The Boojum Bees

Bee Swarms Mimic Human Brain Neurons to Make Decisions

2011-12-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

Swarms of bees and brain neurons make decisions using strikingly similar mechanisms, reports a new study in the Dec. 9 issue of Science. In previous work, Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley clarified how scout bees in a honeybee swarm perform “waggle dances” to prompt other scout bees to inspect a promising site that has been found.

In the new study, Seeley, a professor of neurobiology and behavior, reports with five colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom that scout bees also use inhibitory “stop signals” – a short buzz delivered with a head butt to the dancer – to inhibit the waggle dances produced by scouts advertising competing sites. The strength of the inhibition produced by each group of scouts is proportional to the group’s size. This inhibitory signaling helps ensure that only one of the sites is chosen. This is especially important for reaching a decision when two sites are equally good, Seeley said.

Previous research has shown that bees use stop signals to warn nest-mates about such dangers as attacks at a food source. However, this is the first study to show the use of stop signals in house-hunting decisions. Such use of stop signals in decision making is “analogous to how the nervous system works in complex brains,” said Seeley. “The brain has similar cross inhibitory signaling between neurons in decision-making circuits.”

Co-authors Patrick Hogan and James Marshall of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom explored the implications of the bees’ cross-inhibitory signaling by modeling their collective decision-making process. Their analysis showed that stop signaling helps bees to break deadlocks between two equally good sites and to avoid costly dithering.

The study was funded by the Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station, the University of California-Riverside and the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Source: Cornell University

Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn't Honey

2011-11-07T15:47:00.000-08:00

Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn't Honey

Ultra-filtering Removes Pollen, Hides Honey Origins

by Andrew Schneider | Nov 07, 2011

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News.

The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey."

The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies.

The food safety divisions of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and dozens of others also have ruled that without pollen there is no way to determine whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources.

In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that's been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn't honey. However, the FDA isn't checking honey sold here to see if it contains pollen.

Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey - some containing illegal antibiotics - on the U.S. market for years.

Food Safety News decided to test honey sold in various outlets after its earlier investigation found U.S. groceries flooded with Indian honey banned in Europe as unsafe because of contamination with antibiotics, heavy metal and a total lack of pollen which prevented tracking its origin.

READ MORE!
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/

Buzz about Native Bee Homes- DIY!

2011-10-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

"Bees are a gardener’s best friend. Everyone who loves flowering plants or depends on plants for a living knows that without these important pollinators we would be in big trouble. That’s why wildlife habitat supporters encourage you to spend a little time this winter building and installing Mason Bee nests."

Mason Bee House

Materials

Drill bits 5/16^th of an inch.
Untreated scrap lumber or 4X6 wooden block.

Method

Drill holes 3-5 inches deep using a regular pattern. Shallow holes may produce more male bees. You can attach a roof to protect it from midday sun and rain.
Place the bee house on the south side of buildings, fence posts or trees.
Do not spray insecticides on or around the bee house.

Check out the entire article:

BACKYARD NATURALIST: 'Bee' a friend to wildlife

Buzz About the Vanishing of the Bees Documentary

2011-10-02T12:14:00.000-07:00

Coming to Southern California, see a screening!
October 8 - Santa Monica, CA 90405
October 13 - Pasadena CA 91103

Vanishing of the Bees - Known as Colony Collapse Disorder, honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing across the planet, literally vanishing from their hives. Vanishing of the Bees follows commercial beekeepers as they strive to keep their bees healthy. The film explores the struggles they face...

See more about this informative documentary at http://www.vanishingbees.com!

Bee Knowledgeable: Pesticides & Bee Behavior

2011-07-15T05:11:00.000-07:00

Evidence that pesticide use is a major factor in Colony Collapse Disorder continues to grow. More groups are taking action and bringing to light the effects of the varied pesticides we use on our ecosystem.

In recent studies, honey bees have been observed to seal off or cap over cells full of pollen. The behavior was noted because it is exceptionally odd. Bees do not usually cover or cap their pollen cells, only honey and brood. After testing the pollen in these sealed cells scientists found exceptionally high levels of chemicals and pesticides.

Would you like to know more? Check out the article about it:

Should some pesticides be banned to protect bees?

Buzz About World Pollinators

2011-06-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

It is now well known that honeybee populations are now threatened. Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, is becoming less of a mystery. As troubling as it is, this is just the tip of the iceberg. All of our pollinator species are threatened. Check out this recent UN study:

Bee deaths may signal wider pollination threat...

The Boojum Beeyard: Beeyard Work Day!

2011-05-13T05:21:00.000-07:00

Spring is in full bloom and there was lots of work to be done in the beeyard lately. Our colonies are booming and it was time to put on the honey (medium) supers. A honey super, also called a medium, are just like hive boxes but are about half as deep. We place these with medium frames on top of the hive box. The bees naturally want to move upwards in the hive and will store their honey up above their brood if they can.

Why is a honey super so much more shallow than a hive box? Because those frames get heavy when they are full of honey! By using a smaller box and frames, the honey super is much lighter and easier to carry when full of honey than a deep super would be.

Kurt also brought up a captured swarm, so we needed to "hive" it, or put it in a full size hive body. So we added yet another colony to Boojum's Beeyard. Check out the photos from our beeyard work day!

First we opened the colony that needed a honey super to look for a good frame of brood.

photo: Robyn Young

Wow, look at all the capped over brood on this frame! We'll put this into the hive box that we want to put the new swarm into. Having brood in there will encourage the new colony to stay (they will now have young to care for).

photo: Robyn Young

See the pollen patties on top? Beekeepers can buy these cakes of pollen to help feed their bees, especially early spring before many flower sources are available. This colony is doing so well it has barely touched the pollen patty we put in there a month ago!

photo: Robyn Young

We inspect the colony, finding that it is indeed healthy and ready to be supered.

photo: Robyn Young

Jaimie, an intern here at Boojum Institute, joins us for the inspection:

photo: Robyn Young

This metal grate is called a queen excluder. The holes are big enough for worker bees to get through, but not the queen. We put this between the hive body and the honey super. That way, the workers can fill the honey super with honey and the queen can't get up there to lay brood. That's how we make sure there's no baby bees mixed in with the honey!

photo: Robyn Young

Here's a nice photo of the bees "bearding":

photo: Robyn Young

Here we are putting the frame of brood into the empty hive box. Now it's ready for the swarm:

photo: Robyn Young

This smaller box is called a nuc box. We use it to temporarily house captured swarms:

photo: Robyn Young

A closer look at the nuc box full of bees. A gentle puff of smoke masks the alarm pheromone and calms them.

photo: Robyn Young

The swarm's queen is on this frame, do you see her?

photo: Robyn Young

The new home for the colony. We transferred all the frames from the nuc box into the new hive body:

photo: Robyn Young

Getting ready to "pour" the bees into their new home:

photo: Robyn Young

And there they go!

photo: Robyn Young

Now we put in some empty frames to complete the operation:

photo: Robyn Young

The swarm has been relocated! We've given them brood to care for and gave them pollen and sugar syrup to supplement them, all to encourage them to stay in their new home!

photo: Robyn Young

Thanks for checking in with the Boojum Bees!

Thank you Russell Apiaries!

2011-04-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

The Boojum Institute for Experiential Education would like to give Russell Apiaries a huge THANKS for donating three queen bees for our splits. Your generous contribution helps keep our Honeybee and World Health program going, ensuring that students learn crucial science concepts through a hands on experience with live bees!

The Boojum Beeyard: Splitting Colonies

2011-04-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

The early blooms of spring color the landscape and our two colonies are booming. The first Honeybee and World Health classroom presentations of the year are already scheduled and we need to get the observation hive ready to travel. The colonies seem healthy enough to do some splits.

Beekeepers can make more colonies by splitting healthy ones. Frames of brood and food are removed from a colony and inspected carefully for the queen before being placed in an empty hive box, or deep.

The existing hives are smoked and opened up. We have two hive boxes with some empty frames ready nearby.

We find frames with bees, brood, and food stores and place them into the empty hive boxes. We have also placed a frame feeder in the deep (far right). We will fill it with sugar syrup to help supplement the new split.

We search each frame for the queen. We have two colonies to work from and therefore need to locate two queens.

One queen will be placed in the observation hive with a frame of brood. The other will stay with her colony. Look at this frame full of honeybees! How many bees do you think are on there?

We will need to get three new queens for the splits, unless we want to let the bees rear their own. Since we are in southern California and have a high risk getting Africanized queens, ordering Italian or Carniolan queens would be best.

The new splits will be without a queen for a few days. They will start getting anxious and build queen cells, relocating a young larva into each one. The nurse bees will feed the separated larvae royal jelly. This will cause the larvae to pupate into queen bees.

The observation hive is complete with a queen and two frames of bee brood and food stores. The third frame is empty, giving them some room to expand. These honeybees will travel to classrooms all over, providing an exciting lens into the world of science for the students.

A good day in the beeyard! Boojum Institute's executive director and chief apiculturist Kurt Merrill surveys the apiary and the work we accomplished.

The Boojum Beeyard: Mite Treatment

2011-03-25T04:59:00.000-07:00

We emerged from winter with two healthy hives at the Boojum Beeyard. During the first inspection of the year, we noticed Varroa mites in both colonies. Though it wasn't a bad infestation, we decided to treat using food grade formic acid. Formic acid is a naturally occurring substance. It is found in the venom of most stinging plants and insects. For instance the sting of the nettle plant is from the formic acid. It is also found in the venom of bees and ants. It has many different uses, but beekeepers use it against tracheal and Varroa mites.

The formic acid comes ready to use, in acid soaked pads.

The bees are in the bottom box, called a deep. Another deep and an empty medium super are placed on top. The pads which are saturated with formic acid are placed in the upper level of the stack.

Time to button up the colonies. The lid is replaced and the formic acid is now fumigating the colony. The bees are unharmed by the acid and the mites are exterminated.

Though it does not harm the bees, it is still an acid and all the proper safety guidelines need to be followed.

Now we let the treatment do it's job. We will be coming back in a couple of weeks to do some spring colony splits.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Varroa Mites

2011-03-04T05:53:00.000-08:00

The honeybee has a specialized enemy called Varroa destructor. This mite can only reproduce and grow in a honeybee colony.

1) What is a varroa mite?

photo: Agricultural Research Service

These mites are tiny. An adult mite is 1-1.8 mm long and 1.5-2 mm wide, reddish brown in color, and has a flat, round shape.

The adult female mite goes into a honeybee brood cell and lays eggs on the bee larva. The mites develop as the young bee develops and attach themselves to the bee as she hatches from her cell.

This photo shows a Varroa mite on a bee larva:

photo: Pollinator

A Varroa mite on a honeybee pupa:

photo: Agricultural Research Service

2) How does it harm honeybees?

They live attached to the bee, sucking the bee's blood and leaving open sores. This weakens the bee and exposes the bee to diseases. It attaches itself to the body of a honeybee and, like a flea or tick, sucks the hemolymph (honeybee "blood") from the bee. This weakens the honeybee and spreads disease, called varroatosis. The disease causes deformed wings and the bee is unable to fly.Varroa mites are one of the leading causes of death to a honeybee colony.

Magnified photo of a Varroa mite attached to an adult honeybee:

photo: Christopher Pooley

3) What can humans do to help?

There are many different ways that beekeepers have developed and use to help kill and control the infestation of Varroa destructor.

There are several different miticides that are used to fumigate the bees. These methods can range from strong chemical treatments to all natural solutions. The more natural, organic solutions include the use of essential oils, oxalic acid and formic acid. These do not harm the bees, but kill the mites that are attached to adult bees.

Other methods for eliminating mite problems are the use of screened bottom boards on box hives. When the bee cleans itself and knocks the mite from her body, the mite falls through the screen to the ground and cannot easily climb back up into the main body of the hive to reattach itself to a bee. Small cell foundation is another method of beekeepers. Using a smaller sized base cell foundation encourages the bees to build smaller cells for their brood comb. This gives the mite less room inside the cell with the developing bee and discorages mite reproduction.

