down the microscope

It was the beekeepers' monthly club meeting this evening.  The hall we use has been pretty good about remembering to let us in for some time, but as I drew up into the car park I saw a gaggle of beekeepers standing about in front of the darkened windows, and realised the place must be locked.  There used to be a yoga class that met before us, and the caretaker didn't lock up between them leaving and us arriving, but it must have closed, or moved, or switched days.  Being extremely British we all stood politely in the car park, remarking to each other that at least it wasn't raining, until somebody arrived with the key.

The subject was microscopy.  I went on a beekeeping beginners microscopy class, years ago, and didn't especially take to it.  With my eyesight, glasses and general lack of coordination I find it quite difficult to see anything down a microscope, just as I struggle with binoculars.  Practice would probably make things better if not perfect, but there is something inherently depressing about a field of study where you have to start by killing your subject.  And while the insides of bees are not nearly so unpleasant as the insides of mice and rabbits, still I prefer the look of them when their heads haven't been ripped off and the rest of the bee magnified by a factor of forty.

There are two bee diseases that you can test for using a microscope.  One is a tiny bug that lives in the bee's breathing tubes, which you can inspect if you remove its head and the end of its thorax to reveal the tubes.  Healthy ones are gleaming white, infected ones discoloured and brown. There is no specific cure if you find signs of infection, though if you treat your bees with a thymol based vapour treatment marketed for varroa mites, you will kill the bug at the same time.  The GP giving tonight's lecture had pulled the heads off lots of bees and never found any bugs in their breathing tubes, so it seemed to me that if you had a colony of bees that were failing to thrive you might as well treat them for varroa, which you would probably want to do anyway, and could hit any breathing tube bugs at the same time while you were at it if you used a thymol based treatment.

The other disease you could uncover under a microscope is a bug that lives in the bee's stomach. To test for that one you need to pull the abdomens off a sample of thirty adult bees, mash them up and look at the resulting mess for little white bodies like grains of rice.  There used to be an antibiotic product available but it's been withdrawn.  But you can feed them syrup with a tiny bit of thymol dissolved in it and that will do the trick better than the antibiotic used to.  So if you had a colony that was failing to build up you could give them a booster feed, which you might want to do anyway, and slip a litttle thymol in to see if it improved matters.  Or you could let nature take its course, winnowing out the weak colonies.

So the main reason to do microscopy is that you like it and find it interesting.  Certainly it is a great way of learning more about the anatomy of the honeybee, should you want to.  Our lecturer is fascinated by the innards of his bees, and how their legs work, and their compound eyes.  He is a nice chap, and it was a perfectly interesting lecture.  For myself, however, I would rather watch my bees buzzing around with their heads and abdomens intact.  I treat annually for varroa with oxalic acid, as tutored by the commercial beekeeper who reminds me each winter, but I'm cautious about thymol.  Friends who used it said their bees hated it so much they absconded.  I'm afraid that colonies that can't sort out their own breathing tubes and stomachs might just have to fail, and free up some equipment for swarm control in the colonies that are going from strength to strength.