Bee Knowledgeable: Honeybee History Facts!

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

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

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.