Beekeepers also treat their bees with powdered sugar, poofing it onto their bees and into open brood cells. This encourages the bees to clean themseves vigorously, dislodging the mites. The powdered sugar also makes it hard for the mites to hold on and climb, causing them to fall to the bottom of the hive and not be able to climb back up.

Beekeepers and breeders are also breeding bees with more natiral mite resistance. Russian bees are naturally more mite resistant. Breeding these genetic traits into other strains of honeybees helps create new breeds that have a better defence against this old honeybee enemy.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Varroa Mites

2011-02-18T06:29:00.000-08:00

Honeybees have a specialized parasite that preys on them and causes sickness and death. It is a mite called the Varroa destructor. Think about the following questions and see what answers you can find...

1) What is a Varroa mite?

2) How does it harm honeybees?

3) What can humans do to help?

The Boojum Beeyard: Winter's Rest

2011-02-04T05:18:00.000-08:00

The cold winds blow and snow lies thick on the frozen ground. Most of the natural world takes this time to hibernate, conserve resources, and prepare for spring. Bees are no different. They are clustering and conserving their numbers as best they can so that they may survive the winter.

Soon it will be warm enough for the bees to leave the colony. Anytime the temperature rises above 50F (10C) they will make cleansing flights to expel their waste. When the temperature stays consistently warm enough, scout and forager bees will hunt for any available resources.

Check back soon, we will be checking on the Boojum Bees as winter gives way to spring!

Bee Knowledgeable: Honeybee History Facts!

2011-01-21T04:51:00.000-08:00

The honeybee has been heralded throughout history. Here are some fun facts about the honeybee in history!

Evolving from short-tongued, spheciform wasps, honey bees first appeared during the Cretaceous period about 130 million years ago. About 120 million years ago, the honey bee developed its morphologies specifically to collect pollen and nectar such as increased fuzziness, pollen baskets, longer tongues, and colonies to store supplies.

This bee was captured in tree sap 10-15 million years ago and is now entombed in this chunk of amber. The pollen on her back is from an orchid, and is the earliest example of orchid pollen found to date.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York holds the oldest bee remains known to exist (over 80 million years).

The earliest record of honey bees and people interacting is a rock painting found in Spain (about 6000 to 8000 years old).

The honeybee was the symbol of Lower Egypt and papyri dated 256 BC tell of a beekeeper with 5000 hives. Honey was an ingredient in over 500 Egyptian medicines and beeswax and propolis were important products used in the embalming process.

Egyptian hieroglyphs featuring bees.

The Greeks and Romans were keeping bees 3000 years ago. They called honey "nectar of the Gods”.


Coin from ancient Greece featuring a bee.

Bee Goddess

Scrolls of the Orient, the Talmud, the Torah, the Koran, the Bible, and the Book of Mormon all mention the honeybee and the healing foods she creates and keeps in her hive.

Honeybees did not exist in North or South America, Australia or New Zealand until Europeans settled there. By the mid 1600's, records show that the honeybee population was widespread on the East Coast and the bees spread to the West Coast before the settlers. Native American called the honeybee "White Man's Flies".

The Boojum Beeyard: Relocating a Colony

2011-01-14T06:49:00.000-08:00

The weather at the Boojum Beeyard has been mild and beautiful this week. Pretty soon, it will be swarm season. When the colonies come out of their winter clusters and their queens start laying eggs again, the hive populations grow. Then the swarm season begins.

Beekeepers love swarm season, because they can gather new colonies fairly simply. Last year we gathered several swarms, adding to the number of colonies living at Boojum. One of the swarms last year had started setting up their hive in a discarded TV box. Instead of exterminating them, the person who had these bees move into the box at his house called our chief apiculturist, Kurt Merrill. Kurt was able to take the bees safely away. Here are some pictures he took while transferring the colony from the cardboard box and into a hive box in the Boojum Beeyard.

The box was wrapped in mesh to contain the bees and transported to Boojum in a truck:

photo: Kurt Merrill

A new home has been prepared. Time to put the bees in the empty hive box:

photo: Kurt Merrill

When the box is opened you can see the freshly built comb inside:

photo: Kurt Merrill

The comb is carefully transferred to the nuc box. The bees can use the honey and the wax to help restart them in their new home.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Most of the bees have been transferred to the hive box. See them "bearding" on top of the frames? Also shown are the basic tools of a beekeeper. There's the smoker, which we use to lightly puff smoke over the bees to calm them and mask the smell of alarm pheromone in the air. There's a knife for cutting the comb away from the cardboard to salvage as much of it as possible. Also pictured is the soft brush, which is used to gently brush the bees into their home without harming them.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Most of the bees have been transferred safely to the new hive box. The nuc box full of honeycomb will be left nearby so that the bees can salvage it.

photo: Kurt Merrill

The brood comb from the swarm colony is pressed into the comb built on old frames and placed into the new hive box. This way the bees can save their brood. This comb had queen cells. Do you see the elongated, peanut shell shaped cells that hold developing queen pupa?

photos: Kurt Merrill

Transfer accomplished! The bees are bearding around their new hive, as workers are busy setting up their home inside and fetching honey and wax from the nuc box to their new hive in the Boojum Beeyard!

photo: Kurt Merrill

These bee accepted their new home and stayed with us, adding another colony here at the Boojum Institute!

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Beeswax

2011-01-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

Honeybees produce wax and use it to create clever constructions inside the hive, called comb. Let’s take a closer look at beeswax and how it is used by bees (and humans).

1) How do bees make wax?
All worker bees have glands for making wax on the ventral, or belly, sides of their abdomens. The hive needs to be a certain temperature, 91-97F (33-36C), in order for the bees to produce wax from these glands. The size of the glands depends on the age of the bee. Once a worker starts flying regularly, they produce less wax as the glands begin to atrophy. The wax comes off of these glands in scales that are .12” (3mm) across and .0039” (1mm) thick. New scales of wax are clear, and become opaque when the honeybees chew it and shape it. That is why freshly made honeycomb is pure white in color. It takes 1100 of these tiny, transparent scales to make a gram of wax.

The photo below shows a match stick on top for size comparison and three freshly made, transparent wax scales in the middle of the bottom row.
All the items in this picture are (from top to bottom, left to right): A match stick, three chunks of pollen, some propolis, and another small ball of pollen from a different flower source, a honeybee’s wing, three scales of new wax, and a varroa mite.

photo: Waugsberg

2) How do bees construct comb, what is it used for, and what features does it have?
Honeybees chew the wax the produce and use their mouths limbs, and antenna to shape it into hexagonal cells, or rooms. They begin construction on the roof of their hive and build each wax cell vertically, effectively creating their comb. Bees use their heads to measure how big the cell should be.
Bees use the wax combs they build to raise their young and store their foods, honey and pollen. When used to house bee babies, it is called brood comb. When used for food, it is called honeycomb. Each cell of the honeycomb is angled slightly upwards so that the honey will not run out. Comb darkens as it absorbs detritus and other impurities, brood comb gets the darkest. Honeybees also mix the wax with honey and secretions to make propolis, the substance they use to weatherproof the hive and glue things together.
If you look closely at honeybee comb, you can see that all the cells on one side of the sheet of comb are slightly offset from the cells on the other side. The cells are not perfectly aligned back-to-back. Yet they are still perfectly aligned with each other to take advantage of the hexagonal shape and brace, or strengthen each other. This reinforces the comb, and it is able to support many times its own weight in pounds of bees or stored foods.

This photo is of a comb constructed by the Red Dwarf honeybee from southern Asia, Apis florea. It shows clearly how the hexagonal cells are built slightly offset.

photo: Sean Hoyland

3) What do people use beeswax for?
Humans have a multitude of uses for beeswax. It is a common ingredient of food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Just a few of these examples would include using wax to encase cheese or make some kinds of candy. Lip balms and lotions are made with wax. The most obvious wax tool is the candle. The ancient Egyptians were recorded beekeepers and had many uses for beeswax. In the Middle Ages, beeswax was a valuable enough commodity to be used as currency, or money.
Wax was basically man’s first plastic. It has been used for modeling, gluing, binding, and sealing for thousands of years.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Beeswax

2010-12-24T04:48:00.000-08:00

Honeybees produce wax and use it to create clever constructions inside the hive, called comb. Let’s take a closer look at beeswax and how it is used by bees (and humans).

1) How do bees make wax?

2) How do bees construct comb, what is it used for, and what features does it have?

3) What do people use beeswax for?

Have a wonderful holiday season and fantastic new year!! Be sure to check back in and compare facts!

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Honeybee Gardening!

2010-12-17T05:56:00.000-08:00

Whether you already have a garden or are planning to have one, consider a Honeybee Garden. You can plan a whole garden to help your local native and honey bees thrive, or devote a part of your garden to plants that bees love. You can pick native plants and flowers that will thrive in your area and require very little water and maintenance.

1) What can you do now, in the winter, for your garden this spring?
Winter is for soil preparation and planning. Spread compost and till it into the soil often. Turning the soil aerates and helps keep weeds sparse. If you do not already compost all or part of your garbage, consider it. Compost provides an organic and well-balanced fertilizer that can be used all year.

After the fall harvest and while the earth recovers for spring planting, plan your garden. Which plants have you decided you’d like and where will they go?

2) Define xeriscaping.
Xeriscaping refers to landscaping while reducing or eliminating supplemental irrigation. "Xeri" comes from Greek meaning “dry”. Using native plants is and excellent way to xeriscape or xerigarden. Once established, native plants take very little to no water beyond what they get from the local weather.

3) What are some native plants to your area that will attract and feed honeybees? Can you find any interesting facts about some of those plants?
We are located in a chaparral plant community here at the Boojum Institute, in the mountains of southern California. Adjacent plant communities are coastal sage scrub and pinyon-juniper woodland. The Boojum Bees feast on several native plant species. White Sage and California Buckwheat are two of the main local suppliers of sustenance to our bee colonies.

White Sage, Salvia apiana, is also called grandfather sage and bee sage. The bees make an especially delightful honey from the nectar of this plant’s delicate flowers. This is one of the sacred plants to the indigenous people. They burn the leaves as a type of incense to purify the air. Tribal hunters rubbed the leaves on themselves to mask their own smell from animals. The leaves are anti-septic and anti-fungal among a long list of other properties.

photo: Robyn Young

California Buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum, is also very popular for bees. The multi-flowered umbels provide a heavy load of nutrients for bees. They bloom from summer into late fall, their flower heads like white cotton balls in the bushes along the road. As the bloom ages it turns pink and finally to a rich, rusty red brown. It was used medicinally by indigenous people for headache, wound treatment, and heart problems. Bees make a rich, robust honey from Buckwheat that is especially nutrient dense.

photo: Stan Shebs

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Honeybee Gardening!

2010-12-10T05:36:00.000-08:00

We know that bees and flowers are symbiotic. Almost any garden will attract and nourish honeybees. Does your school have a garden? Do you have a garden at home? This is the time of year to plan next year’s garden and prepare the soil for Spring planting!

Whether you already have a garden or are planning to have one, consider a Honeybee Garden. You can plan a whole garden to help your local native and honey bees thrive, or devote a part of your garden to plants that bees love. You can pick native plants and flowers that will thrive in your area and require very little water and maintenance.

1) What can you do now, in the winter, for your garden this spring?

2) Define xeriscaping.

3) What are some native plants to your area that will attract and feed honeybees? Can you find any interesting facts about some of those plants?

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Honeybee Adaptation

2010-12-03T05:38:00.000-08:00

There are many varieties of adaptation in the animal kingdom. An adaptation is an evolutionary process by which a species develops traits that help better survive and fit the habitat or environment.

photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim

The distinctive coloration of honeybees is an adaptation. The yellow and black stripes on a bees body helps make bees harder for predators to see. It is a camouflage when they are gathering nectar and pollen from flowers.

Bee stingers are also an adaptation. It is actually an organ in their body called an ovipositor. The ovipositor is used by insects to lay their eggs precisely where they want them. Honeybees adapted this organ to be sharp enough to penetrate an attacker’s flesh and venom sacs were developed to make the sting very powerful. This is another defensive adaptation.

