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It's lovely to see the sun out, especially as it shines on our new solar panels at the Head Office!
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In February, we had the pleasure of attending both the Greenmount Show and The Beekeeping Show, and they were both fantastic events. It was great to catch up with so many familiar faces. Next we have the Welsh BKA Spring Convention on Saturday, 22nd March, followed by the BBKA Spring Convention on Saturday 5th April. You can place your orders online now for collection at the shows, and don't forget to bring your wax for conversion!
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Later in this newsletter we have a great article for our Ask the Expert section this month. Written by Russell, one of our members of staff at our Windsor branch. He talks about Artificial Intelligence versus the humble honeybee, make sure to give it a read and let us know what you think.
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During March, we have a 10% discount off our BG Smokers. These are a great cost effective addition to your kit.
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Large stainless steel smoker with a firebox that measures 105mm x 195mm high.
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Thorne All-in-one Beesuits
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This confidence-boosting beekeeping suit, made here in our sewing department in Lincolnshire, provides complete head-to-ankle protection while allowing full visibility and freedom of movement.
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Made from a durable polyester-cotton blend, now available in Khaki, Warm Grey & Ecru. The hat and veil are securely attached to the jacket with a heavy-duty zipper and can be fully removed. The zips meet with a Velcro seal for added security. These suits can also be made to measure.
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- Ideal for beginners this round hat keeps the veil firmly away from the face, no more getting stung on the chin!
- Fine mesh veil means a very clear, unobstructed view
- Hat zips off completely so the suit can be washed
- Chin tie to secure the hat in place no matter the weather
- Elasticated wrists and thumb straps
- Elasticated ankles and waist band
- Multiple pockets including two breast pockets, two hip pockets, one back pocket and one hive tool pocket
- Handy loop at the back to hang the suit when not in use
- Heavy duty zips with Velcro covering where the zips meet
- Thorne applique logo
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This month has been much a continuation of last month; clearing out the apiary, tidying the cabin and clearing out dead bees. We also continue to heft the hives to monitor for stores. It can be a crucial point in the year to make sure the bees don’t run out of food as they begin to build up in numbers. We don’t want all efforts to keep them alive over winter (on our side or the bees’) to be dashed just as we come into spring!
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As you’d expect, most of February has been rather chilly so with that in mind, we have done our upmost to avoid doing anything to disturb the bees, apart from hefting of course. Unless we think the colony might have perished over winter, we leave the hives alone.
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Towards the end of the month, we saw a few lovely sunny days, which encouraged the bees to fly. You may be able to see from this photo that there is a small amount of pollen coming in, which is very exciting to see.
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This month is probably going to have been the last of our ‘quiet months’ and March is likely to bring better weather and more active beekeeping! We always look forward to this time with anticipation and trepidation as to what the new season will bring.
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SAVE THE DATE – Green Match – Conserving Forests Through Beekeeping
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The Green Match takes place soon and is open to charities working on environmental issues – Bees for Development are fundraising to support the forest-dwelling Batwa people of Kisoro District in Uganda. They face many challenges having been forcibly removed from their ancestral forests and are confined to small plots of land with no access to traditional honey collecting sites or land to set up beehives.
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With the money raised we will:
- Educate the Batwa community in the importance of forest conservation
- Establish new land agreements for Batwa beehive sites
- Train additional Batwa people in beekeeping and hive making
- Improve market access for Batwa honey
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Make a donation between 22–29 April 2025 and all donations will be doubled! More details HERE
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WBKA Annual Convention 22 March 2025
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Join Us at the WBKA Annual Convention!?
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Bees for Development will be exhibiting at this year’s WBKA Annual Convention in Builth Wells on Saturday, 22 March – and we’d love to see you there!
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Come and meet the team, discover how we support sustainable beekeeping, and explore how you can get involved. It’s a fantastic opportunity to connect with fellow beekeepers and bee enthusiasts!
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Find out more and get your tickets HERE
Don’t miss it – pop by and say hello!
