This piece expands on “Everything Starts with a Tasty Meal” by sassafrasbeefarm (Beekeeping365, August 1, 2021). The original essay makes a simple, argument: hive pests like Small Hive Beetles, wax moths, and yellow jackets can’t reproduce until they eat, so a beekeeper’s best defense is cutting off their meal. What follows is that argument traced down into the actual biology, chemistry, and behavioral ecology that back it up — and a couple of places where the research complicates the picture in interesting ways.

The Original Insight

The essay’s logic runs like this: Abraham Maslow argued that humans secure basic needs — food and safety — before pursuing anything more sophisticated. Other animals, lacking our behavioral flexibility, run a cruder version of the same program: an instinctual sequence that starts with food and ends with reproduction. Small Hive Beetles, wax moths, and yellow jackets are, in this framing, simply hungry opportunists trying to eat and then breed. A beekeeper’s job is to jam the machinery between those two steps — deny the meal, and the pest never reaches the reproduction stage. The essay then sketches two tactics: starve the pests (entrance reducers, right-sized equipment, careful feeding practices) and trick them (bait traps that exploit hunger without luring in honey bees).
It’s a good insight. It also turns out to be a fairly accurate compression of several decades of chemical ecology and behavioral research — with a few added wrinkles that make it even more useful.

Fact-Checking the Starting Point: Maslow’s Hierarchy

Worth pausing on the source material itself. Maslow’s hierarchy comes from a single 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” published in Psychological Review — not a book, not a series of studies, a single theoretical article. Two details are commonly missed. First, Maslow never drew a pyramid; the triangular diagram everyone pictures was a later addition by management writers popularizing the idea, not something in the original text. Second, the strict “you must fully satisfy one level before the next kicks in” reading of the theory doesn’t hold up well empirically — later cross-cultural survey work (Tay & Diener, 2011) found people pursue safety, belonging, and growth needs in parallel, not in a rigid queue, and some psychologists have flagged the hierarchy as more of a compelling narrative than a well-tested model of human behavior.

None of that sinks the beekeeping essay’s use of it, though — if anything it sharpens the analogy. Maslow’s theory is at its weakest describing humans, who really do juggle multiple motivations simultaneously. It’s a much better fit for an insect, which has neither the neural hardware nor the behavioral repertoire to do anything but respond to its most pressing physiological state. A hungry beetle is not deciding whether to prioritize food or selfactualization. For a simple nervous system, “deficit needs dominate behavior until resolved” isn’t a debatable psychological theory — it’s close to a complete description of how the animal operates.

Instinct’s Own Logic: Proximate Drives, Ultimate Ends

Biology has its own, more precise version of the essay’s food-thenreproduction chain, developed decades before anyone tried to apply Maslow to bugs. The ethologist Niko Tinbergen (1963) proposed that any animal behavior can be explained on two separate levels: the proximate cause (what mechanism triggers the behavior right now — a hormone, a smell, a hunger signal) and the ultimate cause (why that mechanism was favored by evolution — because it improves reproductive success). A beetle following an odor plume toward a beehive isn’t proximately “trying to reproduce” — it’s proximately responding to an olfactory cue that smells like food. But the reason that response exists at all, baked into the beetle’s nervous system by natural selection, is that ancestors who found food reliably out-reproduced ones who didn’t. Food-seeking is the proximate mechanism; reproduction is the ultimate function it serves.

This matters for pest management because it tells you where the chain is interruptible. You can’t argue a beetle out of its hunger, but you can jam the proximate mechanism — block the smell, remove the food, or disrupt access — and the ultimate goal simply never gets reached. This is also why Small Hive Beetles, wax moths, and yellow jackets are such persistent, fastreproducing opportunists in the first place: all three are classic examples of what ecologists call an opportunistic, “r-selected” life history (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967) — organisms built to find a rich, short-lived resource patch and convert it into as many offspring as possible before the patch disappears or gets defended. A beehive bursting with pollen, honey, and brood is about as rich a patch as an opportunist could hope to find.

Case File 1: The Small Hive Beetle’s Hijacked Alarm Bell

The Small Hive Beetle (Aethina tumida) is the clearest illustration of the essay’s whole thesis, and the actual chemistry behind it is stranger than the essay lets on.

