The Political Hive - What can Bees teach us about politics?

At this time of the year beekeepers up and down the land are peering into their hives, checking for signs that the queen is laying properly. There must be enough food to sustain the development of the colony and there must be enough room for the colony to expand to build a foraging force to exploit nectar and pollen provided by the local flowers and trees.
We are approaching the "Swarming" season. This is when the colony decides whether they are happy with the performance of the current queen and that there is enough resource available to continue in the current hive. If they decide it is time for a change then the Beekeeper will see the signs. The worker bees will start creating special cells in which to raise new queens. They will select day-old larvae to populate the cells and feed and nurture these larvae with special hormones and "royal jelly". In a couple of weeks the new queen will hatch out. The existing queen will have left the hive with all the foraging force of flying bees. This is the "swarm" which will have already selected a suitable new location in which to live and a new colony will be established.
So what has all this got to do with politics? Well...
We are in the midst of an election, we as a nation are deciding whether our current leaders are fit for purpose and whether there is sufficient resourse available to continue in the current "hive" or whether it is time for a change. This is a decision which we make collectively for the good of the colony as a whole although most of us will have personal considerations to take into account. We are not bees so we are not constrained by the ruthless logic imposed by our biology and the thought process is probably a great deal more complex than that of the humble bee.
However if we look at this from the persepective of the Beekeeper things start to get more interesting. You might think that the best way of ensuring a good honey crop is to have as big a hive as possible, economies of scale, more bees mean more honey. Up to a point this is true. The problems start when the hive gets too big to manage. A smaller hive can be quickly looked through every couple of weeks to check all is well. The bigger it gets, the bigger the task of managing it. Hives are made up of individual boxes of matching sizes made to a standard pattern and years of experience, experimentation and developement have provided us with two or three basic manageble hive types. At some point you need to split the hive into two to bring it back to manageable proportions. No beekeeper would want to have all his bees in just one hive. If something goes wrong his entire "apiary" is at risk. Of course one could imagine all kinds of technical innovations that may assist the beekeeper in ensuring that his one hive doesnt fail. He could set up cameras, heat detectors, inspect every day, record every movement and run statistical analysis in a laborotary environment. All of this is possible but hugely expensive and completely unnceccessary. Bees can do quite a good job of managing themselves so long as their colonies are not allowed to get too big. The wise beekeeper tries to manage the colonies in tune with the natural behaviour of the bees. It is in the bees best interest to build strong colonies and work efficiently, they do this with very little need of encouragement. If there are signs of disease then they can be treated. If a colony is clearly struggling it can be combined with another or frames of stores can be taken from strong hives and given to those with not enough.
It is important to note that bees manage themselves so well because they have a supremely efficient communication system and each bee takes responsibility for their allotted tasks.
Our political system has evolved over the years to favour central management of a monolithic state machine. The assumption has always been that economies of scale will lead to value for money and efficient government. The only reason this may have been true in the past is because we have not had anything like the same level and sophistication of communication that we have today. When the mechanics of decision making are supported by very slow and unwieldly processes you need to keep the physical distances between the parties in those conversations as small as possible. Therefore it makes sense to build huge office buildings and and huge organisations that can afford to run those buildings. The task of managing this is enormous and demands huge resourses just to keep the process running. The management overhead has now got to the point where it is unsusstainable and as with the beehive is actually becoming completely unnecessary.
In the coming election I will be looking at those candidates who genuinely have a desire to start making some radical changes to the way the government runs things. The collapse of the banks has given us all the wake-up call that allowing big business to get "too big to fail" is not a good idea. Global warming is telling us that we have very little time left to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The growth of the internet and development of highly sophisticated technical means of realtime communication is capable of giving us the way out or our current troubles. So long as the government can manage not to sabotage it with ill-informed interference. So long as self-interested big business can be persuaded not to exploit and trivialize it for their own ends and so long as genuine criminal elements can be persuaded to stop sabotaging it. We as a society must start communicating with eachother properly with a view to rebuilding our local community spirit. We need to allow people to feel responsible and proud of the part they are individually playing in building the future. We need to give small businesses the facillities to provide long-term susstainable employment to their local communities. Of course the term "local" is no longer necessarily tied to its geographical sense. The new communities can contain valuable contributing members from anywhere in the world.
So in my view, the bees can teach us that the way to prosperity is through small scale local responsibility. We build to manageable sizes and then split to form the basis of new enterprises and just keep communicating with eachother.

