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Honey Bees

Honey bees are the only insects that produce food humans can eat.  The most common of the honey bees is one that is found within Europe and Africa known as the Apis Mellifera Linnaeus honey bee.  This type of honey bee is so popular and so good at making honey that it is now distributed worldwide.  It was first introduced to other countries like America as early as the 1600’s by English and Spanish settlers.  It became even more popular from 1859 to the early 1900’s when beekeepers began to actively import this type of honey bee.

Honey bees live in colonies that consist of a single honey bee queen who is usually the mother of the other colony members.  There are about 10,000 to 30,000 semi-sterile female workers and up to a few thousand males, also known as drones.  The adult workers perform all of the different behavioral tasks associated with the keeping the colony from dying out.  The worker honey bees perform the phenomenon spreading as well as other working tasks to make the honey.  When the honey bees come out of their cells as adults they start to clean them and as they age they are able to feed the larvae, process and store food, secrete wax, construct the combs, and guard the entrance to keep out predators.  As early as three weeks old they start foraging for nectar and continue to do this until they die.  The life expectance of a honey bee differs along with many factors such as the social structure of the colony, the environment in which they forage and what type of year it is to name a few things.

Honey bees, like ants, termites and some wasps, are social insects. Unlike ants and wasps, bees are vegetarians; their protein comes from pollen and their carbohydrate comes from honey which they make from nectar. Social insects live together in groups, cooperate in foraging tasks and the care of young, and have different types, or "castes," of individuals. There are three castes of honey bees

Workers- Reproductively underdeveloped females that do all the work of the colony. A colony may have 2,000 to 60,000 workers.

Queen - A fully fertile female specialized for producing eggs. When a queen dies or is lost, workers select a few young worker larvae and feed them a special food called "royal jelly." These special larvae develop into queens. Therefore, the only difference between workers and queens is the quality of the larval diet. There is usually only one queen per colony. The queen also affects the colony by producing chemicals called "pheromones" that regulate the behavior of other bees.

Drones - Male bees. A colony may have 0 to 500 drones during spring and summer. Drones fly from the hive and mate in the air with queens from other colonies.

Newly emerged workers begin working almost immediately. As they age, workers do the following tasks in this sequence: clean cells, circulate air with their wings, feed larvae, practice flying, receive pollen and nectar from foragers, guard hive entrance and forage.

Unlike colonies of social wasps and bumble bees, honey bee colonies live year after year. Therefore, most activity in a bee colony is aimed at surviving the next winter.

By April and May, many colonies are crowded with bees, and these congested colonies may split and form new colonies by a process called "swarming." A crowded colony rears several daughter queens, then the original mother queen flies away from the colony, accompanied by up to 60 percent of the workers. These bees cluster on some object such as a tree branch while scout bees search for a more permanent nest site - usually a hollow tree or wall void. Within 24 hours the swarm relocates to the new nest. One of the daughter queens that was left behind inherits the original colony.

Honey Bee Management

Management is scheduled around natural nectar flows. Beekeepers want their colonies to reach maximum strength before the nectar flows begin. This way, bees store the honey as surplus that the beekeeper can harvest instead of using the honey to complete their spring build-up.

Feeding and medicating should be done January through February. Queens resume laying eggs in January after which brood production accelerates rapidly to provide the spring work force. Some colonies will need supplemental feeding. If colonies are light when you hoist them from the rear, they need sugar syrup. Mix syrup (one part sugar, one part water) and feed the bees heavily. Commercially available pollen supplements provide extra protein for population growth. Feed all medications (see the section on "Honey Bee Diseases and Pests") early enough to allow for labeled withdrawal periods before nectar flows begin.

By mid-February, the hives are ready for detailed inspection. On warm days (at least 45 degrees F) check the colonies for population growth, the arrangement of the brood nest and disease symptoms. Colonies with less brood than average can be strengthened by giving them frames of sealed brood from stronger neighbors. If you use two hive bodies, most of the bees and brood may be in the upper body with little activity in the bottom one. If so, reverse the hive bodies, putting the top one on the bottom. This relieves congestion and discourages swarming. If you use one hive body, relieve congestion by providing honey supers above a queen excluder. Swarming should be avoided because it severely reduces colony strength.

Mail-order queens are usually available by the last week in March. Annual requeening, whether in early spring or in fall, is one of the best investments a beekeeper can make. Compared to older queens, young queens lay eggs more prolifically and secrete higher levels of pheromones which, in turn, stimulate workers to forage, suppress swarming and suppress disease outbreak. To requeen a colony, find, kill and discard the old queen. Let the colony remain queenless for 24 hours then introduce the new queen in her cage as described in the section "Installing Packaged Bees." With a new queen, you can also make a new colony by taking frames of brood, honey and bees from a strong colony (leaving behind the old queen), placing them in a new hive body with a new queen then moving the new hive to a new location. This controlled "splitting" of a colony lets a beekeeper manage the swarming process; congestion and the swarming urge are relieved in the strong colony, and the removed bees are housed in a managed hive instead of lost.

