Introducing... Queen Eunice!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #2 is called Eunice. She is named after Eunice Newton Foote, who was a scientist, and who discovered that certain gases increases in temperature when exposed to sunlight - a phenomenon that we now refer to as the Greenhouse Effect.

Eunice was born Eunice Newton in Connecticut in 1819.  (Fun fact - her father's name was Isaac Newton, so of course she became a scientist...!)  She attended school at the Troy Female Seminary, which was a preparatory school founded by Emma Willard, an education activist and feminist.  She was encouraged to attend science courses at the nearby Rensselaer School, which covered both scientific theory and laboratory experimentation.

In 1841, Eunice married lawyer and mathematician Elisha Foote.  Elisha had undertaken his training under judge Daniel Cady, who was the father of women's rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  In 1848, Eunice and Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined several other women's rights campaigners at the Seneca Falls Convention, which was the first convention on women's rights.  Eunice was a member of the the convention's editorial committee, and was a signatory to the convention's Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded voting rights for women, as well as other legal and social rights.

Eunice conducted several experiments in which she investigated the effect of sunlight on different gases.  This involved exposing tubes of different gases to direct sunlight at different pressures, assessing moist and dry gases, and comparing with gases placed in the shade.  She made two important observations: firstly, the amount of moisture in the gas affected the temperature; and secondly, the tube filled with carbon dioxide became hotter than the others when placed in direct sunlight.  She also noted that the tube filled with carbon dioxide took far longer to cool down than the other tubes.

Eunice theorised that "An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action, as well as from increased weight, must have necessarily resulted."  In other words, she drew a direct link between an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and global warming.

Eunice wrote up her findings in a paper titled Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays, which was presented on her behalf by Joseph Henry (of the Smithsonian) to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856.  It was published the same year in The American Journal of Science and Arts.

Eunice's later work involved experiments on static electricity in air, including the effects of temperature, pressure and water vapour on electrical charge.  She also worked on a number of inventions throughout her life, including a more efficient paper-making machine, and a thermostatically-controlled cooking stove.

As with many female scientists, Eunice's work was overlooked for many years, and her discovery attributed to a man - John Tyndall, in the case of the warming action of carbon dioxide and water vapour.  However, Tyndall published his findings three years after Eunice, and so credit for the discover properly belongs to her.

You can find out more about Eunice Newton Foote here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote

Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Eunice:

Science bonus!

Regular readers will know how much we like an actual research paper at The Southdown Apiary.  So here's an HTML transcript of Eunice's original 1856 paper, published in The American Journal of Science and Arts:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/transcript-of-of-34890503

It's also available as a PDF scan:
https://ecology.iww.org/PDF/misc/foote_circumstances-affecting-heat-suns-rays_1856.pdf

And in a fancy web-reader:
https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382/mode/2up?view=theater

Introducing... Queen Nettie!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #1 is called Nettie. She is named after Nettie Stevens, who was a geneticist, and who first observed the Y chromosome and identified it as being the one responsible for male sex determination.

Nettie Stevens was born in Vermont in 1861, and the family moved to Massachusetts when she was 2 years old.  She attended Westford Academy, Westfield Normal School (now Westfield State University) and Stanford University, where she studied for her BA and MA in biology.  She then began graduate work in physiology and histology.  Following this, Nettie enrolled in Bryn Mawr College to undertake a PhD in cytology.  Her doctoral studies encompassed a number of areas, including the development of sperm and eggs, and the germ cells of insects.

Nettie was awarded her PhD in 1903, and remained at Bryn Mawr first as a research fellow in biology, then a reader in experimental morphology.  In 1904-1905, she spent a year as a post-doctoral research assistant at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, where she received a grant to undertake research on heredity, including sex determination, based on Mendel's theories of inheritance.  Nettie began by studying the germ cells of aphids, to try to identify possible differences in male and female chromosomes.

