While ‘natural beekeepers’ are used to thinking of a bee colony more in terms of its intrinsic value to the natural world than its ability to produce honey for human use, conventional beekeepers and the general public are much more likely. of associating bees with honey. . This has been the main cause of the attention paid to Apis mellifera since we began our association with them just a few thousand years ago.

In other words, I suspect that most people, if they think about it at all, tend to think of a bee colony as “a living system that produces honey.”

Before that first human-bee encounter, these adaptable insects had flowering plants and the natural world largely to themselves (some dinosaurs more or less) and over a span of tens of millions of years they had evolved alongside plants. with flowers and they had selected them. that provided the best quality and quantity of pollen and nectar for use. We can assume that the less productive flowers died out, except for those that adapted to use the wind, rather than insects, to spread their genes.

During all those years, perhaps 130 million by some estimates, the bee continually evolved into the highly efficient and extraordinarily adaptable colony-dwelling creature that we see and encounter today. Through a series of behavioral adaptations, he ensured a high degree of genetic diversity within the Apis genus, among which is the queen’s propensity to mate at a certain distance from her hive, at flight speed and at a certain height from the ground, with a dozen male bees, which have traveled considerable distances from their own colonies. Multiple mating with strangers from foreign lands ensures a degree of heterosis, vital to the vigor of any species, and carries its own selection mechanism for the drones involved: only the strongest and fittest drones can mate.

An unusual characteristic of the bee, which adds a competitive, species-strengthening advantage to the reproductive mechanism, is that the male bee, the drone, hatches from an unfertilized egg through a process known as parthenogenesis. This means that drones are haploid, that is, they have a single set of chromosomes derived from their mother. This in turn means that, in evolutionary terms, The queen’s biological imperative to pass her genes on to future generations is expressed in her genetic investment in her drones. – remembering that their workers cannot reproduce and are therefore a genetic dead end.

So the suggestion I made to the conference was that a biologically and logically legitimate way of looking at the bee colony is as’ a living system for producing healthy, fertile drones for the purpose of perpetuating the species by spreading queen genes of the best quality’ .

Thinking about this model of the bee colony gives us a completely different perspective, compared to the conventional point of view. Now we can see the nectar, honey and pollen simply as fuels for this system and the worker bees attending to the needs of the queen and carrying out all the necessary tasks to guarantee the proper functioning of the colony, with the ultimate goal of producing drones of high quality. , which will carry the genes of its mother to virgin queens of other distant colonies. We can speculate on the biological triggers that cause drones to be lifted at certain times and evicted or even killed at other times. We can consider the mechanisms that can control the number of drones as a percentage of the general population and dictate what other functions they can have within the hive. We can imagine how the drones seem to be able to find their way into the ‘congregation areas’, where they seem to gather when waiting for the virgin queens to pass, when they themselves rarely survive more than about three months and almost never during the winter. There are many things that we do not yet know and we may never fully understand.

An important aspect of this view of the bee colony is that it calls into question many of the practices of ‘modern beekeeping’, by which I mean post-Langstroth, post-1850 beekeeping, which has always focused on production of honey. everything else. From the point of view of our evolutionary model, many modern practices have been implemented with the specific goal of suppressing drone lifting: thus going directly against the evolutionary interests of queens.

In support of this thesis, we can cite the invention of the wax base, impressed with the cellular pattern of worker bees, deployed with the specific purpose of encouraging the colony to increase the maximum number of workers and the minimum number of drones. We can also blame those who decided that the frames should be close together, thus allowing only the construction of worker cells and forcing the drone cells to the outer edges of the honeycomb. More recently, we can mention and condemn the encouragement of certain sectors to ‘sacrifice’ pupae of drones with the intention of reducing the population of Varroa destructor in our hives.

Other recent practices, such as the sterilization of woodwork and the use of plastics, ensure that hives are relatively free of any other tiny creatures that evolved to share hollow logs and trees with bees. However, we are now discovering that some of these little insects may well hold the secret of how pests and diseases are kept at bay. Significantly, experiments with mites Stratiolelaps Gender is proving to be successful in control Varroa and I suspect that the humble earwig and the wood louse have a role to play.

The almost universal use of acaricides over the last half century has turned our biodiversity model bee colonies into sterile monocultures, at the expense of a multitude of molds, fungi and insects whose functions and interactions we can only guess. Who knows what simultaneous damage pyrethroids and neonicotinoids, widely used in our crazy and toxic agricultural system, may have caused not only bees but also the soil, which supports all life.

It seems to me that the history of modern beekeeping is replete with examples of anti-drone behavior on the part of beekeepers, from ignorance of their true role in the colony and in direct contradiction to the needs and instincts of the queen bee. Conventional beekeepers, as much as they may protest their love and devotion to their loads, are in fact denying the wishes of bees by focusing their efforts on the fuel of this intricate system, rather than its true purpose: the production of drones. of high quality, without which Apis mellifera it is as certainly doomed as the dinosaurs.

Therefore, ‘natural beekeepers’, who focus on creating environments close to ideal for the use of bees and work in line with the wishes of their queens, are in the best position to ensure the future of the species, as long as they don’t succumb. undesirable “modern” trends.