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How to kill bees with soapy water

I want to address this issue because lots of non-beekeepers land on this site looking for ways to kill bees without using pesticides. This is good news because it shows that people are becoming aware of the dangers of pesticides to our environment, children, and pets. But killing a swarm of bees with soap is not a walk in the park.

If you have stinging insects you need to get rid of, I strongly recommend you call a local beekeeper or a company that gathers wasps for medical purposes. These people will generally come out to your home for free. Once there, they will be able to identify the type of insect you have and either collect it or tell you what needs to be done. If a nest is firmly established in your walls, removing it may be a time-consuming and expensive undertaking. In any case, you will know a lot more after a bug person takes a look.

If the nest is small and outside your home, you can try to kill it yourself with a solution of soapy water (one part liquid dish soap to four parts water) in a plastic spray bottle or garden sprayer. Before you start you need to sequester your family and pets in a safe place and cover yourself from head to toe with protective clothing. Also, be sure no neighbors or pedestrians are nearby.

Soap kills insects because it is a surfactant—a substance that essentially makes water wetter. If you take a leaf and spray it with plain water, the water forms little round droplets. If you spray the same leaf with soapy water, the water flattens out into a thin layer. The wax of the leaf is a fatty substance much like the wax on the outside of an insect or the grease on your dishes—normally water cannot penetrate it. But add soap to the water and suddenly the water and the wax (or grease) form an attraction for each other.

In effect, the molecules of water—with the help of the soap—surround the fatty molecules. In the case of your dishes, molecules of fat surrounded by the soapy water are released from the dish and go down the drain. On the leaf or insect, the molecules of wax surrounded by soapy water allow more water to freely enter the insect’s body. Essentially, it drowns.

The homeowner who tries this method must be aware of several things:

Remember that pollinators of many types are endangered, so it’s best to have someone look at a nest before destroying it. If you know nothing of bees and wasps, stay clear of them until someone can identify them. If you live in areas with Africanized honey bees you don’t want to go near a swarm—even to kill it—until someone in the know has assessed the danger.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

The waxy surface of leaves is similar to the protective surface of insects. Soap can break down these layers and make them permeable to water. Flickr photo by Brett Jordan.

Is there a way to feed wild bees?

It’s my turn to ask questions, and I have a few of them lined up. This first one just came from a reader in Texas (Mike) and I don’t have an answer for him.

Because Texas is having such a terrible drought, the wild bees are finding little to eat–a situation that doesn’t bode well for the overwintering young (generally, they each need a little pile of nectar and pollen) or the overwintering queens.

Mike put out hummingbird feeders and is attracting nothing but–you guessed it–hummingbirds. This is odd in a way because lots of beekeepers complain about honey bees frequenting hummingbird feeders and even storing pink “honey” in their combs. [Commercial hummingbird food is often colored red.]

Most bees are attracted to food sources by both sight and scent. Sight first, until they get close, and then scent. So if the hummingbird feeder is a color the bees don’t see, it probably wouldn’t attract bees as readily as one they can see. Also, different bees see slightly different parts of the spectrum. Honey bees, for example, don’t see red (it appears black to them) but they do see ultraviolet. I don’t know which colors other bees are sensitive to, although I often see bumble bees on red flowers. Whether the bumble bees found them by color or scent, I don’t know.

As with any other “open” food source a hummingbird feeder may attract predators (wasps) as well as bees, but apparently that is not a problem for Mike who is attracting nothing but hummingbirds.

My “feeding” of wild bees has been limited to planting flowering species they seem to like. I’ve never considered feeding them beyond that, but in such a severe drought, I can certainly understand the desire to lend them a hand. Does anyone have any experience feeding wild bees? Please send me your thoughts.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite.com

Tiny bee builds flower-petal nests

Scientists in Turkey and Iran recently discovered a tiny bee that uses flower petals to build nest capsules. The bee, Osmia avoseta, uses only the petals of Onobrychis viciifolia for this important work.

I somehow missed this story, which was run by NPR on May 6, 2010. But it’s not too late to follow the link and see a fascinating series of photos by Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History. It is well worth a look.

