At The Boojum Beeyard: June and July

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

2) How do they differ from European honeybees?

3) What makes these bees so dangerous?