Honey Bee Swarms

Honey Bee Swarms are one of the most beautiful and interesting phenomena’s in nature. A swarm starting is a thrilling sight. A swarm may contain from 1,500 to 30,000 bees including, workers, drones, and usually the older queen. Swarming is an instinctive part of the annual life cycle of a honey bee colony. It provides a mechanism for the colony to reproduce itself. The tendency to swarm is usually greatest when bees increase their population rapidly in late spring and early summer.

Overcrowding and congestion in the nest are factors which predispose colonies to swarm. The presence of an old queen and a mild winter also contribute to the development of the swarming impulse. Swarming can be controlled by a skilled beekeeper; however, not all colonies live in hives and have a human caretaker.

When honey bees swarm they will settle on a tree limb, bush, or other convenient site. The cohesiveness of the swarm is due to their attraction to a pheromone produced by the queen. The swarm will send out scout bees to seek a cavity to nest in and will move on when a suitable nesting site is found. Rarely, swarms may initiate comb construction in the open if a suitable cavity cannot be found. You may want to call a local beekeeper to see if he would like to collect the swarm. Contact your county extension office or Department of Agriculture for a list of beekeepers in your area. Late season swarms after August are of little value to beekeepers, they usually don’t live through the winter.

A swarm in May - is worth a load of hay.

A swarm in June - is worth a silver spoon.

A swarm in July - isn't worth a fly.

A beekeeper can capture a swarm by placing a suitable container, such as an empty beehive or even just a bucket, on the ground below the swarm and dislodging the bees. If you can coax the bees into a hive, watch the bees’ scent-fanning at the entrance to signal the entrance to the new nest as the bees march into their new home. If for some reason the queen does not go into the new hive, the bees will abandon it and form a cluster where she lands. If you use a bucket simply carry them back to your apiary, spray a little sugar water on them to mask their sent and keep them from flying. Then the beekeeper can just dump the bucket load of bees into a new hive.

What can be done if a honey bee swarm establishes itself in an undesirable place? Honey bees are beneficial pollinators and should be left alone and appreciated unless their nests are in conflict with human activity. If honey bees nest in the walls of a home, they can be removed or killed if necessary; however, it is advisable to open the area and remove the honey and combs or rodents and insects will be attracted. You can prevent swarms from nesting in walls by preventive maintenance. Honey bees will not make an entrance to a nest. They look for an existing entrance, so periodic inspection and caulking is all that is necessary to prevent them from occupying spaces in walls.(Marion Ellis)

Bibliography

Marion Ellis, Extension Apiculture Specialist. http://entomology.unl.edu/beekpg/beeswarm.shtml. n.d.

Bee Hive Parts

There are many different types of beehives and hive configurations that beekeepers use.  I’m going to talk about the most common type of hive, which is called the 10 frame Langstroth beehive. There are four basic components to a beehive.  They are the bottom board, the supers, the frames and the inner cover.  Within those hive components there are many different options to choose from.  A common configuration is made using deep supers for the brood chambers and the medium supers or shallow supers for the honey.

There are two basic bottom boards that beekeeper’s use. There are solid bottom boards and the screened bottom boards. The screened bottom board simply has a screen on the bottom. The solid bottom is comprised of just a solid floor.

Deep super is a large size hive box.  Each super holds 10 frames inside it that the bees build wax onto. Some people use an 8 frame hive box which would require 8 frames per super. Super Frames (with foundation), these are the heart of the hive.  They are made from wood or plastic and usually have foundation in the middle. Foundation is made from wax, wax with wire, plastic or a combination.  The bees use the foundation as a model to build their own wax onto.  Some beekeepers may choose not to use foundation at all, but this requires a slightly different frame setup not described here.  Each super in a 10 frame hive needs 10 frames with or without foundation.

Queen Excluder, this is a flat rack made of metal or plastic, with holes large enough to allow the worker bees to get through and small enough to exclude the bigger queen bee. This is a handy piece of equipment to have. The most common use is to prevent the queen from laying eggs inside the honey super.

Inner Cover, this is a wooden cover that goes on top of the uppermost super. It has an entrance hole to the outside and a hole in the middle. It also has two sides one for the winter and one for the rest of the year. The inner cover is vital for proper hive manipulation.

Outer Cover or Hive top, there are several different outer cover types. Most covers seen are telescoping outer cover.  That means it fits over the inner cover with sides that hang down over the top super.(BEES)

Bibliography

BEES, BEVERLY. http://www.beverlybees.com/parts-beehive-beginner-beekeeper/. n.d.

It's all about the Queen

Worker honeybees are all females and are the only bees most people ever see. They forage for food and build and protect the hive, among many other societal functions. All honeybees are social and cooperative insects. A hive's inhabitants are generally divided into three types.

There is only one queen per hive. The queen is the only bee with fully developed ovaries. A queen bee can live for 3-5 years. The queen mates only once with several male (drone) bees, and will remain fertile for life. She lays up to 2000 eggs per day. Fertilized eggs become female (worker bees) and unfertilized eggs become male (drone bees). When she dies or becomes unproductive, the other bees will "make" a new queen by selecting a young larva and feeding it a diet of "royal jelly". For queen bees, it takes 16 days from egg to emergence, Worker bees 21 days and Drone bees 24 days.

