How to get free media coverage for a bogus beehive design

I started getting questions about this “urban beehive”  early in November.  I thought it was fairly obvious that it was a gimmick–a PR op by a company that wanted to get some free press.

And yet…it has become the story that will not die:

“The extraordinary contraption hangs inside the house and features see-through materials so you can watch the insects at work.  Separated into two parts, a flower pot and entry passage sit on the outside wall and the hive hangs indoors. Owning one means doing your bit for the environment – since honey bees are key pollinators – and getting a handy supply of very fresh honey….

The removable glass case even cleverly filters light on a special ‘orange’ wavelength, which is used by the insects for sight.  Called the Urban Beehive, the design is part of a new project by Philips called the ‘Microbial Home’.   

Today, I found an article in the UK Mail–not a good major newspaper, but still a major newspaper, printing the entire press release unchallenged.

I expect better from professional journalists.

I was able to find out this product was vaporware in less than 1 minute. It is, as Patsy says in the Holy Grail, “only a model.”
What ever happened to finding at least one–ONE!–secondary source to comment on something? Every story that I have seen so far has printed the basics of the Philips Press Release with pretty photos. And NONE of them seems to have had the thought:

“Hang on. Perhaps I might ring up some beekeeper chappie and ask him about the feasibility of this beehive?”

Yes. That would be a good idea.

Since there seems to be a lot of coverage about this thing, and I fear that the earlier bump of coverage is about to be repeated, I thought I would take some time to point out that this hive will not be coming to a store near you. Ever.  Philips introduced this as part of a design contest called “Microbial Home.”

Their designers came up with some pretty crazy ideas about what the home of the future would look like–including a creepy diagnostic bathroom tool that will analyze your feces and saliva, and something called “bio-light”, a methane digester that looks like a molecule with nipples. (The digester is where the feces and saliva go after the creepy diagnostic bathroom is done with them. I still don’t know why there are nipples, though.)

None of these, including the “Urban Beehive”, are real products. They are entirely conceptual, other than the pretty plastic model made for the Design Show.

WHY did so many media outlets that should know better unquestioningly tout this story, completely unchallenged?   I wish I knew the answer.   Even if this beehive did exist, it would be a very bad idea, indeed.

As best I can tell, this indoor hive is what you get when you build a hive based on information about bees that you got entirely from Wikipedia. Or maybe Sports Illustrated.
It is nice and shiny….and shows a complete lack of understanding of how bees live their lives.

First of all, the purpose of a bee hive is to make more bees.  The honey is stuff that we steal from the bees.  That’s why they get so cranky about honey harvesting–we are taking the food away from the mouths of their children. Literally.

This hive has no place for bees to lay eggs and rear their young. You’ll end up with brood mixed in with the honey and pollen stored in the hive.  Which means…you are going to get a lot more protein and fiber in whatever honey you manage to extract than you might be comfortable consuming.

But hey, bee brood is actually delicious, and eaten in many other countries. So perhaps you will boldly go forward with a plan to extract honey. That’s going to probably destroy all your larvae. Whoops, no more bees.

This design for smoking the bees doesn’t really solve the problem that to get at the honey you have to remove the cover completely…while the hive is inside your house.  While bees that are smoked are pretty mellow, they do still move around, and quite a few will escape.  If you have Junior playing around the area, or a curious cat, this will not end well.

The sealed nature of the hive will make it nearly impossible to look at your bees and see how they are doing. A tremendous number of things will kill bees:  Foulbrood. Nosema. Tracheal Mites. Varroa Mites. Hive Beetle.  And that’s just the short list!  Regular inspections are needed for the health of your hive. With this hive, that means taking the cover off the hive and removing comb with bees on it to look at it inside your home. I’m sure nothing could go wrong with that…..

The hive itself is tiny.  That means that it will probably be generating swarms on a regular basis, as the hive grows and has nowhere to expand. I’m sure your neighbors will be just fine with swarms of a thousand bees or so landing on their balconies.

A major issue for bees is regulation of temperature and humidity within their hive. If it gets too hot, they will ‘fan’ at a hive entrance to create a sort of air conditioning.  The tiny entrance to this hive means that will be impossible.  Because the hive is inside, it will be at room temperature–which may not be the temperature the bees want it at.  They also won’t get cold and slow down for winter, since the temperature will be mostly constant, and the artificial lighting of the room will mimic the long days of summer.  It’s difficult to forage for pollen and nectar in winter!