The hair on a honeybee’s body is another adaptation. As a bee flies, the incredibly fast beating of their wings generates static electricity. The static builds up in their fur. When a bee lands on a flower to drink nectar, the flower’s fine, dust-like pollen cling’s to the bee’s fur due to the static charge. The bee can then use their feet to “comb” themselves, gathering the pollen and storing it on the pollen baskets on their back legs.

photo: Jon Sullivan

Did you come up with other honeybee adaptations? What were they?

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Honeybee Adaptation

2010-11-26T07:35:00.000-08:00

There are many varieties of adaptation in the animal kingdom. An adaptation is an evolutionary process by which a species develops traits that help better survive and fit the habitat or environment.

What kind of adaptations do you think the honeybee has developed? Do your research and try to come up with at least three honeybee adaptations.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Honeybees and Water

2010-11-19T05:08:00.000-08:00

photo: Luc Viatour

Honeybees use water for a few different purposes. The most obvious use of water is for drinking, and bees also use water to dilute the honey they feed their young. Another use that honeybees have for water to cool the inside of the hive. They will place droplets of water all over inside the hive when the weather is hot. They fan their wings and circulate the air past the droplets of water. This cools the air as it passes by the droplets, creating a swamp cooler type effect inside the hive.

Honeybees will find the closest source of water to their hives that they can. They will often decide on a water source and use it exclusively, sometimes ignoring other sources. In hot weather, a healthy colony can use a quart of water a day! To gather that much water, over 800 bees each had to make 50 trips to the water source!

Guttation on a Strawberry leaf by Noah Elhardt

Bees will collect water from almost any possible source. This includes wet surfaces, standing puddles, damp earth, pools, drippy faucets, pet water dishes, and even the sides of swamp coolers. Bees get some water from the nectar they gather. Plants can help provide water to bees in ways other than just in the nectar of their flowers. Moisture collects on leaves and stems in tiny drops called dew, easily collected by bees. In some weather conditions, plants also exude watery liquid from inside. This is called guttation.

Water is a necessity to bees just as it is to every form of life on earth. Water can also be very dangerous these days. Pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals can drift into water supplies, especially ground water. Bees that collect water directly from chemically treated plants can be gathering highly concentrated doses of lethal poisons. Even if the dose of chemical isn’t enough to kill the individual bee, it can still have devastating effects. The bees carry tainted water back to the hive and share it among workers, weakening the immune system of the individuals that drink it. Contaminated water that may not kill a grown bee could certainly kill honeybee larva, destroying the colony.

This is yet another reason why it important to avoid the use of chemicals in your garden, on your lawn, or anywhere. The effect of chemical use on our environment is serious and far reaching.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Honeybees and Water

2010-11-12T03:17:00.000-08:00

photo: Bartosz Kosiorek

Do you know that honeybees drink water too? Where do you think they get it? What other uses for water might bees have?

Stay tuned next week for some fascinating answers about honeybees and water!

The Boojum Beeyard: Honey Harvest! Part 2

2010-10-28T16:48:00.000-07:00

One of the most exciting aspects of keeping bees is well underway at the Boojum Institute: The honey harvest!!

Just like any agriculture, bees are “farmed”. Egg farms have chickens that lay eggs, vegetable farms have acres of produce that they grow, and dairies have cows that are milked. Beekeepers keep bees for a couple of agricultural purposes. Bees are transported to orchards and farms to help pollinate the crop and increase yields. Another agricultural use for bees is probably the first thing that comes to most people’s minds: honey!

Honey is the rich, sweet liquid gold that honeybees produce. It is amazing in both taste and healthful properties. To learn more about honey, see Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Honey! and Bee Knowledgeable: Bee Savvy! for more honey facts!

We pulled the honey from the Boojum Bees in September. If you missed it, you can catch up: The Boojum Beeyard: Honey Harvest! Part 1 This week we extracted the honey from all those frames we pulled! Here’s how it went:

First we set up our uncapping tank. This is a long, deep, rectangular, stainless steel basin that has a drain.

photos: Robyn Young

A large screen fits inside the tank onto which the wax and honey will fall during the uncapping process. The screen catches the wax and any honey that escapes the combs can drip through to the bottom of the tank. A drain and valve on the bottom allows the gathered honey to drain out into a bucket. A bar is also fitted horizontally across the top of the tank. This acts as a rest for the frame while uncapping.

The first super of honeycomb fames to be uncapped:

The frames full of capped over honey cells are hung in the uncapping tank to one side of the bar. We use a hot knife to slice off the wax caps that seal the honey cells. This knife is electrically heated and easily cuts through the wax.

This was my first experience in extracting honey and I learned a lot. Here I focus on learning to master the hot knife.

The caps that were missed by the hot knife are scratched open using a scratcher, a tool that looks like a sharp, metal comb.

After the frames are uncapped, we place them on the other side of the bar. They are ready to be extracted. The wax caps fall onto the screen in the uncapping tank and any dripping honey drains down. That way, as little honey as possible is lost in the process.
Here is our four frame extractor:

The large, steel cylinder holds a four-sided cage. The uncapped frames are fitted inside the cage.

When the extractor is turned on, the cage inside the cylinder spins. The honey is flung from the open cells by centrifugal force, splattering the inside walls of the cylinder. Look closely at the following photos, can you see the honey being spun out from the frames? These shots were taken while the extractor was in motion; the camera’s shutter speed was able to capture this without much blurring:

We extract one side of four frames, and then turn them around to extract the other side.

If the frames are not fairly even in weight, it will unbalance the extractor. Then it must be held down to keep it from jumping off the bench:

The honey then runs down the inside of the extractor and collects in the bottom. A valve lets the honey pour out:

We strain the last bits of wax from the honey as it drains from the extractor into the bucket.

Down to the last set of frames! The whole room is redolent with the rich, heady aroma of honey. Yum!

Almost 200 pounds of honey was harvested from the Boojum Bees! How cool is that? And if you happened to have been visited by the Boojum Bees in your classroom, this yummy honey is the product of those very same bees!

And all that wonderful White Sage and Buckwheat honey may soon be available to you! Support the Boojum Institute for Experiential Education and the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experiences they offer. Support the Boojum Bees. Watch this blog to find out how to get your very own Boojum Honey as soon as it is available!!

Bee Knowledgeable: Honeybees in Winter

2010-10-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

The weather has dramatically cooled here where the Boojum Institute is located in the mountains of Southern California. The summer season has officially passed into autumn and this last pattern of storms has brought quite the chill. For the last week, we have had nightly low temperatures from 34F to 38F (1-3C).

So what is happening in the bee yard with this weather and temperature change? We discussed some of the behaviors in honeybees as the seasons cycle around the year in our post Seasons of the Honeybee.

Photo of some beehives in winter:

photo: Boris Romanov

Honeybees, like most insects, are exothermic or cold-blooded animals. This means that they cannot maintain a warm body temperature on their own. Exothermic animals must find heat fro their environment. For example, reptiles are exothermic as well, and they find warmth by resting on hot, sun-warmed rocks. Humans are endothermic, or warm-blooded. Our bodies naturally generate warmth from within.

Most insects hibernate, or go to sleep, when it gets cold. Honeybees do not. They are unique in the insect world for this. While an individual honeybee is exothermic, the collective colony is actually endothermic. When the temperature drops below 54-57F (12-14C), honeybees gather in a group forming a ball of bees called a cluster. The bees within the cluster all shiver their fight muscles. Honeybees are able to detach their flight muscles from their wings. This way, when they vibrate those muscles with their wings detached, their wings do not move. The muscles simply move against each other and this generates heat. When the entire colony of bees does this within the hive, they can generate enough heat and maintain the hive temperature at around 70F (21C).

Infrared photo of beehives showing heat distribution within the hive:

photo: Boris Romanov

The bees will cluster over their stored food. As the bees eat the honey from one section of comb they will move to another, full section of honeycomb. The entire cluster will move from one section of honeycomb to another as they eat their winter stores. The honey and pollen they have stored for the winter gives them the energy they need to constantly shiver their wing muscles and keep their colony warm and healthy.

The cluster of bees can adapt as the weather changes. As the temperature gets colder, the cluster will contract. The bees will pack as tightly together as possible, contracting the cluster and generating the maximum possible warmth. When the temperature warms some, the cluster will expand and grow larger. It is the same number of bees, but they allow more space between individuals and do not generate as much heat. By expanding and contracting the cluster, honeybees are able to maintain an almost constant temperature within the hive.

There is one more element that allows bees to survive the winter without hibernating. Towards the end of summer, the new bees that hatch are actually “winter bees”. They are physiologically different than summer bees. Where summer bees are lighter and smaller for long flights and foraging for food, winter bees are born larger and fattier. The fattier bodies allow them to survive the cold with less food. Their blood is also different. The winter bee has a different blood protein profile than summer bees. This also helps them to survive the colder temperatures.

During the cold, winter months, honeybees will stop producing brood. The eggs and brood require higher temperatures to develop and hatch. So in most climates, the queen stops laying eggs and brood production stops while the temperature is too cold outside. Also, the healthier and larger colonies have a better chance of winter survival. The larger the cluster they can form (basketball size), the more warmth they can generate. The smaller colonies can only form smaller clusters (softball sized) and therefore generate less heat and have more bee deaths over the winter.

Here is a photo of bees clustering:

photo: Guia and Mark Hoffman

For a more in-depth look at what happens in honeybee colonies over the winter, check out this fascinating article at Beesource:
The Thermology of Wintering Honeybee Colonies

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Venom

2010-09-30T04:09:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered what bee venom is made of? Or why some people are so much more sensitive to bee stings than other? Is bee venom similar to the venom of other stinging insects, like ants and wasps?
Earlier this year we took a look at the defensive behaviors of honeybees. Let's take a closer look now at the substance that makes their defense such an effective one.

What is bee venom made of?
Honeybee venom is an acidic, bitter substance that bees inject into their perceived attacker using their stinger. When a bee stings something, she injects about .1 mg of the colorless fluid through her stinger. This venom, when injected under the skin, can cause pain, swelling, and many other reactions.

The venom is also called apitoxin and is made up of many proteins and peptides that have many different properties, or effects. In fact, it is made of over 20 active substances. The main part of bee venom are several proteins, called melittin, that cause pain. Melittin is also one of the most potent anti-inflammatory agents known. It is up to 100 times stronger than hydrocortisol. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index rates the pain of stings from 78 species of ants, bees, and wasps on a scale of 1-4. A honeybee’s sting is scored at 2 on the scale and is “Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.”

Other parts of apitoxin include agents that act on the adrenal glands and stimulate cortisol production. There are also small amounts of neurotoxin and anti-inflammatory agents. However, besides melittin, the other major component of apitoxin is histamine. Histamine is what causes allergic reactions in animals. Allergies are overreactions of the immune system.

What is the effect of bee venom on humans?
Humans have different levels of sensitivity to the histamine in bee venom. Statistically, 0.5% to 5% of people have extreme allergic reactions to bee stings. These people are extremely sensitive, or hypersensitive, to the bee venom histamine. An adult with little sensitivity could take over a thousand stings. For a hypersensitive person, only one sting could result in serious to deadly effects.

Some people have been stung many times in their life with only the normal, mild effects and then are later stung and have a severe reaction. Hypersensitivity to bee venom can develop later for some people. Also, people who are on anti-inflammatory treatments can have a very serious reaction to stings. Beekeepers who have never had problems with stings have reported moderate to seriously increased sensitivity after consistently taking NSAIDS like ibuprofen and naproxen (Advil and Aleve).

A bee sting is generally only mildly painful with a little bit of swelling and itching. These symptoms only last for a few days at most. For those who are hypersensitive, or allergic, a single sting can cause serious swelling of the throat and paralysis of the respiratory system, possibly leading to death. Some people actually get stung by bees or injected with bee venom on purpose as part of apitherapy.

photo: Wausberg

Six minutes after the stinger is removed:

photo: Wausberg

One day later:

photo: SuperManu

Why would someone WANT to be stung? How is bee venom collected for medical use?
Apitherapy has been practiced for centuries and uses the products of bees for health benefits. Apitherapy includes the use of honey, pollen, propolis, royal jelly, and venom from honeybees. Honeybee venom is used in apitherapy to help alleviate medical conditions such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Bee venom is even used for people with severe bee allergies in very small doses to help them build immunity to bee stings. These healing effects have been noted for many years and now studies are being done that prove the efficacy of bee venom treatments.