Royal Jelly is the substance that turns an ordinary bee into the Queen Bee. It is made of pollen which is chewed up and mixed with a chemical secreted from a gland in the nurse bee's heads. This milk like substance is fed to all the larvae for the first two days of their lives, but queens swim in it their entire grow period. The larvae chosen to become a queen continue to eat only royal jelly. The queen grows one and a half times larger than the ordinary bee, and is capable of laying up to two thousand eggs a day. The Queen Bee lives forty times longer than the bees on a regular diet. There is no difference between a queen bee and a worker bee in the larval stage. The only factor that is different between them is that a developing queen bee continues to eat only royal jelly. (Gecographic) (Cassino)

 Bibliography

Cassino, Mark. http://www.fcps.edu/islandcreekes/ecology/honey_bee.htm. n.d.

Gecographic, National. http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bugs/honeybee/. n.d.

 

How is Honey made?

Honey is made by bees in one of the world’s most efficient facilities, the beehive.  The 60,000 or so bees in a beehive may collectively travel as much as 55,000 miles and visit more than two million flowers to gather enough nectar to make just a pound of honey. Honey comes in all types of colors and flavors. The color and flavor of honey depends on the how old the honey is and the kind of flower that the nectar was extracted from.

Honey bees collect pollen and nectar in the spring when most flowers and plants are in bloom. They use their long, tube like tongues like straws (called proboscis) to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their stomachs and carry it to the beehive. While inside the bee's stomach for about half an hour, the nectar mixes with the proteins and enzymes produced by the bees, converting the nectar into honey.

The bees then spread the nectar throughout the honeycombs where water evaporates from it, making it into thicker syrup. The bees make the nectar dry even faster by fanning it with their wings. Once the honey is 18% or less moisture, the bees seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. The honey is stored until it is eaten. In one year, a colony of bees eats between 120 and 200 pounds of honey. (Honey)

Bibliography

Honey. http://www.honey.com/honey-at-home/learn-about-honey. n.d.

POLLINATION

When conditions for flight are not ideal, honey bees work close to their colonies. Although they may fly as far as 5 miles in search of food, they usually go no farther than 1 to 1-1/2 miles in good weather. In unfavorable weather, bees may visit only those plants nearest the hive. They also tend to work closer to the hive in areas where there are large numbers of attractive plants in bloom.

Pollination of crops is a specialized practice, not just a sideline of honey production. Beekeepers who supply bees for pollination must learn the skills of management that are necessary for success in this phase of beekeeping. Bees for pollination should be placed within or beside the crop to be pollinated.

More than 100 agricultural crops in the United States are pollinated by bees. This means bees are important, if not essential, for the production of more than $15 billion worth of agricultural crops produced across the US. Examples of bee pollinated crops include watermelons, cantaloupe, citrus and apples. Although some of these crops are pollinated by bee species other than honey bees, honey bees are the only ones that can be easily managed, moved around and are known to exploit a wide variety of crops.

(http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/vista/html_pubs/BEEKEEP/CHAPT8/chapt8.html)

Local beekeepers

Nearly one in three commercial honeybee colonies in the United States died or disappeared last winter, an unsustainable decline that threatens the nation’s food supply. Multiple factors pesticides, fungicides, parasites, viruses and malnutrition are believed to cause the losses.

Local beekeepers are working to get their bees healthy, as we move into the fall season. We feed our bees because there was nothing left for the bees to get, no flowers with nectar left. If you have bees, you need to check them because they could be on the brink of starvation.

Honey bees are crucial to pollinating flowers and food crops. Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world's food, over 70 of them are pollinated by bees. In our area, many of our fruit and vegetable crops depend on bee pollination to grow, including tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, melons and blueberries.

Without bees to pollinate many of our favorite fruits and vegetables, the United States could lose $15 billion worth of crops not to mention what it would do to your diet.(KEIM)

Bibliography

KEIM, BRANDON. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/winter-honeybee-losses/. May 2013.

Honey Bee Health Part 1

I brought some of my hives home today that were out on pollination contracts close by our home. These hives have not been opened in 3 or 4 weeks. They were strong and thriving the last time I looked at them. Today was different; there were dead bees on the ground in front of the hive entrance. I asked myself what could be going on, what happened to the health and happiness of this colony of bees.

Lesson learns many years ago, if you take honey from the bees and don’t leave food for them in a time of need then you have to feed them. You have got to feed them a sugar source and also pollen is always good, but use pollen patties in small pieces because of hive beetles. It is the end of August and there isn't much in the line of nectar sources around here this time of year.  

I guess the main thing to remember about colony health this time of year is check the hives supplies of food and check for mites. Last winter we lost 20 plus hive to mites. This was a hard lesson learned. All the colonies had plenty of food supplies but the bees were dead and gone. So check for mites and feed.