I’ll toss one more objection in to this by-no-means comprehensive list of why the hive design won’t work: bee space. That phrase will not mean much to you if you haven’t worked with bees before. Bee Space is a special measurement–3/8ths of an inch, or slightly less than one centimeter.  Anytime there is a space in a hive bigger than 3/8ths of an inch, bees will fill up the gap.

This photo shows a nice example of how bees will build additional comb to fill in gaps, or to brace comb that might be getting a little saggy because it’s full of heavy honey.  This is exactly what would happen in the “Urban Beehive”.  The second you tried to open that hive, you’d have angry bees and comb spilling out all over your floor.

I honestly don’t know if the bees would tolerate horizontal comb in the Philips design–they usually build vertically.

Having said all this: If you want to raise bees, and have your own observable bee hive, that can be done! Just not with this design.

Bees are incredibly complex animals, and you shouldn’t just decide to get a hive like you might decide to get a puppy. They need special care and feeding.   There are usually beekeeping classes offered by gardening groups, extension offices, or your local university. Setting up a hive is not cheap–take the time and invest in learning how to take care of your bees. You’ll fall in love with them once you have them.

Winner of the Actual ESA Limerick Contest

We had a lot of fun making naughty limericks up at the Bug Blog, but I thought people might be interested in the actual winner of the REAL Entomological Society of America (Not-At-All-Ribald-Please-Keep-It-Clean) Limerick contest. The winning limerick was not only clever, it illustrates an interesting relationship between two firefly species.

The Official ESA Winner:

Au Naturel Selection: Photinus meets Photuris

A firefly who was benighted
saw a light and became so excited–
he rushed to his fate
while selecting a mate:
lost his head, lost his heart, was de-lighted.

~Martha Lutz

Love it!

In case you aren’t familiar with the two genera of fireflies referenced in the limerick, their clever and deadly system of sexual mimicry was first described by Thomas Eisner.  The flashes that attract males from the genus Photinus could be from female Photinus fireflies that want a hookup. But they could also be from the “Femmes Fatales” of the genus Photuris. They don’t want to have sex–they want to have a snack.

Photinus males aren’t just flashy dudes–they contain defensive chemicals in their blood. These chemicals repel predators like spiders. The Photuris females steal these chemicals from the males…by eating them.  As you can see in the photos above, there isn’t much left when she’s done. Just some wings, like an empty candy bar wrapper.

The graph on the left is from tests of 29 females/group exposed to predator spiders–one group of females that had eaten Photinus males (“Fed”), and another group of females that haven’t had the special love bite (“Unfed”).  Just eating two males is enough to completely protect the Photuris females from spider predators!

So pity the Photinus male; when out cruising for love, he must choose very, very carefully who he flashes.

You can read Eisner’s original paper here.  I’m tempted to call it a “seminal” work.

Eisner T, Goetz MA, Hill DE, Smedley SR, & Meinwald J (1997). Firefly “femmes fatales” acquire defensive steroids (lucibufagins) from their firefly prey. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 94 (18), 9723-8 PMID: 9275191

Mark your calendars: National Moth Week!

National Moth Week is a new project celebrating moths and biodiversity in the US.

July 23-29, 2012

Why moths? Moths can be found everywhere from inner cities to heavily forested remote areas.  You might dismiss moths as boring brown fluttery things, but Moth Week is a great time to look more closely.

They can be amazing mimics; they can be as tiny as the head of a pin. They can be huge with surprising underwing patterns, like the moth on the Moth Week Logo.

The purpose of Moth Week is two-fold; to encourage people to go outside and look at the life around them, and also to encourage people to document and submit what they see as part of a larger citizen science project.

You don’t need to know what you are looking at to participate–if you post your images on the Discover Life site (following the protocol), they will identify them for you!

You can find instructions for having a Moth Party at your house on the Discover Life website, too.  I plan to have a Moth Night Celebration at my house in Connecticut; let me know if you are interested!  I live in a perfect area for mothing–streams, a big pond, forest, and agricultural land all near me.  We’ll get lots of interesting insects, including moths.