Armchair Beekeepers Wanted!

Adopt a Beehive fundraising campaign launched to save our honey bees

The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) today (March 19) announced its response to the widespread public concern over the country’s disappearing honey bees, by launching Adopt a Beehive – the first public fundraising campaign in its 136-year history. Sponsored by the Saga Group and supported also by Michelin-starred chef Raymond Blanc, the new campaign is aimed at the many thousands of people who are concerned over the appalling loss of honey bees , but who are unable to have a hive themselves. Martin Smith, BBKA President, said: ”Adopt a Beehive is the way people can do something to help the plight of the honey bee and support the charitable aims of the BBKA.

“They can be confident that their donation to the campaign will be making a direct contribution towards funding applied bee health research and training beekeepers – the vital measures needed to ensure our honey bees survive.”
Raymond Blanc, Michelin- starred chef, said: “I like to cook with the finest fresh locally sourced fruit and vegetables and I know just how important honey bees are in pollinating them. “We cannot take it for granted that the bees will always be buzzing around; we have to keep them healthy. If they disappear it will be a recipe for disaster. “We can all help by planting pollen and nectar rich plants and trees and of course giving money to fund research into why they are dying. “The Adopt a Beehive campaign will help. Remember, without bees, there may be no Apple Tart Maman Blanc… and no more honey for tea.” Investment in bee health research will be directed into tackling the effects of the varroa mite, endemic in UK colonies since 1992 , viruses and infections, work on queen rearing, honey bee genetics and bee husbandry as well as considering the effects of pesticides, bio-security and habitat loss. The BBKA recently announced £36,000 funding for post doctoral research into the genetic basis of hygienic behaviour (self cleansing) in honey bees at Sussex University.
Another beneficiary of campaign funding will be the BBKA’s new three year education programme to ensure that the nation’s beekeepers are up to the new challenges they face.

Martin Smith, BBKA President, continued: “Our honey bees have to stay healthy, research must continue into why they are dying, and we have to make facilities and materials available to ensure that British beekeepers are the best informed and trained in the world. This is the recipe for successful beekeeping.”

“Saga’s generous sponsorship has allowed us to set up Adopt a Beehive . Its millions of customers care deeply about the environment and the role honey bees play in it and we welcome their support.”

Andrew Goodsell, the Executive Chairman of Saga, said:"I am delighted that Saga has been able to help create the Adopt a Beehive campaign. Many people are deeply concerned about the environmental and other problems facing the honey bee. This scheme enables people who do not have time to keep bees personally to play an active part in helping to saving the British bee."
To Adopt a Beehive for a year costs £29.50 and each person will receive a welcome pack including a jar of British honey or a jar of honey mustard, a fridge magnet, a wooden honey dipper, postcards, facts sheet and certificate. The seasonal newsletter will provide a link to the hives of a network of beekeepers from around the UK and the latest news of bee health research. To sign up for Adopt a Beehive visit www.adoptabeehive.co.uk and meet the colony of 14 beekeepers whose progress can be followed online.

Its a Matter of Attitude

The society which scorns excellence
in plumbing as a humble activity and
tolerates shoddiness in philosophy
because it is an exalted activity
will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy ...
neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John W. Gardner

Inspiration

“If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it.”

- John Carmack

“Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.”

- Linus Torvalds

Evidence Based Beekeeping

I was recently asked, by a friend on Twitter to give my opinion on this article from the University of Sussex Apiculture Laboratory. I am just an amateur beekeeper so certainly would not claim to have anything like the same knowledge and facilities as those at the university so this is purely my own personal opinion based on 8 or 9 years of beekeeping.
I whole-heartedly agree that beekeeping does need scientific research and welcome any initiatives which will cast new light on some of beekeeping's mysteries. However I would suggest that it is far from correct that much of what we do as beekeepers is based on nothing more than traditional lore and custom. A great deal of research has been carried out using scientific methods over the many years that people have been writing books about beekeeping. It is just that the equipment and monitoring facillities available to the professional research scientist are far more powerful and sophisticated today than anything available at the time that Langstroth was busily revolutionising the craft.
I believe that most beekeepers would aim to carry out evidence based beekeeping if the evidence was available and was interpreted in a way that was applicable to their particular circumstances. However, the variables involved, have highly complex interrelationships.
For example, the survival of a queen being introduced into a hive will be dependent on several factors:

