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.
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