Could you imagine a doctor’s office with a hive of bees, ready to use for treatments? Quite a funny picture, isn’t it? Doctor’s who practice apitherapy actually use preparations from collected bee venom. Beekeepers who collect venom for medical reasons have developed methods of collection that kill as few bees as possible. A sheet of glass and a wire grid that gives a mild electric shock is used. When the honeybee lands and gets a little shock, she stings the glass. Her stinger does not get stuck and so she will survive. The venom dries on the glass and is scraped off. The dried venom is a white to yellowish powder that can be specially prepared back into a liquid used to inject patients. Balms and ointments are also made, but do not have the same strength as an injection.

Is bee venom the same as wasp venom?
Theses two different stinging insects have similar ingredients in their venom. The major difference is the percentage of the amounts of the different substances varies between the species. Wasps have more enzymes that break down cell material. Bees have far more melittin that stimulates anti-inflammatory response. There is one chemical that bees, wasps, and ants share with plants. It is called formic acid and many plants use it for defense. It is what causes plants, like nettle, to sting when touched or poked.

Did you do any of your own research this week? What did you discover about bee venom? Use the comments and share your knowledge!

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bee Venom

2010-09-24T04:39:00.000-07:00

2010-09-17T05:10:00.000-07:00

We would like to give a profuse thanks to Strachan Apiaries for donating a New World Carniolan queen honeybee to the Honeybees and World Health program!! We appreciate your support, and your donation helps us bring the wonder of the honeybee to students and classrooms.

She arrived with her entourage of queen attendants this week and is being introduced to our large, three frame observation hive. Frames of eggs, brood, and food stores were chosen from the Boojum Beeyard hives and placed in the glass observation hive. They have been without a queen long enough to be ready to accept the new queen.

This is very exciting! Once the bees have accepted this new queen, the observation hive will be ready to take into classrooms to show and teach more students about honeybees and how profoundly important they are to our world’s health!

The Boojum Beeyard: Honey Harvest! Part 1

2010-09-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

It is honey harvesting time at the Boojum Beeyard!

This week we pulled most of the honey supers off of our Boojum Bee hives. Here are some photos of harvest day:

Kurt Merrill, chief apiculturist, points out the hive he's already started on when I get there.

photo: Robyn Young

Kurt has tacked a terry towel into the inside of a hive lid. Some scented liquid is squirted onto the towel. The bees don't like this smell and it will drive them down into the lower boxes. That way we can drive them out of a super, pull it off, and drive them down again. This way we can pull off the honey supers while leaving most of the bees in the hive.

photo: Robyn Young

The orange super is a honey comb super which holds "Ross Rounds", or honey comb cassettes. The bees will draw these out with comb and fill them with honey. When they are done, round honeycomb cakes will pop out yielding nicely shaped little raw comb sections.

photo: Robyn Young

The metal grate between the hive body and the honey super on top is called a queen excluder. The bars are too narrow for the queen to get through, but the workers can pass through just fine. This keeps brood out of the honey supers.

photo: Robyn Young

Here is the stack of honey supers ready to travel to the honey house. The towel covering the top is wet. This helps mask the smell of the honey and therefore keeps the bees from mobbing it and trying to take it all back.

photo: Robyn Young

Those six supers full of honey will yield over two hundred pounds of the sweet liquid gold. These will travel away from the beeyard to the honey house.

Then onto the extraction, the next step in the honey harvest!

Bee Knowledgeable: Seasons of the Honeybee

2010-09-03T04:09:00.000-07:00

School has started for many of you and Summer Vacation is over. I hope everyone has had a fantastic summer! Although the weather is still warm in a lot of places, cool weather will soon come. Fall is almost here!

So what do the honeybees do as summer fades into fall? What activities are the bees engaged in to prepare for the cold, with meager (if any) food sources for months ahead? What about the other seasons of the year? How do honeybees behave during the different seasons?

Fall
Food supplies dwindle as the last blooms of the summer fade. The hive’s combs should be full of honey and pollen. The amount of food they have been able to gather and store will determine whether the colony will survive winter. The bees also gather tree sap and make into propolis. They use this thick, sticky substance to seal all the cracks inside their hive to weather-proof it. They also block most of their hive entrance, to reduce the cold wind coming in. Here is a photo of propolis along the inside the wooden cover of a beekeeper's hive box:

photo: Abalg

During this time the colony will reduce its numbers. The drone bees will be forced outside the hive and not allowed back in. They cannot work and so have no purpose during the months ahead. The food that the drones would eat will now go to the young workers and the queen. This will help ensure the colony’s survival.

In this video you can see workers bring home full pollen baskets and evicting drones from the hive:

Winter
During the cold winter months the honeybees will cluster for warmth. The entire colony gathers and generates warmth over a section of comb that has the queen, brood, and stored food. The bees on the outside of the cluster will keep close together, forming a tight seal. The cluster will maintain a temperature of 94F using a special technique. They can unhook their wings and still work their wing muscles to generate heat without moving their wings.

The queen will slow, and even stop laying eggs. On the days that it is warm enough to move, the cluster will relocate on another part of the comb that has brood and food. During especially cold winters when it stays too cold to move for long periods, the bees can die of starvation just inches away from the nearest honey sores.

The older workers will continue to die over the months of winter. It is the brood and the youngest bees that will make it through to spring.

Spring
As soon as the days grow a little warmer and the hours of light grow longer, the colony will stir. They feed the queen a little more food, stimulating her to start laying more eggs. As soon as the first flowers appear, workers start collecting food again. This stimulates more growth and the colony begins to rebuild their population.

When winter’s touch has finally faded and the spring rains have come, lush blooms emerge everywhere. The prolific availability of food helps the honeybee population grow rapidly. As the temperature grows warmer, the queen will start laying drone eggs. Once again, the colony will have drone bees. With the booming food supply, this is the season the colony’s population will quickly outgrow their hives. The rapidly increasing young bees and the presence of new drones will induce the nurse bees to make queen cups in readiness for the inevitable swarm. Soon they put eggs in those cups and the larva is fed royal jelly. The queen will leave the hive, taking part of the colony with her in a swarm. Part of the colony stays behind to rear a new queen. A new colony begins. Ideally, a colony will be able to swarm several times in spring. Here is a swarm of bees in a tree:

photo: T.Voekler

Summer
When the weather stays warm, the colony will build to their optimum population and then focus on building food supplies. The honeybees will spend their summer foraging. Summer has its own temperature extremes, but the colony must still maintain the ambient hive temperature. The bees will cool the hive on very hot days by creating a swamp cooler. They place droplets of water all over the comb inside the hive and then fan air inside by beating their wings at the entrance. As the air circulates across the water, it cools the air inside the hive.

The honeybees will spend the rest of their summer gathering honey and pollen from the various plants that are blooming. They work every long hour of light they can and store their food away. Soon fall will come, the plants will stop flowering, and the bees will have to start their winter preparations.

Nature’s seasonal cycle for the honeybees will begin anew.

Bee Knowledgeable: Seasons of the Honeybee

2010-08-27T04:55:00.000-07:00

School has started for many of you and Summer Vacation is over. I hope everyone has had a fantastic Summer! Although the weather is still warm in a lot of places, cool weather will soon come. Fall is almost here!

So what do the honeybees do as Summer fades into Fall? What activities are the bees engaged in to prepare for the cold, with meager (if any) food sources for months ahead? What about the other seasons of the year? How do honeybees behave during the different seasons?

See what you can find out using your research resources like your local library. If you have more questions, please comment and ask us! Then join us next week with the answers. Let’s compare the facts!

Bee Knowledgeable: Bee Savvy!

2010-08-20T04:27:00.000-07:00

Bee Savvy!
Here are some fun and interesting facts about honeybees...

The worker honeybee's brain has the densest neuropil tissue among the animal kingdom, even though it is only about the size of a sesame seed. Neuropil tissues make up most of the gray matter in animal brains. Bees have a remarkable ability to learn and remember things and are able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.
The queen bee can live for several years. Worker bees live for 6 weeks during the busy summer, and for 4-9 months during winter.
A honeybee beats its wings at an incredible 11,400 times per minute, that’s almost 200 beats per second! No wonder they have such a distinct buzzing sound when they fly. And honeybees can fly at the speed of 15 mph.
Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors; these are organs for smelling, like your nose. Compare that with fruit flies that only have 62 and mosquitoes that have 79 receptors. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell was so precise that it could make the distinction between hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from yards away.
Honeybees take on 80% of all insect pollination. Agriculture is greatly dependent on honeybees. Without them, one third of our food could not grow.
Honeybee colonies have a population of 20,000 to 80,000 bees!
Every year, each bee colony will collect up to 66 pounds of pollen for food. Where honey is the bee’s carbohydrate source, pollen is their protein.
Pollen is a nutrient dense food, consisting of up to 35% protein, 10% sugars, carbohydrates, enzymes, minerals, and vitamins A (carotenes), B1 (thiamin), B2 (riboflavin), B3 (nicotinic acid), B5 (panothenic acid), C (ascorbic acid), H (biotin), and R (rutine).
A honeybee visits somewhere around 50 to 100 flowers every day gathering nectar. To make one pound of honey, about 556 worker bees must visit around 2 million flowers.
A hive of bees must fly 55,000 miles to produce a pound of honey.
It would take approximately one ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the earth.
Honey makes baked goods brown faster, and improves their shelf life.
Honeybees are the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
Humans have been collecting honey for over 10,000 years. There is ancient rock art that depicts people gathering honey and keeping bees that dates back to the Stone Age. In ancient Egypt and Rome taxes were paid with honey.
Honey contains almost all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it's the only food that contains "pinocembrin", an antioxidant associated with improved brain functioning.
In order to produce 1 lb of wax, the honey bees have to eat 17 to 20 lbs of honey.
Bees make a substance called propolis as a kind of glue and a varnish to seal cracks, repair, and help waterproof their hive. They make propolis by mixing tree resins or saps and wax.
Royal jelly is the powerful, milky substance that turns an ordinary bee into a Queen Bee. It is made of digested pollen and honey or nectar mixed with a chemical secreted from a gland in a nursing bee's head. It can be very expensive, rivaling the prices of imported caviar. It is used by some people as a dietary supplement and fertility stimulant. It is loaded with all of the B vitamins.
Honeybee stings can involve a little pain and swelling, or can be deadly if a person is allergic. There are a lot of people that get stung on purpose for health reasons. Bee sting therapy is used all over the world to help such things as arthritis, high blood pressure, neuralgia, and even high cholesterol.
Honeybees keep the temperature inside the bee hive 92° to 93° F, no matter what the temperature is outside. They do this by clustering and beating wings to generate warmth in the winter. In summer they cool the hive by fanning their wings at the entrance and placing droplets of water all over the comb inside. This effectively cools the hive, the same way a swamp cooler works.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: The Rise of a Queen

2010-08-13T04:04:00.000-07:00

There are always plenty of questions about the bees that are left behind in the hive, the other half of the colony. They cannot survive without a queen to lay eggs, so what happens?
Let’s find the answers to the questions that are raised about the birth and first month of life for a virgin queen honeybee.

1) How is a new queen made?
You should know the answer to this one. We covered it in April in Bee Knowledgeable: Swarming and in May’s Bee Knowledgeable: Royal Jelly.
When the colony becomes overpopulated and a natural swarm is necessary, the workers prepare for it. As part the colony gets ready to take off with the old queen, the workers start a few new queens developing. They do this by moving some eggs to queen cups and supply plenty of royal jelly. By the time the colony swarms and the old queen leaves, new queens are almost ready to hatch.

photos: Waugsberg

2) If there is more than one new queen, what happens?

(This one’s for you, Jordan)
There can only be one queen in the colony at a time. It is her pheromones that keep the colony happy. In our example of a swarm, there are several virgin queens about to hatch. Usually, the first queen that emerges will go around to the other queen’s cells and sting the un-hatched queens through their cell wall, effectively killing her rivals. If more than one queen hatches at the same time, they will fight to the death.
The pheromones of the victorious queen will now start to permeate the hive. Her scent will become stronger once the virgin queen has mated and then workers will take care of her. In three to four days after hatching she will leave the colony for her mating flight.

