INTRODUCTION The Honey Trap hhave not always loved bees as I do now. Even when I was a child, it was butterflies, baby birds, frog spawn, snails, and newts that most grabbed my attention, never bees ~ apart from bumblebees, that is, which [loved from an early age for their bumbliness and the humming, buzzing sounds they made. It wasn’t till many decades later, whilst I was running an envi- ronmental charity in 2006, that I first became aware of the magnitude of bee diversity and the wonders of bees’ relationships with flowering plants. ‘The media were at that time reporting mysterious and extremely worry- ing happenings on the other side of the Atlantic. Vast numbers of honeybees were ‘disappearing’ in the United States, and che phenomenon — which thankfully appears to have since abated —became known as colony collapse disorder, or CCD. One of its key features was the complete disappearance of worker bees. These bees were heading out on foraging trips, leaving hives full of eggs, grubs, and honey, but not returning. No trace could be found of them; and their queens, left untended, died. For several years ina row, around 30 percent of hives in the United States were reported to have failed, and at the peak of CCD, over the winter of 2006-07, an alarming 1DANCING WITH BEES 60 percent failed. People began totalk ofa ‘bee apocalypse’, and extra funding ‘was poured into research and outreach programmes to save the honeybees. Like many others, I followed the story of honeybee losses with increas- ing concern. Initially, I was mostly worried about the implications to the Juman food chain ifthe losses being reported in the news were to continue. However, as I began to do a litle research of my own into what was going fon, my concerns and focus switched from how the losses might affect us to concern for the honeybees themselves, and then other insect pollinators. Planet Earth is home to some 352,000 described species of flowering plants. These are, in turn, pollinated by at least 350,000 described, and many additional undescribed, species of pollinating animals. Plants and their animal pollinators have been evolving together for millions of years, and whilst some flowers have become specialists, and adapted to coexist with specific animals, most are generalists and are visited by many different species. Birds and bats pollinate flowers, as do rodents, marsupials, and liz~ ards, But the majority of pollinating animals are insects: wasps, hoverflies and other fies, butterflies, moths, ants, flower beetles, Bees are known for the important role they play in pollinating the plan- c¢'s flowering plants. Through this role, they help sustain major ecological and agricultural systems, Bumblebees are vital for the cross-pollination of tomatoes. A group of native North American solitary bees, the so-called squash bees, can take the lion’s share of the credit for the production of ‘most commercially grown squashes and pumpkins. And without managed honeybees, the vast California almond crops would fal I was shocked when I realised the enormous scale of commercial beekeeping in North America, and horrified when I learned about the stresses these poor creatures are exposed to, The figures involved, and the distances the bees are transported, are mind-boggling. In 2017, migratory beekeepers shipped around 1.7 million honeybee colonies to and around California, where they pollinated 1.3 million acres of almond trees. These bees were in addition to the 500,000 colonies that were already resident in the almond valleys. The almond crop alone relies on trucking some 88 billion bees from their wintering homes, which, in some cases, are upto one thousand miles away. Back and forth go the hives on flatbed trucks, east and west, with stops to pollinate summer erops in the Midwest, before they finally get.a rest over the winter. Early in the new year, they start the whole of course, bees. 2THE HONEY TRAP circuit all over again. Some of these hives will travel ten thousand miles of roads each year as the bees pollinate crops including apples, clover, canola, alfalfa, sunflowers, and blueberries. Far from being surprised that honeybees were disappearing and dying from a mysterious ‘disorder, I became increasingly surprised that any of them were surviving at all. Our relationship with honeybees goes back at least nine thousand years, to the very dawn of agriculture. Archaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic farmers kept wild bees and gathered their honey and wax for medicines and food, but we have almost certainly been dancing with bees since long before then. A cave painting in Valencia, Spain, believed to be about fifteen thousand years old, very clearly depicts a human figure robbing honey from a hive high up on a cliff wall. Our human ancestors must have taken a liking to honey from bees before anyone ever attempted to manage them. You may be under the impression that all the planet’s honeybees live in hives, groups of which are known as apiaries. In fact, not all honeybees are managed by humans. Honeybees frequently set up home inside tree hol- lows, chimneys, wall cavities, roofs, and other spaces where they canand do survive, undisturbed, and unmanaged, for many years. Bees that swarmand establish colonies away from hives are often referred to as feral Asithappens, [have a number of friends who happily share their homes with active honeybee colonies, more often than not, lodging in their roof spaces or chimneys. So long as the bees don’t come inside the house, and whilst the weight of the honeycomb doesn’t compromise the structure of the building in any way, such colonies are perfectly harmless. People often become quite attached to them and fondly refer to the colonies as curbees. Butsuch colonies are not always welcome. [read areport recently about an NHS hospital in Cardiff that had become aware of a massive honeybee colony living in its roof space only after honey started seeping through the ceiling and down the walls into one of the wards. Needless to say, this caused quite a kerfuffle when it happened. Wherever they end up living, feral honeybees need a space large enough to accommodate a colony of pethaps sixty thousand bees or more, as well asa sufficient volume to build ‘wax comb in which the queen can lay her eggs and the workers can store honey and pollen, Other than this, anything goes. Whether the cavity is tall 3DANCING WITH BEES and narrow, or long and horizontal, the colony will build their comb to fit the space available to them. Honeybees that live in hives are ofien referred to as domesticated, though to my mind this term applies more to animals that have changed their wild behaviour to fin with humans, than honeybees, which as far as we can see, have not changed their behaviour one bit to suit us. I believe the word ‘managed! is far more appropriate ~ or, in the case of the large-scale beekeeping that occurs in the United