#1 :: There's no place like home
Intro music: "Fixing My Brain Final Remix" by UFO
JAKE Hello, you’re listening to Insectapod cast. Each month we choose a theme, then offer two or three different views of that theme. This month’s theme is “There’s no place like home.” First, we’ll spend some time talking about honey bees, why humans move them so much, and how it affects them. Then we take a look at an old foe many had thought was out of the house for good, bed bugs. I’m Jake McCarthy with Anna Fiedler, this is insectapod cast, a product of the Michigan State University Dept. of Entomology, funded by the Ray and Bernice Hutson Memorial Entomology Endowment.
ANNA Driving down a narrow, rutted woods road in a purple late-model PT cruiser, Beekeeper Terry Klein in pointing out the tell-tale white boxes that dot the Michigan woods around his home and house his livelihood. As we come up on a clearing, he stops the car to show me a swarm of bees he recently gathered from near a school in Birch Run and brought up to his property with hopes they might survive and move into a managed hive.
TERRY And on your right you;ll see the bee hive from Birch Run with its multitude of habitants. These bees are overcrowded. They are getting ready to swarm.
[sound of buzzing bees]
ANNA They were in on old stump, thousands of them, so many it looked like the bark was moving. Klein had placed an empty bee-box on top of the stump, hoping to catch the queen in the managed hive and keep her there to bring in the workers, too.
It’s a common scenario: the movement of bees to places more advantageous to humans, but with true reverence and caution, not because of the threat of stinging, but because so much rests on bees and the places they call home.
Honeybees are positively and negatively affected by the ways humans cultivate them. They were originally brought to the U.S. in the 17th and 18th century by humans and we have always affected where and how honeybees live. Michigan beekeeper and honey packer Terry Klein relocates his beehives during the growing season. He also rescues beehives when they are in places that people don’t want them.
And while there are, in fact lots of places people don’t want bee hives— backyards, playgrounds, campsites, for instance— there are even more places where we NEED beehives.
And not just because of honey. Although that’s the primary concern for beekeepers, a large chunk of the US economy rests on the availability of bees to pollinate fruits, nuts, and some vegetables- over 80 agricultural crops in the U.S. are dependent on honeybee pollination. MSU Entomology Professor Zachary Huang, a specialist in honeybee biology, told us that pollination services provided by honeybees are valued at about 450 million dollars a year in Michigan, and about 15 billion dollars a year nationally, whereas Huang told us the honey we produce in Michigan is valued at less than 10 million dollars.
As a beekeeper Terry Klein uses honey production as his primary source of income, but
pollination is still a secondary source. I asked him whether, like many beekeepers, he loads his hives onto trucks and moves them to other parts of the state and country where crops are in need of pollination and growers are paying for that service.
ANNA Do you relocate hives seasonally so that they’re near flowering crops at all?”
TERRY Yes, we do pollination. Right now we’re in the process, tonight we’re going to move some out of blueberries. We do primarily apples and blueberries in the spring, and very little in the summer crops; as far as pickles, we don’t do pickles. We do a few in the pumpkins, but with the pickles there’s no honey and they bloom right at the time where the honey flow is on and we’re primarily honey producers. Pollination is a secondary income for us.
ANNA Moving hives to Texas, Florida, and other southern states in the winter months to pollinate crops also allows numbers in the hive to continue growing; often the bees that overwinter in southern climates can be split into two hives when they are brought back to Michigan in the spring. This benefits bees and beekeepers as it can result in increased honey production and bee survival. Klein keeps his beehives in Michigan during the winter, and lost about 50% of his hives during the winter of 2007.
ANNA How long does a worker bee live in the winter months?
TERRY In the summer months they’re only living approximately 6 weeks where they wear themselves out, but the bees that are born in September- October, they usually live through until spring. That’s the plan."
ANNA A challenge in Michigan, a northern state, is for bee hives to survive the winter. Bees stay in the hive, forming a mass, eating honey, and shivering to remain warm. Irregular winter temperatures, or very cold winters, can kill hives. In the last 20 years, two pest of bees, the varroa and tracheal mites, were accidently introduced into the U.S. These tiny parasites live on and inside bees, sucking their blood. Infested bees are weak, and infested hives may not survive the winter. A new disorder with an unknown cause – Colony Collapse, is also impacting hive survival over the winter.On the other hand, moving bees can also cause bee mortality and stress. Huang put it this way:
ZACHARY Definitely moving the bees is probably causing them more stress, just imagine you are enclosed in a black box and crowded with 40,000 of your sisters and driven 4 to 5 days all the way to California from Maine. You will be jet lagging for three or four different time zones and no fresh air, lots of CO2 build up.
