures. Where you got some lures with you? I want some lures.

 Becky Masterman
Wait, are you making them in your kitchen?

Dr. Chip Taylor
Oh yeah.

Becky Masterman
You are? And you're giving them out to just your best friends? Cause Jeff and I are very good friends of yours now.

Dr. Gard Otis
There's a little cost involved.

Becky Masterman
Well, I'll I'll I'll pay the money. I honestly I read this I read this paper about they were studying swarms and they were they were putting the lures right on like a fence post to see if that was a viable way to catch swarms. And and it and it worked. So instead of ha you know, going into cavities or anything or anything like that, they just actually they lured the fence posts and so they were able to catch swarms off their colonies using a good enough lore.

 Dr. Chip Taylor
So All right, all right.

Dr. Gard Otis
Okay.

Dr. Chip Taylor
We were leaving Mexico, our money had run out, and we were leaving Mexico and we were packing up all sorts of things and we said, What are we gonna do with all this Nazanov pheromone mimic? Well let's put it on a tree. There is a a tree that we have in the in the in the area. And we put it on slathered it on this tree.

Within within forty-eight hours we had four or five swarms come into this Oh my gosh. And but we just kept harvesting the queens off of this swarm. The qu the swarms would come in Land on this tree truck, and the queens would be immediately balled. So we could reach in there with our bare hands and coax these balls into our hand and then roll it on a hive cover until we could get the queen and then we'd serve s harvested the queen for genetic purposes.

We harvested something like a hundred and eighty three queens 186 queens, something like that, out of this uh this swarm over about a two week period. This form at one point was eighteen feet long. It was massive. And we didn't get all the queens and there were times when s big masses of bees would leave this swarm and keep moving.

Now what was going on at that time was we were in a period that was very dry and there was a lot of absconding behavior. And the swarms were moving across with the wind. They were riding a tailwind and they would come past this tree and there would be downwind of this tree and then they would turn around in the midair And come back to this tree and land on them. And we were getting five, six, eight, ten swarms landing on this tree every single day And this, you know, this is not a unique story except in the Americas.

This happens in Africa too. And and I've read of stories about these massive swarms w involving a lot of different aggregations of absconding and reproductive swarms all coming to one place because they're all very locked into responding to this Nasnoff orientation pheromone. And it's a wind dated thing and it's a wind determined behavior, right? So we've seen this before.

With Roger Hoop and Garner I saw this behavior where we were locked into watching a bees scout a particular nest. And then when they actually took off to come to this nest, they ran into a f a plume of Nazanov pheromone and they turned away and they never went to the nest they were scouting. I mean it's it's a very powerful thing. And and one of the one of my other experiences was to be traveling across uh Savannah.

and with a photographer. And as we were driving along slowly, I said, oh, there's a swarm, and it was passing right in front of us. It was moving very slowly. I said, let's see if we can catch it.

I jumped out of the I jumped out of the vehicle. I jumped out of the vehicle.

Dr. Gard Otis
Let me just say something. Isn't it stranded, too? He he often didn't finish things, but he loved to play with things. He was always diddling with something.

 Dr. Chip Taylor
All right, all right. Let me tell this story. A paper mache flower pot, was very dark, and a Nazanov lure, and I ran after the swarm and I caught the thing. I got in front of it, I caught the thing in midair, it came into the box, and the photographer got a picture of it.

I mean it was one of the most fun things I've ever done in terms of bee stuff. Because it gets bringing a swarm right out of midair boo with an as an opherman. Wow.

Becky Masterman
I love that. I want to see a picture of that tree swarm multiple swarms on a tree. Do you do you have a picture of that?

Jeff Ott
Oh yeah, we have pictures of it.

Becky Masterman
Okay, that would be fun to see.

Jeff Ott
Well if you can send it to us, we'll get it in the show notes and put it on the website for our listeners Well, garden chip, sorry to bring this hour to a close. I know it feels like we just got started. There's a lot to talk about. There is, there is.

Well we'll have to set up another time and continue the stories and document everything you've seen. It this is really fascinating. I appreciate you taking the time to come back and talk to us today.

Dr. Chip Taylor
All righty. Very good talking to you both.

Jeff Ott
Thank you. I know I say this after every guest, but I really enjoy talking to Garden Chip and Chip especially because I spent that time with him and a hooping gardener in and Lenaris back in ninety-three and I was going through a lot of things at that point in my life and be able to spend that week with them. Might not have been a week. It felt like a week.

But at the research lab and working with them and doing a lot of photography with them. It's just fun to catch up with these researchers today. and hear their stories.

Becky Masterman
There's a combination of stories and then data and both are fascinating. A couple of things that they both said really contradict what I've learned about swarms or what I've heard about swarms. So it was it was really interesting to hear just the little nuances that they know. I don't know, it's just it's it's a fun topic, but I think it's the two very accomplished professors that we had delivering the information that makes it Even more special.

 Jeff Ott
It is. And I was thinking that, boy, if we had like a Patreon page or something like that, we have a collection of stories that are not part of this podcast that are recorded. That we could release as you know stories from Chip and Guard from their days of chasing the African honey bees across the savannas of the South America. These guys are treasures.

I appreciate them joining us on the show.

Becky Masterman
Exactly.

Jeff Ott
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