Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Honeybee Gardening!

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?
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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!!