In 1905 Nettie observed that the male chromosome set of Tenebrio molitor (the yellow mealworm beetle), consisting of 20 chromosomes (in 10 pairs), had one unusually small chromosome.  She correctly identified this as being the chromosome that determines sex, and published her results in a paper titled Studies in Spermatogenesis.  Nettie further noted that this small chromosome was always paired with a larger one, and that an egg fertilised by a sperm that carries the small chromosome becomes a male while an egg fertilised by a sperm with the larger chromosome becomes female.  She then studied other organisms, including aphids, mealworms, beetles, and flies, and found that they used the same large-large / large-small chromosome parings to determine sex.  We now refer to these pairings as XX and XY.

Nettie became ill with breast cancer at the age of 50.  She was offered the position of research professor at Bryn Mawr College, but was unable to accept the offer due to her ill health.  She died on May 4, 1912.  Despite her short life, she published around 40 research papers and made one of the great discoveries of modern biology.

You can find out more about Nettie Stevens here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens

Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Nettie:

Science bonus!

If you're a bit of a geek (and regular readers will know this is a pro-geek zone), you can read Nettie's original Studies in Spermatogenesis paper online.  Here's the screen-reader friendly version, courtesy of Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31545.html.images

It's also available in other formats - here's a list:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31545

And here, at the Internet Archive, is a scan of the original:
https://archive.org/details/studiesinspermat01stevrich/page/n8/mode/1up?view=theater

And Another One!

A couple of Fridays ago, I got a call from local bee enthusiast Gerry (who was involved in the previous post's shenanigans) letting me know about another swarm.  This time, it was a small-ish swarm, around shoulder height, in a small fir tree at the crazy golf course in Victoria Park:

This looked like a nice easy one - and since Gerry and I had just had practice with the previous swarm, we were feeling pretty confident.  Everything started well - the whole swarm dropped easily into Gerry's bucket when I shook the branch, and they all went into the nucleus in one go.

But, that was when it all started to get a bit more complicated.  As you can see from the photo above, there were quite a lot of bees on top of the nucleus, and airborne in front of it.  We watched for a few minutes, hoping they would settle down.  Instead, the opposite happened - and bees started walking out of the nucleus and gathering at the front:

This looked like a problem - when bees do this, it usually means they are about to re-swarm.  Gerry and I discussed what to do, but the reality is, when this starts to happen, there is almost nothing you can do to stop it.  Your only chance is to find the queen, and somehow keep her in the nucleus.  But, really, what are the chances of spotting a queen among a swarm of 10,000 bees?

And that's when I watched the queen walk right out of the front of the nucleus.

I had to act fast.  The next conversation went something like this:

"That's the queen Gerry - I can see her, right there on the front of the nuc.  What do I do?  Do I grab her?"

"Yeah, I think you need to pick her up."

"Yeah - I think you're right.  OK.  I'm doing it."

And with that, I reached towards the front of the nuc, aimed a finger and thumb at the queen... and missed.  You pick up a queen bee by her wings, and it's not the most difficult thing to do, but I'm a clumsy oaf.  The thing is, if you miss once, she'll usually wiggle about a bit, and you have to hope she stays pointing in roughly the right direction (if you're right-handed, it's easiest if she's facing up and to the left).  If you miss twice, she'll get spooked and start haring off and you'll never catch her.  So I basically had one more shot.  I leaned in, breathed in, hovered a finger and thumb over her...

And got her!

This was great - now all I needed was something to put her in.  A matchbox would have been ideal.  Or my queen cage, which I'd foolishly left locked in the car.  Gerry had a quick chat with the chaps who ran the crazy golf, who went to have a rummage in their shed.  it felt like I was standing there for ever, holding onto this little insect who desperately wanted to wriggle free.  And trying not to hold on too tight, for fear of damaging her wings.  And then they came back, with an empty box that they used to keep their allen keys in.  It was good enough - I flipped open the flap, popped her inside, closed it up and put some gaffer tape on to make sure she couldn't escape.

The next problem was making sure all the other bees knew where she was.  They keep track of the queen via pheromones, which were of course now all circulating inside the box.  So, back to the shed to get a large screw, which I used to make some holes in the box.  And then I carefully placed the queen-in-a-box into the nucleus, and hoped the bees would be able to pick up the scent of her pheromones.