All that moving around of beehives isn’t really something the bees would choose for themselves. Bees have an innate ability to return to their own hives— Terry says they’re like homing pigeons in that respect. There are instances, though, when bees will relocate on their own. When they will swarm. In early spring, a beehive will contain 10-15,000 bees, nearly all of which are female workers, and one queen bee. In July-August, numbers have increased to 50-60,000 in one hive. When bees get overcrowded, the queen will stop laying eggs due to lack of space and a new queen will develop in the hive. The old queen, then, will take about half of the worker bees with her to start a new hive. This is a ‘swarm’, and when people see an undulating ball of bees all clinging to each other and hanging from a branch, they will call 911 to report a swarm. Terry told us “911 has our number” – he is called when a swarm is reported anywhere in the greater Saginaw area. I asked him what sorts of spaces a swarm of bees might choose as their new home.
ANNA When bees swarm, where do they end up? Where do they find homes, typically?
TERRY Typically, they look for hollow trees. Any cavity will work. I’ve taken them out of oak barrels of various sizes. Women like to have them on their porch for decoration but they forget to cover that bung hole, and we’ve had bees in the barrels. I had a fellow bring me an oven last spring. Lo and behold, it had been scrapped and it was laying in the yard on its back, but there was a crack. They got in. I opened the oven door, and here it’s full of beeswax and comb in every different direction, but unfortunately the bees didn’t survive, but the wax did. Most commonly they’re in hollow trees and buildings. I’ve gotten 2 calls in the last week of bees in buildings, one just today from Saginaw. They were in the soffet of the house, and there’s just no way they can tear into it and get them out. If they were going to tear the house down, yes. I did two of those in Midland a couple of years ago, but normally we restrict ourselves to trees that we can manage in the back of a pickup and bring home and get the bees worked out of them.”
ANNA Klein does this as a public service; sometimes he successfully gets the swarm to move into a managed beehive by catching the queen up in the managed hive and putting a wire mesh that doesn’t allow her to move back into the unmanaged hive. Other times, Klein is less successful.
When you find a basketball-sized group of bees on the end of a limb like that, are they searching for a place to nest?
TERRY Actually, they’re in this cluster, protecting the queen. The queen will be somewhere in the center, and they are pausing in the tree and they are actually sending out scouts looking for nice homes with a nice view and a good honey supply in the neighborhood. So, we try and get there and supply them with that before they- I have pulled into yards and ‘oh, there it is, nice little limb, I’ll just back up to it’, and they take off and they’re gone, so I’ve wasted a lot of gas. But no two calls are alike, it’s quite fun. I enjoy the variety.”
Interlude music: "Fixing My Brain Final Remix" by UFO
ANNA People can have strange reactions to bed bugs, but mention the insects to someone and nine times out of ten they’ll tell you they didn’t even think they existed any longer. And there’s a good reason for that, because, for all intents and purposes, for a long time bed bugs weren’t a common problem in North America. Today, that’s changing though. Once relegated to a nursery rhyme, bed bugs are back. I just saw a slew of them in Detroit, myself.
To find out more about why bed bugs are more commonly invading people’s homes in the U.S., we talked with Mark Sheperdigian, known as Shep, Vice President of technical services at Rose Pest Solutions. He is also a 1982 graduate of Michigan State University, with a B.S. in Entomology.
SHEP Bedbugs are very real and only a couple of generations ago, they were a common everyday occurrence and everybody had seen them and everybody had been bitten by them and it was an everyday fact of live. Along about the time that the revolution in pesticide chemistry came around, which would have been about world war II and DDT and the cyclodienes came into vogue, the bedbug began it’s retreat. The materials that were used against it were extremely effective. In fact, somewhere in the 60’s, I would say, the bedbugs were pretty well beaten back to a minor pest and then they faded all but from existence. In fact, I began in the industry in the early 80’s and for the 1st 15 years of my career, I had seen actual bedbugs only twice.
ANNA Recently, however, bed bugs have made a come back and Rose Pest Solutions currently gets about 2 calls a month to control bed bugs in homes, apartments, dormitories, and hotels. Why the comeback? Possible reasons including increased world travel and decreased reliance on chemical pesticides for pest management in homes, schools, and workplaces. Neither have been proven, but scientists are looking at the genetics of bed bugs collected throughout the U.S. to try to trace the origin of the outbreaks. Interestingly, the bed bugs currently being found in the U.S. are extremely pesticide resistant, making them difficult to control.