Beetles don’t find hives by luck. They home in on a specific odor blend, and the dominant component of that blend is isopentyl acetate — the honey bee’s own alarm pheromone (Torto et al., 2007, PNAS). Worse, the beetles carry a yeast, Kodamaea ohmeri, that colonizes fermenting pollen and hive debris and, as it grows, produces a volatile bouquet that mimics that same alarm pheromone (Benda et al., 2008, Journal of Apicultural Research). In chemical-ecology terms, this is a kairomone: a signal that evolved for one purpose (bees warning each other of danger) but that a second species has hijacked to its own advantage (beetles using it as a dinner bell). The result is a nasty feedback loop — a few beetles ferment some pollen, the yeast smell draws in more beetles, and a hive with “few beetles” can suddenly host hundreds.

This is precisely the mechanism the original essay gestures at when it asks whether a feeding program “announces food availability with fragrant oils.” Fermenting syrup, spilled feed, and exposed comb all produce the same class of volatile organic compounds that this whole detection system is built to find. You’re not just feeding bees; you’re broadcasting.

The essay’s “deny them food” strategy also holds up well at the mechanical level. Colonies with reduced or modified entrances host measurably fewer adult beetles than colonies with open entrances (Ellis et al., 2002a, cited in Neumann, Pettis & Schäfer, 2016) — entrance reducers aren’t just folklore, they’re a documented barrier to invasion. But the research adds a genuine complication to the simple “starve them out” model: strong, healthy, foodrich colonies actually attract more beetles than weak ones, precisely because they have more to offer (Neumann, Pettis & Schäfer, 2016, Apidologie). What determines the outcome isn’t food availability alone — it’s whether the colony has enough workers, relative to the amount of comb it’s trying to guard, to intercept the beetles once they arrive. Weak or queenless colonies with a low bee-to-comb ratio are dramatically more vulnerable to serious SHB damage than strong ones, even when the strong ones host more total beetles (Annand, 2011, and Mustafa et al., 2014, both cited in Neumann et al., 2016). This is the scientific basis for “hive rightsizing”: matching the number of boxes and frames to the actual size of the colony isn’t about tidiness, it’s about keeping the ratio of guards to guarded comb high enough that food denial can actually be enforced.
And when bees do catch a beetle, the “deny them food” strategy turns out to be under active evolutionary counterattack. Honey bees can’t easily kill a Small Hive Beetle outright — its shell deflects stings and bites — so instead they wall it into a small propolis cell and post guards, sometimes for months (Ellis, Pirk, Hepburn, Kastberger & Elzen, 2002, Naturwissenschaften). By the essay’s logic, an imprisoned, foodless beetle should starve. Most don’t. Researchers found that trapped beetles solicit food from their guards through the same begging behavior honey bee larvae use, and the guard bees respond by feeding them protein-rich glandular secretions via trophallaxis — mouth-to-mouth feeding (Ottati et al., 2021, Journal of Experimental Biology, titled, fittingly, “Prisoners receive food fit for a queen”). The beetle isn’t just hungry; it has evolved a way to trick the bees into feeding it inside its own prison cell. It’s a small but vivid example of the arms race underneath the essay’s tidy metaphor — every time bees close off one route to food, some pests evolve a workaround, and beekeeping pest management is really an ongoing skirmish, not a single move that ends the game.

Case File 2: The Wax Moth’s Cruel Paradox

Wax moths (Galleria mellonella, the greater wax moth, and its smaller relative Achroa grisella) run a similar food-to-reproduction script, but with a twist that refines the essay’s “deny them food” rule even further.

Female wax moths lay eggs in hive cracks and crevices, and the larvae tunnel through comb eating not the clean wax itself but the protein residues embedded in it — pollen, cocoon silk, and brood-cell debris left behind by developing bees. A moth can’t complete development on pure, never-used wax; it needs that protein signature of an active or recently active brood nest. Here’s the paradox: research indicates female wax moths often prefer to oviposit in strong, healthy colonies, because that’s where the richest concentration of brood-associated protein is. Yet it’s the weak colonies that suffer the worst wax moth damage — not because moths target them, but because a small, understaffed workforce can’t patrol enough comb surface to find and remove eggs and young larvae before they tunnel in and become unreachable. It’s the same lesson as the Small Hive Beetle case, arrived at independently: food availability draws the pest, but colony strength — not food denial per se — determines whether the pest actually gets to complete its life cycle.

