APIS Volume 7, Number 7, July 1989
In this issue
- Publishing APIS From Italy by Electronic Mail
- Initial Observations on Italy
- Initial Observations on Italian Beekeeping
- Flyways for Honey Bees--Tracking Bees
PUBLISHING APIS FROM ITALY
This is a first. An issue of APIS to be published directly from Italy. I am writing these words at a computer terminal deep in the bowels of the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world. It seems amazing that in as few as two hours, they will arrive via BITNET/INTERNET at my Gainesville office. By many estimates it would take an airmail letter over two weeks to make the trip from Italy. I am currently in touch with my office on an almost daily basis. Soon a local phone call from anywhere in Europe will allow me to directly dial up the IFAS computer network in Gainesville. This dramatically shows how the world is rapidly shrinking through use of electronic technology.
In spite of this the situation, on a local scale orientation is still difficult for me and is the reason this newsletter is delayed. Communicating in another language within the context of a foreign culture takes an immense investment in psychic energy. I am slowly adjusting, however, and each day am more encouraged. I was in Bologna initially until July 1, when I left for Rome, headquarters of Apimondia, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in the same building as the Federation of Italian Apiculturalists (FAI). Also in Rome there is a branch bee laboratory of the Italian network of agricultural experiment stations.
INITIAL OBSERVATIONS ON ITALY
Italy is a modern country with a Medieval past. This juxtaposition is at once complimentary and counterproductive. Bologna is a prime example. This once walled city still retains the structure of its past. A number of ancient doors called "portas," are still used as landmarks, although the walls themselves have for the most part been torn down as the city has expanded. Also evident is the city's architectural unity with most streets lined by large domed porticos. These make for comfortable walking in the hot summer sun. This integrity also makes for easy travel by public transportation. A number of buses ply their way around the city and getting from one place to another never takes more than 20 minutes.
Unfortunately, the once charming narrow streets are now filled to capacity with modern automobiles. The walls keep the exhaust fumes from freely escaping into the atmosphere. Parking becomes a monumental problem. Cars simply pull off the road and onto the sidewalk. When traffic becomes jammed, mopeds, bicycles and even cars and trucks may skirt around using the sidewalk as a kind of shoulder. The risk of becoming an automobile casualty is very real. Accidents are an everyday occurrence, further delaying traffic. The air pollution is noticeable almost everywhere and the damage the emissions are doing to the country's art and environment is all too real.
It is difficult for me to tell whether or not Italy is the laidback country many think. It is true that banks and stores appear to be closed more than open, but that may only be because of the perception of those who come from other parts of the world used to another time schedule. The ancient history of the country confuses. An engineering colleague here says that it is the only country where automobiles are totally assembled by robots. The standard of living appears to be very high; there is little that is not available to the consumer. Some 40 to 50 tv channels beam across the country. The telephone system is one of the best in Europe and evidence of computer use is everywhere. Many of the larger train stations have computerized information booths which allow one to quickly find and print out schedules of interest. On the other hand, some things we take for granted in the U.S. are difficult to find in Italy. Although water running from the tap is drinkable, most people continue to buy bottled mineral water, a tradition cultivated in the past when the water may not have been so healthful. Bottled water is a common part of any restaurant's menu, shades of the future in Florida where this necessity of life is becoming dearer each year. Thus, when you ask for water in Italy, it comes in a bottle and can cost anywhere from $.42 to $.72 per quart.
In spite of information to the contrary, much is intense in Italy. A central problem appears to be overpopulation in urban areas. Living is confined to high-rise apartments. Zoning is strict, not to protect property values or aesthetics, but to maximize agricultural land. Places to live on a temporary basis are not easy to find and are very expensive.
Agriculture is also intense, especially in the Po River Valley, which begins in the Alps and runs to the Adriatic. Not a speck of land is left unused. By U.S. standards, the fields are small, but in aggregate vie with anything one might see in California's San Joaquin Valley or the grain fields of Kansas. Farm machinery is everywhere, some of it, like many manufactured items, plastic shrinkwrapped. The intensiveness carries into the cities where emphasis is on quality. Every piece of fruit on the streets for sale seems perfect and exacts such a price, most of it extremely high by U.S. standards.
An unseen cost is use of pesticides. The technology is part of every farmer's bag of tricks. The bees in Italy have suffered from and continue to be affected by pesticide use. There now exist some three hundred stations around northern Italy where colonies are tested for pesticide residues.
A summary of a paper prepared by Giorgio Celli and Claudio Porrini of the Istituto de Entomologia "Guido Grandi" dell'Universita degli Studi Di Bologna published in 1987 indicates that from 1983-1986 most mortality was caused by dimethoate and parathion. Dithiocarbamtes appeared to be the most significant pollutants found in colonies; some 313 samples of dead bees showed residues. During the period, 8 samples of honey appeared contaminated with dithiocarbamates, 2 by Parathion, 2 by Endosulfan, 2 by DDE, 1 by methylparathion, 1 by Carbarly (sevin), 1 by Lindane, 1 by Fenson and 1 by Carbofuran.
Pesticide use is a big public issue here. In Bologna, there is a significant presence of environmentally oriented persons handing out literature opposing presence of chemicals in the food supply. With the presence of Varroa in Italy, the risk that pesticide will somehow get into bee products has become very real.