In case you are wondering, none of this is by-the-book swarm collection.  It was pretty much a combination of amateur hour, and making it up as we went along.  But, amazingly, it worked.  The bees picked up the scent, calmed down, and started heading back into the nucleus.  All was looking fine.  Until Gerry asked the obvious question:

"How are you going to get her out at the other end?"

Yeah.  I hadn't thought of that.  This was when my queen cage (now retrieved from the car) was going to come in useful.  It's basically a cylinder with a plunger, that looks like this:

If we could transfer the queen into the cage, and put that into the nucleus, then releasing the queen at the other end would be as easy as pulling the plunger.  But first we had to get the queen out of the box and into the cage.

Gerry devised a plan where we would cut the top of the box on three sides, peel back the flap and then put the cage over the queen.  So, back to the shed for a razor blade, and then we took the box out of the nucleus and I knelt down next to Gerry while he started cutting.  I was hoping he wouldn't slice through the queen...

Gerry told me he was ready, pulled back the flap (and got a sting for his efforts) and... no queen.  Well, not that we could see - the problem was, lots of bees had followed the pheromone trail, so the area where we'd been cutting the box now looked like this:

I felt I had no choice - I was going to have to put the open box back into the nucleus, and hope for the best.  I was just about to place it back, when the queen walked out and stood herself right in the middle of the bottom of the box.  This time there was no need to pick her up - I still had the queen cage in my other hand, so I carefully placed it over her, made sure she was at the far end of the cylinder and pushed the plunger half an inch in.  Now that she was secure, I put the queen cage into the nucleus, put the roof on, and waited.  After about half an hour, things were much more calm.

That was the hard part over, and after another half an hour I closed up the entrance, took the bees back to the apiary and put them in the hive.  Not a textbook swarm collection by any means, but at least I now have two full beehives again, which I'm really pleased about.  Neither of the queens have names yet, but that will probably be the subject of the next post.

Out With The Old... In With The New

April was cold, wet and just not good for beekeeping.  So I had to wait through most of the month before I could actually check my hives for the first time.  On the last Saturday, the weather was finally warm and dry enough to open up, so I headed over to the apiary, feeling cautiously excited to see what lay in store.  Unfortunately, it was pretty bad news.  Both hives and the nucleus looked like this:

That is, sadly, a cluster of dead bees.  So, all three colonies have perished.  What killed them?  I can't say for sure - maybe it was a virus, maybe the cold and damp weather, perhaps a combination of the two, or something else entirely.  Whatever the reason, this is sadly the end for queens Christina, Philippa and Henrietta.  Unfortunately, there is only one thing to be done - all the brood frames have to be burned.

There is some honey in the hives.  Some of it has started to ferment, and so won't be consumable.  But some I think is still sealed and could well be extracted and put into jars.  I'm going to have a look tomorrow and see what I can rescue.  As for the honey that has started to ferment... I'm wondering if this is the year when I finally have a go at making mead?  At least it will be something to cheer myself up after losing all my bees.

However... all is not lost.  On Wednesday, I got a call from fellow local beekeeper Gerry, who saw this hanging from a tree opposite his house:

That is a swarm - a big one, too!  Gerry already has his apiary fully stocked, so he was kind enough to offer me first dibs on the bees - and I of course jumped at the chance!  Luckily, the swarm was on a nice flexible branch at head height, so Gerry held a large bucket underneath while I gave the the branch a quick shake, and the whole swarm dropped into the bucket.  It was a textbook swarm collection.  Gerry had a spare nucleus, so he tipped the bees in and put the roof on, and then we waited for them to settle.

After about an hour they had all settled down, and the remaining airborne bees had all made their way into the nucleus.  So I placed them (carefully!) into the car, and drove the short distance up to the apiary, where I had some spare frames ready to pop inside.  This was the point I realised just what a big swarm it was - it took some time to carefully slide the new frames in between the thousands of bees:

So that is where we are so far - all my old bees are gone, but I'm in a great position to get back started again this year.  I'm planning to go to the apiary tomorrow, rescue what harvestable honey I can, and then move the bees into one of the hives.  Once that's done, the new beekeeping year should be properly under way.