On the “trick them” side of the essay’s strategy, researchers have made real progress identifying the wax moth’s sex pheromone components (compounds including nonanal, decanal, and undecanal show up across several studies, with the exact blend ratio varying somewhat by moth population), and male moths have been shown to fine-tune their own pheromone release in response to the wingbeat frequency of nearby females — an acoustic-chemical feedback loop layered on top of the basic scent signal. Pheromone-baited traps built on this research are useful for monitoring wax moth populations in stored equipment, though they’ve proven less reliable as a stand-alone in-hive control method — which is exactly why the standard beekeeping advice is still to keep colonies strong and to freeze or tightly store unused drawn comb, denying the moth’s larvae both the workforce-patrolled hive and any long-term undefended stash of protein-laced wax to grow in.

Case File 3: Yellow Jackets and the Calendar of Hunger

Yellow jackets (mostly Vespula species) make the essay’s dearth-season observation almost self-explanatory once you look at their annual colony cycle. A single mated queen founds a nest in spring and spends early summer as the sole forager, hunting insects and other protein to feed her first larvae. Those larvae, in turn, secrete a sugary substance that they exchange with adult workers for masticated protein — a mutual trophallaxis arrangement that fuels the colony’s rapid summer growth. Through midsummer, colony demand is protein-heavy, which is why wasps are aggressively hunting live prey and carrion in that window.

By late summer, the calculus flips. The colony begins producing new queens and males instead of more workers, larval production drops off, and with it the supply of larval sugar secretions that adult workers depend on. A colony full of adult wasps that suddenly has far less of its usual sugar source has to go looking elsewhere — right at the moment natural nectar sources are also drying up. That collision is precisely the “food dearth” window the original essay flags, and it explains why yellow jacket pressure at hive entrances and feeders spikes hardest in exactly the weeks beekeepers most need their colonies left alone.

The essay’s “trick them without tricking your bees” strategy also has a welldocumented chemical basis. Heptyl butyrate is a synthetic attractant that draws several common pestiferous Vespula species into traps with reasonable species-selectivity, while doing essentially nothing to attract honey bees (Reierson, Rust & Vetter and related field trials). Large-scale trapping studies have shown that heptyl-butyrate-baited or protein-baited traps can measurably suppress local yellow jacket forager numbers for weeks at a stretch, though researchers are consistently clear that trapping alone rarely eliminates a well-established population — it reduces pressure rather than solving the problem outright, which is a useful caveat to add to the essay’s otherwise tidy trapping advice.

The Common Thread: Three Links in One Chain

Laid side by side, the three case studies point to the same refinement of the essay’s core claim. “If they don’t eat, they don’t reproduce” is true, but a pest actually has to clear three separate hurdles to get there, and each one is a different point of intervention:

Locate the food. This step is chemical, not behavioral — beetles follow hijacked alarm pheromone, moths follow protein-scented comb, wasps follow protein and (in season) carbohydrate cues. Anything that adds fragrant, fermenting, or spilled food odor to an apiary — including well-meaning feeding practices — recruits pests at this stage before a beekeeper even knows they’re there.

Get access to it. This is where physical exclusion works: entrance reducers, robbing screens, screened bottom boards, and right-sized equipment don’t remove the food, they just narrow the number of doors a pest can use to reach it, concentrating the colony’s limited guard force where it can actually do its job.

Complete development undisturbed. This is the step the SHB and wax moth research keeps landing on: a hungry pest that finds food and gets inside still has to survive long enough, uninterrupted enough, to finish its life cycle — and that survival window is set almost entirely by whether the colony has enough workers, relative to the space it’s defending, to keep finding and evicting it.
The essay’s two tactics — starving pests and baiting them — map neatly onto hurdles one and two. The bee-to-comb ratio research reviewed above adds a third lever the essay doesn’t explicitly name but clearly gestures at with “hive right-sizing”: defense capacity, not food access alone, is often what decides the outcome.