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Bees for Development – Women extension workers empowering beekeepers in Ghana
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Bees for Development Ghana has worked in the Afram Plains in the Eastern Region of Ghana, for over six years, supporting some of the poorest households and difficult to reach communities through nature-based beekeeping. In 2023, through a Darwin Initiative fund, over 900 more individuals across 21 communities, were equipped with skills in hive construction, site selection and preparation, apiary set up and management among many others. This has created a pool of beekeepers that must be guided and supported to become productive beekeepers, to earn income from their newfound livelihood. Our female extension agents, Clara, Rejoice and Florence, are busy giving back to the beekeepers the rich repository of knowledge and skills they have obtained from Bees for Development Ghana, through eighteen months of training and apprenticeship in nature-based beekeeping. Read the full blog HERE
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Our programme for lecturers for the 2025 show include: Stephen Martin, Joe Ibbertson, Steve Riley, Gene Robinson, Humberto Boncristiani and Maggie Gill. More info to follow.
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The early March, first Friday at 5.15pm UK local time, lecture release from the 2024 show is Professor Martin Giurfa’s ‘Honey bee pheromones: new discoveries and unsuspected roles’. You can view it on the show’s YouTube Channel.
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Martin has brought a cognitive dimension to studies on honey bee learning and memory as his work revealed bees under new light of their remarkable cognitive faculties. This lecture demonstrates that exposure to pheromones changes the bees’ predisposition to learn events associated with reward. Overall, he shows that besides being chemical messengers, pheromones act as important modulators of motivational processes and thereby influence animal cognition.
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Martin Guifa’s lecture on unsuspected roles of bee hormones
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Martin also joined us for a chat during the 2024 show, which you can still see on our YouTube channel under the ‘Live’ tab.
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The ‘live’ videos from previous shows, featuring interviews with interesting people on various aspects of the show, are still available to watch on the National Honey Show YouTube channel:
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Don’t forget to ‘Subscribe’ to the channel, it costs nothing and is a great help to the show.
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Do get in touch with Val: publicity@honeyshow.co.uk for more information if you would like more leaflets; if you are involved with organising the bee tent at your local county show; or if you are involved with a school or youth group interested in visiting the show.
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We look forward to seeing you at this year’s show:
National Honey Show Thursday 23rd to Saturday 25th October 2025 at Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, Surrey, KT10 9RT, UK.
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The Thorne Challenge: Artificial Intelligence versus the humble honeybee
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in the news, big time, and the race, it seems, is on. Will it be United States or China to dominate in this emerging technology?
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AI promises a great deal. Some hope that it will help us live better, more fulfilled lives that provide greater opportunity for free time. Some see that AI can replace doctors and solicitors or even run companies and countries better than people. However, before we get too carried away, let’s test it against something that should be a lot less complex than human know-how and organisations. Let’s test AI’s capability in a complex, real life situation. Let’s test it against the humble honeybee!
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In the 1980s academics and technology professionals took on the challenge of developing a machine that could beat a chess master. The result was Deep Blue. This was a chess-playing expert system run on a unique purpose-built IBM computer. It first played world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1996, where it lost four games to two. It was upgraded in 1997 and in a six-game re-match, it defeated Kasparov by winning two games and drawing three. Deep Blue's victory is considered a milestone in the history of AI.
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Chess is a strategy game that is played on a chessboard with sixty-four squares arranged in an 8×8 grid, and two players each control sixteen pieces. It has a very clear set of rules; there is no ambiguity. The game involves no hidden information and no elements of chance. In comparison with the complexity of life faced by even the humble bee, chess is a simple game.
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The Thorne Challenge is to update the contest. Can AI, or an improved Deep Blue, emulate the decision making and behaviour of the humble honeybee to ensure the survival of the colony generation after generation? In other words, can AI create a virtual colony that ebbs and flows during the different seasons, produces sufficient stores, survives and reproduces itself through swarming?
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Emulating the behaviour of the humble bee at the individual level means that the developer of an AI system cannot use an algorithm that applies at a colony level, for instance ‘When drones fall below 15% of colony, produce more drone cells’. The challenge is to have the collective sum of the individual bee activities add up to efficient honey production and the survival of the colony.
