Everything that the wild honey that lives in forests | Climate and environment

More than 20,000 species Bees that are calculated that exist in the world, none is as known as that of honey, Apis Mellifera, Adomated by humans for millennia, as well as goats, cows or horses. When talking about beeMost people automatically think about the hive insects. Apreakekeers with their special costumes to protect you from bites. However, colonies of wild characteristics can also be found that produce honey in trees and other cavities in natural spaces. This is what the book shows Ai helpers. His secret life in the forest, Jürgen Tautz, a work now published in Spanish by the terrestrial publishing house of fertility that enters the nests of these incredible social insects in German floretas to claim the great importance of wild populations.

The first surprise of researchers who study these wild colonies of honey bees in Europe is that there are many more than those of thought. Thomas SeeleyPioneer in these studies estimated that in the Arnot forest, in the state of New York, there was a tree inhabited by these pollinators per square kilometer. But the amazement is much greater when their behavior and their curious mechanisms to defend themselves observe closely when they live independently. For example, unlike what happens in the hive of the beekeepers, in the nests of the trees that bees live with other species with which they establish positive associations, such as pseudoscorpions, which feed Varroa mites, one of the main parasites that threaten the pollinating. Although conservationism has never paid too much attention to these insects, due to the overabundance of beekeeping, a sector considered even cattle, in recent years the interest in the United States and Europe in these wild colonies has grown a lot. Above all, with the problem of mortality in the beef’s hive and the decline of many pollinators.

“The Hypi bees managed by humans are subject to great pressure for diseases and parasites. Obviously, obviously, they survive these problems. When they study what contributes to the success of wild bees, we hope to learn how to better support the controlled bees”, says Tautz, author of the book and professor emeritus at the University of Wurzburg (Germany). “An important second aspect is that the populations of wild bees are configured by natural selection, not by human selection. In this way, wild bees host a genetic treasure that one day could be fundamental.”

After settling in Spain, the beekeeper Alejandro Machado, who grew up in Germany but with the Galian mother, read on the internet that some German researchers were looking for a collaboration to find colonies of wild bees that nest on the trees. “I wrote to them and I told them: I am in Galicia and here there are honey bees that live between the trees, on the walls, in the electric poles …”. This is how two collaborators of Tautz at the University of Wurzburg, Benjamin Rutschmann and Patrick Kohl, began to monitor the populations of these companies polished in Xinzo de Limia (Outrese).

These insects need holes to nest, but they are not able to do them alone, so they often use holes that leave the carpenters among the trees. They select the cavities from the ground, a way to protect themselves from sweet bears, when they are there. All this does not make it easy to identify and study these nests scattered in all forests. However, in Galicia the German researchers found that it is much easier when wild bees live in cable cement electrical places, very accessible and localizable, therefore they concentrated their research on these locations. “In the agricultural landscapes without natural nesting habitats, these posts act as artificial cables,” says Rutschmann. Second Published in Biological conservationAfter checking 214 batteries, 29 found colonies of bees Bee mellifera iberiensis A subspecies of the Iberian peninsula (of a darker color) which, despite the expansion of some lineages in the current beekeeping due to performance problems, is still used in many hive of the country’s beekeepers.

Ornosa Concepción, entomologist specialized in pollinators of the University of Complutse, differentiates two types of colonies that can be found in nature: those of truly wild bees that have nothing to do with the tame populations, “which in Spain is very difficult, but who knows”, and the kindergartens of the swarms outside the horn of the beekeekeers of the beeekeekeers, “Very common”. THE escape From this second way they are inherent to the very nature of the species, because when the colonies reach a certain population, half of the bees leaves the nest with a queen to look for another settlement. In the hives, beekeepers are generally in progress to change them before this happens, but this does not always happen. “Finding resources in the area, various flowers, bushes, pastures and possibilities of nests, obviously that bees can survive themselves, since they are very versatile,” says Ornosa. “In the classroom I have always told students that the best conservation is the intervention: nature works better if we do not go to put the hand. That we must intervene to restore a landscape, because yes, but more natural it is better means that the species live there.”

For Patrick Kohl, another of the German researchers who monitor the wild colonies in the electrical places in Xinzo de Limia, is still early to draw conclusions on these populations. As he says, “in general, we cannot distinguish wild bees from raised bees according to their genetics or morphology in most places in Europe”. “Therefore, a crucial question in our research is whether the cohorts of wild colonies can form car populations -that is, we study if they would be stable over time based on their survival and reproduction,” says the scientist. “What is usually accepted as a” truly wild “population is the one that does not depend on the immigration of shamans from the colmenares. For example, in the study region in Galicia, according to the survival rates observed, the wild colonies would need to produce two to three shamans per year to maintain the population.”

The Galician Beekeep Machado claims to have looked out of the electric places for these bees for a few years. In his case, this discovery, together with the publications of Seley and Tautz, has changed their way of looking at bees and managing their hives. It is contrary to the use of varieties of bees very different from the natives, such as Buckfast, which presumably are milder and bite less. Or with constant intervention in the hive, fueling insects or providing them with health treatments. On the contrary, try to act as little as possible, so that the bees live similarly to the wild one. “What I do is leave them honey,” he underlines. “Here is a conflict of interest, because how much honey comes out, more money,” says Machado. “I don’t live from honey and I don’t want to live with honey, exactly for this reason.”

One of the main surprises faced by the book by Arndt and Tautz is the way in which, despite the multiple blends and hybridizations of current beekeeping, honey bees have not lost their wild form. “Because after so many millennia of human beekeeping there are still no Holifers that they are so different from its original appearance as a sausage dog is a wolf?” Toutz asks. “Two reasons explain this fact. First of all, the reproductive biology of bees and their mating behavior significantly hinder their reproduction as cattle or pigs,” explains the German professor. · “Secondly, the distribution of genes within a population and aplodiploidia as a basis for sexual determination gives rise to a system very resistant to change. And when they occur, they occur very slowly. All this prevents a rapid evolution in the bees.”