Ages ago, I penned a blog post about the bee louse, Braula coeca. Nearly all my subsequent emails discussed a single photo caption in which I claimed the bee louse has sex legs. The messages suggested I was a bad typist, a bad speller, a bad editor, or perhaps a poor judge of what is sexy and what is not.
The second most discussed item occurred after someone from London offered pronunciation guidance for Braula coeca, adding an “r” to the end of both the genus and species names, resulting in “browler seeker.” My turn to giggle. Were we talking about an itsy-bitsy bug or a piece of advanced weaponry?
In most of the United States, we don’t annex random r’s to the ends of words. In fact, some parts of New England have a Depression-level shortage of r’s, leading to words like “wata” for water. But in other areas — Long Island, New York comes to mind — locals add r’s where none should be, giving us “idear” for idea.
In response to the spate of reader comments, I suggested we set up a sort of trade agreement with Great Britain. In return for a stash of their extra r’s, we could supply some useful definitions. For example, we could explain that a boot is something worn on the foot, not a place to store your smoker.
The matter of bee lice
All this nonsense showed me that most North American beekeepers were not concerned about bee lice in their hives. Although since then, I’ve discovered that some people are very concerned, but often because of mistaken identity.
To the untrained eye, a bee louse can look a lot like a varroa mite, allowing it to remain undetected. Still, because I highlighted some of the major hive residents in previous articles, I decided to take a closer look at Braula coeca — or browler seekers, as the case may be — and explain what they do and why.
We can start with the fact that a bee louse is not a louse at all. Instead, it is a minute, wingless fly in the order Diptera, family Braulidae. Because of its lack of wings, it is easily mistaken for a mite until you count sex — er — six legs, not eight. And because this tiny creature is actually a fly, for the sake of clarity, I will now refer to it as a Braula fly, something I copied from the Australians.
According to many sources, Braula flies are not parasites. Instead, they are a commensal species, meaning they do not harm their host. They simply live in the protective environment of a beehive and, unless a population gets truly out of hand, cause no problems for the resident bees …
