Wild Honey Bees at Coral Pink Sand Dunes

It took us over six hours to find the hive. It was early October and we were just a few minutes north of the Utah Arizona border on the buffy orange sand at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park (in Kanab County, Utah). The sun had been up for an hour or two when Braiden spotted the first honey bee. It was visiting rabbitbrush flowers, intent on finding nectar and not giving a whole lot of thought to the human following along with an insect net in hand. 

Within moments, Braiden had the insect in his net and was slowly coaxing the angry insect into a wooden container half the size of a shoe box. Once inside, the bee moved to the back of the box where there was light. It was hoping to get out, but in vain. The light was coming through a plexiglass window and the bee was now trapped. Braiden then quietly placed a small bee comb filled with a high concentration of sugar water near the opening and then shut the door. When he then placed a cloth over the window, the box became dark inside and the bee slowly worked its way away from the window to the sugar water.

This is the method developed by George Edgell of Harvard University a century ago, and later optimized by Thomas Seeley of Cornell University. Edgell was a professor of architectural history that happened to love looking for wild bees. His slender book, The Bee Hunter, described his use of the bee box and, perhaps just as importantly, it was used by Seeley many years later who optimized the method through a career studying wild bees in the Arnot Forest near Ithaca, New York. 

Braiden and I decided to make our own boxes based on Seeley’s design. We were impressed that it worked so well even though we were novices and had never followed wild bees before. We knew that we could capture honey bees and get them to drink sugar water. But, before using Seeley’s box, we had not succeeded in following the bees to their hives. I knew that we (humans) have been hunting for bee hives for thousands of years. I imagined that finding them here in Southern Utah would be a good challenge but intuitively doable. It turned out to be quite a bit more challenging than I expected. I gained a new respect for our neolithic ancestors. 

According to Eva Crane, humans have been following wild honey bees for possibly 7,000 years. Rock paintings in the Old World show humans climbing spindly ladders and hanging on ropes in precarious positions in order to get at the honey. One picture I particularly like is on a vase from the Etruscan city of Volci showing mythical honey hunters in a cave on Mount Dikte. A few men (without loincloths) are carrying what look like torches while illuminated bees fly around their heads. 

These examples are all from a time before we developed skeps or wooden hives to keep the bees closer to home. Of all the pictures in Crane’s book, one of the most compelling looks very much like honeycombs on the walls of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia. It was painted by some of the first city-dwellers of our species - at around 6,600 - 7,000 BC. It is evidence that we have had a sweet tooth that we were willing to get stung for - and for as long as we have been gardening. And maybe even for a lot longer than that.

But what about using honey bees to help pollinate our crops? If the part about finding hives to get honey goes back thousands of years. The part about managing bees as pollinators is harder to track. It probably goes back thousands of years as well, but we can’t say for sure. It may be that we have been manipulating pollination for only a few hundred years. 

This hidden history is harder to track because farmers don’t typically write books. The story is also complicated because it involves more than just placing hives in orchards or around gardens. It also includes the honey bees that have escaped from our semi-domesticated and handmade hives and have taken up residence on their own wherever they can find a suitable cavity with a suitable hole - Meaning an entrance that allows them to protect themselves from the many creatures that want to eat their honey, their brood, and even their sisters. 

Sometimes these wild colonies find a tall tree with a hollowed-out core. A woodpecker hole, perhaps, or even a piece of rotted heartwood from a broken branch. The bees like to be well above ground level where it is harder for mammals such as bears to find them, or to leverage their weight against their home and break inside to get at the honey. In urban areas, bees have been known to start a colony on their own in old abandoned houses, or in the eaves of apartment buildings. Most cities have a beekeeper or two that can be called on if a colony-forming swarm happens to converge somewhere that causes panic. After all, hundreds (even thousands) of bees landing on your back porch can feel like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. 

In Utah these wild honey bees are poorly known. We occasionally have a determined beekeeper that will move hives to a wild place in order to crossbreed domestic bees with wild drones. But that is about it. In Arizona Gerald Loper, Steve Tabor and a dedicated team of bee enthusiasts have located several wild honey bee colonies in the Sonoran Desert. These bees are mostly found in rock cavities with only a few establishing colonies in old walnut or mesquite hollows.

Our first effort in Utah suggests that the wild honey bees here are also finding suitable nest sites in scrubbier habitats. I assumed that they might also be nesting in rocks. But it turned out that I was wrong - at least on this occasion. After Braiden’s single captured bee had taken its fill of sugar water, it flew out of the bee box and proceeded to circle the area as it flew higher and higher into the air and then headed off to the west and away from the dunes. 

