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NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, JULY 2017
WOOLLY THINKER’S BRAIN TURNS INTO A HIVE OF ACTIVITY MEMBER PROFILE Dr Jenny Nelson
flowers within flight range. Some flower stamens open just once a day in the morning but others, like pear trees, have stamens that continue to open during the day. Nectar-foraging bees also get covered in pollen from some plants. Like pollen foragers, they will pack it into their pollen baskets and bring it back to the hive, but their loads tend to be much smaller in size as the bee is limited in just how much weight it can carry, being mostly nectar. You can see the difference in the type of foragers on the flowers also. Pollen foragers tend to dance across the flowers’ anthers, gathering pollen on their body hair, but will also take a little nectar as fuel for the journey back to the hive. At the hive entrance, watch the bees entering the hive. Pollen foragers’ abdomens won’t be as distended as those of nectar-foraging bees. Linda Newstrom-Lloyd of the Trees for Bees team has written several articles for the journal on trees that produce good-quality pollen; those with 25% protein are best. We know we can add pheromone strips to hives to get bees to collect more pollen, which stimulates greater brood production. These strips mimic the brood pheromone. The dynamics of the brood nest are very interesting. So what sort of bee is produced from pollen supplement? It’s food for thought as well, as we know that we can’t raise bumble bees on this alone. It shows the importance of having natural pollen available to the bees. Now what causes bees to become water carriers and undertaker bees? Start digging. References Amdam, G. V., Page, R. E., Fondrk, K., & Brent, C. S. (2010, Sep–Oct). Hormone response to bidirectional selection on social behavior. Evolution & Development, 12 (5):428–436. doi: 10.1111/j.1525-142X.2010.00429.x. Siegel, A. J., Freedman C., & Page, R. E. Jr. (2012). Ovarian control of nectar collection in the honey bee (Apis mellifera). PLoS ONE 7 (4): e33465. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033465 Further reading Winston, M. L. (1987). The biology of the honey bee . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
It never crossed my mind that bees would become part of my future.
Yes, as a child I would have to sit and prick frames of combs before extraction. I had a very eccentric uncle who had a small farm on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. I would spend whole summers with him learning about self- sufficiency. He would make me take a crochet hook and pull out pollen-filled cells from the frames of his beehives. This pollen was stashed away in jars for ‘medicinal’ use. My uncle was one of the first vets to use homeopathy and acupuncture in both large and companion animals, and he refused to use antibiotics as he foresaw antibiotic resistance occurring long before it ever did. However, the honey was a side product that did not interest me much. The bees were not very interactive—not like the goats or sheep! Now they really fascinated me. As I grew older I wanted to be either a riding instructor, or a sheep shearer. (I also wanted to play rugby for Scotland, but in the mid 1970s that was never going to eventuate.) Unfortunately these options did not come up in the school career test. These tests told me that I was best suited to being a scientist. Both my parents were scientists, and that did not appeal to me at all! I did not want to be a scientist, and I pretty much rebelled. I learned to shear sheep at the age of 15. Women shearing sheep was pretty much unheard of then, and I went shepherding. However, there was a thirst for knowledge that pushed me to go to university. Here the sheep shearing came in handy, as it was a skill that pretty much paid for my tuition. Not content with just having book knowledge though, I also put myself through agricultural college in the North of England. There I learnt old traditions like crook making and dry stone walling, as well as modern shepherding techniques.
The college also did beekeeping courses— did I do one? Nope. Not interested in bees— just sheep, dogs and horses. One weekend, there was a National Beekeepers Conference held there. I remember a friend and I laughing because when we walked into the college dining room, the beekeepers’ talking sounded like the hum and drone of bees. The years went by and I worked my way through the ranks, and continued to gain university accreditation—I was literally dying by degrees! I worked with some of the world’s top veterinary scientists all around the world and honed my specialities. I had a rare mix of book and practical knowledge, so was able to gain respect from farmers at the grassroots and also from academia. As a scientist, I worked on several major projects including transgenic sheep. In 1995, I finally landed my dream job as
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