Free Spirits: Investigating Free-Living Nordic Honey Bee Colonies (Ep. 38)

We’re looking into the fascinating history and current efforts to conserve a unique dark honeybee in Sweden, Apis mellifera mellifera or the Nordic honeybee. One of the intriguing aspects we discuss is the historical presence of honeybees in Swedish forests. Hollow trees used to be abundant in old forests, providing natural habitats for honeybee colonies. The industrialization of forestry practices has led to a drastic reduction in these hollow trees, posing a significant threat to the species that depend on them. Enjoy this deep dive into forest history and learn more about Sweden’s solitary bees but also the importance of preserving natural habitats and the role of urban gardening for pollinators.

Mats Niklasson is Head of Education and Science at Nordens Ark, a private non-profit foundation focused on the conservation of endangered species and the sustainable use of biological resources. He’s also an Associate Professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Good to know

Solitary bees appreciate trees just as much as social ones looking to build a hive. If you’d like to try some forest bee-spotting, go for a walk in a young, open canopy forest or along edges and roads of older closed canopy forests. The best place to look is around any flowering plant, shrub or tree. Depending on where you live, you may spot mason bees, a variety of sweat bees, and bumblebees.

In Episode 9, we talked to Dr. John Mola about the importance of forests for bumblebee conservation.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Bee’s Knees. I’m your host, Jacy Meyer. The Bee’s Knees is a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity.

Thanks for being here.

We don’t talk much about honeybees at The Bee’s Knees, and that’s deliberate. Native and wild bees are hugely important to biodiversity and ecosystem function. And I believe, considering their level of importance, there’s a distressing lack of information and conversation surrounding them. In many parts of the world, the honeybee is an introduced species, and as any type of introduced species, they compete for resources with the local fauna.

However, in some parts of the world, the honeybee is a native species. Today we’re going to [00:01:00] look at one such native honeybee. Whose homeland is one you may not expect, Sweden. A. mellifera mellifera, or the Nordic honeybee, is nearly extinct, but breeding and conservation efforts are in full swing. Let’s learn more.

My name is Mats Niklasson. I work mainly at Nordens Ark. It’s a private foundation. We work with endangered species and ex situ to breeding, but also in situ to work, uh, which means we work with breeding of species outside of their habitat in a zoo setting, so to speak. We also work a lot with ecological restoration and uh, I work in particular with the Nordic honeybee or the dark honeybee, which is a native subspecies of the.

European honeybee. So tell me about the Nordic honeybee. Its origins, characteristics, and what is its current status in Sweden? [00:02:00] Where they up A. Mellifera mellifera, the dark one, which is almost totally black. It’s not like the archetypical yellow, black stripe bee. It’s more like black or brownish. It used to be the dominant subspecies all over Southern Scandinavia.

Central and Western Europe, uh, had a huge distribution before the advent of the frame beehive keeping that. started in the 1860s, but gradually took over the beekeeping and with that, we started importing other subspecies. So this import has pushed away the native subspecies over actually in many countries.

So the subspecies is extinct in some countries and it has a very tough situation in Sweden with about 1000 hives. Out of 160,000 hives. So it’s just a small proportion of honeybees that are the [00:03:00] native honeybees today. So let’s discuss your findings into the free living colonies of the bee. Why did you decide to investigate the bees local history?

I have a strong interest in forest history and fire history, and when you start to read about the honeybee, you realize that it’s actually a forest or a tree species. It is really, in most of the temperate areas where you find this honeybee, it’s really a tree inhabitant. It’s living in trees, in hollow trees.

It’s by far the majority of the findings are in trees in our colder climates, whereas in the warmer climates it doesn’t need to have the insulation of wood in the winter, so it can live in rocky crevices and in other places. So I was always interested in honeybees. Since I worked with forest history and came across some old testimonies, [00:04:00] like 30 years ago, I was reading old documents and just by chance I saw these comments on old farmers and old, you know, the self subsistence people of southern Sweden, they used to come across wild honeybees in the forest.

Yeah, and today we don’t hardly see any wild honeybees at all. So that was always, you know, nagging me in my, we say in the Swedish, in the back head. I don’t know how you say it in English. It was always there and how is that possible, you know? And then I came across this super interesting ethological material that was collected in the 1920s and thirties mainly.

And it had been scanned into PDFs recently so you could find it on internet. And it was interviews with old beekeepers in Sweden. So it was combination of interest in both forest history, human use of forests and human use of bees, and these, all these notions of [00:05:00] wild bees in the forest. And they don’t fit with what you see today when you go out in the forest, you just don’t find them.

And if you find them, you regard them as something odd, something, it shouldn’t be there almost, you know? So in compiling all this information, what was your biggest takeaway? Well, it seemed to be. I would say rather a common species in forests, uh, the honeybees, because indirectly we could, if you say you read between the lines, right, that hollow trees were just so common in the old forest before industrialization of the Swedish forest.

You know, Sweden has extremely efficient forestry, right? It’s a type of industrial forestry. I’m a forester myself, my background, but I took an ecological turn quite early. Uh, we are often seen as a trademark for [00:06:00] sustainable forestry. In reality, maybe that’s not the full truth. If you come here, you will see huge clear cuts and you actually start to realize that, species that need hollow trees or old trees and these kind of habitats, they are actually on the red list or they are almost going extinct.