Putting the Science to Work

None of this changes the essay’s practical recommendations so much as it explains why they work and adds one more:

 Cut off the scent trail. Avoid open or fragrant feeding, clean up spills promptly, and be mindful that essential-oil feed additives and fermenting syrup produce exactly the class of volatiles that draw in opportunists looking for a hijacked signal to follow.

 Narrow the doors. Entrance reducers, robbing screens, and screened bottom boards reduce the number of access points pests can exploit and concentrate a colony’s guard force where it matters — a strategy with direct research support in the SHB literature.

 Right-size the box to the bees. Keep the amount of comb a colony must defend proportional to its actual population. An over-supered, understrength hive isn’t just an SHB risk; it’s a wax moth risk for the same underlying reason — not enough guards per square inch of comb.

 Bait the hunger, not the hive. Species-specific attractants — mineraloil/vinegar SHB traps, pheromone lures for stored wax moth comb, heptyl-butyrate traps for yellow jackets — exploit the same detection systems pests use to find your hive, redirecting that hunger somewhere it can be safely dead-ended instead. This is a version of what integrated pest management researchers call a “push–pull” strategy: making the protected resource harder to find or reach (push) while offering a more attractive, disposable decoy nearby (pull).

 Expect an arms race, not a solved problem. The SHB’s trick of getting guard bees to feed it inside its own prison cell is a useful reminder that every defensive measure is answered, eventually, by some counteradaptation. Pest management in an apiary is maintenance, not a single fix.

Closing Thought

The original essay ends by suggesting that during a food dearth, it pays to think like a pest for a while. The research bears that out more literally than the essay probably intended: these pests aren’t reasoning about anything, they’re running fixed chemical and behavioral programs tuned by evolution to find food fast and convert it into offspring before the opportunity closes. That’s actually good news for a beekeeper. A fixed program is a predictable one. Learn the cue it responds to — a hijacked alarm pheromone, a proteinscented comb, a queen’s shifting nutritional demands — and you don’t have to outsmart the pest so much as quietly turn its own wiring against it.

Sources:
Review, 50(4), 370–396.
 Tay, L., & Diener, E. (2011). Needs and subjective well-being around the world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 354–365.
 Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433.
 MacArthur, R. H., & Wilson, E. O. (1967). The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton University Press.
 Torto, B., Boucias, D. G., Arbogast, R. T., Tumlinson, J. H., & Teal, P. E. A. (2007). Multitrophic interaction facilitates parasite–host relationship between an invasive beetle and the honey bee. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(20), 8374–8378.
 Benda, N. D., Boucias, D., Torto, B., & Teal, P. (2008). Detection and characterization of Kodamaea ohmeri associated with small hive beetle
Aethina tumida infesting honey bee hives. Journal of Apicultural Research, 47(3), 194–201.
 Neumann, P., Pettis, J. S., & Schäfer, M. O. (2016). Quo vadis Aethina tumida? Biology and control of small hive beetles. Apidologie, 47(3), 427–466.
 Ellis, J. D., Pirk, C. W. W., Hepburn, H. R., Kastberger, G., & Elzen, P. J. (2002). Small hive beetles survive in honeybee prisons by behavioural mimicry. Naturwissenschaften, 89(7), 326–328.
 Ottati, S., et al. (2021). Prisoners receive food fit for a queen: honeybees feed small hive beetles protein-rich glandular secretions through trophallaxis. Journal of Experimental Biology, 224(2), jeb234807.
 Reierson, D. A., Rust, M. K., & Vetter, R. S. Traps and protein bait to suppress populations of yellowjackets (Hymenoptera: Vespidae).
International Conference on Urban Pests proceedings.
 Boyd-Wilson, K. et al., and related field studies on greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella) pheromone identification and biology (various regional studies).

Here in the Midlands of South Carolina we are well into the pest control season for honey bee management.

It’s time to begin pest control. For wax moths, manage internal volume as we enter the period of declining population by removing space so bees can adequately cover the frames. For SHB, you have multiple methods such as oil traps, dry unscented Swiffer pads, hive tool whack-a-mole, vacuums, and/or interrupting their life cycle with soil drench, DE, or bait. Choose one or more. Pictured: Pool salt and GrubX.

Stress reduction for bees. Reduce pest pressure on your bees through pest management. Kill SHB at the source – as they seek to pupate in the ground.