INITIAL OBSERVATIONS ON ITALIAN BEEKEEPING
As one might imagine, Italian beekeeping is also intensive. The largest beekeeper in the country has less than two thousand colonies, according to my latest information. Many beekeepers are producing single floral source honey. Apiaries are as immaculate as the orchards of fruit trees seen almost everywhere. A small apiary outside Bologna is characteristic. It consists of a neat double row of colonies painted a uniform robin's egg blue. There is movement of colonies by truck, but little to rival the kind seen in Florida when bees are moved to the orange and later to the midwest. Most bee flora in Italy is cultivated as opposed to the U.S. where the majority is wild. This contributes to the problem of pesticide poisoning.
A wide range of bee products is used by the Italian public. Every pharmacy carries a line of marvelously packaged goods which include honey, royal jelly or propolis as ingredients. Italy is not self-sufficient in honey production. The country produces only about 50% of its need. The rest is imported from other parts of Europe, Asia and the Americas. The honey is top quality and heavily regulated by the autorities. I visited one of the oldest beekeeping families in the Bologna area, Piana. They originally concentrated on producing queens, but now have become mostly a honey packing outfit. The laboratory at the packing plant takes up almost a quarter of the space consumed by the whole operation. Every sample of honey is tested for moisture, color, impurities, presence of hydroxymethyl furfural, and pollen content to determine floral source. The Istituto Nazionale de Apicoltura employs several experts in field of honey analysis. Recently a conference in Paris dedicated to pursuing an agreement on European honey standards when the European Economic Community becomes a reality in 1992 was held. Another activity of the National Apiculture Institute is to monitor the presence of bee disease and continually upgrade the quality of queens in the country. A test period is about to be concluded using instrumental insemination in an effort to produce pure Italian (Apis mellifera ligustica) queens of very high quality. Soon the Institute will begin releasing these queens to the beekeeping public along with instructions on how to evaluate them. The best will then be chosen to mother subsequent generations. Four values from 4 (the best) to 1 (the worst) are to be recorded by the beekeeper for each of the following characteristics: population of adult bees, brood area and quality as judged by pattern, amount of honey produced, aggressiveness, number of queen cells (used to judge swarming tendency), and behavior of the bees (whether they are calm on the combs or not).
With arrival of Varroa in 1981, the use of pesticides by the beekeeper has become commonplace in many areas of Italy. Depending on the location in the country, four substances are currently in use: Perizin, Apitol, Apistan strips and amitraz. All appear to be extremely effective. As in the U.S., it is difficult to find Varroa damage because most colonies have been treated. However, the mite is still considered a significant problem. This is not the case for tracheal mite. The latter pest appears to have run its course, and is now found only in epidemic stages on a local level. Most beekeepers in Italy are not using menthol to treat colonies for tracheal mite, but do routinely use antibiotics for control of European foulbrood. Colonies showing symptoms of American foulbrood are destroyed, as practiced in the United States. It is obligatory for beekeepers to report occurrence of mites, nosema or the foulbroods to the veterinary authorities.
FLYWAYS FOR BEES
Dr. Elbert Jaycox in his latest "The Newsletter on Beekeeping," reflects on recent thoughts concerning flyways for bees. He suggests that the new ways scientists are using to track bees (from bar codes to radar) may reap benefits in basic research on communication and foraging behavior not possible in the past. Dr. Jaycox continues to be skeptical of those who accept Dr. Von Frisch's theories without reservation. In the article, he says that Von Frisch admitted in his own writings to killing bees that deviated from his notions on how they should be performing, and that Dr. Adrian Wenner and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, revealed that the wind, number of bees foraging at a source and the odors of bees, crop and environment played a role in the success of bees recruited to a food source. Without these additional clues, many bees could not reach their foraging goal, in spite of the dance language. Dr. Jaycox likes the idea of a bee highway in the sky, where the recruit is attracted by the collective odors of the commuters and their loads. This, he says, may be a function of wind direction, especially if an apiary is surrounded by several productive foraging areas. Dr. Larry Atkins at Riverside California, Larry Friesen a colleague of Dr. Wenner's, and Dr. Von Frisch himself noted, according to Dr. Jaycox, that bees often fly upwind while foraging.
The late Dr. J.E. Eckerd, Dr. Jaycox says, also observed this kind of behavior on the open plains of Wyoming. When apiaries were isolated, Dr. Eckerd said that flight was generally "...over a narrow angle and in one particular direction." In the San Luis valley, with sweetclover fields available in all directions, the best ones to the southwest, bees flew mostly
Perhaps the best new technology available, according to Dr. Jaycox, is radar. It cannot track individual bees, but will detect mass movement. Dr. Jerry Loper's studies at the Tucson Bee Laboratory have shown drone flyways to be 80 yards wide and up to two miles long. Branches of these flyways are congregation areas where queens and drones mate. Dr. Jaycox admonishes that we shouldn't let the dance controversy die now that new tools are available to study it on a more intensive basis. As he concludes: "Now we may be able to confirm or reject the idea that a language rules or that foraging is based on all the systems studied so far, with automatic overrides for some of them when conditions are most difficult."
Malcolm T. Sanford
Bldg 970, Box 110620
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
Phone (904) 392-1801, Ext. 143 FAX: 904-392-0190
http://www.ifas.ufl.edu/~entweb/apis/apis.htm
INTERNET Address: MTS@GNV.IFAS.UFL.EDU
©1989 M.T. Sanford "All Rights Reserved