3) What happens on a mating flight?
Drones will leave the colony in the early afternoon to spend time in a “drone congregation” area. This is, as it sounds, one area where drones from nearby colonies will go and hang out. They wait for a chance to mate with a new queen.

photo: Waugsberg

Three to four days after emerging from her cell, a virgin queen will take off on a mating flight. We believe she uses her sense of smell to find a drone congregation area. She will mate with 12-15 drones. If the weather permits, she might go everyday for several days. She will store the sperm from this mating flight to produce fertile eggs for the rest of her life. Having mated with several drones, she can ensure genetic diversity in the brood she produces.

photo: Eric Tourneret

The mating flight takes place in the air. The very large eyes of the drone bee serves to help him spot the queen and maneuver around her. If the mating is successful, the drone’s reproductive organ will be left inside the queen. Part of the drone’s abdomen will also be torn out. He will die soon after mating, having helped ensure the continuation of his species.

Do you have more questions? Please comment and ask us!

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: The Rise of a Queen

2010-08-06T05:23:00.000-07:00

We’ve learned about swarming, and how this is the bees’ natural method of making new colonies. There are always plenty of questions about the bees that are left behind in the hive, the other half of the colony. They cannot survive without a queen to lay eggs, so what happens?
Let’s find the answers to these questions that are raised about the birth and first month of life for a new queen honeybee. What questions do you have?

1) How is a new queen made?

2) If there is more than one new queen, what happens?

3) What happens on a mating flight?

At The Boojum Beeyard: June and July

2010-07-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

What have you been up to for summer vacation? Have you been observing the bee activities around you? What have you seen? You can comment and tell us all about it!

The Boojum Bees have been quite busy while school’s been out for summer! All the colonies are thriving and the hives are getting heavy with honey.

Also this summer, I had to re-queen a hive. Re-queening involves taking out the old queen and letting the colony be queenless for a couple days, then slowly introducing a new queen bee. There are a few different reasons for a beekeeper to have to do this. Maybe the queen is old and not producing eggs as well as she should, or maybe the beekeeper simply wants to try keeping a new breed of honeybee. Or, as is commonly the case here in the Southwestern United States, the colony becomes aggressive (possibly Africanized) and hostile.

This colony had become very aggressive. By introducing a new queen, the new brood would also be like her. They would have the same genetics and therefore be just like the new queen. There are many different breeds of honeybees. There are Italian honeybees, Russian, Carniolan, Yugo, and many others. All of them have different attributes, or strengths and weaknesses. For instance, Italian honeybees are very commonly used for beginning beekeeping, as they are some of the calmest honeybees around, produce well, and they readily build comb. Russian honeybees may be a little more aggressive, but they have more resistance to mites and cold weather.

I turned to Beesource for help. This online community of beekeepers is a wealth of information and support, simply a wonderful resource. I was immediately contacted by Barry, who on behalf of Beesource, wanted to help our program. Beesource collaborated with Koehnen & Sons who generously donated a beautiful Cordovan Italian queen to us. How wonderful was that? Thanks again, guys, you made it possible!

So the next step was to remove the old queen from the hive. Suited, I used the smoker to smoke the hive liberally. After a few minutes, I removed the lid from the hive body. Immediately guard bees “bumped” me, testing me, the intruder. I applied more smoke. Instead of the normal bee behavior I’ve seen, like falling down into the hive and starting to drink their fill of honey, these bees boiled up out of the hive. I quickly began to work. I pulled the first frame out of the hive body and held it up, looking for the queen. Frame after frame I searched without any luck.

And now this colony was very upset with me. By the time I had looked at each of the ten frames, the bees had started finding chinks in my armor. I hadn’t worn anything more than a veil, jacket, jeans, and boots. This was far more protection than I usually wore while tending hives, but it wasn’t quite enough this day. I was being stung around my ankles, but I wasn’t about to quit and come back later. It took another twenty minutes methodically searching all ten frames before I finally found the queen hidden between some burr comb and the frame foundation.

I put her in a jar, put all the frames back in the hive, and closed it back up. I took the queen and left the beeyard surrounded by a cloud of bees. I walked around until most of the bees had given up the barrage of defense. Now the old, aggressively natured queen was gone and her special pheromones would start fading away. Without the smell of their queen, the colony would become more agitated. Worker bees do not like being without a queen, for the colony will die without her. When the old queen’s scent is gone, the workers will be more likely to accept the new queen as their own.

A day later the gorgeous new golden colored Cordovan Italian queen bee arrived. Cordovan is a genetic trait that includes gentleness, comb building skills, and coloration that makes it easier to identify her majesty. She was shipped in a tiny cage with several attendants. One end of the cage had a hole plugged with a cork and sugar. It was time to put her in the hive. And this time I put on a lot more protection. Again I opened the hive and found two brood frames. I removed the small cork from the hole in the new queen’s cage. Now all that was blocking the queen from getting out of the cage was the sugar.

I wedged the small cage in between the two frames that had open brood. That means the larvae were still developing and hadn’t been capped over to pupate yet. I put the frames with the queen’s cage back into the hive and closed it back up. It would take awhile for the workers to eat through the “door” of hard sugar. By the time they did chew through, the colony would be used the new queen’s particular scent. The colony would accept her as their queen.

Time to wait; the old queen’s brood would finish maturing and the new queen would begin to lay eggs. We waited ten days before checking to see if the new queen had been accepted by the colony and whether she was laying eggs yet. And indeed she had. We removed the empty cage and observed all the signs that the colony had a new queen. After a month, the old workers would begin to die naturally and the new, calmer and gentler brood would be maturing and taking over all the jobs of a healthy Cordovan Italian colony.

Have You Heard The Buzz?

2010-06-18T03:52:00.000-07:00

The Honeybees and World Health Traveling Education Program has wrapped up it's season. The Boojum Bees visited several more schools and even more educational conferences and fairs.

Here are some photos of just a few of the classrooms that got to experience honeybees firsthand...

The Center for Early Education in Los Angeles:

Any Boojum Institute experience is always very hands-on.

Idyllwild Community School:

Susan B. Coombs Intermediate School in Banning:

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Royal Jelly

2010-06-11T04:30:00.000-07:00

Royal jelly is another substance made by bees. When the Boojum Bees visited some more classrooms recently, there were a lot of questions about royal jelly.

1) Where does royal jelly come from?

Royal jelly is made by glands, called hypopharyngeal glands, found in the heads of worker bees.

2) What do the bees use it for?

The bees make the royal jelly and feed it to the young larvae. All bee larva are fed royal jelly for the first three days after hatching from their eggs. Larvae that have been selected to become queens are fed royal jelly for their entire larval stage. They grow very large on this exclusive diet, and they develop large, fertile ovaries. They pupate into fully grown queen bees.

3) What do humans use it for?

Royal jelly is eaten by humans for it's health benefits. It is believed that royal jelly can help with such problems as arthritis and asthma, and helps with alertness, reducing cholesterol, and boosting the immune system. It is also known to possibly create a moderate to severe allergic reaction in those with lots of allergies, especially bee allergies.

Royal jelly is made up of 60-70% water, 12-15% protein, 10-16% sugars, and 3-6% fats. It has many trace minerals, amino acids, enzymes, and antibacterial and antibiotic properties.

photo: Waugsberg

The queen larvae in their elongated queen cells are kept in a pool of royal jelly. Beekeepers that harvest it will place a tiny bit of royal jelly and an older larva in each cell on a comb. The comb is placed in with bees for about 36 hours. When they are removed, the bees will have made each of those cells larger and filled them with royal jelly. The beekeepers then scoop the jelly out and into containers.

Here's a video by an old Greek beekeeper that explains the process. This video is subtitled with grammatical errors, but shows the whole process of the production and harvest of royal jelly.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Royal Jelly

2010-06-04T08:35:00.000-07:00

Royal jelly is another substance made by bees. When the Boojum Bees visited some more classrooms recently, there were a lot of questions about royal jelly. This week, let's learn what it's all about! See if you can find the answers...

1) Where does royal jelly come from?

2) What do the bees use it for?

3) What do humans use it for?

At The Boojum Beeyard: May

2010-05-28T05:44:00.000-07:00

The Boojum Beeyard is really buzzing now! The flowers are all blooming and the bees are booming. We just put honey supers on two of our four established colonies. A "super" is the name of the boxes beekeepers use for hives. A deep is usually used for the main hive body. A box that is shallower and takes shorter frames is a honey super. It is placed on top of the hive body. Bees tend to keep their brood below and then put food stores above.

The reason we use shallower boxes is that they are easier to manage. When all ten of those frames are full of honey-filled comb, they can get heavy. When we have to harvest the honey, we have to gently brush the bees off of the frames and carry the honey super to where we process it. That box of frames full of honey is heavy! So we use the smaller honey supers.

We also caught a swarm that was making a home in a decorative wine barrel. The barrel of bees was brought back to the beeyard and the bees were transferred to a small nucleus hive. A nucleus hive is a box that holds five frames instead of the ten that a full-sized hive box holds. They are used to help a colony build itself. The smaller box is easier for a smaller colony to mantain until they build their numbers up great enough to be transferred.

We made a video of this particular swarm relocation. Check it out!

Bee Knowlegeable Answers: Africanized Bees

2010-05-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of warnings, news stories, and now even scary movies about "Killer Bees". This is especially true here in Southern California where the Boojum Bees are located. It is a fact that "killer" bees, or Africanized honeybees, are present and likely to stay.

So let's learn about these honeybees this week and think about what kind of impact they are having on our environment. See if you can find answers for the following questions:

1) Where do Africanized bees come from? How did they get here?
In the 1950s, the Brazilian Agriculture Ministry wanted to breed a honeybee that was better adapted to their climate. The gentle European honeybee, Apis mellifera, did not thrive in the tropical climate of South America.

Across the Atlantic in tropical Africa the people had been getting honey from their own very productive but aggressive native honeybees, Apis scutellata, for centuries. The African people had developed their own ways of dealing with the highly defensive native bees.

In 1956 Brazil asked a prominent geneticist if he could breed a honeybee that was adapted to the tropical climate like the African honeybees, but be gentler and less aggressive like European bees. The scientist agreed to try breeding a better suited honeybee for Brazil.

In 1957 the breeding experiment was underway. Twenty six African queen bees were being bred to European honeybees. Those queens and their colonies were accidentally released into the South American forest.

2) How do they differ from European honeybees?
The most obvious difference in the two species of honeybee is their level of defensiveness. African honeybees have more guard bees than European colonies, and many more African bees will respond when alarm pheromones are released.

There is also a difference in swarming and hive selection. African bees will swarm, or split their colony far more frequently than European honeybees. While swarming, European bees will only travel a few miles to find a suitable location to build a hive, African bees will travel up to 60 miles before settling. This is how they traveled so quickly through South America to Mexico, and now into the United States.

African honeybees are also much less picky about hive location. They will settle and make a hive out of any rotten log and even in open air in trees. European honeybees are pickier and try to find the perfect quiet, dark, safe place to build their new home.

3) What makes these bees so dangerous?
It’s not that their venom is any stronger. In fact, African honeybees are smaller than European honeybees and so have smaller venom sacs. They respond to threats in larger numbers and pursue the target much greater distances. They are more sensitive to what they perceive is a threat. After being disturbed, they will also stay in an agitated, attack mode longer than the more docile European species.

Consider that unless a person is allergic, it takes about 10 bee stings per pound of body weight before a bee attack is fatal. That would be about 1500 stings for a 150lb adult or 400 stings for a 40lb youth. European honeybees rarely if ever respond to threats in such numbers. With African honeybees, there is a greater chance of being stung that many times.

What is the environmental impact of Africanized honeybees, a new, introduced species?
When you consider the fact that these bees are voracious foragers and will make a home out of almost any available space, it is thought that these bees will push out vital native bee species by being too competitive.