Join me in being one Bad Moth-er…
(Shut your mouth!)

Some great resources:

• How to light trap moths (PDF)
• How to bait for moths (PDF)
• BugGuide has photos of most common moths in the US!

Honey Laundering

You might have seen some news coverage recently that claimed much of the honey sold in the US isn’t actually… honey. So what is it, then?

Well, it IS still honey, and it did still come from bees. But it’s been treated and filtered to a point that it no longer meets the standard of what is properly called honey by several regulatory agencies, including the FDA:

“In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey. …Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey.”

It’s in part a semantic quibble, but also hides a larger issue: where does the honey sold in the US actually come from?

bee by nutmeg66

Honey normally contains pollen.  Bees gather pollen from plants to feed their young, and they also drink nectar from some plants too.  When a bee is out collecting for her hive, she stores the nectar in a special pouch of her gut. When she returns to the hive from foraging, she passes the nectar to a “house bee” through a process called trophallaxis.  This is a nice sciency word for barfing up nectar so another bee can eat it.

The house bee “chews” the nectar for a while, getting the digestion started and breaking down some of the complex sugars in the nectar. She then barfs up the honey (Again! I know!) into the comb, where it gradually loses some of it’s water content and becomes the very sticky, sweet stuff that we know and love.

While all this is happening, there is pollen everywhere.  Bees are fuzzy, so in addition to the pollen they actively collect, they are usually covered with pollen.  It’s sticky stuff–but, you know, it is plant sperm.  That shit gets everywhere.

Ahem.  Anyway.

So, pollen in honey is normal. And it serves as a sort of honey provenance.  The problem with pollen-less honey is you don’t know where it came from, or what kind of plants the bees were feeding on.  The fear is that Americans are the victims of “honey dumping”—or, yes, “honey laundering.”

Instead of happy bourgeois American bees, our honey is coming from oppressed proletarian bees in China.  (I’m exaggerating of course, but that’s about the tone some of the news reports have taken.)  Chinese honey has a bad reputation, and has shown up in the US with a variety of contaminants. Heavy metals are another fear, since bees don’t recognize toxic waste dumps as places they should not forage in.  They go where the pollen is.

Support your local beekeeper!

So how can you make sure you get American honey? Buy local. And by local, I mean honey that is not part of a chain store brand, but something from a beekeeper that is in your state, with a traceable address and name.  Not everyone has access to a farmer’s market, but the analysis done by the Food Safety News Group (more about them later) suggests that purchasing organic honey is more likely to be locally or at least US-sourced honey.

Why is honey ultra-filtered? There are two reasons usually offered, one benign, and one sinister.  The reason most large honey packagers give for filtering out the pollen is that it creates a more shelf-stable honey, and it is clearer.  Basically, it’s a cosmetic treatment to make honey pretty.   That is probably true; Americans are awfully paranoid about the slightest defects in their foods.  Filtering has a shady side effect: it makes it easier for honey to be processed and shipped longer distances (like from Asia) and means that many different kinds of honey can be blended together undetectably.

Does it matter that both American and foreign honey has the pollen removed? Aside from the issue of honey tampering and tracing your honey back to a source, probably not. There are a LOT of wild health claims made for eating honey and pollen, and the best summary I can give you of the scientific support for that is “little to none.”  It probably doesn’t really matter if your honey is filtered.   From an energy conservation standpoint, eating locally produced, non-processed honey saves a lot of carbon.  Foodies can chat up their local beekeepers and find out the details of the flowers that went into their honey.  But eating raw honey will not cure your allergies, or your cold.

So, why the sudden interest by the media in where our honey is coming from? The study of over 60 commercial brands of honey by a leading melissopalynologist (honey pollen detective, in human speak) was commissioned by the Food Safety News Group, which is a collection of very good science journalists…. run by a legal firm specializing in food illness lawsuits.  Hmm.

This is part of a honey reporting effort by this FSN group that’s been going on for several months, and some of which is a bit alarmist, frankly.  It’s clear they hope to drum up support for a law or a regulation that puts “honey should have pollen in it” in writing, as well as requiring clearer labeling on where the honey is coming from.  That’s not a bad thing, really, since it is good to know where our food comes from.