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Scientists and bee keepers can agree that bees are amazing but if we are talking about intelligence, artificial or the real thing, surely that means the application of some sort of logic and the making of a decision to do something. With their ‘tiny’ brain, many would argue, the individual bee must simply be on automatic - somehow programmed to respond to a complex set of visual, vibrational and hormonal signals?
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If that is the case then the job for AI is simple. Identify these cues and programme the behaviour accordingly.
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To help scale the challenge, let’s look at some of the abilities of bees and divisions of labour that there are in the colony.
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Scientists have already addressed the questions - are bees smart? Do they have a memory? Can they solve problems, and be trained to understand concepts such as ‘different' or 'same’?
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The short answer to these questions is ‘Yes’. For its size, the honey bee, in fact, has a large brain and many scientific experiments have proven that they can be taught to remember, recognize, discriminate and learn.
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The humble honey worker bee emerges from its wax cell at twenty-one days and after a little time cleaning themselves up, being fed by other bees and orienting themselves they put themselves to work. There is plenty to do in the hive including cleaning, feeding larvae, manipulating wax, processing honey, guard duties and tending the queen. These tasks can be done at any time dictated by the needs of the colony.
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As more new bees emerge in the hive it is time for the ‘nurse’ worker bees to go foraging. Whilst some seek nectar - others seek pollen.
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If these divisions of labour are not truly amazing then consider that the flying bee develops a ‘mental map ‘of their environment that takes into account the landscape in a three-mile radius. It uses this knowledge to go to the source of food that is most abundant - with a little instruction from the dance of other bees. And remember, the famous bee waggle dance takes place in the dark!!!
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This division of labour and efficiency surely has some element of individual choice in it?
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A beekeeper only needs to have two hives to see how differently bees behave. And when it comes to swarming the differences cannot be more acute. Surely there can be no other conclusion than bees choose when to swarm. Yes, of course there are a huge range of biological cues that help in the timing of this but two colonies next to each other will show very different behaviours and indeed within the colony only some of the bees set themselves to start queen cells. When it comes to actually following the queen as a swarm, roughly half the colony will choose to stay at home.
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In the whole life of the colony and its annual cycle of growth and decline there are many other examples of the choices that bees make, such as moving to a new home after swarming.
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In fact, in studying the behaviour of bees, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that each hive has its own ‘personality’ and there is a ‘super-mind’ in operation.
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Scientists and some beekeepers may say that I am using language that is anthropomorphic, meaning I am giving them human qualities when talking about choosing to do this or that or have a mind. However, putting aside the tricky subject of a ‘super mind’ I really mean that bees choose to do this or that. It is not a choice that they can verbalise but it is a choice that they are making in any case.
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Scientists have had outstanding success in understanding, making predictions and garnering the benefits of the physical world. In the physical world, there are actions and reactions, stimuli and responses, one thing causes another thing to happen. However in the social realm, the realm where bees operate, nothing is as simple as that. No organism simply responds to a stimulus. All creatures, including bees and humans, respond to how we interpret the stimulus and this in turn is a function of intentions or the goals that we have.
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Goals, intentions! Bees!! I can hear the collective sigh of disdain. But bear with, bear with…
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We are all, from amoeba to human being, goal-oriented and are continually asking, ‘If I do this, then this will happen, or will it?’ This is always the question whether or not we can verbalise it. The question is sometimes easy to answer, sometimes difficult to answer without investigation and sometimes it is impossible to work out at all.
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Within the confines of their genetic boundary and physical limitations, bees are free to choose. Nothing ever quite repeats. There is randomness in the world and without exercising free choice bees wouldn’t be able to cope with the gap in knowledge that life throws at them. What is true for bees is true for all creatures. A bird may be programmed to build a nest but where and with what exactly, well that is up to the bird itself.
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Intention guides the choices bees make (and all other creatures) and enables them to operate one step ahead of learnt behaviours and their evolutionary specified responses, and in anticipating the future they beat the world to the punch.
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A colony of bees operates as complex adaptive system. The Thorne Challenge is for an AI system to emulate this ability to adapt to different situations in an efficient way.
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My thought is that the Thorne Challenge is going to be harder than it appears at first sight. An AI system that truly emulates bee behaviour looks like it has to have some sort of intentionality built in. In addition, it has to provide opportunities for the ‘virtual’ bees to make individual choices or, in other words, encompass freewill. Good luck with that!!
