Hi, I'm Nick from Australiannativebee.com that it'd be in today's video is going to be on bee psychology
this is something that I've wanted to talk about for some time because
learning to read Bees and the way they think
Will help you as beekeeper to make decisions as to what to do with your stingless bees, so
I'll go in and we'll explain a few things about Bee psychology
All right, let's have a look at how messages are sent within the bee's body
throughout its body
And its response to that so basically a bee has brain it has a nerve cord that runs down and on the nerve cord
It's got thickenings in that nerve cord now inside those thickenings we have
Neurons and the neurons have little feet and all those feet touch
Now a neuron has a large foot and it also has these
Little feet that come off
Those little feet are called
dendrites
so basically when a bee receives a message a
signal runs down the nerve cord and
We have what's called an input neuron and those input neurons touch on feet
on the other
neurons feet and
Send messages throughout
To let the bee know what's going on
the cell the neuron cell membrane is
positively charged and when a message comes in that positive charge
Turns from positive to negative and that's called depolarization and the Bee
Depending on the strength of that electrical signal will react according to it
so when the bee is
Somebody's fiddling with the hive that's obviously gonna be a strong
electrical impulse that runs through the beat and the bee will react
according so
So let's talk about some of the
psychological modes I guess you could call them or electrical impulses that the
bees work on so these are some of the modes that
I'm aware of
when I'm working with bees and
So what I've got here is pollen collecting
And nectar collecting they sort of go hand in hand where the bee leaves the colony. It's thinking pollen and nectar
So they kind of go hand in hand. Attack and defense
also go hand in hand and
Colonizing and construction that's a particular mode bees go into
why this is important to look at these different modes is
They pair in some ways
now
If you were to group these different modes
and
You're able to read
What our being is thinking you can do lots of things with your bees
For instance
If I see bees that are pollen and nectar collecting it's very unlikely that I'm going to be able to get those bees to
colonize and move into a box they're already in a mode and
You can't do anything about that if the bees are attacking or defending.
To ask the bee to go into a pollen mode or even a nectar collecting mode
is near impossible
the bee
Has received a message and that's what it's doing
So let me give you some examples of how
This can be useful for you as beekeeper
Here's some bees that are in a searching mode they're moving up and down the tree
They're looking for any sort of hole or crevice and at the base of the tree, they're sort of clustering around
They've been here for two weeks. I
Was able to help the bees move out of a searching mode into a colonizing mode just by using some honey and pollen pots
In a hive so they knew where home was
Here you can see their bees electrical signals or mode has changed the bees are not spread out
They're in a tight ball and they're all facing the same way and moving into the hive so something's changed there
Here's what that colony looks like now. They're laying brood and collecting honey and pollen
Here's a little experiment I set up today that I thought everyone would find interesting
And that is how to pull bees out of a fighting swarm. So I put two strange hives
Next to each other and a fighting swarm was triggered
now most people think these swarms are territorial and some of them are but this swarm is to do with
Two hives that look very similar to each other and the bees are strange
so what I've done is I've stuck a soccer ball on one side of
one hive and I've stuck a bag with grapes on the other and that's
Providing the bees with a visual so that they can tell the two hives apart
This is roughly two hours later, and they're still swarming going on and three hours later. No swarming going on
so this is just about learning to read what mode a bee is in and how to
Change that mode to get the bee to do what you want it to do
So my last example is that I wanted to move a bunch of hives up here on the plank
And I wanted to do it all in one go
So this raises the question of the
Foragers left behind from where the hives were. This is where the hives were here and also up on that plank next to it
So what I did is I put two weak colonies here. I left the bees looking for their hives for a day
so they lose some of their smell and
Now they're going into these two weak colonies and joining with them
So that was just three very quick
examples of modes and their solution
but what I want to say is there are many many many different types of swarms and things that bees do and
It's up to you as beekeeper to figure out what mode your bees are in and how you can help them
as a beekeeper, so I hope this is
Inspirational in some ways and gets people to think
Outside the box with how they work with their bees
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