The American Beekeepers Federation has been lobbying for a “standard of identity” for honey; just this month they reported that the FDA just rejected their petition.  The laws about labeling honey are pretty confusing; the country of origin is only required to be declared if the honey bears a “USDA mark.” (Why organic honey has to be clearly labeled, but not other honey.)

The short term result of those regulations could be higher prices for your honey. Not because there is a major honey shortage–the frequency of Colony Collapse Disorder is declining, thank goodness–but because the cost of producing honey in the US is much, much higher than it is in China, India, or Argentina.  It isn’t possible for US beekeepers to sell large quantities of honey at low prices when they are struggling with so many other challenges. There are so many things that kill honey bees they have to deal with right now, on top of what we all experience as rising costs of living.

It’s hard out there for a beekeeper. So I do hope that those of you that can will buy local honey!

Thanks Giving

Just before I left for the ESA conference on Nov. 13th, this happened:

Yep, shot past the 1 million mark.  The actual number is probably higher; this counter doesn’t include RSS feeds and subscriptions, as well as views inside frames (like when you click on a networked blog link via Facebook).

What really matters is that I know many of you that are regular readers, and you are awesome.   Just wanted to say *THANK YOU* to everybody that has stopped by since the Bug Blog moved to its new WP.com home and this counter began.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled insect news.

 

Transcript of my ESA talk about Social Media

Sorry this took so long to create! This is the transcript of my Entomological Society of America talk that I posted last week. I have taken the liberty of editing and prettifying things up, and including some feedback on the draft version I got.  You can download the PDF handout from this talk here, including some recommended links and resources.
I am still not happy with this, mostly because the topic is so huge, and there is so much very good info and thoughtful stuff out there. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but hopefully this will help you find some new ideas to chew on.  Without further ado:

The Adventures of Bug Girl
OR: Everything you wanted to know about entomological social media but were afraid to ask

In a 12 minute talk, I tried to address these topics:

• Why do this social media stuff, anyway?
• Why was Bug Girl successful?
• How can you measure your success?  (An overview; I’ll leave the question of tools you can use to measure and assess online success for a separate post/presentation.)
• How can YOU become an online entomology goddess?

Sounds of summer

I am dog-tired from the Entomological Meeting, so how about some pretty sounds from the “Dog Days” of summer?  I could use a mini-vacation right now.

This little video introduces you to one of the cicadas of the midwest, Tibicen dorsatus. They have the nickname of “Dog Day Cicada.”  This beautiful (and big!) cicada doesn’t have the elaborate life cycle structure of the 17- or 13-year periodical cicada species.  Periodical cicadas emerge all at once in a few spectacular days of noisy orgy before disappearing again for over a decade.

Annual cicada generations overlap, so every summer you can find them making a racket.  That doesn’t mean their life cycle is just one year though–their emergence is just not synchronized to happen all at once.  After 3 or 4 years sucking on roots, the nymphs will emerge and mate.  Eggs are laid each year, ensuring that we’ll have sounds of summer in the future.

Entomological trivia: some really wonderful cicada mythology from Greece.  Did you know cicadas are mentioned in the Iliad?  That link also contains a translation of this lovely greek poem from 1st Century, BCE:

The Cicada to the Cricket

O cricket, you who soothe my passion and provide the consolation of sleep;
O cricket, shrill-winged rustic Muse;
You natural imitator of the lyre, sing for me some poignant song
As you tap with your charming feet and strum your loquacious wings,
So as to relieve me from toilsome worry that completely deprives me of sleep
As, o cricket, you spin out a song that dispatches Eros.
Then I shall give you as gifts, first thing in the morning, an evergreen leek
Along with dewy droplets that I separate with my mouth.

The Cricket to the Cicada

O resonant cicada, drunk on dewy droplets.
You sing your rustic song that sounds in lonely places.
Perched with your saw-like limbs, high up among the leaves
You shrill forth the lyre’s tune with your sun-darkened body.
But, dear friend, sound forth something new for the woodland nymphs,
A divertissement, chirping a tune for Pan as the song which you sing in your turn,
So that I, escaping from Eros, can catch some noon-time sleep
While reclining there under the shady plane tree.