After a few minutes, the bee returned and a pattern of feeding from the bee box, flying off to the west, and returning was repeated several times. The area to the west of the dunes is dominated by pinyon pines and junipers. These trees are substantially shorter than the high canopies of the eastern forests where Seeley did most of his work. It is also an area of small cliffs and broken rocks and we assumed that the bees would have greater luck finding cavities here than in the relatively smaller trees. 

Once away from the sand, Braiden (and his wife Keesha) continued working with their bee box and following the flight path along a road paralleling the cliff (and paralleling the road to the park). I decided to head towards the cliffs and see what I could find. I also set up a bee box and began tracking bees closer to the rocks. 

In Seeley’s account of finding wild honey bees, he makes a point of placing a drop of paint on the backs of some of the bees. He does this in order to time individual bees. If the painted bee takes several minutes to leave from the bee box and return for more sugar water, then the hive is likely to be over a mile away and may be difficult to find. As the bee hunter moves along the bee line, however, and the time is lessened, the bee hunter knows that the hive is not far away. 

Both Braiden and Keesha following their bee line, and I (following mine) were watching bees return to the bee box after just two or three minutes. We knew we were getting close to the hive, but as beginners, we weren’t quite sure of when we should leave the boxes and start canvassing the area looking for hives. 

I was scouting among the rocks and even started climbing the more accessible parts of the cliff, but without success. Ravens and scrub jays were wondering what I was up to. They circled above the trees and hopped from pinyons to junipers scolding me. Even a flock of bushtits flew out of their way to see what I was doing. 

Back at my bee box, I found dozens of bees loading up on liquid sugar but I was having a difficult time determining the direction of their flight home. The problem was that I was too deep in a small wash and there wasn’t enough of a blue horizon to see the bees once they flow just a few dozen feet away. A few dozen feet, I might add, is quite a distance when you are staring at a cliff or a pinyon copse as background. 

So I loaded my bee box and supplies into my bucket and found a broken part of the cliff that was only 50 feet high. Using my old insect net (that I have fashioned out of a golf club) as a walking stick, I scrambled to a place that had more sky to look at and then reopened the box. By now the afternoon was turning into evening and I had been out for over six hours with only a bit of water to drink. I was getting tired, but the bees seemed to be flying to the east now. It seemed that I had over-shot their hive while climbing. 

I was about to call it a day and come back later to start again when I ran into Braiden and Keesha just over a small hill. Their bee box was full of bees and, perhaps more interesting, the bees were heading south. We sat and watched the bees come and go so quickly that we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave just yet. We now had three different directions to consider and our best guess was that the hive must be somewhere on the cliff and not very far away. 

We weren’t all that excited to try our luck scrambling back down the cliff, but we decided that a general reconnaissance wouldn't hurt. No sooner had we started looking around when we found it. Bees were flying at a regular pace in and out of an old juniper. It was actually at the base of the tree right above the rocks forming the beginning of the cliff. Some years ago (probably many years ago) the tree had split at the base leaving a cavity into which the bees had settled. 

I scooted under some old branches to have a closer look and in my excitement managed to smash my head on a snag. Braiden and Keesha were just as excited and decided to celebrate the way newlyweds are wont to do. We had just succeeded in finding our first wild bee colony. It wasn’t in a tall tree, nor was it in a rock cavity or a walnut burl. It was in a place that looks a lot like Southern Utah - an old juniper surrounded by sage and rabbitbrush. The big question remains in the back of our minds: where else might they be hiding?

References

Crane, Eva. 1999. The world history of beekeeping and honey hunting. Routledge, New York.

Edgell, G.H. 1949. The bee hunter. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Lloyd-Jones DJ, St Clair JJH,Cram DL, Yassene O, van der Wal JEM,Spottiswoode CN. 2022 When wax wanes:competitors for beeswax stabilize rather than jeopardize the honeyguide–human mutualism.Proc.  R.  Soc.  B289: 20221443.

Gerald M. Loper, Diana Sammataro, Jennifer Finley and Jerry Cole. 2006. Using Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) to Relocate Feral Honey bees in Southern Arizona, 10 years after Varroa infestation. USDA Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, Tucson, AZ.

Seeley, Thomas. 2016. Following the wild bees, the craft and science of bee hunting. Princeton University Press. 

Seeley, Thomas D. 2019. The lives of bees, the untold story of the honey bee in the wild. Princeton University Press.

Dusted Bees

 I recently found myself early in the morning in a parking lot next to the Virgin River with an hour to spare. The sun was just creeping through the eastern hills and the good people of Saint George were largely asleep. It was the weekend and the parking lot was nearly empty. An old man driving a big red dually was the only other person around. 

