A Cool Window for Students into Their Natural World and Healthier, Happier Bees

Saddle up, folks.

Drew’s Honeybees has students at local schools paint our beehives. It’s a win-win-win-win. Win 1: students get a fun, interactive, interdisciplinary art project. Win 2: schools get art materials and eager collaboration. Win 3: Drew’s Honeybees gets the coolest beehives. Win 4: bees get a home that is visually unique.

Why would a bee care about how its hive is painted? How would it even know? Why should we care? To try to answer that, we must tour some science. If you will keep me company, I will be grateful. At DHB, we hope to create healthier pollinator ecology–the interplay of life. That is the work of us all. To #savethebees we must appreciate the bees. To appreciate bees, we must better understand the bees. Don’t fret, they’re marvels. It’s satisfying to learn about marvels.

In the northeastern U.S. there are wild honey bee colonies living high in forest trees. They live in low density and far apart. The best data we have is at least 5-8 wild colonies per square mile in the forests of the northeastern U.S. This is a critical point. Beekeepers group many hives in a small space, a bee yard. In an unnatural cluster, confused foragers return to the wrong hives. This can be exacerbated by the nerve agents common to agriculture. By poisoning insect nervous systems, insect navigation is likely to suffer. Bees return to the wrong hive, set off scuffles and transmit pathogens they may carry. This is a Big Friggin’ Deal. #BFD

Consider a sick hive in the wild. There are no nearby hives. Bees from healthy hives are less likely to find the sick hive, much less enter it. If bees from healthy hives do not enter, they do not carry pathogens back to their hives. In time, the sick hive dies. Another pest of beekeepers–the wax moth–finds the hive, eats the comb, and quickly consumes the dead hive. What happens to the pathogens that killed the hive? The pathogens die too. A pathogen that kills a host and does not find another host reaches the end of the line.

Let’s consider what happens to a sick hive in a beekeepers’ bee yard. The hive begins to falter in the pestilence of mites and malady. It becomes weaker than the hives adjacent to it. As it becomes weaker, neighboring hives begin to rob its store of honey. Grand battles take place as the sick hive valiantly struggles to save itself. But the intruders are too many. They overrun the sick hive and carry their ill-gotten gains home. The sick, robbed hive starves. What happens to the sick hive’s pathogens? They do not die. They spread everywhere. In grisly, intimate combat, the pathogens spread from bee to bee, from hive to hive, to other bee yards and any wild hives that may be nearby. To paraphrase ZZ Top, the pathogen is bad, it’s nationwide. A pathogen that can always find another victim has the evolutionary pressure to become more deadly.

To keep bees better we must do our best to square two things. How do we A) keep hives in groupings that are efficient for beekeepers? and, B) How do we minimize confused bees returning to the wrong hive?

Beekeepers are farmers. We, too, worship the golden calf of efficiency. How do we gain more from less? We elevate efficiency over other considerations to the point we are no longer efficient. As I write this beekeepers are suffering losses “well over 50%.” The industrial beekeeper business model plans to lose around 70% of their hives each year. And yet their bees are sickly. You’d think with that amount of death disproportionately killing the weakest, industrial operations might have vigorous bees. But they don’t. I suspect this failure is because they push for more than a bee can do. A bee is a mighty insect. But she’s still an insect. Push her too far and she breaks, just like you.

A honey bee can see a lot. A bee's first flights outside of the hive are “orientation flights.” They fly lazily to and fro. At first, they fly inches away. They gradually fly further and further, always looking at the hive. They sure seem to be taking it all in. But we still won’t know if kid's wild artwork helps bees unless we roll up our sleeves for science. Fortunately, there is an accurate way to measure how many bees are going to the wrong hive. Basically, some queens have boys with black butts and some queens have boys with orange butts. We’ll put hives headed by queens with orange-butt-boys next to hives headed by queens with black-butt-boys. We’ll test hives with unique, highly contrasting artwork against hives painted white. Everything else will be identical. After a time, we’ll count the orange-butt-boys in the black bee hive. We’ll count the black-butt-boys in the orange hive–the bees that don’t belong.

We have many other ways to differentiate hives in an efficient bee yard layout. We can add variation to visual features of the approaching “runway.” We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. We can simply leave a shrub rather than mowing it. We can modify the heading of hives–where they face. I can attest that if you modify the heading of a hive inches, bees return home to where the hive was. We also have cultural cues (where and how bees enter the hive.) These behaviors are properly cultural–learned, malleable features that define and differentiate each social unit in relation to the rest of a species. Imagine how we communicate “this is home” to a bee. Imagine a bee, Gilda, saying-

“The approach to my hive swings around a peach tree on the left then leaves a weedy shrub on the right. As I round the shrub, I see home. Some promising young artist painted my hive entirely unbowed by convention–an ethereal limber purple form vying in a haze of blues. It feels like home in the fullest sense. We enter at left, leaving an inexplicable green block to our right and pink block at left. What these blocks do, there’s no telling. They are just noticeably there.

I left one part out due to its unbelievability. I worry you may think me mad–or worse–a speaker of breezy lies. We bees are occasionally visited by bipeds. They are a low sort. They puff a bit of smoke. My sisters prattle on about an approaching inferno and set about beginning preparations should the inferno draw near. Here’s the thing, I suspect this is, smoke (literally) and mirrors. There is no fire. These bipeds are a cunning, misdirecting sort!

I suspect something of these bipeds. They are not a subtly discerning species. While rather mastered in cunning trickery and fond of ponderous looks, they are–in the grand accounting–quite dim. They do their thing and pass on looking mighty content. What this all means there’s no telling, though I suspect a vast practical joke upon us all, Homo and Hymenoptera included.”

I was going to detail what we know bees see. But no matter how much we catalogue the impressive visual ability of the honey bee we still won’t know if hive differentiation works until we roll up our sleeves for science. If the good people see fit to give us the means, Drew’s Honeybees will do this in 2026 or 2027. This is the glory of science–by admitting we don’t know we take the first steps to learn.