States, perhaps it would be better to say ‘farmed’. Either way, most of the bees kept in hives today are kept for the express purpose of pollinating human crops, or to harvest their wax and their honey, and often both. Although some other bee species do make and store small amounts of honey, it is mainly Apis species that produce honey in sufficient quantities to make them attractive to beekeepers. It is honeybees’ ability to store enough ofthis sugary food to see them through times of hardship, whether thisbe drought, heavy rain, or the cold of winter, that marks them out from most other species. This hoard, combined with their ability to adapt to use whatever space is available to them to build their homes, has been key to their success and survival not only in the wild butalongside humans as well. Butt is not just their honey, or their ability to pollinate crops, that has, drawn generations of humans to keeping honeybees. There is something clse, something resonating deep within the human psyche, that makes us wwantto care for them, to know more about them, and even to overcome our fear of them so that we might connect with them in some way. Perhaps itis their work ethic, or how everything they do is for the ‘greater good’ of the hive, Maybe it is because we aspire to be more like them. have been thinking about this alot recently, for though itis the ‘other bees’ have ended up championing, Lalso find myself wanting toknow more about honeybees. From what litle time Ihave pentwith them, [completely “understand why those who keep them grow to love them so much. [havea book, The Life ofthe Bee, written in 1901 by Maurice Macterlinck, a Belgian poct, playwright, and beekeeper. Itis without doubt one ofthe mostbeauti- faland enchanting books I have read about honeybees. ‘No living creature, not even man’, writes Maeterlinck, ‘has achieved in the centre of his sphere, what the bee has achieved in her own’ Maybe that's partof their attraction? ‘That, if we get closer, we, too, might learn to achieve what the honeybee -THE HONEY TRAP has achieved, thats, to be truly social, to cooperate and coexist as they do, not always putting ourselves first, but working together towards acommon cause. Maeterlinck calls this “The Spirit of the Beehive’ Honeybees are highly developed social creatures, living together in colonies that comprise a queen, tens of thousands of female workers, and up to a few thousand male drones that are produced at specific times of the life eycle for the sole purpose of mating. In scientific terms, this level of social organisation, in which a single female produces the offspring, and non-reproductive members of the colony cooperate in caring for the young, is known as eusociality. As well as living in communities with overlapping generations of adults and offspring, and cooperatively caring for the young, eusocial creatures are defined by the fact that they have a ‘division of labour’, with individuals assigned to specific castes, each caste having aclearly defined role thats not performed by others. Amongst honeybees, these are the queen, workers, and drones. Honeybee colonies and other eusocial units (including the five hundred or so species of 'stingless bees, called Meliponini, that are foundin tropical or subtropical regions) are often described as superorganiims; each “unit functioning as an organic whole and individuals within the unit being ‘unable to survive by themselves for any length of time. A honeybee colony without its workers, or its queen, would be like a human body without its limbs, or its heart. Eusocial species are capable of expressing extremely complex behav- fours, including group decision-making. This complexity provides them with several advantages over their more solitary cousins. For starters, ceusocial creatures are more efficient foragers, not only working together to find food and other resources but also communicating the whereabouts of their findings to other members oftheir colony. Because the queen does not need to care for her brood ~ that is, her eggs and grubs, or larvae ~ but can rely ona caste of thousands of workers to do so, honeybee colonies can grow very large. Their sheer numbers mean they are able to outcompete other insects for both territory and food. (This is why introducing vast numbers of honeybee hives to an area can have a negative effect on existing populations of native bees.) These enormous populations are also quickly able to build oF repair their homes, or to mobilise to defend their hives and stores if they should come under ateack. The advantages of sociality are 5-DANCING WITH BEES balanced by disadvantages, such as the demand for large amounts of food to support the colonies. There are other eusocial insects, including ants, termites, and certain wasp species, but amongstbees, rue eusociality isthe exception rather than therrule. Even bumblebees, hough mostly social, fall just short of the more developed form of eusociality displayed by honeybees. Unlike honeybee colonies that ean survive as a unit for many years, bumblebee colonies are annual, and until the first brood of worker bees hatch out, there is no worker caste in the nest to share the labour with the queen. Other bees display various degrees of sociality, including nest sharing and cooperative brood care, without being truly eusocial ‘The majority of bees have no social traits whatsoever and are called solitary. Though solitary bees might live alongside each other, they usually have their own individual nests or nest entrances, and do not interact with others of their kind (unless, thats, hey are mating). Whatever their social tendency, once you get to know a little about bees, you cannot help but see them ina different light. Of the twenty thousand species of bees, itis the eusocial colonies of honeybees that are by far the easiest to observe, in large part because so ‘many of them live in hives managed by beekeepers. Iam not a beekeeper, but as it happens, my husband, Rob, is—and much of what I have learned about the ways of these bees has been through watching the comings and goings atthe entrances to Rob's hives. I met Rob in the summer of 2013, ata natural beckeeping convention, held at an outdoor conference centre in Worcestershire. It was organised by my friend, ‘bee-centric’ beekeeping advocate and teacher Phil Chandler. The convention had been arranged as an opportunity forbeekeepers who prefer minimal intervention and a hands-off approach, to get together and swap ideas. Phil had invited me along to givea talk on ‘otherbees’—to fly the flag, s0 to speak, for our beautiful but less well known bumblebees and solitary bees. My talk was not scheduled till the Sunday afternoon, but Phil had invited me to join them for the whole weekend. I had for some time been curious to know more about natural beekeeping, so jumped at his offer. It was on the Friday evening, as people were arriving and setting up camp, ‘