Winner–2011 Ribald Tales of Entomology

At last! It’s time to reveal our winner!
This was a late entry, but it rocketed to the top of the list by popular acclaim. It’s so rude it even took ME back a bit.  Enjoy!

There once was a pine tip moth from Nantucket 
whose aedeagus was so long he could suck it
He said with a yalp
as he wiped off his palp
“If my tympanum was a gonopore I could fuck it”

Congrats to Tim, our winner of the Ribald Festivities! I owe you a beer

For those of you that don’t recognize the jargon, “aedeagus” is the fancy name for a bug penis, and “gonopore” is…well, a pore where your gonads go.  Loosely defined (very loosely!)

Huzzah!

Ribald Tales of Entomology Limerick Contest: 1st Runner up

It’s time for another reveal of a naughty winner in the contest! I’m at the Entomological Society of America Meetings right now, so it’s time to wind things up.

As you may remember, the ESA is sponsoring a “clean” limerick contest. I take the position that the only good limerick is a bawdy limerick. That’s just how I roll.

Our first runner up will have to assume the duties of the winner, should he or she be unable to complete their term as Miss/Mr. Ribald Tales of Entomology.  What are those duties? Um. Probably best discussed offline, really.

Our 1st runner up is Elissa Malcohn, for a series of awesome limericks that were so good, I couldn’t just pick one.  Elissa is a bit of a ringer, as a professional writer, and you can tell!

The mayfly is singin’ no blue-blues.
He knows Nature’s makin’ no boo-boos.
His doubled-up penes
Are not extra weenies:
The love of his life has two hoo-hoos.

The queen bee grows fat on royal jelly
So she can grow eggs in her belly.
Her suitors she’ll goad
Till their testes explode.
What else could she do, without telly?

The red velvet mite is the warden
Of sperm that he sprays on his garden.
A lovelorn female
Tracks his long silky trail
And will sit on his sticks, if you pardon.

Drosophila, species bifurca
Can take a long distance to jerka.
His sperm runs two inches.
(Dear lord, how that pinches!)
To unzip, this fly goes berserka!

Hoist a tankard to our winner!  And look for the Grand Prize Winner tomorrow!

I’m off to the ESA

If you aren’t a major bug nerd, you may not know what goes on at a big scientific meeting like the Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America.  It is the largest insect meeting in the world. There are usually ≈4000 insect scientists of all kinds, from every continent. (Except Antartica. But if I’m wrong, let me know!)

Unfortunately, it’s not anything like a science fiction convention. Nearly everyone is in suits, and it’s a time to make professional networking connections and present your research. There are organized symposia about some topics I’m really interested in–the way in which media has covered Colony Collapse Disorder in honey bees, for example.  Multiple bed bug symposia.  I’ll be sure to report back about those topics, as long as I’m not revealing anything that seems to be publication bound.

Titles of talks or papers usually have formal names like “Update on medical consequences of bed bug biting,” although sometimes you get a bit more humor; I liked this one: “To Baetidae or not to Baetidae: comprehensive phylogeny of baeitid mayflies.”  

Talks start at 8:00 AM and run until 9:00 PM at night. For 4 days.  By the end you just feel like your brain is swollen.

It’s also a great time to hang out, talk to old friends, and commune with bug people.  I’ll be distributing “I am Bug Girl” stickers in the spirit of “I am Spartacus” in order to:

1. Confuse the issue on just who Bug Girl is; and
2. Help bloggers and blog fans find each other at a huge meeting!

There will also be a Bug Blogger/Friends of Bug Blogs party Tuesday night; check out the Facebook Event Page for more details once we get on the ground in Reno and scope out venue and liquid refreshment options.

If you are an undergrad or a graduate student attending ESA for the first time: DON’T BE SHY! Seriously, entomologists are fairly laid back, even if they do insist on wearing suits. Anyone with an official ribbon–even the ESA President–will make time to talk to you.   If you see someone with an “I am Bug Girl” sticker, odds are good they also are a good person to ask questions of as well.  Don’t sit alone when you have meals–ever! That is a great time to sit down next to someone and start a conversation.

I’ll be revealing the winner of the Ribald Tales of Entomology Limerick Contest later this week, as well as other updates.
Stay Tuned!