Check out this video from National Geographic:

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Africanized Bees

2010-05-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Defense

2010-05-07T05:42:00.000-07:00

1) Why do bees sting?

Bees sting when they are afraid, when they have been harmed or attacked, or when their hive is in danger.

A worker bee that is out scouting or foraging flowers will not sting unless she is harmed, handled roughly or frightened. So if she were accidentally stepped on, she would try to sting. Or if she accidentally flew into a person's hair, she could become tangled up and afraid and then maybe sting.

2) What happens when a bee stings?

When a bee stings, she releases a certain chemical smell, called an alarm pheromone. Other bees that smell the alarm pheromone will come to help fight off the threat.

Her barbed stinger will get stuck in the skin of a mammal or bird. This kills her because her stinger will stay in the other animal when she walks or flies away, pulling part of her body apart.

photo: Waugsberg

The bee's stinger has a poison sac that will pump venom for up to ten minutes after stinging. It is important to remove the stinger from a person's skin as quickly as possible. The method of removal is not nearly as important as getting it out fast.

photo: Siga

The venom of the bee causes an allergic reaction. The area that is stung will swell, itch, and be painful for a few days. Some people are very sensitive to bee venom. These people will have a severe allergic reaction to a bee sting and will need immediate medical care. Bee stings can be deadly for those people who are allergic to them. Otherwise, bee stings are generally mild and go away quickly.

3) List some other animals and their defensive behaviors.

There are many different kinds of defensive behaviors that animals use. Here are just a few examples:

Skunks use smell to defend themselves. They will spray an especially strong stink at their attackers.

Bulls, rams, rhinoceros and other horned animals use their horns to defend themselves.

Snakes and lizards use their sharp teeth to bite their attacker, often with venom.

Can you think of even more defensive behaviors that animals use to protect themselves?

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Defense

2010-04-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

Bees are very well known for their defensive abilities. When asked what bees can do, one of the most popular answers we hear is: "Bees can sting you!"
Think about the following questions and see what kinds of answers you can find this week.

1) Why do bees sting?

2) What happens when a bee stings?

3) List some other animals and their defensive behaviors.

Have You Heard the Buzz?

2010-04-23T09:25:00.000-07:00

The Boojum Bees have been all over Southern California this year!

Our little bee friends have made their appearance in several classrooms to the delight and fascination of all the students (and teachers, too!).

The Boojum Bees had their first "in the field" visit to an exuberant group of seventh grade environmental students in Joshua Tree National Park.

photo: Megan Beckett

These students were part of the California Regional Environmental Education Community, or CREEC. The students learned about the vitally important roles bees (and all pollinating animals) play in our ecosystem. We discussed how very crucial the bees are to our environment and to our human survival on this planet.

Our buzzing buddies next visited Westwood Charter School in Los Angeles. Five classes of 1st and 2nd grade students learned all about bees and their importance to our farms and food supply.

photo: Robyn Young

The Westwood Charter students got to participate in the waggle dance game, as well as touch and smell real honeycomb and queen cells.

Next the Boojum Bees will make their appearance for the kindergartners at Vintage Hills Elementary in Temecula, and many more schools are being visited in May!

At The Boojum Beeyard: April

2010-04-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

The Boojum bees are healthy and growing! The two new swarms that were hived last month have taken to their new homes and are thriving. That brings the beeyard total to four colonies!

photo: Robyn Young

After hiving the last swarm, a pollen patty was placed on top of the frames to help feed the colony until they could get their own pollen stores flowing. The bees started building comb from the bottom of the pollen patty:

photo: Robyn Young

Almost all the local flowers are blooming and that means the nectar flow is on!

Next we will be adding "honey supers" on to the strongest colonies. Honey supers are shallow hive boxes placed on top of the "deep", or full-sized hive body. Shorter sized frames go into the honey super.

Generally, the bees like to put their honeycomb above their brood. So by adding these honey supers, the bees have a convenient place to start packing in the honey. And we beekeepers have a smaller (and lighter weight) box to move when it comes time to harvest some of that delicious honey.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Swarming

2010-04-09T04:49:00.000-07:00

What do you think a swarm of bees are? Why does a colony swarm?

Swarming is a natural way for bees to split their colony and reproduce. When a colony of bees gets too large for its hive, usually in Spring to early Summer, the colony will decide to swarm. The workers will start rearing new queens in queen cells. The old queen will leave the hive behind, taking some drones and half her workers with her. Swarms can have 1500 to 30,000 bees!

Queens lay thousands of eggs in a day and colonies can build to greater and greater numbers very quickly when lots of food sources are available. The bees can reach a point that the hive is too crowded. It becomes harder for the workers to maintain the proper hive temperature. The bees will decide it is time to swarm.

The swarm leaves the hive and begins searching for a new home. Swarms will temporarily rest in the strangest of places. They’ll hang from a tree or hang off the back of a lounge chair, or just about anywhere. While the swarm is resting, scout bees will venture out to search for a new home. The swarm may move again in a few hours or a few days, but it will keep moving until the bees have found the right place.

Swarms of bees are less likely to sting than established colonies. A swarm has no brood or stores of food yet to defend. Bees sting to defend their homes, their babies, their food, and each other. Left alone, a swarm shouldn’t bother anyone.

Eventually the scout bees will return successful and tell the swarm where the new possible is located by doing the waggle dance. The swarm then goes and inspects the new hive location. The swarm will decide whether the location is suitable or not. If it is not, they will keep traveling and looking. If the location is right for a good hive, the bees will start emitting a “home pheromone” which has a lemony smell.

Immediately worker bees will start cleaning and building new comb. They will even ‘measure’ the space by forming chains of bees from one side of the space to the other. The swarm has settled into their new home and is now considered a colony with a hive of their own.

What has happened to the original hive, you ask. They have no queen anymore and half their workers have left! Well, the worker bees left behind will move eggs into larger than normal sized cells, called queen cells. They look very much like a peanut. When that egg hatches, it will be fed only a very special diet of royal jelly. Royal jelly is a special substance made only by the nurse bees who take care of the brood, or baby bees.

Being fed only royal jelly during her development, the larva will pupate and a queen bee will hatch. Usually the bees have moved several eggs into queen cells and so have several queens developing at once.

The queen that hatches first will find the other queen cells and sting the other queens through the walls of their cells. If more than one queen bee hatches at the same time, the queens will fight to the death. The strongest queen will survive to be the mother of the colony.

So swarming is the way a bee colony makes a brand new bee colony. It is a completely natural process. Healthy colonies can even swarm several times during a season.

If you see a swarm, it is best to just leave it alone. It will move on, either within hours or a few days. Otherwise, call a local beekeeper to remove and relocate it.

2010-04-04T11:15:00.000-07:00

So what does a swarm of bees look like? What do bee hives look like if the bees are wild and not kept in beekeeper’s hive boxes? Take a look at these photos to see for yourself!

Here is a swarm of bees in an oak tree:

photo: sandersj89

Here are a couple of photos showing some comb that swarm of bees were busy working on:

photos: sandersj89

Here is comb being built by swarms establishing a hive:

photo: GoldenDropsFarm.com

photo: Reed Booth

And look at this wild hive built by bees:

photo: Geoff Kipps-Bolton

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Swarming

2010-04-02T06:42:00.000-07:00

It’s Swarm Season!

Spring is officially here in the northern hemisphere of the world, and nature is waking up from winter’s cold. All the plants and animals that have been hibernating or have been dormant during the long cold of winter are sending green shoots towards the sun, shaking out their fur, and stretching out wings.

The first flowers of the season have opened their faces to the light and warmth. What does this mean for the bees? It means a fresh source of nectar and pollen. It means the colony is active again and can grow and thrive.

What do you think a swarm of bees are? Why does a colony swarm? See if you can find the answers this week!

Help Save The Bees of Our World

2010-03-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

You are starting to understand how important bees are to us all. Their role in the pollination of our food supply is crucial to human survival on this planet.
You also know that bees are disappearing at an alarming rate. The problem is critical, whether the cause is pesticides and herbicides, mites, viruses, or the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder.
So what can the average person do? No matter who you are, where you live, or your age, there is plenty that you can do to help save our pollinating insect friends

1) One of the first things you can do is simply bee aware of bees and other insects around you. Avoid killing them out of fear. Bees generally want nothing to do with humans. They only really notice us when we accidentally get in their way, smell like a flower (or enemy), or attack them.

If you are standing in a bee’s flight path, one might accidentally fly right into you. If you are near a swarm or hive, bees may come to check you out. Swatting at bees makes them think you are attacking them. Avoid wild movements or running if you have a close encounter with bees. It is best to stay calm and slowly walk away. They will quickly lose interest as you retreat.

2) Avoid using pesticides and herbicides and encourage others to avoid using them as well. Even if they are not used while bees are active, these chemicals will get into the nectar and pollen of plants with deadly consequences. Even ‘natural’ chemicals like pyrethrins can have a deadly effect on bees.

Instead opt to use organic gardening techniques and buy organic food, which is grown without deadly chemicals, where possible.

3) Plant pollen- and nectar-rich plants and flowers in your yard, your garden... all over. Check with your local agriculture department to find which plants that bees like grow well in your area. Try to stick with native plants and wildflowers. You can also contact the agency that runs your local parks and encourage them to plant bee-friendly flora.

Some of the plants that bees like are flowering herbs, mints, flowering vegetables, sunflowers (and flowers that have a similar shape and appearance). Also, any of the species of Salvia, Allium, and plants of the Asteraceae family are good food sources for bees.

Try visiting http://www.nwf.org/backyardwildlifehabitat/nativeplants.cfm for a list of plants native to your area.

4) Go wild and let your garden or lawn be a little messy, a bit overgrown. Bees love those dandelions in your lawn. Let some plants in your vegetable and herb gardens go to flower. Some overgrowth or ‘wilderness’ in your garden provides food and shelter for all kinds of bees.

5) Prove a water source for bees. Along with nectar and pollen, bees need water to drink, to cool their hive, to survive. Did you know that to cool the hive in summer, bees gather droplets of water and place them around the hive and then fan their wings to create a swamp cooler effect? Keep a birdbath full of water, or a bowl or pan set on or into the ground.

6) Protect swarms by calling a local authority or beekeeper to come move any swarms you see or know about. If you or someone you know has a hive of bees, do not exterminate them or try to drive them off. Call a beekeeper so the colony can be removed safely. If the bees are in an area out of the way, simply leave them be.

7) Buy local honey from local beekeepers. This not only helps support your local beekeeper, it can also be a health benefit. Local honey has local pollens in it, and eating it is said do wonders for your allergies.

8) Educate yourself about bees. They are fascinating and beautiful creatures. Learn more about them and then spread your knowledge. Educate others around you. Man is probably the bee’s biggest enemy, and helping people learn more about them dispels the fears and ignorance that leads to unnecessary destruction.

9) Provide a space for a beehive. Often beekeepers in urban areas do not have enough space for all their hives and would be grateful if you allowed them to put a hive or two in a corner of your yard or garden. The beekeeper does all the tending of bees and you get some of the honey and the most productive garden on the block.

10) Become a beekeeper yourself. Beekeeping is a rewarding hobby and we need more beekeepers everywhere. If you think you would like to be a beekeeper, look up your local beekeepers association and attend a meeting. They can help you get started.

These are just a few ways you can help save the bees. What other ways can you think of to help?

At the Boojum Bee Yard: March

2010-03-19T18:52:00.000-07:00

The Boojum Bees have grown!

This week Kurt Merrill, generational beekeeper and the executive director of the Boojum Institute, captured two recently-swarmed colonies. We hived the colonies, putting the captured bees into a box hive with frames, pollen, and syrup to entice them to stay.

The first swarm Kurt calls the "Swimmer Swarm", because he had to "swim" through a bunch of attic insulation to get to them. He couldn't wear his veil because it was too big, he would not have fit. So he vacuumed these bees with the special "bee-vac" without a protective veil! He didn't get stung though.