Register for the State Fair honey show this month! Photo: watching wax harden is like waiting for a pot to boil.

Wikipedia: Petro Prokopovych (1775–1850, Ukrainian: Петро Прокопович) was a revolutionary Ukrainian^[1][2][3][4] beekeeper, the founder of commercial beekeeping and the inventor of the first movable frame hive.^[5] He introduced novelties in traditional beekeeping that allowed great progress in the practice. Among his most important inventions was a hive frame in a separate honey chamber of his beehive. He also invented a crude queen excluder between brood and honey chambers.^[6][7] Petro Prokopovych was also the first to ever model a ‘bee beard’ after delineating and calculating ‘bee swarm behaviour”, inspiring students for generations.^[8]

From http://beekeeping.com.ua: Petro Prokopovych was born in Ukraine, in the village of Mytchenky, near Baturyn, where he spent his childhood. The parents sent eleven-years-old Petro to Kiev-Mohyla Academy, where he studied for eight years. 

After the academy he wanted to be a teacher. However, the future genius of beekeeping was to go to a military career. Despite it was quite successful (the state awarded him, etc.), in 1798 he resigned.

At the brother’s small bee-garden the retired officer admired the life of mysterious small flying beings, which were kept in primitive hives, made from pieces of log. 

In 1799 Petro Prokopovych decided to devote himself to beekeeping and in 1808 he already had 580 bee-families. All these years he tried to understand the internal life of bee-family and to improve existing methods of beekeeping. One of directions of his research was looking for a way to take honey without wanton destruction of the family. 

In 1814 the tireless search resulted in the invention of the first in the world dismountable frame beehive, in which it was possible to control family and to actively influence the course of its development. In this beehive Prokopovych for the first time has considered a frame as a module of bee-hive – which used today by millions beekeepers all over the world. It was a landmark in the history of beekeeping, which has begun the epoch of rational beekeeping. 

One more his invention – the wooden partition with apertures, which were passable only for working bees. It made possible getting pure honey in the frames. 

Amos Root highly praised the inventions of Prokopovych: ” His frame has much in common with a modern section frame with openings for passage of bees, the walls of his beehive were joint in the lock. He applied methods, which far outstripped his time “. 

Prokopovych possessed not only the gift of researcher but also that of teacher. The school, founded by him, during 53 years of its existence prepared more than 700 qualified beekeepers with the most advanced experience of that time. The school apiary in 1855 had 2542 bee-families. 
Prokopovych published more than 60 articles in the newspapers and magazines. Many of his findings remain important now; for example, the drugless method of treatment foul brood by driving of bees to a new hive. 

Prokopovych considered beekeeping the most profitable branch of the agriculture and proved it, having become rather rich man. He had 6600 beehives of his own design only. 

Petro Prokopovych is buried  in a village Pal’chyky in the Chernigiv region, where his beekeepers’ school was located. The monument of Prokopovych is erected here,  the Ukrainian Institute of Beekeeping is named after him.

All this plus a great gravestone showing him with a removable frame!

This time of year, in my truck, I keep a deep 10 frame Langstroth box with 10 frames installed, screened bottom board, inner cover, and either migratory or telescoping top. And a ratchet strap to hold it all together for transportation. The entrance reducer is either closed or I replace it with #8 hardware cloth folded in a “U” shape. I also have ready for quick loading a swarm bucket with attachable telescoping painters pole and a ladder.

Additional, sometimes useful, items I usually have on hand include: A queen clip, a spray bottle of imitation almond extract, small and large limb pruners, and a spray bottle of sugar water to spray them with before the shake.

Turn your telephone on with volume up this time of year. You need to ask how high. If they say “not too high” ask what that means. Head height? Taller than two men, etc. How large is the cluster – baseball? soccer ball? or basketball? Are they in a bush or tree? If they say they are flying around their front porch ask if they are clustered? (yes, people call because their ornamental holly is blooming and attracting bees). After you determine they indeed have a honey bee swarm and not miner bees, yellow jackets, or carpenter bees, get the address and get there soon.

