Our Approach to Honeybee Care
We know our patients: western honeybees
Our patients are primarily domesticated western honeybees (Apis mellifera). Honeybees are known for their elaborate hives made of wax, their complex and organized eusocial colonies, and their production of honey. Of all pollinating species in the world, the western honeybee has become so important to our most essential food crops that it is the only insect species to be successfully domesticated by humans. While these beloved fuzzy flyers are native to Europe and Asia, humans have imported them across the world for their use as honey producers and crop pollinators.
At the clinic, our care-giving and rescue protocols are heavily informed by the biology, behavior, colony structure, and cognition of these social insects. Read on to discover how scientific knowledge of Apian biology was applied to create species-specific care for our imperiled pollinators!
Nutrition
There is an important relationship between bees’ nutritional status and their resilience. Bees’ ability to withstand the effects of toxic pesticides, parasites, viruses, and bacteria is intimately tied to having abundant food sources near their colonies, and unfortunately, these food sources are becoming more and more scarce as urban development overtakes green spaces and natural environments.
One of our main therapies at the clinic is based on addressing our patients' nutritional deficiencies. We offer concentrated sugar-water solutions, honey, pollen protein clusters, and foraged flowers to malnourished bees in order to stave off starvation and re-build their strength.
Heat Therapy
Another vital consideration for honeybee care is warmth! Honeybees are such interdependent creatures that they need their hivemates’ body heat just to survive. Their body temperature needs to be maintained at a steady 95°F (35°C)—similar to our own internal body temperature—before their extremities, including their wings, become activated, allowing them to fly.
Environmental heat and accumulated warmth within the hive dictate the energy level of the bees, sustaining them, and allowing them to move and function properly. If bees are removed from their hivemates for an extended time, they will become hypothermic and their wings will cease to work. On especially frigid days, bees can become stranded away from their hive—far from the life-giving warmth of their hivemates.
Additionally, bees’ visual and spatial perception hasn’t evolved to process human architecture or the structure of cities. The rapid disappearance of natural spaces in the environment causes the bees to make deadly navigation errors. When they are unable to locate themselves relative to their hive, these lost, errant bees usually succumb to starvation or hypothermia, shutting down and slowly dying.
These factors, together, have led to a surge of lethargic bees, which you may have noticed crawling sluggishly on the ground in your area. In an effort to stave off hypothermia, we have prototyped a special honeybee incubator called the Bee Intensive Care Unit (BICU) at the clinic. The thermo-regulated BICU raises our patients’ body temperature to that perfect 95° Fahrenheit. Coupled with nutritional support, this heat therapy is a vital lifeline, giving the bees a second chance to try to find their way back home.
Comfortable Clinic Visits
We are committed to providing care that is ecologically valid and that replicates the comfort of the natural hive as much as possible! To design a space of safety and recuperation for the bees, we had to imagine ourselves as honeybees, adopting trans-species perspective-taking as our main design strategy.
The materials in the clinic—terrariums, incubators, and rescue pods—are informed by the perceptual world of Apis mellifera, with hexagonal geometries, warmth, darkness, snugness, and density of the hive becoming important considerations. It was also critical to privilege chemical senses—taste and smell—the bees’ predominant mode of processing the world.
Foregrounding the olfactory senses led us to use very specific materials to make the bees feel more “at home.” We use genuine beeswax—extra wax sourced from local beekeepers that is melted and re-formed into sheets—in order to line all of our BICUs and hospitalization terrariums. The familiar scent of the wax is so attractive to the bees that it even compels sick bees to clamber right into our rescue pods, of their own free will!
Finally, synthetic queen bee pheromone is included in the clinic’s comprehensive plan for providing care. This pheromone gives the convalescing worker bees the sense that everything is “queen-right”—a very vital thing for a bee! This bolsters the clinic’s efficacy in terms of providing extra comfort and a sense of safety for the patients in our care.