This approximately 4 pound swarm was about a week old. The girls had hung 5 hand sized pieces of comb from the room of this attic and the queen had laid them full with eggs already!

photo: Kurt Merrill

The swarm was put into a hive body with frames, a feeder (with sugar syrup) and a pollen patty.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Enjoying their new home:

photo: Kurt Merrill

The second swarm had settled into a cardboard TV box. He used a mesh tarp to wrap around the box to haul it off.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Opening the bottom of the nest:

photo: Kurt Merrill

Exposing the top of the hive. In this picture, Kurt has already cut out about 20 pounds of honey and half of the comb and bees:

photo: Kurt Merrill

The comb was cut out to be salvaged and then placed into a hive body. There was no brood (baby bees) but several caped queen cells were present, meaning that they had most likely recently swarmed.

photo: Kurt Merrill

The empty box, a small nuc (center) with the honey I remove, and a hive body with most of the bees and come of the comb. It is hard to see but there were many hundreds of bees in the air.

photo: Kurt Merrill

I am not sure if this hive had a queen or not. I found these three queen cells (they are the cells that look like peanuts) in the hive. I pressed the comb into a frame of comb and placed it in the hive. If there is a queen - she will open these cells up and kill them. If not, one of them will hatch, kill the other two and assume her throne.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Close-up of the queen cells:

photo: Kurt Merrill

Taking to their new home:

photo: Kurt Merrill

People always ask me "how you tell the difference between the boys and the girls". The drones are circled in this picture. They are larger, have square back ends (with no stinger) and much larger eyes.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Talk

2010-03-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

Bees buzz around, but do they talk? Not with words and voices like we humans do. So how do they know which flowers have the most nectar and how to locate them from their hive? How do threatened bees tell others to come help defend their home? Honeybees may not speak as we do, but they do have other methods or forms of communicating.

1) What strange behavior do honeybee’s use to communicate or talk to each other? What is it commonly called?
Honeybees dance to communicate to each other! Commonly called the “Waggle Dance”, it is a specific series of movements that bees use to tell each other where to find the food source.

Scout bees fly from the colony in search of good pollen and nectar sources. When one finds some food-rich flowers, she flies back to the hive to tell all about it. She walks up onto a comb with the other workers gathered around her and begins her dance. She runs a precise pattern that tells the others the direction, distance, and even how plentiful the flowers are.

First she runs a straight line, the turns left and circles back around to where she started. She runs the line again and then turns right, circling back around to her starting point. She may repeat this figure-8 pattern up to 100 times.

If the food is more than 300 feet away, she waggles her body as she runs. The line she runs tells exactly where the food is in relation to the sun. Her waggles tell how far away the food is. The forager bees then follow her directions and fly off to gather the pollen and nectar.
Check out this video to see a waggle dance:

2) What is another major method of communication? Can you list an example?
Honeybees also use odors to communicate. Bees can put off a certain smell, called a pheromone, and it has a specific meaning to the other bees. Pheromones are chemicals made by animals to send signals or messages. Many animals use pheromones, even humans. Honeybees have one of the most complex set of pheromones used in the animal kingdom. They have fifteen different glands used for making these chemicals. Bees receive the chemical message, or “smell” the pheromones, with their antennae.

For example, if the hive is being attacked by an animal, guard bees release an alarm pheromone when they sting the attacker that smells like bananas. As soon as other bees smell that particular pheromone, they come help defend the hive.

Honeybees use these smells to communicate many different messages within the hive. A new hive is marked with a lemon scented pheromone. The queen has her own pheromone that tells the colony she is alive and “all is well”, and another pheromone is released which keeps the queen’s attendant bees nearby.

Scout bees bring back the smells of the various flowers they have visited. It is believed that the scent of the flowers is a vital part of the waggle dance as well. The dance tells the physical coordinates and the smell tells which flowers to look for.

Honeybees also use taste. A scout bee will share the nectar she gathered with other bees. This tells them the quality of the food source as well as exactly what kind of flower the food came from. This may also be important to honeybees to decide which patch of flowers should be foraged.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bee Talk

2010-03-05T17:13:00.000-08:00

Sure, bees buzz around, but do they talk? Not with words and voices like we do. So how do they know which flowers have the most nectar and how to get to them from their hive? How do threatened bees tell others to come help defend their home? Honeybees may not speak like humans, but they do have other methods or ways of communicating.

1) What strange behavior do honeybee’s use to communicate or talk to each other? What is it commonly called?

2) What is another major method of communication? Can you give an example?

Bee Knowledgeable Quiz

2010-02-26T04:25:00.000-08:00

Challenge yourself on your bee knowledge! Here are two fun activities to test yourself. Click on the numbered link to go to that challenge…

1) Bee Anatomy Matching Game
Can you match the bee body part names to where they belong?

2) Bee Crossword Puzzle
How much about bees do you know?

Have you heard the Buzz?

2010-02-19T19:57:00.000-08:00

The Boojum Bees took another trip to a classroom! Students in the S.A.F.E. Afterschool program at Hamilton Elementary in Anza, CA were visited by the bees last Friday. The first through fifth grade students were taught about the importance of bees to human and world health while observing the queen and her colony working in the observation hive.
An article about the student’s day with the bees was published in the March 1st edition of the High Country Journal.

Here are some photos from the presentation:

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Honey!

2010-02-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

Bees are best known for one thing: honey!
Honey is an incredible, energy-packed super food for bees. It is what energizes them to work constantly and tirelessly. How do you think bees make honey? Use your science textbook, your library, or the internet to find the answers.

1) What do honeybees gather to make into honey?

Forager bees collect nectar from flowers to make into honey. They use their tongue, called a proboscis, which acts like a straw to suck the nectar from the flower. Nectar is basically a kind of sweet, sugary water that plants make to entice bees to visit them (and pollinate them). Nectar is 80% water.

2) Which part of a bee’s anatomy, or body, is used in the honey-making process?

Honeybees use their honey stomachs to turn the nectar into honey. Bees have two different stomachs, a honey stomach and a regular stomach. They store the nectar they gather in their honey stomach until it is full and they return to the hive. Inside the honey stomach are special ‘chemicals’ called enzymes. These enzymes eat the sugars in the nectar and turn them into simpler honey sugars. This is happening in the forager bee’s honey stomach while she is out visiting flowers. When she is full of nectar, she returns to the hive where other worker bees take it from her. These other bees, house bees, collect the nectar from the forager’s honey stomach using their proboscis.

3) What are the last steps in the process of making honey?

The house bees drink the nectar into their own honey stomachs. Here the enzymes inside the house bees honey stomachs finish converting or changing the sugars of the nectar. The house bees then regurgitate, or throw up, the honey into cells designated for honey storage. The fluid is left to evaporate a little. Evaporate means that the air takes some of the water content away. The bees will also fan their wings over the honey cells to help the evaporation. This turns the fluid into thick, sticky syrup. The finished honey is 14%-18% water. The bees then cap over the full honey cells with wax for storage. The bees can use this stored honey to get them through the winter when there are no flowers blooming for food sources.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Honey!

2010-02-05T05:06:00.000-08:00

Bees are best known for one thing: honey!

Honey is an incredible, energy-packed super food for bees. It is what energizes them to work constantly and tirelessly. How do you think bees make honey? Use your science textbook, your library, or the internet to find the answers.

1) What do honeybees gather to make into honey?

2) Which part of a bee’s anatomy, or body, is used to start the honey-making process?

3) What are the last steps in the process of making honey?

Bees, Flowers, and Pollen: Some Photos

2010-01-29T06:59:00.000-08:00

Bee with full pollen baskets:

Photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim

Honeybee collecting pollen:

Photo: Christopher Down

Rosemary flower with landing strip:

Photo: Robyn Young

Flower as normally seen:

Photo: Fumio Yokozawa

Same flower using UV photography:

Photo: Fumio Yokozawa

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bees and Flowers Part 2

2010-01-22T06:09:00.000-08:00

Now we know that bees and flowers have a special, symbiotic relationship. You may not realize that flowers have special ways to attract bees.

What do you think flowers do to attract bees? In which ways do they encourage bees to visit them?

1) Visually, or the way they look.

Plants make their flowers look very different from their leaves or stems. The shape and color of flowers make them stand out from the rest of the plant.

Flowers have patterns or guides for bees, like airstrips for airplanes. Flowers have stripes and dots that are ‘landing strips’, showing the bee where to land. They also have a ‘bull’s-eye’, like the center of a target, to show the bee where she can find the nectar.

Sometimes these patterns can be hard to see for a human, because the patterns are only visible in UV light. A honeybee sees UV light and can see the patterns vividly on the flower.

2) Olfactory, or smell.

Most flowers have a fragrance. Some have a very light smell, like a daisy. And some are very strong, like a rose. Bees have a very sensitive sense of smell. They have olfactory sensors, or ‘noses’, on the ends of their antenna (and many other places on their bodies). Flowers use this sensitivity to smell to attract bees.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bees and Flowers Part 2

2010-01-15T05:02:00.000-08:00

Now we know that bees and flowers have a special, symbiotic relationship. You may not realize that flowers have special ways to attract bees.

What do you think flowers do to attract bees? In which ways do they encourage bees to visit them?

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bees and Flowers

2010-01-08T07:40:00.000-08:00

We all know that bees love flowers, let's look at this special relationship.

Use a dictionary, your science textbook, or the internet to look up the word symbiosis.

1) What is the definition of symbiosis?

Symbiosis: n., the relation between two different species of organisms that are interdependent; each gaining benefit from the other.

This means that two completely different species of plant and/or animal work together, cooperate, and each one gets something they need from the other one.

Sometimes one organism gets what it needs from another and the other organism is harmed by the relationship. This kind of symbiosis is called parasitism.

Another kind of symbiosis, called commensalism, occurs when an organism gains a benefit and the other organism isn’t affected at all, neither harmed nor helped.

The third type of symbiotic relationship is called mutualism. This is when both organisms gain something helpful from the relationship.

Mutualism is the type of symbiotic relationship between bees and flowers.

2) What are the main motivations for the bees to visit flowers? What do the bees want from the flowers?

Bees visit flowers for the nectar and pollen they find there. Nectar is an essential food for the bees. It is what they use to make honey. This is the “superfood” that keeps them going, gives them energy, and allows them to fly for many miles and hours at a time. Bees also gather the pollen from flowers. Pollen provides the protein that the bee needs to survive.

All of the bees nutritional needs come from flowers.

3) What main benefits do the flowers get from the bees?

So what do the flowers get out of it? Each time a bee visits a flower, she is dusted with the flower’s pollen. The bee’s body is covered with tiny hairs that have an electrostatic charge. This helps the pollen dust from the anthers of the flower to stick to all the fine hairs covering the bee.

The bee leaves to visit another flower and grooms herself, pushing the pollen dust collected on her body into her pollen baskets. Pollen baskets, or corbicula, are stiffer hairs on the bee’s legs that weave together to hold a bundle of pollen. The bee even uses one hair like a pushpin to secure the bundle down.

In the process of the bee grooming her body, some of the pollen dust scatters off of her and onto the new flower that the bee is perched upon. The pollen is transferred to the stigma of the new flower and fertilizes or pollinates the flower. Pollination is when pollen is transferred from the anther to the stigma of flowers. Fertilization then occurs and the flower’s ovule develops into a seed. This is how plants reproduce.

There are many plants that depend only on bees to reproduce and make new plants. Just a few of the plants that are dependent mainly on bees for fertilization include alfalfa (cows eat this), almonds, apples, berries, melons, and most vegetables. The list of plants that need bees to exist is quite long.

Can you imagine what would happen without bees to do this very important job? These plants would die off and possibly become extinct, no longer occurring in our world.

What would a cheeseburger look like? Well, it would just be a bun. There would be no hamburger meat, because cows need to eat plants that are dependent on bees. So no steaks either. And no milk or cheeses, as these come from cows as well. There would be no tomato, lettuce, or onion on your cheeseburger. The only part of a cheeseburger that would still be possible would be the bread of the bun because bread comes from wheat and wheat is wind pollinated, not insect pollinated. Or how about sitting down to a tasty pizza without sauce, cheese or pepperoni? Yuck.

In fact, bees and other insect pollinators are necessary for a third of our world’s food. That means that when you sit down to eat, every third bite of food depends on bees to be on your plate.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T05:20:00.000-08:00

Out with the old and in with the new, and not only a new year but a new decade. Take a look around and see what new, small things you can change in your life that will help keep our remarkable planet healthy.