It was a chess tournament that brought me to Saint George. A few weeks earlier our SUU chess team was invited to a tournament at Utah Technical University. Our players were eager to participate but because chess is a niche game, we are not supported by university athletic funds and so have to pay our own way. This shoestring existence occasionally has its perks. It sometimes takes me to interesting places where I don’t have to feel guilty looking for insects and birds, since I’m covering all the travel costs myself. This particular morning it found me in an abandoned field by a parking lot where the only insects I could find were honey bees.

I don’t normally give honey bees much attention. They are not native to Utah even though we recognize them as our state insect. A few of my entomologist friends go so far as to call them an invasive species. I disagree. They do compete with our native bees in places, but the American West is not their ideal habitat and they have not become “weedy” in any significant way. We lack the many hollow tree trunks that are their preferred nesting sites in out-of-the-way places. We also benefit a great deal from their pollination services. Many varieties of apples, apricots, peaches, etc., bloom when our native bees are still sound asleep in the early spring. Only honey bees (with their winter store of honey and pollen) are available to do the work.  

Even though it was still early, the temperature was in the high 60’s and the desert air was moist from recent rains. I was hoping to find a few morning wasps, or beetles perhaps, but not much was out except a handful of mushrooms that were pushing through the hard-packed soil between tumbleweeds and clump grass. And so I started following the bees. 

They were visiting large white jimsonweed flowers (Datura stramonium) that were still wide open. This was their chance, I thought. Jimsonweed flowers would seem to be a significant source of nectar and pollen to a lot of desert species. They are beautifully trumpet-shaped and noticeable from a distance. The only trouble is that they remain open primarily at night. Diurnal pollinators like most bees don’t have much of a chance. It is the night-flying hummingbird moths with their long tongues that get most of the nectar.

But these early-rising honey bees also seemed to be getting their share of the flowers before the large white petals closed up for the day. It was a narrow window of light and open flowers when the hummingbird moths were no longer active and couldn’t push them away. 

As I watched I didn’t see the bees digging deep into the corollas after nectar. They were clinging to the long styles and seemed intent to just hold on, nibbling now and then at the cream-colored stigmas that were holding the pollen. It also seemed to me that they were getting drunk. 

A casual observer might think they were just cold. After all, they weren’t very active. A lot of flower-visiting insects can be easily approached in the morning because cool temperatures make it very difficult for them to move. Often they spend the night on the petals and wait for the temperature to rise to an acceptable point. This is usually in the 60’s or 70s depending on the species. Seeing honey bees moving slowly on a big white flower in the morning might seem natural. And I have to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to it at first.

But honey bees don’t follow this pattern - at least not when they are sober. It occurred to me as I was wandering from flower to flower that they don’t sleep outside. They spend the night in their hives protected, and warming themselves, by the side of hundreds (maybe thousands) of their sisters. So if you find a honey bee on a flower in the morning, it means that it flew to that flower fairly recently. Realizing this, I started paying closer attention to their behavior. 

And their behavior was odd. Not only were they slow moving but they seemed oddly tentative about flying - as if they wanted to move but that something was holding them back. When they did manage to launch themselves into the air, they looked like miniature ravens being blown around in a windstorm. They pointed themselves in one direction but were flying in another.

Honey bees sometimes fly this way. If a foraging bee happens upon a rich source of nectar, she will lift her heavy recently-filled abdomen somewhat deliberately from the flower and fly in circles or figure eights as she slowly lifts herself into the air. She is memorizing the location of her find and sometimes does fly backwards or sideways as she does so. Once she has fixed the location in her find into her insect-sized brain, she flies in a more direct way back to the hive to inform the others. But what I was seeing was different. I watched as bees would start to fly and then bump into a leaf before getting above the flowers. Sometimes they would lose their horizontal position and veer one way or another. 

Bees don’t fly this way when they are visiting different flowers. Sometimes it looks like they are half jumping and half flying but their movement is more directed. They are looking and smelling for flowers that have sugary rewards. The bees I was watching emerge from the jimsonweed were acting in ways that were known bee behaviors but in ways that were out of context. And I started wondering if they really might be drunk or somehow intoxicated.  

I didn’t have time to continue watching. The chess tournament was about to start and I had to hurry back into town. It turned into a fun event. We won most of the matches and every player was a good sport. Not everyone, however, was entirely magnanimous. During the fifth and final round, as our third strongest player finished his game (and won) I mentioned to him in a hushed tournament-appropriate voice that our team was finishing strong. He jokingly replied that he hoped our top players would lose or tie their games. He was suggesting that he might end up placing higher in the tournament if they performed poorly. And, in fact, there were a couple of scenarios where their losses could have played out in his favor.  

I wasn’t amused. My priorities, as the team's coach, was for the entire group to do well. I smiled noncommittally and continued to encourage our other players in the only way I know how: quietly and with attention observing their games. The thought of teammates lacking social graces, however, was still in the back of my mind.

