[Bonus] Short - Honey with Dr. Dewey Caron

[Bonus] Short - Honey with Dr. Dewey Caron

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast Shorts, your quick dive into the latest buzz in beekeeping.

Becky Masterman: In 20 minutes or less, we'll bring you one important story, keeping you informed and up to date.

Jeff Ott: No fluff, no fillers, just the news you need.

Becky Masterman: Brought to you by Betterbee, your partners in better beekeeping.

Dewey: Hi, I am Dr. Dewey Caron. I come to you from Portland, Oregon. I present another audio postcard on communication in my continuing series of once-monthly Beekeeping Today Shorts. The topic this month is honey. For these audio postcards, I've been discussing communication on three levels: bee scientist to beekeeper, beekeeper to bee, and bee to bee.

In my last Beekeeping Today postcard, I discussed summer and adding additional remarks about super management from the previous Beekeeping Today Short on supering. Spring management, once colonies grow, means adding supers to both expand the living space of the increasingly populous hive and to provide space for surplus that we might harvest as our payback for colony care. Our communication to the bees when we super, fill it up. I sure hope your bees have been listening.

How much do you want your bees to fill up beeswax combs with honey? It's a marvelous product, so sweet and aromatic to eat, not your average carbohydrate, but for much of the world, honey is much more than a dietary sweetener. It's a healer for a whole lot of human ailments. You might be surprised to learn, and maybe you already know, there's no single accepted definition of honey.

An acceptable definition by FDA is "Honey is a thick, sweet, syrupy substance that bees make as food from the nectar of plants or secretions of living parts of plants and store in honeycombs." Other definitions get more specific. "Honey is a natural sweet substance produced by Apis mellifera bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, and store in beeswax combs." This marvelous material needs a long definition.

Well, neither definition is quite correct. In part to remedy the lack of a standard, the Honey Integrity Act was introduced by Congressman Steube and Congressman Panetta to enact federal honey standards. That is HR Bill 2162. A companion bill was also introduced to the US Senate by Senator Tuberville in the bill number S1028. It's also a longstanding committee effort to define organic honey. Sadly, it is not anticipated that much progress will be forthcoming on either initiative.

What we more likely know is the primary dietary carbohydrate intake for our bees is in the form of nectar. The sugar content in flower nectar averages 40% but ranges from as low as 5% to as much as 75%. Bees prefer the higher concentrations. Bees find nectar in over 200 flowering plants during a season, although a single bee might visit one single plant for nectar during her entire foraging life of one to three weeks.

Once brought back to the hive and transferred to middle-aged bees working in food processing, enzymes such as sucrase and invertase break the nectar sugars into the simpler sugars of glucose and fructose. The initial stages of maturation involve microorganisms, including several bacteria and fungi, and they transform into several sugars of nectar, although sucrose is the predominant sugar, into the simple sugars.

These materials that aid disappear as the moisture content is reduced. Some of the glucose is also converted by another enzyme, glucose oxidase, into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. The simple sugars are consumed directly to provide energy. Some may be converted into fat and glycogen. Gluconic acid makes acid acidic, and hydrogen peroxide helps protect the supersaturated sugar once the nectar is processed into honey.

Honeybees can live on a pure carbohydrate diet for a long time, but without dietary protein, they're unable to continue raising brood, and their important body glands, such as the hypopharyngeal and wax glands, don't continue to develop. Honey is the bees' processed carbohydrate. Let's start with bee scientists, the beekeeper communication. In this BT short, I discuss honey in human health.

Although now eight years have passed, I draw your attention to a mega review of honey in human health that examined nearly 200 published papers in which 108 were included finally, covering a 42-year period of research from 1970 to 2014. Honey is not likely to be used by mainstream health personnel figures in traditional medicine practices as an alternative treatment for clinical conditions ranging from wound healing to cancer treatment. The aim of the review was to emphasize the utility of honey in human medicine and its multitude in medical aspects.

The review of the literature was done by Iranian individuals from two medical schools and published in Pharmacognosy Research, which I reference at the end. These mega reviews of published papers become handy as a way of pulling lots of very technical information together, and then, with good writing, as this one is, you can understand what the topic means. This is easily readable, and I recommend you take a look at the review.

The authors found articles that report honey to "exert antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, anti-proliferative, anti-cancer, and anti-metastatic effects." In the instance of honey as an antioxidant, for example, the extra substance secreted by flowers into their nectar, the flavonoids and polyphenols, those are the two main bioactive molecules that provide this medical effect. The report studies for which honey is used is the treatment of eye diseases, bronchial asthma, throat infections, tuberculosis, thirst, hiccups, fatigue, dizziness, hepatitis, constipation, worm infestation, piles, and eczema.

Perhaps a bit more controversial of the authors assert, "Many evidence suggest the use of honey in the control and treatment of diabetes mellitus, cancer, asthma, and also cardiovascular, neurological, and gastrointestinal diseases." Honey is very versatile. Development of manuka honey was one of the most significant advances promoting mainstream medical use of honey as a wound dressing. It is possible to sterilize mānuka honey via gamma radiation without destroying methylglyoxal, or MGO, which disrupts bacterial cell membrane.

MGO has been shown to be effective against a range of bacteria, including those resistant to antibiotics like the staph infections or MRSA, and it makes antibiotics more effective. One target of sterilization is Clostridium botulinum, or botulism, found in more than 26% of samples of honey, but just because harmful microorganisms might be present, for example, in honey, it does not mean that it might be able to multiply and cause disease, but it can be found. Medical-use honey is sterilized by gamma radiation at doses of roughly 25 to 50 k.