The bees are disappearing and this tells us that we need to change how we grow our foods and how we choose to live our lives. Take initiative. What choices are you making that could be better ones?

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bees and Flowers

2009-12-31T17:09:00.000-08:00

We all know that bees love flowers, let's look at this special relationship.

Use a dictionary, your science textbook, or the internet to look up the word symbiosis.

1) What is the definition of symbiosis?

2) What are the main motivations for the bees to visit flowers? What do the bees want from the flowers?

3) What main benefits do the flowers get from the bees?

2009-12-29T15:52:00.000-08:00

Check out this video on the marvels of bee anatomy:

from Silence of the Bees.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Sense

2009-12-28T17:34:00.000-08:00

We humans rely on our five senses to interact with our world: Touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. Think about how differently bees may use these senses for themselves.

1) What different senses do bees use throughout their lives?
Bees, like us, use all of their senses throughout their lives. Some senses, however, are far more developed than others.

2) What are some of the ways these senses are used?
The eyes of a honeybee are compound, meaning each eye is made of many tiny light sensors that each makes part of the image the bee sees. Bees are sensitive to different colors in the light spectrum as well as UV. If you look at a flower under UV light, you will see the colorful stripes and dots that vividly stand out and look like perfect landing strips. They can also see polarized light, so they are able to tell where the sun is even when the clouds are thick.

Smell is a highly developed sense for honeybees. Bees have receptors all over their bodies that detect odors. They can tell the difference in the fragrances of hundreds of species of flowers. Bees use their sense of smell extensively to communicate as well. They use pheromones, odors which are chemical signals. When a colony finds a new location for a hive, a lemony scent is released to let everyone know that this is now home. Guard bees let off pheromones to sound the alarm that there are intruders. After stinging, bees release a pheromone that smells like bananas and signals other bees nearby to attack as well. Queen bees have their own special set of pheromones that are also very important to the hive.

Bees can taste with receptors on the end of their long, tongue-like proboscis. They can differentiate between sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. This sense is used to test potential food sources.

A honeybee has three different organs to sense sound. One is located in the legs, used to hear different messages through the comb of the hive. They also have “ears” on their antenna, which let them hear specific frequencies.

Bees use touch to measure and form the wax comb of the hive, as well as all the other duties of the colony. Touch is also featured in the bee’s “waggle dance”, an important communication of direction to food sources.

Bees have another sense that they depend on, called magnetism. Magnetism is the ability to read our Earth’s magnetic field. This ability is found in lots of different animals that migrate and have homing abilities including whales, dolphins, and pigeons. Bees use this ability to navigate and also to construct the precise dimensions of the cells of the comb. The honeybee’s sense of magnetism is more sensitive than that any other animal known.

3) Which sense do you think bees rely on more than any other?
Like any creature, every sense used by bees is important to everyday life. As highly developed as smell and pheromones are in a bee’s world, this sense is probably the most dominant.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bee Sense

2009-12-14T06:46:00.000-08:00

We humans rely on our five senses to interact with our world: Touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. Think about how differently bees may use these senses for themselves.

1) What different senses do bees use throughout their lives?

2) What are some of the ways these senses are used?

3) Which sense do you think bees rely on more than any other?

Bee Knowlegeable Review Quiz

2009-12-11T19:09:00.000-08:00

Bee Knowledgeable Quiz » Create A Quiz

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Jobs

2009-12-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

1. The queen bee is a vital member of the colony. What does she do that is so important?

The queen bee is the mother of the colony. Her duty is to ensure the survival of the colony by laying viable eggs. A productive queen on a good day can lay up to 2,000 eggs!
She is cared for constantly by her attendant bees. These dedicated workers feed her, clean her, and see to her every need. She is the largest bee in the colony, and her body is long and slender compared to workers or drones. The queen can sting as many times as she needs to. Her stinger has no barbs; therefore she does not die after a single sting like a worker bee.

2. What is a drone bee’s sole purpose?

The sole purpose of the drone bee is to mate with a queen on her mating flight. They have no other duties in the hive. Drones are the only male members of the colony. Drone bees are the product of unfertilized eggs that the queen will lay specifically to become drones. Drones are more round and fat in size compared to the other bees in the colony. They have larger eyes and lack stingers.

3. What are three different worker bee jobs?

One type of worker bee has already been mentioned, the queen’s attendants. There are also nurse bees, guard bees, gathering bees, and many more. There are quite a few different roles that workers bees take on during their lifetime. Most of the jobs are assigned according to age. When a worker bee first climbs from her cell, she immediately begins cleaning duty. She must clean up her cell and other cells that need to be tidy. The queen bee is picky about which cells she will use to lay eggs. Therefore the cells need to be clean and neat.
Soon after, the worker will become a nurse bee. She tends to the eggs and larvae of the brood. It is only during this young nurse bee stage that workers are able to make royal jelly from a special gland on their head. All bee brood are fed this royal jelly for the first couple of days. Remember that only a larva destined to be a queen is fed exclusively on royal jelly.
When a worker gets a little older, she moves to the hive entrance to be a guard bee. It is then her duty to protect the hive from intruders. She will sting predators and threats to her hive. All worker bees’ stingers have barbs. Once they sting, the barbs stay in the ‘enemy’. When the worker pulls away, she leaves her stinger and part of her insides behind and will then soon die.
The oldest workers in the colony are on gathering duty. These bees forage for nectar and pollen and bring it back to the colony to be made into honey. These forager bees can travel up to two miles away from the hive in search of food sources, and make about ten of these trips per day.
Some other jobs for worker bees are mortuary bees (drag the dead out of the hive), builders (make the wax comb), and scout bees.

Here is a picture that shows a worker, queen, and drone for size and shape comparison:

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bee Jobs

2009-12-02T17:59:00.000-08:00

1) The queen bee is a vital member of the colony. What does she do that is so important?

2) What is the sole purpose of a drone bee?

3) What are three different worker bee jobs?

Use your library or the links on this page to help you find your answers.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Brood

2009-11-26T20:35:00.000-08:00

1) In one of the pictures below, can you find eggs, larva and capped over brood?

Look closely, the eggs look like tiny grains of rice placed deep in the cells. The larvae take up more room in the cells as they have grown much larger. They look like a short worm or grub curled up inside their cells.

Here is a close-up image of brood cells. See the eggs on the right side of the comb and larvae on the left side of the comb?

photo: Waugsberg

Capped over brood are easier to spot. Look in the photos above for the brood cells with opaque covers or caps. The larvae have grown and are ready to pupate into young bees. As the larva turns to pupa, the nurse bees cap over the brood cell with a wax covering.

2) Can you spot the queen bee?

The queen can be identified in the photos by her size and shape. Also by the green dot that has been placed by a beekeeper on her thorax. Notice the queen’s larger size and slender shape compared to all the other bees in the photos.

3) What do honeybees feed to the young larva?

Worker bees assigned to care for the brood are called nurse bees. They feed the newly hatched eggs a very special food called royal jelly, a substance secreted by glands located on the heads of the nurse bees. Then the nurse bees switch the larvae diet to a protein-rich mixture of pollen and nectar or diluted honey known as beebread. If they feed a larva an exclusive diet of royal jelly, the larva will develop into a queen.

Installing an established hive...

2009-09-23T13:17:00.001-07:00

Today we went up to our hives, so that we could feed the hives that are there and install our newly acquired hive. The flowers around here have passed, and as winter comes there is a drop in food sources for the bees. Because of this, we use some sugar-water in frame-feeders for the bees. Frame-feeders are the same shape as a comb-frame, but hold the sugar water. As you will see from the pictures, the environment can get harsh. Though sometimes there are horses and orchards nearby, so the bees can get water from the horse watering troughs and visit the orchards for pollen and nectar - food. The pictures should make things more clear.

This is the truck with the new hive. It's supposed to be CLOSED, however the bees somehow pushed up the screen, and boy was that a comedy! Looking a bit like Pig Pen, Charlie Brown's friend. Luckily the truck was on our 'campus', where we program but do not actually have any access to the public - strictly staff here in the hills. We just keep equipment, and bees, of course.

Here you can see the bees 'bearding' on the new hive that is going to be installed. Closer to the camera are 'feeder frames' which will hold sugar water in the hive for the bees to munch on.... yum!

This is Kurt, Executive Director of the Boojum Institute and generational beekeeper.

Here you can see our property. We are very lucky to have so much room for the Boojum's Beeyard..

Filling the Feeder Trays with sugar water.

Taking a feeder frame OUT of our new hive. It was empty, left in there who knows when.

Here we are smoking our new bees, just off screen, to the right. On the left are some comb filled frames ready for action!

Very nice comb! You can see the bees have drawn comb along the bottom of the frame - and you can see nice brood cells and pollen towards the bottom.

Looking for the queen, we just didn't see her. However there are lots of eggs and brood and they are smack in the center so the queen seems healthy.

The bees are way too busy to even notice us!

Putting the frames, one by one, into the boxes.

Slipping bits of loose comb we had cut off the frames, because we want to give the bees all their stores and brood back. Now they can really take over the new hive! We will come back later to clean the hive up a bit.

Here we are stripping the loose comb off the old box, to also put into the new box. Notice that throughout all this Kurt is using his bare hands, AND wearing shorts! However he knows this hive is tame, and he has many years of experience.

Finally, with the lid back on, we left a little ramp for the bees that had spilled while shaking them into their new home. This will help them find the entrance. We could see bees leaving scent at the entrance, which will attract their new friends. We also closed much of the entrance with some roofing tile that was left on the property, so the bees have less to defend.

The Boojum Bees

2009-04-22T13:23:00.001-07:00

The Boojum Bee Yard with a nice view of Santa Rosa Mountain. The mountain is part of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument.

Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bee Brood

2009-04-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

1) In one of the pictures posted below, can you find eggs, larva and capped over brood?

2) Can you spot the queen bee?

3) What do honeybees feed to the young larva?

2009-04-22T13:12:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the Buzz?

2009-04-22T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Boojum Institute’s Honeybee and World Health traveling experiential education program recently visited the Santa Rosa Academy in Murietta, CA. Read a story, see the pictures and view a short video published recently in the Press Enterprise.
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_S_sbees16.3ebb489.html

2009-04-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

The Queens Have Arrived

2009-04-07T20:54:00.000-07:00

Four beautiful Italian queen bees arrived in the mail today. They each came in a cage with several young nurse bees that take care of the queens in transit. I gave each cage a drop of water and put them in a cool dry place for the night.

The queens were piping in their cages when they arrived. This is one of the most special sounds to hear in the world - it is a very high pitch sound that almost sounds like a whimper. They make these sounds by vibrating their wings. Researchers think that it is a warning sign to other queens as they ready to do a battle to the death. I have often heard this sound when many queens are together in shipping cages but have never heard it in a hive.

To hear queens piping, click on the player:

The queens are marked with a green mark of paint on their Thorax. There is an international color code system whereby queens are marked according to the year they are born. All 2009 queens are marked green.

Tomorrow, we will install the queens into the queen less colonies.

2009-04-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

A little background information.

The Boojum Bees are a swarm that arrived on our property last May. They took residence in some beekeeping equipment that we had on property. They were not wild bees meaning that they came from another beekeeper's hives nearby. How do we know? The queen was marked on her thorax with a small dab of colored paint. We were able to harvest about 90 pounds of honey from the colony last fall leaving plenty for them to survive over the mild winter months.

Making Splits:
Beekeepers often make new colonies by dividing-up colonies and introducing new queens to them. We made an observation hive with three frames that included bees, brood (unhatched bees) and some honey and pollen. This hive also had the old queen.

We then took the remaining colonies and made them into four colonies. Since we live in an area of the country that has Aficanized Honey Bees, we do not raise our own queens and allow them to open mate. If they were allowed to open mate, the colonies could become "africanized" or aggressive. We ordered four queens from a breeder in Northern California to ensure that we know the pedigree of the queens.

2009-04-07T20:19:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Boojum Bees blog! Have fun following our honeybee colonies throughout the year to learn more about honeybees, the environment and beekeeping.