Honey Bee Drones Chase Bat: by Julian Wormald.

Introduction.

You’re in for a treat this week. Regular Beelistener reader Julian shares his remarkable observations and thoughts on drones with us. We also get a peek into his beekeeping life in beautiful rural Wales. Thank you for taking the time to put this fascinating guest blog together, and for sharing your lovely photographs with us, Julian. I’m very glad that I discovered your blog recently and I’ve subscribed to it so I don’t miss a good story.

A Scientist’s Curiosity.

I’ve followed Ann’s blog for several years and picked up many valuable insights and information about honey bees from it over that time. Including the considerable variety of ways in which bees are looked after. As well as what motivates people to engage with them, whether for small or large-scale honey production, pollination services, or simply to try to understand these amazing creatures a little better. Like Ann, I began my own blog and website as a project. After googling “thermogenesis in snowdrops”: did snowdrop flowers generate or create a little extra warmth to attract pollinators during the often cold inclement conditions when they flower?.

This search took me to an American galanthophile’s site and made me think I’d really like to write something similar, from the perspective of a science-trained professional who’d gradually, with my long-suffering wife, created an upland garden in wet West Wales. I’m burdened with an inquiring mind which makes me want to try to understand how the natural world around us co-exists, and I love the quote by Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh that “To know fully even one field or land is a lifetime’s experience.” It so happened that around the same time I began my blog, I’d just begun my own 14-year-plus journey of discovery into the lives of honey bees and their behaviour, which you can read about on this web page. (1)

Strange Behaviour.

With this background context, about a month ago, I observed a very strange bee- related event, and Ann, the Beelistener, was one of those people I reached out to for an opinion. The observation I made was of a large day-flying bat foraging over our yard mid-afternoon, and again mid-morning the next day.

I figured it was probably doing this because of a food shortage, in a very poor year for many insects here. It was only after looking on my large monitor at the video clips I had taken, that I noticed a few honey bees whizzing in and out of focus. (2) This was no real surprise since the yard sits roughly in the centre of where our 6 minimal/zero intervention honey bee colonies are located. However, when I looked really closely, zoomed in on the bat and slowed the action down as much as I could, there were a few occasions where I was convinced that the bees were altering course towards the bat.

In one clip in particular, 2 bees followed the bat quite closely, twisting and turning as swallows do when harrying a sparrowhawk, and closing in on its rear. What was going on? Either foraging workers attacking this strange day-flying object emitting echolocation clicks? Or my own preferred, although second idea, was that these were drones, homing in on a fast-moving object, thinking it might have been a virgin queen and hence worth chasing. My wife, Fiona, thought this so ludicrous, she laughed, as she often does when I get one of my madder ideas!

Mechanical Drones and Bees.

But if bees chased bats, maybe they’d chase birds as well. This led me to an American YouTube, of bees chasing a (mechanical) aerial drone I watched Adam’s video, (3) with the story and pictures he showed of his bee-splattered drone – once Adam had guided it back to the ground. I also noticed that most of the bees in the still images were drones, with their huge eyes. So maybe I was on the right track thinking my bat-chasing bees were drones? But then what about all the stings on the aerial drone, when it was recovered, which Adam described?

The other slightly disconcerting feature of Adam’s story was how many other drone flyers had had similar experiences – multiple impacts from a “swarm of bees” attacking the drone. At least I now knew that acquiring a drone, or even hiring a drone operator to try to track drones on their flights out to the aerial drone congregation areas (DCA’s) wasn’t a sensible idea – something I’d been toying with for a while.

Suffice to say that after sending my video link out to a number of contacts across the honey bee and wider bee world, like a swarm cluster sending out scouts to locate a potential new home, I didn’t have long to wait. The reports came buzzing back. It seems beekeepers have acquired many of the efficient and inquiring traits of their colonies.

Firstly, no one seemed to have seen or been aware of such a bee/bat interaction before. Do comment if you can add your own confirmation of witnessing such an event. Secondly, I had comments that honey bees have very poor auditory perception so they’d be unlikely to ‘hear’ the bat, or respond to its prey/navigational echolocation clicking type sounds. Thirdly, apparently drones are attracted to locations with strong thermal air currents and many people have tried to categorise common features in the landscape which might define DCA’s. There’s some insight into drone behaviour and their importance in free-living honey bee biology and their mating with virgin queens in the two excellent lectures by Dr David Tarpy, “Young Regality – A day in the life of a young Honey bee Queen” (4) and the late Kim Flottum “All about Drones” (5) from the archive of the wonderful National Honey Show. Plus another video with more details by Dr Larry J. Connor, (6) on “Secrets of Drone congregation areas”.

These videos illustrate just how many drones are produced by free-living honey bee colonies; how many are needed in a wider area to make viable DCAs; and how the crazy and risky concept of bees massing high in the sky away from their homes, (Connor reports that roughly 25% of queens never return from their mating flights) with multiple matings of the virgin queen bees, is vital to preventing inbreeding.