The fertile female O. avoseta builds about ten of these petal nests in a cluster. The cluster itself is in the bottom of a thumb-size burrow in the ground. One by one she collects chunks of petals and laminates them together, cemented by thin layers of mud.

Once a capsule is complete, she provisions it with a mound of nectar and pollen and, like other Osmia females, lays a single egg on top of the provision. She then seals the open end of the capsule to protect it from environment dangers. Once the capsules are complete, the eggs transform into larvae and then pupae. The pupae spin a cocoon inside the capsule before eventually becoming adult bees.

The petal-donor, Onobrychis viciifolia (also known as sainfoin) is a perennial legume native to Eurasia. It has been cultivated widely for animal forage and is now found throughout the world. The flowers are pink, showy, and produce large amounts of both pollen and nectar, making it extremely attractive to many pollinators, including honey bees.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Pollen can carry disease to native bees

While studying pesticides in pollen, I was always curious about the potential for pollen to carry disease organisms as well. Indeed, a new study that appeared in the December 22 PLoS ONE confirmed my worst fears—that pollen may be a major route of viral infection from managed honey bees to wild native bees.

The authors of the study examined the four viruses that are most commonly found in North American honey bees—deformed-wing virus, sacbrood virus, black queen cell virus, and Kashmir bee virus—plus Israeli acute paralysis virus, which is often found in conjunction with colony collapse disorder. They asked a number of questions about bee-to-bee disease transmission and then set up a series of experiments to answer those questions.

They found eleven species of wild pollinators in Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois that carried at least some of the viruses. These viruses were much more likely to show up in wild pollinators that lived near apiaries known to be infected with the various pathogens.

Tests on both the pollen and the bees themselves showed that in many cases disease-free foragers were carrying pollen loads that contained viral diseases—especially deformed-wing virus and sacbrood virus. This finding indicates that the pollen, itself, may be capable of transmitting the disease from one bee to another—it may not be necessary for an infected bee to pass the virus directly to another bee. Similar to human viruses that survive on door knobs, these bee viruses appear to survive on pollen grains.

In other experiments, honey bees and bumble bees kept in greenhouses were shown to transmit Israeli acute paralysis virus among themselves by simply foraging on the same flowers. The disease moved freely in both directions, from honey bees to bumble bees and from bumble bees to honey bees.

The authors point out that the exact mechanisms of disease transmission via flowers and pollen are not understood and more study is needed to see if host plants have a greater role in disease transmission than just as physical carriers. In the meantime, it is important for beekeepers to understand the impact diseased honey bees may have on wild pollinator populations. Honey bee health needs to be a priority if we are to maintain the health—or perhaps the very existence—of wild pollinator populations.

For more information, you can download the complete paper for free at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0014357.

Rusty

Foraging habits of different types of bees

Bees may be grouped into three categories based on their foraging habits. Bees that prefer only a small number of flowering species are known as oligolectic. The advantage to the plant kingdom from this behavior is enormous, since it assures cross-pollination within a single species.

A few species of bee are known to pollinate one—and only one—species of flower. Bee-flower mutualisms of this type, known as monolectic, are rare but extremely important from an evolutionary perspective. Neither species will survive without the other, so a loss of one means the loss of both. Most bees, however, are opportunistic foragers that gather pollen from a vast number of species. These bees, known as polylectic, are valuable to farmers who often grow more than one crop at a time or more than one crop in sequence. Both honey bees and bumble bees are polylectic.

Even bees that are polylectic tend to visit only one type of flower per foraging trip, a trait known as “floral consistency.” Nature’s way of ensuring good pollination, floral consistency prevents a bee from going from a clover to a vinca to a cucumber to a bean, for example. Such random flower visits would not yield the pollination necessary to set seed and maintain plant populations from year to year.

Although polylectic bees are able to forage on many different plants, they still have preferences. Nectar-collecting bees such as honey bees and stingless bees prefer flowers that have high sugar content. Honey bees will readily visit apple, cherry, and plum, for example, but avoid pear unless there is nothing else to eat. On the other hand most wild bees—because they collect only pollen and not nectar—readily visit the low-sugar-producing flowers of pear and similar plants.