We've often commented on the similarities between honeybees and humans, and sleep is yet another area that we share. Honeybees sleep at night, and sometimes rest during the day by sticking their heads inside empty wax cells in the comb (cute, huh?) where presumably it's quieter and out of the way of the house and field bees busy with their work. In 2020, we noticed our bees were angry and aggressive, and it seemed to get worse as the season progressed. We thought perhaps it was the historic drought and the double disaster of the spring dandelion fail and the lack of fall honey flow that made them edgy, but now we know the truth: we inadvertently moved our hives last spring so they were closer to our electric fence. A study done in 2019 in Italy noted that when hives are closer than 2 m to an electric fence, the bees are more aggressive, and it is believed the repetitive pulses of electricity disrupt their brains. They are highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields, and are even charged themselves - a positively charged bee can find flowers by their negative charges, among other things. A field bee leaving a flower changes the electric field around the flower momentarily, and this signals to another bee in close proximity that the flower was already visited (and its nectar already collected), so not to bother visiting that flower. We have noticed in the past that we never see bees serially visit the same flower one after another and now we know why!
What is amazing to us is that our fence is not typically on 24 hours a day, but we always have it on at night to ward off bears and raccoons and yet during the daytime, the bees were pretty mad at us. All we could surmise was the obvious: the electrical pulses disrupted their sleep, and bad sleep at night translated into unhappy bees during the day.
In late winter, we rearranged our fence on a cold windy day when everyone was safely tucked inside their hives. Most people don't realize it, but honeybees still go out in winter, but a cold, windy day is also an "indoor" day for them too (just like for most people). Last week we did our first major spring inspection, a highly disruptive activity because we're pulling frames out to look at brood and count eggs. What did we find? With a good night's rest, our bees were sweeties again, busy with their work and largely ignoring us. No one bumped us, and nobody got hurt!
Lesson learned? So many of us lie in bed with our cellphones next to our heads on nightstands, and not always turned off either. We walk around with these things in our pockets and handle them 24/7. We have modems and repeaters everywhere we go. We used to think that perhaps all this concern about wifi and electromagnetic waves was silly, but now, we're not so sure. Instead of looking at YouTube before bed, at least some of us are leaving the phones off, and opening up a good old fashioned paper book. We're sleeping better too.
The bees are off to a good start this year...we already see nectar coming in and the dandelions are not in bloom yet! Good sleep=busy bees!
Disclaimers: Blog posts are opinions, not advice. One thing all beekeepers will agree on, is that if you ask 10 beekeepers what to do, you'll get 13 different answers. Beekeeping is alchemy, nature, and a bit of magic.
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