After thinking about this a little more, perhaps our yard area now constitutes part of a local DCA?  

The annotated satellite view (from many years ago) shows the layout of Hives, buildings and the yard where most of the Bat footage was taken. And a scale to illustrate approximate distances between colonies. There are a lot of hard dark surfaces to raise the local air temperature when the sun shines.

Drones Attempt to Mate with Pebble.

One responder wondered if the bees were instead tree bumblebees, Bombus hypnorum, which will aggressively defend their nests. Finally, thanks to Ann forwarding the video link on, came a comment from Professor Tom Seeley. He agreed with my thought that he saw 2 drones tracking the bat in one of the clips. But also added that on one occasion he’d used a slingshot to fire a pebble into a known DCA and watched drone honey bees zoom in on it from behind in an attempt to mate with it.

I was very grateful to everyone for the time they’ve spent on this, and their comments. It has occurred to me that interpreting such poor-quality images is challenging. I’d been trying to concentrate on keeping the bat in the centre frame of the camera, without any awareness of honey bees drifting in and out of the focal plane. Which makes it a bit like trying to interpret a 3D image from a 2D X-ray. Except that the image in this case was a moving video, and not a still, and the bees are tiny specks on the screen.

Colony Health on Camera.

I’d like to finish this guest blog by providing a link to another short video I made to accompany it (see last link), and pose the question: which of the 6 colonies which I feature is ‘doing the best’ on the basis of the footage that I’ve included. The first sequence of footage was recorded on August 10th at about 2 pm on a rare day of part sunshine, light winds and 20 degrees C. Looking at the footage from another day, and another time might make you think differently. And how do we judge ‘doing the best’? Forager activity, pollen intake, honey production, or drone activity? After watching Flottum and Connor’s presentations one might conclude that as far as the bees are concerned, sending out lots of (healthy) drones into an area is a great way of perpetuating their genetic information, compared with the maybe one or two queens that might get produced each year, per colony. Taking the longer view, this is what local honey bee survival and fitness might rely on.

I should add that I try to film each colony for about a minute, once every 10 to 14 days. As a minimal/zero intervention bee observer, my aim is to remove enough honey for my wife and I to consume each year. 1 of the colonies can’t be opened (based as it is on a sealed German Butter churn). 3 could be, but I never do (2 homemade simple Warre-type boxes, 1 based on a Swedish butter churn). The comb honey I take comes from two National supers which are (like all the ‘hives’) insulated with 40 mm cork boarding, part internal, part external, and so contain a reduced number of frames.

None of the colonies get any chemical treatments, supplementary feeding, or swarm control measures. Over the longer term, I hope to build up a record, as I do with many other things I write about, of just how “successful” this approach is – both for us and for the bees.

As well as the pleasure and mental stimulation which come from trying to understand how the bees are behaving, I have tried to create a local environment in our garden and wildflower meadows which provides not just our bees, but all the bumbles and other insects locally, with a diverse range of both nectar and pollen sources throughout the year. Which we now manage for most months, weather permitting.

Some human physicians have at last begun to promote in recent years just how important a diversity of plant polyphenols is for our gut biomes, health and immunity. Not just the quantity of primary nutritional components, but the quality. I’m sure that all insects, including honey bees, are also more likely to thrive in environments where as well as appropriate “homes/hives”, they have access to similarly diverse nutritional options.

Sadly, as we all know, in many parts of the UK such floral diversity has reduced dramatically in recent decades.

Over many years, I’ve built up a list of the insect-friendly flowers (6) we now grow in the garden, and also records of how we’ve been able to create wildflower-rich meadows in some of the fields around our home (7,8).

Hopefully some of the above is either interesting, entertaining or a stimulus for thought on the part of anyone reading it. Many thanks to Ann for the invitation to contribute to The Beelistener.

References:

1: “Honey Bees – My Journey of Discovery”

Honey Bees – My Journey of Discovery

2: “Unique? DAYTIME Bat Flying, then CHASED by honey bees. Are they

drones?”

3: “Bees Attack Drone!!! Swarm of bees attacking my DJI Mavic Mini. Crazy

Footage”

4: “Young Regality – A day in the life of a young Honeybee Queen” – David

Tarpy

5: “All about Drones” – Kim Flottum

6: “Secrets of Drone congregation areas” Dr. Larry Connor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy3qSx5wc7w

7: “The Real Botany of Desire – Insect Friendly Flowers”

The Real Botany of Desire – Insect Friendly Flowers

8: “Meadow Plants and Flowers”

Meadow Plants and Flowers

9: “Meadow Musings”

Meadow Musings

Julian’s Latest Video.

If you want inspiration and cheering up in the middle of winter, watch Julian’s beautiful observational video again; I certainly shall.