Heating honey is the other means of eliminating potential harmful microorganisms like botulism, de-natures components, unfortunately, such as the glucose oxidase system, which contributes to honey's antibacterial action. Heating it helps as a form of destroying that.

As a wound dressing, honey forms a protective barrier over a skin wound, preventing the entry of harmful bacteria and reducing the risk of infection. It helps create a moist wound environment, reduces wound dressing odors, facilitates removal of dead tissue, and reduces possible scarring. Wounds heal faster, and there's less scarring with honey dressing. I provide a reference with this BT Short and recommend this article to help you become better informed what your honey might be able to do to improve human health.

Let's go on to beekeeper-to-bee communication. What do we wish to communicate to our bees about your apiaries' nectar flow? Not all of us want more honey. Our bees can visit over 200 different flowering plants over the season. How do we know when the nectar flow has started and there's plentiful nectar for our bees to store? This is where the concept of nectar flow management comes in. It takes large, populous colonies, a major number of flowers of one or maybe a couple of flowering species, long forage days of favorable foraging weather, and supering of colonies to stimulate hoarding behavior to capture a nectar flow.

Some would even add, there is a colony morale factor that involves them storing honey during this nectar flow. We know beekeeping is time. Beekeepers not necessarily interested in obtaining quantities of honey or those lacking experience to recognize the nectar flow timing often fail to or are slow to communicate with their bees. They wait for the bees to tell them that they need more space to store incoming nectar. They react and are not proactive in management of their bees. The bees manage the beekeeper rather than the beekeeper managing their bees. That is fine if you do not wish to obtain honey for your beekeeping colony care.

Failure to anticipate and properly super colonies or failure to help guide expansion of the spring colony, both negatively affect the potential storing of excess harvestable surplus honey. Think, actively growing colonies, already populous with foragers and lots of middle-aged bees, and space to ripen a watery nectar into honey by active and passive evaporation. These are things we can communicate to our bees. The large amounts of rich nectar and weather favorable to secretion of nectar and for bees to forage to the nectar-bearing flowers we can do little about.

I cut this discussion short to get to the bees-to-bee communication of nectar flow and honey. Foragers who gather the nectar transfer it to hive to middle-aged bees who specialize in honey processing. This is the behavior of trophallaxis. Trophallaxis is defined as the transfer of liquid food by mouth from one individual to another. The system of trophallactic food flow among adults of honeybee colonies is critical to colony survival. Trophallactic transfer, in addition to food, is also involved in distribution of pheromones within a colony. That's a topic for another day.

Worker bees specialize in receiving nectar from foragers near the hive entrance and transporting it to deposit in the comb and other parts of the hive, for example, the supers. Foragers perform offering contracts that transfer the contents of their crops to sister nest mates. They do not go to the combs directly to deposit their crop contents. This saves time and helps the foragers to more efficiently return to the field and continue to gather food resources while they are still available.

Trophallactic behavior is normally initiated by a bee asking for food by extending her proboscis toward the mandibles of another bee. That bee then termed the donor bee. The donor may offer food with or without being asked. The antennae of the recipient hive bee are directed towards the donor forager. The donor's antennae are kept more or less downward and close to the head. This antennal contact of both individuals is the critical message. If, however, we partially or totally amputate the worker's antennae, success of transfer is reduced. That suggests there might be a mixture of signals, for example, heat and richness of both the odor and concentration of the offering.

What a forager has to offer seems also to be involved in this bee-to-bee communication. A food droplet, the size of which may vary, is kept between the mandibles and the permentum and is sucked up by the recipient's proboscis. Food transfer might last from a few seconds up to a few minutes. In the hive, a forager's search for a receiver appears to be influenced by the type of scented nectar they carry.

The speed at which the liquid is obtained from a flower, that is what is called uploading rate, is related to the profitability of the recently visited food source. For the forager, several trophallactic events of different lengths usually occur for emptying of a full crop. The main nectar unloading is probably performed during the longest trophallactic contacts, which go roughly 20 to 30 seconds long, but all contacts lasting more than three seconds were effective food transfers.

Contacts lasting two to three seconds also showed liquid food transference, while those contacts of less than two seconds are likely related to dance language the foragers might do to recruit new foragers. Finally, the forager becomes a beggar, so it has carbohydrate resources, it's got food, in other words, to fly back to the same flower patch to repeat the collecting of more nectar. Trophallaxis impacts the efficiency of the hive's nectar acquisition process. Trophallaxis communicates information about resource opportunities both within and outside the hive.

With diminishing storage space, the forager has difficulty in finding a receptive hive bee, and so food acquisition decreases. Dr. Walter Farina of University of Buenos Aires has looked at various aspects of the behavior of trophallaxis between foragers and hive bees. . I include a reference to his studies and to those of a fellow by the name of Crailsheim in Austria on trophallaxis. Clarence Collison has a nice summary of the work of both these authors in his April 2017 Bee Culture column. Honey, the bee postcard for this month. Critical to bees and a significant factor in human health for much of the world's population.

A neat example of how bee-to-bee communication functions so exceedingly well in their social existence. I trust you are able to successfully communicate to your bees and obtain the honey you seek in return for their care. If you want more, be proactive in your management. Be well.

[music]

[00:16:17] [END OF AUDIO]