Tag: The Hive Detectives

Guess what arrived this week? My new-and-improved, fully-copyedited bee book manuscript. Go on, have a peek:

Did you notice the new title? THE HIVE DETECTIVES is now called COLONY COLLAPSE: CHRONICLE OF A HONEY BEE CATASTROPHE. I am not sold on this change yet; what do you think?

Did you also notice the scads of purple ink on the text pages? (You might have to click the image to enlarge it and see the scads clearly.) The fun begins on page one, with the word honey bee. Houghton Mifflin house style calls for this to be changed to a single word: honeybee. Scientists, however, prefer the more accurate two words: honey bee. My job is to figure out which is most appropriate for this book … and once I have to move on and address hundreds of similar issues on pages two through sixty-seven (plus i through xxxv).

If you are my friend and you are a beekeeper, you will surely be hearing from me this week!

 

This week I have been working with my foremost Work-In-Progress, the bee book. For the last month I have been diligently polishing and perfecting the text, so this week was all about the images.

THE HIVE DETECTIVES will be illustrated with sixty or more photographs, and one of my many jobs is to choose which images best suit the text I have written or convey principles that complement what I have written. I thought I’d share a bit of the process here on the ol’ blog …

First, some context. Here is a sneak peak at the reader’s introduction to the Varroa mite, a nasty little creature that plagues honey bees:

Let’s start with Varroa mites. These are tiny insects—about the size of this letter “o”—that survive by attaching themselves to the outside of a bee and feeding on its blood. (Technically, bees don’t have blood. They have hemolymph, which is blood mixed together with other bodily fluids. Either way, an insect that drinks this stuff is pretty gross.) Mites spend the early part of their life cycle hidden inside a honeycomb cell, usually underneath a growing larva. When the larva is fed by adult bees, the hidden mite is fed, too. Later, when the cell is capped and the larva begins to pupate, female mites lay eggs. The eggs hatch and dozens of newborn mites attach themselves to the developing bee. In many cases the bee will die. If the bee does survive, it will emerge from its capped cell unhealthy, misshapen, and covered in a new generation of Varroa mites. These young mites hop from one bee to the next until they find a new larval cell to hide in and begin the cycle again.

And to give you an idea of what the little buggers look like:

Photo by Scott Bauer, Courtesy USDA/ARS

Now, I plan to use the image above in the book, but I also want to give the reader a visual of a mite actually on a bee. Here are my two best choices:

Photo by Scott Bauer, Courtesy USDA/ARS

This image is incredibly crisp and the mite on the bee stands out well. Aesthetically speaking, it is my favorite. But the location of the mite is unfortunate. All honey bees are darkish and less-hairy in this part of their bodies. (Scroll through the images here and you will see what I mean. The honey bee is third row down on the left.) I am worried that readers will think the mite in this image is actually a normal part of the bee’s anatomy.

Photo by Lila de Guzman, Courtesy USDA/ARS

This second choice is less crisp because the photographer was attempting to capture a group of bees. (Let me assure you that it is very hard to focus a camera on a cluster of busy honey bees and produce a crisp, sharp and focused image!) However, these bees are horribly infested with Varroa mites, and the mites should be easily recognizable to my readers. It is a creepy image, too, and sometimes creepy is good.

Which would you choose?

 

Today I interviewed two experienced monarch-taggers about their work; in the process I stumbled on a useful method for finding wild beehives. It is much easier than the process I outlined yesterday:

1. Visit your local Audubon Sanctuary (I happened to be at this one today);

2. Ask the staff naturalist if she knows of any feral hives on the property;

3. Follow her directions to the tree.

© Loree Griffin Burns

I don’t actually know if this is a bee tree. I watched the holes for ten or fifteen minutes and didn’t see any bees enter or exit … but the temperature was hovering just under fifty degrees outside, which is cold for flying. Maybe the bees were huddled up inside?

::rubbing hands and remembering this commercial::

It will be fun to find out!