[MUSIC] Both wild and domesticated bee species facilitate pollination that helps agricultural production and supports ecological diversity. Many species of bees have been domesticated throughout human history, but bees in the genus Apis, collectively called the honey bees, were the first to be domesticated, about 7,000 years ago. Bees were domesticated because they produce a variety of products that we use or consume, including honey and wax. Both of which are produced in large enough quantities to be harvested and farmed by humans. They're also easily managed by keeping them in hives, which has promoted a long history of apiculture in human society. Apiculture is the maintenance of honey bee colonies by humans in hives built by people. It is an important part of our agriculture, economy, and environmental health, and is now an important global practice. We know from cave paintings of bees and honey collection that the exploitation of honey bees has been happening for at least 9,000 years. Honey is a sweet, carbohydrate-rich food that is still consumed by people all around the globe. There are more than 80 million managed beehives around the world that together produce about 1.6 million tons of honey every year. In Canada, over 700,000 managed honey bee colonies produced more than 43 million kilograms of honey, valued at $230 million in 2015, most of which is produced in the prairie provinces. Most of the honey production around the world comes from the domesticated honey bee. While honey bees were originally kept solely for the purposes of honey and wax production, other bee products used by people include bee pollen and royal jelly as nutritional supplements, and royal jelly in beauty products. Besides the products we obtain from farming honey bees, bees also provide important environmental services. Honey bees are generalist pollinators that forage on a variety of flowers. In fact, a recent study found that honey bees are the most common visitors to flowers in natural ecosystems. While the presence of honey bees may have adverse effects on the diversity of native bees due to this competition, they remain extremely important for global food production. Almonds, for example, are entirely dependent on honey bee pollination. Without honey bees we would have much more difficulty cultivating important crops, such as apples, avocados, sunflowers, certain strains of canola, cherries, and many others. Honey bees are responsible for 80% of all insect crop pollination, and contribute to more than $19 billion every year to agricultural crop production in the United States alone. In Canada, the estimated value of honey bee pollination to key crops is over two billion dollars. The most important honey bee pollinated crops in Canada include apples, blueberries, and canola. Today, beekeeping is widespread, from bee farmers in greenhouses to backyard bee keeping, virtually anyone can become involved in apiculture. To do it safely though, beekeepers must use personal protective equipment, such as special sting-proof clothing, and smokers, which calm the bees. Modern day beekeepers often farm honey bees for their honey, which can be produced in large quantities during the summer months. We got an in-depth look at a large honey harvesting facility in the province of Albert, one of the largest honey producing regions in the world. We spoke with Mike deJong, the owner and operator of Busy Bee Farm here in Alberta. >> We're at Busy Bee Farm in our storage shop facility. And behind us is a bunch of our honey supers that are getting stored away for the rest of the year and waiting for the next year's crop. Out of this facility, around about 8,000 bee hives. We come out of winter, we assess the hives, what survived and see what we're playing with and then we use some spring management, where we grade the hives. We control our queen management and make splits out of the strong ones to recover our winter losses. We then start supering and getting ready for the harvest. In our business, we also have hives going to pollination through the end of June. We start bringing them down to southern Alberta. And yeah, then the honey harvest commences and it's pretty intense through July and the first parts of August. And then we start getting ready for wintertime and feeding them up and doing disease and mite management and covering them up. With our extracting facility, we are pretty automatic or semi-automatic compared to a side liner or a smaller guy. Doing it as a hobby, they would be more manual. Techniques with pulling honey, I mean, beekeepers pull honey all the same way whether you're big or small. It's just what they use for their management practices, but it's a very labor intensive job. Everybody's gotta work to get that honey off whether it's one hive or 8,000. I would say Alberta would be, I think average is around 130, 150 pounds a hive. You only have one window to get ready for winter, and that's through September and maybe October. Sometimes winter comes early and you don't have everything done. But you gotta be fast at what you're doing, you gotta feed and feed and feed. You gotta get their bulk stores up so that they have access to enough sugar or honey in their hive. They consume sugar or honey, they turn that into energy, and they make heat all winter long. If they run out of that stuff, they're going to starve to death. And then with insulating, we have insulation on the top of their hive to stop heat from coming out, and then we cover them with an insulated tarp in groups of four and it’s basically like a Christmas present. We wrap them up in a cube with a block tarp with some R-value to it and it collects the solar rays and it stops the wind. We collect wax just as a byproduct of extracting and other than that, we don't. We leave