When you return home with your swarm now in your equipment let them settle down for a couple hours before you open them and insert a frame of open brood from another hive. This will typically lock them to the hive (remember they didn’t choose your hive as their preferred cavity). One final item is to place a feeder on them. They will want to draw comb and it takes carbohydrate to do so. You can get some fantastic drawn comb in a short amount of time from a swarm. Then open the entrance to let them fly and orient to their new home.

Here’s another method used called the queen’s throne. It uses a frame of brood or brood comb to lure the bees into the bucket. In the video he is capturing bees at a school yard and wants to minimize flying bees.

Add any tricks you have below.

I had one of my bee buddies call me yesterday. He was headed out of town for a few days. He wanted to tell me how well his colonies were doing on the lower Congaree River. Booming! He had just come from inspecting them and said they were dripping out when he lifted the inner cover. He said he rotated boxes and placed a super.

My question to him was, “How much capped brood did you see?” He replied that there were multiple, multiple frames of deep frames with capped brood.

From my experience, if they have not yet started queen cells his efforts may work for a few days tops. By then they will probably start queen cells and swarm. Why? Because a deep frame of capped brood with clinging bees represents about 9000 bees (very close to a package worth). That’s 1000 of clinging bees on each side and ~3700 capped cells per side. Cappped on day 9 and emerged on day 21 means within the next 12 days all of those capped cells will emerge (and all the ones on other frames as well). That’s roughly 7000+ more bees in that brood nest per capped frame in a short period of time. One of the “events” leading to swarming is congestion of bees in the brood nest which can happen very fast this time of year. And my friend said he had multiple frames of capped brood.

Another way of thinking about this is simply that the queen is laying 1000- 1500 eggs a day. Therefore, every day 1000-1500 new bees will emerge. Probably a minimum of 7000 – 12000 per week – about a package worth of bees per week.

Why am I so concerned about all this? Well, it’s the bees end-game to swarm. Swarming = Success They started this effort back in the fall and upped their game in January. And about 4 weeks ago they started the spring buildup. Bees start final swarm preparations 2-4 weeks prior to actually leaving the parent hive. My friend’s efforts are appropriate if there were no swarm cells but his efforts will be short lived unless he takes measures to reduce congestion. And in case you were wondering, that super he placed above will do little to prevent congestion in the brood nest. Simply, nurse bees have a job to do and that job is in the brood nest which is where they want to be – not that super given to them way up above.

Those that have suffered through my presentation on swarm prevention know that swarm prevention can be divided into two phases – early and late swarm prevention. Early swarm prevention starts at the first signs of spring pollen production while night time temperatures still threaten freezing. These measures are low stress which take into account that the bees’ population is still low and unable to heat the brood if we are too aggressive and disrupt their nest too much. Low stress swarm prevention methods include hive body rotation and checkerboarding honey frames in the boxes above the brood nest.

Then there is the second phase of swarm prevention. These are interventions that we can do after the weather warms enough to allow us to disrupt the brood nest. We are able to disrupt the brood nest during this late swarm prevention period because 1) the night time temperatures are higher and 2) we now have many more bees to heat the colony and brood area. The bees can now handle the addition stressors. Manipulations which can now be done late phase to interrupt the swarm urge include opening the brood nest with drawn comb, or even foundationless frames. Another method is an early Demaree which involves moving open brood out of the brood nest and into a hive body and placing above the brood nest separated by an empty super. This will reduce brood nest congestion as the nurse bees will migrate upward to cover the open brood. Pretty disruptive but remember that congestion in the brood nest must be lessened to disrupt the urge to swarm. A final option is to simply make splits moving frames of open and closed larvae out of the brood nest and replacing those frames with drawn comb. A word of caution here, do not insert frames of foundation in the middle of the brood nest. By doing so you may create a wall further restricting the queen. The drawback of making splits instead of working within the parent hive is you are losing 9000 future foragers with every frame you take out. That’s like reducing your nectar gathering work force just before they are needed to make surplus honey.

Swarm prevention hopefully does what the name suggests – prevent swarms. So what happens if the bees beat us and start queen cells. Well, first realize they have more practice than we do at this so don’t despair. If they make queen cells they will be relentless in their efforts and more drastic measures must be used.