Some woodpeckers are a very good example of that, but they are very rare and they have even gone extinct, also using hollow trees, right? All these documents, they tell you that very likely this honeybee was not regarded as something odd or peculiar or, Strange or unusual or so, you know, it was, you just went out to the forest and if you were lucky you could find a colony in a tree and you chop down this piece and get some honey for free, you know, or the colony, you know, it had a huge value.

It’s so clear to me that the honeybee was a very, very common species as a wild species, right? And that [00:07:00] is, for me, quite mind blowing. When you walk around in the forest today, you just don’t see much of hollow trees.

You start to realize that it’s very likely that the hollow trees are a crucial factor for the populations in the forest. The number of hollow trees, their properties, their hollow sizes and volumes and so on. It’s not every hollow tree that suits a bee colony, right? So that is also very interesting. And it again tells us that.

Hollow trees must have been just everywhere in the forest in the past, right? Just everywhere. And that for me, it gives us a good aim, right? A good future aim where we could strive for having such forests back, where we protect forests and where we restore forests. I think this is a super important take home message.

This is probably what the nature was looking like. Like only 200, [00:08:00] 150 years ago, when these interviews usually had the oldest ones, they were born in the 1840s. That’s a long time ago. Yeah, so they had experienced a time way before the industrialization of forestry, right? There was no commercially managed forest in the very efficient way of today.

There were no plantings of a huge area for example. You would cut one tree here, one tree there. And so their testimonies, they tell us that until quite recently, these forests were common. And it’s, for me, very, very interesting. And it’s kind of, it’s another take on why we are sitting in such deep problems with biodiversity in forests in Sweden.

So talking about kind of bringing back the Nordic honeybee to Sweden, you have breeding stations. How does it work? And what results have you seen? Yeah, the Nordic Honeybee, it started as a rescue program in the late [00:09:00] 80s, because beekeepers in the 80s started to see that, Jesus, the native dark one is not existing any longer.

So if we are going to have these native, our native original genes in our country, we have to do something. So there was an initiative by, for example, Ingvar Arvidsson, but there were many more. And they actually, they initiated the breeding station and it was started up in the biggest lake of Vänern of Sweden.

You can see it on most maps. It’s quite a large lake. So in the middle of the lake, there’s some big islands and there’s the first breeding station. Yeah, they had some problems in the beginning in the late 80s, how to monitor the quality of the breeding and obviously for non specialists, you must have breeding [00:10:00] stations in areas which is about, I would say, no less than 15 kilometers away from any other beekeeper.

So either you must stay out in the, in the ocean or in the big lake. Or you must be very confident that there are no other beekeepers with other subspecies. We are running this second breeding station in Sweden. Uh, out in the ocean and we have fully pure genes from these matings, yeah. So we are, uh, together with the other big breeding station, we are supplying every beekeeper that wants to have the native Nordic bee.

We have to transport everything far, far away. It’s an hour and a half. With a boat out to the ocean, and it’s a very exotic, very touristic, archipelago, very extreme environment, but actually lots of nectar flowers out there. Are there other native bees in Sweden? [00:11:00] And what are their status? Yeah, you have like 250 solitary bees, right?

Yeah. So we have one social bee, which is the Apis mellifera mellifera. And of course, we have like in all Europe. About 250 species of solitary bees. Yeah, which is of course, in terms of number of species, a lot, yeah. And they are also having tough times. So, personally I work a lot with the flora restoration.

Because we have here on the zoo where I work, we have a huge piece of land where we are We are restoring spruce monocultures, which is a common theme in all throughout Europe and Czech Republic as well. So we are removing spruce monocultures and putting cows back on these. They were used to be grazed grasslands in the past.

But we are trying to get back flowers either by planting or by sowing. It’s actually not so simple, I would say [00:12:00] it’s a quite hard work without having any scientific evidence. We are right now in the peak summer and together with the beekeepers, I sense that there is this quite strong decline in flowering the peak summer.

Yeah, we have quite good flower resources in the spring and early summer. We have. Many species, we have dandelion. That’s an important one, right? Everywhere in Europe, in the spring. And then, right in high summer, we don’t have many flowers anymore, because the meadows are basically gone. Where we produce fodder for cows, it’s managed in a way that doesn’t give us many flowers.

It’s a tough situation, actually. For example, I suspect that we are lacking species like the lime tree. Of course, we have lime trees, but they are just around the houses and, you know, in just a few trees. And you can see that, of course, there are magnets [00:13:00] in July right now, right? So they are super important for bees.

It’s like the only big resource that we have at this time of the year. So we are going to plant lime trees as well. So we are trying to provide more nectar and pollen resources. It’s very hard to produce a lot of flowers. And actually, you can see that urban areas are very, very important for bees. You know that.

We know that from scientific papers that it’s actually very important because that in urban areas you keep flowers all throughout spring through the autumn, right? And that’s the key for this success in urban areas and many pollinators. So we should not at all underestimate private gardens. I think that’s a super important thing and it’s not like naive hope, right?

It is very important. We can just agree on that, I think. [00:14:00] The story of the Nordic honeybee is so familiar. Removing or adapting natural habitats is detrimental to the species that rely on the resources that habitat provides. Clever interventions, like flying bees to far off archipelagos to breed, are wonderful, but it is unfortunate that such measures have to be taken.

Thanks so much to Mats for sharing this story and thank you for listening. I appreciate your time and thank you for caring about our bees. Please visit thebeesknees.website to sign up for The Hive, our twice a month newsletter, and please follow and rate the show. Until next time, stay sweet.