Bee Knowledgeable: Seasons of the Honeybee

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

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!

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

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

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

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: