Bee Knowledgeable Questions: Bees and Flowers

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?

Check out this video on the marvels of bee anatomy:

from Silence of the Bees.

Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Sense

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

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?

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Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Jobs

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

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

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...

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

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

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?

Have you heard the Buzz?

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

The Queens Have Arrived

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.

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.

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