the bees all the pollen they can collect. We find that essential to their strength. And other than that, we provide a pollination service out of this business. Biggest thing right now with beekeeping in Alberta is probably the Varroa mite. It's always a consistent battle taking or managing them and keeping their populations close to, if zero. They thrive through the summers as the bees thrive as well, and you do your controls in the spring, and then you have a window in the fall to do your fall controls and get them as low as possible for wintertime. There's a fungal disease, too, called Nosema, that's tough on the bees. Especially through winter, since the bees can't fly. Unless it's warm, but there are periods where they can't fly for two months. And we feed a type of antibiotic for them to control that. Verroa might, let's say, if you have a high population of Verroa mites, all you can do is put the midas sides in and baby your hives. If you're too late, you're going to lose your hives over the winter. With Nosema, there's comb replacement, there's disinfection through radiation. Queen management is a big thing. Our business imports a lot of queens from Hawaii and California. We don’t raise our own in our management style, we need to have our hives ready to go for a production or at the right strength for pollination. So we buy queens by the thousands through California from a supplier who we're pretty confident in, and then we also have suppliers out of Hawaii as well, just to get some diversity. Now that's all done through May. Yeah, we are assessing, basically keep pretty simple. We're just basically strong, medium, weak, and all our strong hives get split from right away. That controls the swarming. Just work hard at it, stay consistent. Be ready to adapt, because it's never the same every single year. Sure, the bees are amazing, they are. I mean, if you step back and look at it, I think it's amazing what they do. We've got a passion for it, but most beekeepers and yeah, it's nothing like collecting that crop right? And on a scale like this now, it's maybe a little different. I mean, yeah, I get to see the bees, but a lot more management in that but still, when you step back and look at things, it's amazing what they can do. So bees are probably up there as my favorite insect. >> The first bee domesticated by humans was Apis mellifera, sometimes called the European honey bee. It is thought to have been introduced to Europe in the 17th century from either Africa or Asia, then into North America and other parts of the world. The biology and behavior of European honey bees makes them valuable pollinators, great honey producers, and well suited to the semi-natural conditions of domestication. In nature, this species lives in large colonies and nests in natural cavities. So it's a smooth transition to move them into artificial hives made by people. European honey bees can regulate their nest temperature. This means that entire colonies can overwinter. The hives stay warm over winter, but no foraging or brood rearing occurs at this time. In other bee species in cold climates, only queens can overwinter, and must start a new colony every spring. African relatives of the European honey bee are also raised and farmed for honey. African honey bees were interbred with European honey bees and introduced into South America in an attempt to improve the beekeeping industry in Brazil. This is because European honey bees are poorly adapted to tropical climates. When African honey bees mate with their European cousins, they produce an aggressively defensive hybrid, called the Africanized honey bee. Unfortunately, the Africanized bees can enter and take over other honey bee hives. These hybrids will pursue attackers further and have more hive guards than regular European honey bees. This has led Africanized honey bees to be a cause for concern in areas of Central America and the southern United States, where they are invasive. Although they are often referred to as killer bees in the media due to their aggressive nature, their venom is no more potent than that of the European honey bees. Species of honey bees other than Apis mellifera are also farmed around the world for their honey. Apis cerana, the Asiatic honey bee, is commonly kept in hives across Asia. They generally have smaller colonies and produce less honey than their European cousins. However, some researchers have suggested that the Asiatic honey bee may be more tolerant to parasitic mite infestations and can survive in lower temperatures than the European honey bee. In Southeast Asia, honey from the giant honey bee, Apis dorsata, is harvested from wild colonies. This large bee species produces a lot of honey, but has never been domesticated because it does not nest in enclosed cavities. The giant honey bee also tends to be more aggressive than European honey bees, likely due to its exposed nesting habits. Apis florea, the dwarf honey bee, is much smaller than the European honey bee and produces less honey per hive. Like the giant honey bees, they nest out in the open and are not domesticated. They are, however, important pollinators in southern Asia, and their honey is sometimes harvested by local farmers. Apiculture is an ancient practice that has spread across the world due to the demand for the sweet substance we call honey. Today, multiple species of honey bees are farmed for this sugary treat and other products. Many are also managed for pollination services of important crops. The most common species of domesticated honey bee across the world is the European honey bee, Apis mellifera. In the next few lessons, we will discuss several aspects of European honey bee biology, including cast determination, physical and behavioral adaptations, as well as communication.