1. Strain of bee that produced the queen
2. Genetic heredity of queen
3. Strain of bee in target colony
4. Time of year
5. Status of target colony - how long queenless/existence of brood/availability of stores/proportion of nurse/housekeeping/foraging bees
6. "Mood" of colony - have they been recently disturbed/will they be disturbed/more or less agressive
7. Local climatic conditions
8. Local availability of forage - is there a flow on
9. The "Quality" of the queen - is she laying well/physically well developed/nourished

and several more that we are probably not even aware of yet.
These variables will all affect the level of pheremome responses to the various stimuli involved. The use of a cage is intended to give the resident bees a chance to get used to the chemical makeup of any queen that is introduced so that comunication can be set up before the bees come into direct contact with the queen. Without this separation it is likely that alarm messages will be propagated and the new queen will be killed. The attack message is communicated by scent so heavy smoking of the hive will also work by masking the attack scent. So the bees will not attack the new queen. This could well be effective every time because the mechanism is known and the variables in the laboratory apiary are probably pretty constant. The queens are probably raised in a standard way rather than being sourced from whatever the beekeeping suppliers happen to be breeding or importing at the moment. The arrangement of the apiary, the relative position of the hives, the location of external stimuli will be fairly consitent. The important thing here is that the research predicts the probablity of a particular outcome given a particular method. The value of the research should be in the identification of the variables and an assesment of there interractions and relative validity rather than determination of a particular method on the basis of probability.
The evidence suggested by the results of any particular scientific experiment will need to be replicable by beekeepers in practice. What I am trying to get accross here is that before beekeepers can practically follow an "Evidence Based" approach to beekeeping they will have to understand which variables are significant and be able to replicate conditions that will allow the recommendations to be followed.
Scientific research and the dissemination of its findings costs a lot of money. Recently the only big money in entemological research has been provided by the agrichemical companies who obviously will have a diferent focus. It is to be hoped that with the promised Government funding the money will finally be available to determine the relative value of all the variables involved in assessing and working with bee physiology/sociology climate/environment/chemicals etc. and inform the beekeeper accordingly.
Will I be just using smoke to introduce queens in future?
Well... if I buy a queen from most suppliers she is going to cost in the region of £40, in the height of the season it is quite likely that there will be no queens to purchase and if you can it could be up to a week before you can try again, there will have to be some pretty compelling evidence to persuade me to risk it! I will next year try to start raising my own queens so if I have plenty I may well experiment, does that qualify as "Evidence Based Beekeeping" ?

Why Engineers Don't Write Cook Books

Chocolate Chip Cookies:

Ingredients:

1.) 532.35 cm3 gluten
2.) 4.9 cm3 NaHCO3
3.) 4.9 cm3 refined halite
4.) 236.6 cm3 partially hydrogenated tallow triglyceride
5.) 177.45 cm3 crystalline C12H22O11
6.) 177.45 cm3 unrefined C12H22O11
7.) 4.9 cm3 methyl ether of protocatechuic aldehyde
8.) Two calcium carbonate-encapsulated avian albumen-coated protein
9.) 473.2 cm3 theobroma cacao
10.) 236.6 cm3 de-encapsulated legume meats (sieve size #10)


To a 2-L jacketed round reactor vessel (reactor #1) with an overall heat
transfer coefficient of about 100 Btu/F-ft2-hr, add ingredients one, two
and three with constant agitation.

In a second 2-L reactor vessel with a radial flow impeller operating at
100 rpm, add ingredients four, five, six, and seven until the mixture is
homogenous.

To reactor #2, add ingredient eight, followed by three equal volumes of
the homogenous mixture in reactor #1. Additionally, add ingredient nine
and ten slowly, with constant agitation. Care must be taken at this point
in the reaction to control any temperature rise that may be the result of
an exothermic reaction.

Using a screw extrude attached to a #4 nodulizer, place the mixture
piece-meal on a 316SS sheet (300 x 600 mm). Heat in a 460K oven for a
period of time that is in agreement with Frank & Johnston's first order
rate expression (see JACOS, 21, 55), or until golden brown.

Once the reaction is complete, place the sheet on a 25C heat-transfer
table, allowing the product to come to equilibrium.

Written by Butch Kemper (a long time ago!)

Review of Lady Chaterly's Lover

This pictorial account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion the book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.
Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959)