After queen cells are created, these measures are called Swarm Control. The easiest is to simply split them which, for the bees, seems like they swarmed. Sure you’ll lose out on a bountiful honey harvest from that colony but hey, they won the battle so make lemonade from the lemons – you get a new colony of bees anyway. Other ways of handling include the Demaree method, and several other methods all of which fool the bees into thinking they have swarmed. Google: Snelgrove, Padgen, or Taranov all of which fool the colony into thinking they have swarmed.

Jan Swammerdam (February 12, 1637 – February 17, 1680) was a Dutch biologist and microscopist. His work on insects demonstrated that the various phases during the life of an insect—egg, larva, pupa, and adult—are different forms of the same animal. As part of his anatomical research, he carried out experiments on muscle contraction. In 1658, he was the first to observe and describe red blood cells. He was one of the first people to use the microscope in dissections, and his techniques remained useful for hundreds of years.

While studying medicine Swammerdam had started to dissect insects and after qualifying as a doctor, Swammerdam focused on insects. His father pressured him to earn a living, but Swammerdam persevered and in late 1669 published Historia insectorum generalis ofte Algemeene verhandeling van de bloedeloose dierkens (The General History of Insects, or General Treatise on little Bloodless Animals). The treatise summarised his study of insects he had collected in France and around Amsterdam. He countered the prevailing Aristotelian notion that insects were imperfect animals that lacked internal anatomy.^[1] Following the publication his father withdrew all financial support.^[2] As a result, Swammerdam was forced, at least occasionally, to practice medicine in order to finance his own research. He obtained leave at Amsterdam to dissect the bodies of those who died in the hospital.^[3]

The most striking features of Swammerdam’s work are his drawings of his dissections. One of his most famous figures was his illustration of the queen’s ovaries. This extraordinarily detailed drawing, accompanied by three pages of description and a 1000-word long legend, was backed up by an attempt to count the number of eggs present in the ovary — he calculated that there were around 5,100 eggs in the ovaries.

At university Swammerdam engaged deeply in the religious and philosophical ideas of his time. He categorically opposed the ideas behind spontaneous generation, which held that God had created some creatures, but not insects. Swammerdam argued that this would blasphemously imply that parts of the universe were excluded from God’s will. In his scientific study Swammerdam tried to prove that God’s creation happened time after time, and that it was uniform and stable. Swammerdam was much influenced by René Descartes, whose natural philosophy had been widely adopted by Dutch intellectuals. In Discours de la methode Descartes had argued that nature was orderly and obeyed fixed laws, thus nature could be explained rationally.^[4]

Swammerdam was convinced that the creation, or generation, of all creatures obeyed the same laws. Having studied the reproductive organs of men and women at university he set out to study the generation of insects. He had devoted himself to studying insects after discovering that the king bee was indeed a queen bee. Swammerdam knew this because he had found eggs inside the creature. But he did not publish this finding. In 1669 Swammerdam was visited by Cosimo II de’ Medici and showed him another revolutionary discovery. Inside a caterpillar the limbs and wings of the butterfly could be seen (now called the imaginal discs). When Swammerdam published The General History of Insects, or General Treatise on little Bloodless Animals later that year he not only did away with the idea that insects lacked internal anatomy, but also attacked the Christian notion that insects originated from spontaneous generation and that their life cycle was a metamorphosis.^[5] Swammerdam maintained that all insects originated from eggs and their limbs grew and developed slowly. Thus there was no distinction between insects and so called higher animals. Swammerdam declared war on “vulgar errors” and the symbolic interpretation of insects was, in his mind, incompatible with the power of God, the almighty architect.^[6] Swammerdam therefore dispelled the seventeenth-century notion of metamorphosis —the idea that different life stages of an insect (e.g. caterpillar and butterfly) represent different individuals^[7] or a sudden change from one type of animal to another.^[8]

Swammerdam equally made the first precise descriptions of the bees’ mouthparts and of the sting and poison gland. In both respects his description was correct and highly detailed.

Credits:

Wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Swammerdam

Jan Swammerdam website: http://www.janswammerdam.org/

As the local natural beekeeping group, we’ve got to know and respect Filipe. The recent article in The Guardian about his findings at Blenheim has led to some heated debate in the Twittersphere. In the following article, Guy Thompson addresses some of the controversy. By Guy Thompson This piece in the Observer has caused a […]

Blenheim bees – news article and response — Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group