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Answers on a postcard to Thornes (find us on any search engine).
Article written by Russell Connor, Wednesday Boy at Thorne Windsor.
P.S If the themes of AI, intention and freewill are a bit heavy and difficult to follow, the most important thing to remember is that when you are stung, the bee chose to do that!
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Dead Bees Don't Make Honey
By Theresa Martin
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“An extremely well written, practical guide to help insure success with bee colony care. If you mentor others, this book could be your instructional manual .. If you wish to become treatment-less than I highly recommend Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey by Theresa Martin.” - Dewey M. Caron
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Little Wolf Farm (1st ed. 2024)
Paperback
260 pages
£16.25
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Reviewed by Dewey M. Caron of Bee Culture
(November 15th 2024)
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Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey by Theresa Martin is an extremely well written, practical guide to help insure success with bee colony care. If you mentor others, this book could be your instructional manual.
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Author Theresa Martin is a six year beekeeper from Kentucky. She started with two colonies and now keeps 20, each individually named. Following a treatment-less management approach, she has had only a single colony loss in her beekeeping journey. Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey clearly and thoroughly explains how she has managed such success.
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Dead Bees has four sections, each different but highly informative. The first section of 10 Tips is roughly half of the book. The tips are her beekeeping roadmap. Five tip examples are: Acquiring local bees, encourage more propolis, space colonies out in apiary, keep colonies smaller and insulate hives. Each tip is discussed in less than 10 pages. The format is easy to follow and flows easily. Throughout the author references back to the tips as tip #1 or tip #3 for example.
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Each tip has repeating, clearly identified subheadings. The information begins with a bee biology section and then, relative to that tip, coverage of conventional beekeeping related to the tip. Footnotes and references (130 total) identify the source of the material. The last two subsections are how adoption of the tip can improve bee health and productivity and then there are personal notes by Teresa identified as “my implementation.”
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Theresa, in her introduction, writes that Dead Bees is not a “how to” book of common beekeeping practices. She recommends Honey Bee Biology & Beekeeping and ABC XYZ of Beekeeping for that information. The “my implementation” section is her personal application of the tip. She specifies that the my implementation material is “detail only of the natural practices that…” are less common.
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The second section is 40 pages of 10 illustrative precision beekeeping practices. The data presented by Teresa was developed via use of the T2SM BroodMinder© temperature sensor. Included are five examples of how temperature data illustrates brood rearing and colony queen right condition, one example of how temperature can detect swarm departure (a distinctive 4◦ temperature spike), two examples of how temperature can illustrate colony stressors of varroa and a single nighttime visit of a skunk and the last two illustrate how beekeeper management (winterizing and colony examinations) can be documented simply via temperature measurement. We can see how winterizing a colony is especially conservative of holding a Winter heat sink and its influence on Winter brood rearing.
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The third Section (20 pages) covers the concept of treatment-less management as practiced by Theresa. She describes her effort to establish a treatment-free zone around one of her apiary sites but could not get buy-in from nine surrounding beekeepers (heavy losses would be expected with adoption of treatment-free selection pressure before achieving colonies more tolerant of mites). Therefore, she describes how she adopted treatment-less management. Her wintering success speaks to the effectiveness of her adopted managements.
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The fourth section includes 18 frequently asked questions FAQs – developed from talks to beekeeping groups (by the way, if you are looking for a club speaker, Teresa has a great message, well delivered – you might consider inviting her to a future meeting). She additionally has seven suggestions for novices and a detailed 21 page seasonal management calendar. It includes sufficient detail to permit adoption for where you keep bees. There are numerous photos, mostly by the author and the Broodminder charts along with tables of her beekeeping results.
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This is a great self-help book for those who wish to keep bees more closely to natural beekeeping but who wish to avoid continued losses. There is nothing you couldn’t do – the author recognizes we all keep bees to our individual preferences. The why and how to adopt these 10 tips is clearly detailed. If you wish to become treatment-less than I highly recommend Dead Bees Don’t Make Honey by Theresa Martin.
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