Then I remembered the dusted bees flying haphazardly and bumping into leaves. They were not managing their social lives very well either. They were stuck on flowers that offered them treats but that were altering their brain chemistry. Instead of flying back to the hive where sister bees would unload their sugary loads for the benefit of everyone, they were struggling to find their way. 

I suddenly felt sorry for my gifted chess player. Like most of his colleagues and friends his life was deeply embedded in the gaming community with its brain-altering addictions. I knew that on many occasions, he was unable to break free of the computer screen. Like the bees, his personal intoxication was keeping him from feeling part of our team. 

Bethany Teeters and a few of her associates noticed that when honey bees are exposed to certain insecticides, they don’t move as much. Not only are they more hesitant to fly but they also stay for longer periods of time near a food source. This seemed to be the behavior of the bees I was watching. Was it a general pattern for other species as well? 

Jimsonweed is a member of the nightshade family - a group of plants that are known for making all kinds of protective compounds that are harmful to animals. But since honey bees are not native to North America there seems little likelihood that the two species have been adapting in any meaningful mutualistic ways. Perhaps the plant was getting pollinated, and maybe the bees were eventually finding their way home. But the whole situation was out of context. An insect from a distant land was getting intoxicated on a native plant in a weedy field next to a desert parking lot. What a tragedy of errors.

Jimsonweed poisoning interferes with nerve cells. In high enough concentrations it is lethal. Unfortunately it is also hallucinogenic and the concentration separating dangerous amounts of the toxins and the psychological effect is fairly small. 

In 2015, Sean Spina and Anthony Taddei reported on a case of teenagers being admitted to emergency care after eating several hundred jimsonweed seeds. They experienced visual hallucinations for sure, but also became disoriented, began mumbling incoherently, and their eyes became less responsive. Knowing that the plant can also cause delirium and even seizures, doctors kept the patients under supportive care and administered activated charcoal to mollify their digestive discomfort. They were fortunate and recovered. 

Bees and humans are not related other than by the fact that we are both animals. Even so, if you compare the DNA of small fruit flies (the so-called insect lab rats in the genus Drosophila) and humans, it turns out that we share roughly 60% of our genes. This means that most of our metabolic pathways are the same - including some of the ways we process nerve signals. 

For hundreds of years the Navajo have recognized both the narcotic and hallucinatory nature of jimsonweed. They left it alone because it could be dangerous, unless someone was a victim of theft. If the stolen item was valuable enough to risk getting sick, the victim would first make an offering of turquoise and pollen. Then a small hole would be dug and a section of jimsonweed root would be removed. The piece had to be at least several inches long but not long enough to kill the plant. 

After chewing half of the retrieved portion, the victim would soak the rest in water for several hours before drinking the solution. Within a few hours one of three things was expected to happen: the victim would “sleepwalk” through the village and stumble upon the stolen item or the thief; the victim might hear voices (sometimes plants began speaking) giving directions to the find; or, more commonly, the victim would fall into a trance and see the stolen item or the thief in vision (Hill, 1938). 

I can’t help but imagine - somewhat facetiously - if the poor honey bees were not having dreams of nectar-filled flowers. More relevant, perhaps, is the realization that plants and animals have been elbowing each other around for millions of years in order to make a place for themselves in a challenging world. Plants don’t offer up their goods for the fun of it. 

Living in a world that has large corporations spending billions of dollars trying to sway our minds with modern forms of narcosis, I can’t help but see a cautionary tale in the jimsonweed and the bees. Maybe the Navajo had it right. We should only partake when we really need to. 

References

Decourtye, A., & Devillers, J. (2010). Ecotoxicity of neonicotinoid insecticides to bees; Chapter 8 in: Insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, 85-95.

Hill, W. W. (1938). Navajo use of jimsonweed. New Mexico Anthropologist, 3(2), 19-21.

Raguso, Robert A., Cynthia Henzel, Stephen L. Buchmann, and Gary P. Nabhan. 2003. Trumpet flowers of the Sonoran Desert: floral biology of Peniocereus cacti and sacred Datura. International Journal of Plant Science 164(6), 877-892. 

Spina, Sean P. and Anthony Taddei. (2015). Teenagers with jimson weed (Datura stramonium) poisoning. Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, 9(6), 467-469.

Teeters, B. S., Johnson, R. M., Ellis, M. D., & Siegfried, B. D. (2012). Using video‐tracking to assess sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees (Apis mellifera L.). Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, 31(6), 1349-1354.

Weiler, Elizabeth. (May 19, 2023). The Beehive State is ranked among worst beekeeping states, kslnewsradio.com. 

Wink, M. (2018). Plant secondary metabolites modulate insect behavior-steps toward addiction?. Frontiers in Physiology, 9, 364.