If you feed your colonies, medicate them, requeen them and control swarming, they should be strong enough to collect surplus nectar by mid-April. This is the time to add honey supers above the hive bodies. Add plenty of supers to accommodate incoming nectar and the large bee populations; this stimulates foraging and limits late-season swarming. As nectar comes in, bees place it in cells and evaporate it to about 18 per-cent water content. When bees cap the honey, it is considered ripe.

Not all honeys are alike. Usually, lighter honeys command higher prices, and most beekeepers try to keep darker honeys from mixing with lighter ones. For example,  some beekeepers remove supers with dark tulip poplar honey before it can mix with incoming sourwood honey which is lighter.

During late summer and early autumn, brood production and honey production drop. Unlike in spring, you should now crowd the bees by giving them only one or two honey supers. This forces bees to store honey in the brood nest. Colonies are usually overwintered in two hive bodies or in one hive body and at least one honey super. If you overwinter in one hive body and a honey super, remove the queen excluder so the queen can move up into the honey during winter. Colonies should weigh at least 100 pounds in late fall. If they are light on stores, feed them a heavy syrup (two parts sugar one part water).

Stings

Anyone who keeps bees will inevitably get stung. Consider this before you invest in a beekeeping hobby. You can greatly reduce stinging if you use gentle, commercially reared queens, wear a veil, use a smoker and handle bees gently. Experienced beekeepers can handle thousands or even millions of bees daily and receive very few stings.

A bee sting will cause intense local pain, reddening and swelling. This is a normal reaction and does not, in itself, indicate a serious allergic response. With time, many beekeepers no longer redden or swell when they are stung (however, it still hurts!). An extremely small fraction of the human population is genuinely allergic to bee stings. These individuals experience breathing difficulty, unconsciousness or even death if they are stung and should carry with them an emergency kit of injectable epinephrine, available by prescription from a physician.

When a bee stings, the stinger and poison sack remain in the skin of the victim. Always scrape the stinger and poison sack out of the skin with your fingernail or a hive tool ; never pull it out because this squeezes the remaining venom into the skin.

About Beekeepers

A beekeeper, or apiarist, is one who practices apiculture, which is the care and maintenance of honey bee colonies in manmade hives. The purposes of apiculture are to collect honey and beeswax and for pollination of plants, chiefly crops. This practice has been going on for 3,000 years, judging from evidence at the site of ancient Israeli civilizations.

There are thousands of different species of wild bees, but beekeeping as it exists today is concerned with the management of the species of honey bees that are ‘social’ and live in colonies of as many as 100,000 bees. The Western Honey Bee is the species ‘raised’ by beekeepers throughout Europe and the United States. Bee breeders are constantly striving to hybridize these honey bees to increase honey production and other desirable characteristics.

Much has been written about the apiculture industry as it developed from a few beekeepers who simply smoked out the bees and destroyed the hives when collecting honey and beeswax. In the nineteenth century, beekeeping was changed dramatically by the introduction of the moveable comb hive.

Construction of these hives allowed the removal of honeycomb sections without damaging the hive or the bees. Among the definitive works that have been published is Dr. C.C. Miller’s Fifty Years Among the Bees. In the late 1870’s, he was among the first ever to make beekeeping his sole occupation, and his book is still a classic in the industry.

The study of bees and their habits and characteristics is fascinating in itself; it is also a necessity for anyone interested in becoming a beekeeper. Successful apiarists must understand their bees’ requirements in terms of habitat, disease control, food supply and many other important factors. Beekeepers must also understand the structure of a hive, and how the different ‘castes’ queen and workers and drones function together.

Beekeepers must be aware of the causes of bee behaviour such as swarming, which is a group of bees, sometimes only a few hundred, sometimes many thousands “moving house” from one location to another. A swarm generally takes place only after a hive has become filled with honey and with eggs, larvae and baby bees. The age of the queen bee is also a factor, and some species tend to swarm more readily than others. Contrary to common assumption, bees are actually less likely to sting when swarming.

Experienced beekeepers often work without gloves or other protective clothing except for a veil over the face and throat, but most novices need more caution. It is interesting to note that for their own safety, beekeepers must be stung a few times each season, to keep immunity built up. Most honey bee stings can be quickly scraped off the skin to reduce the amount of venom injected.

According to a report by the FAO in August of 2007, the United States has the largest number of apiary hives in the world (about 2,400,000) with just over 12,000 apiarists.
Interestingly, Egypt runs a close second in the number of hives (around 2,000,000) but with over 200,000 apiarists.