How to find honey bees living in the wild?

For millennia hunters relied on bee-lining to follow foragers from fields back to their forest homes, for honey, for wax, for the bees themselves. But this ancient and dying craft’s utility has become less effective in modern times, with dwindling habitat and an explosion of managed apiaries abutting swaths of woodlands. Thankfully, though, some practitioners do still persist, and bee-lining is experiencing a resurgence, as research and conservation of free-living honey bees grows. To increase the effectiveness of one’s hunt, modern-day bee-liners have honed their bee-spying and -tracking skills and developed new techniques that reveal where the bees live, some of which will be shared with us during this kickoff event of the 2024 Honey Bee Watch Symposia Series.

In partnership with Arboreal Apiculture Salon, this co-presentation will be a continuation of the conversation they started in December 2023, during Salon #30 — which we recommend you listen to in advance — when seven guests introduced their respective projects and shared stories and musings on bee-lining. Four of the original speakers — Cheyanna Bone, Joe Ibbertson, Thomas Seeley, and Michael Joshin Thiele — return to dive deeper into the topic on Thursday, 21 March.

Join the conversation! Free and open to all. More info and registration at www.HoneyBeeWatch.com/events.