The best defense, as far as preventing bed bugs from getting into the home, is to secure the border— making sure furniture and suitcases that might be harboring bed bugs don’t enter.
SHEP Most common is they’re brought home by the inhabitants themselves, usually from going with a suitcase to spend a few days in a place that has bed bugs, or having a visitor come who’s coming from a place that has bed bugs. It’s also possible to bring them in used furniture, in used household goods, in things bought at rummage sales, in swap shops and in garage sales and the like.
ANNA In hotels and apartment buildings, bed bugs will move from a unit that is very infested to surrounding units over time. To prevent bed bugs, Shep recommends that you inspect your room when traveling, before you unpack.
SHEP Pull up the bedsheet covers and look for bed bugs. Look for any small, mahogany, oval insects hanging out in the piping of the mattress or lurking behind the corner protectors of the boxsprings. Also, be very leery of second-hand furniture, of furniture bought in thrift shops or resale shops of any kind.
ANNA We visited an apartment complex in the Detroit area where bed bugs were in a number of adjoining apartments. We saw flattened, oval bugs, the smallest of which were the size and shape of a sesame seed, the largest were ¼ inch long. They were, true to their name, found in people’s beds but also moved to wherever people slept or sat, including couches and futons in living rooms.
SHEP Bed bugs are a little unique, in that they are incredibly sensitive to heat and they are able to find the warm body in any room. They can travel great distances to find it. If you put a single bed bug on the counter in the bathroom and you go to sleep in the living room, the bed bug will find you, will track you down and will get there, regardless of the obstacles in its path.
ANNA We also saw that when bed bugs are in greater numbers, they are also in other locations throughout the home, including the edge of floor and ceiling molding, where walls and ceilings meet, behind picture frames, and in other cracks and crevices. Surprisingly, we found that the best tools for control were a flashlight to locate bed bugs in the dark crevices where they spend daylight hours and a vacuum cleaner to remove them.
The concern with bed bugs is this: they bite. While a human host is bitten, they feel nothing. In fact, many people do not react at all to bed bugs, and many others react only lightly. Some, however, react severely, breaking out in large red welts and itchy areas that continue to itch for days or even weeks. Bed bugs cannot transmit disease. They can even feed on a host that has pathogens and the pathogens will be found in their body, but they won’t transmit them. Bed bugs also do not cause structural damage to the home. The primary thing about them, in fact, seems to be the emotional reaction humans have to bed bugs.
SHEP Now that bed bugs are back, we have an entire generation who’s never really seen these things, who has to come to grips with the concept of an insect that lives in your bed, with you in your bed, in your jammies or whatever it is you wear to bed, and they’re going to bite you between the sheets. This is a rather intimate relationship for a human and it’s pest.
ANNA Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a more physically intimate relationship than one in which an uninvited and unseen house-guest feeds on your blood while you sleep. It’s a level of intimacy more people in all walks of life are experiencing, though, as bed bugs become more populous. One young person described the relationship well in a post to Craigslist entitled, “An Open Letter to my Bedbugs”.
MONICA Unfortunately, because I am paying over $400 a month in student loans and am therefore very cheap, I made the mistake of accepting a used mattress from a coworker to put on top of my new bed frame and box springs. So. You and I have, by my calculations, been residing together since May. MAY. That's when I unwittingly brought you and your home into my bedroom. That's when I became your new food source. Your "host."
You guys are pretty tricky, I have to tell you. I mean, when I started seeing little purple dots on my toes in the morning, I did what you wanted me to do, which was to blame them on anything and everything under the sun except you. This is because I was wholly unaware that such hideous creatures as yourselves existed. I figured it was a spider, so I vacuumed profusely. Then I thought it was mosquitos, so I busted out the Off. Nothing seemed to be working. But you know this already, don't you? Yes, you snacked on me all through the month of June, getting your fill of my blood while I snored on, retreating back to the crevices of my mattress just before dawn, leaving no sign or trail.
Outro music: "Fixing My Brain Final Remix" by UFO
JAKE Thanks for listening to InsectaPod Cast, we hope you enjoyed the experience. I'm Jake McCarthy, my partner is Anna Fiedler. our guest editor for this episode was Michigan State University Department of Entomology Professor Chris Difonzo. InsectaPod Cast is funded in part by the Ray and Bernice Hutsen Memorial Entomology Endowment. If you're hungry for more, we've got posted at www.insectapodcast.com a compelling description of bed bug mating behavior. Here's a hint: it's weird. Thanks for listening.
