It is believed that bees have been making honey for more than 125 million years, in the very same way that they do today.
The life of the honey bee colony revolves around the honey supply, particularly in the winter. It makes sense that the bees would need a reserve of food for those months when nectar isn't available to them, because few flowers are in bloom. Being industrious creatures, honey bees secure themselves against the slightest possibility of starvation by producing far more honey than the colony could reasonably consume. More than 35% of the food you eat comes from things pollinated by honey bees.
What are Honey Bees? The queen is the biggest, and the workers are the smallest. The queen lays her eggs in a cell of the honeycomb (hive). Each egg hatches, and a little worm-like larva crawls out. The worker bees feed pollen and honey to the baby larva. Soon, it spins a little web blanket inside the cell and becomes a pupa. After 16 to 24 days, a full grown bee climbs out of the cell.
There is usually only one queen per hive, usually and all she does is lay eggs. She is selected, while still in her larval state, by the rest of the bees in the hive. When she emerges from her cell, she is ready to mate with the drone (male) bees.
During the mating period, she mates with 10-24 drones in the air and stores enough sperm to lay fertilized eggs for the rest of her life 2 -5 years. A Queen Bee can lay up to 3,000 eggs a day, and because she is the only member of the hive who produces offspring, she is most important to the colony. Male honey bees are called Drones. Their sole purpose is to mate with the Queen Bee, and this appears to be the sum total of their chores. Only a few drones get to be fathers of the babies. There is usually about 200-500 in a hive. They neither collect food or pollen, and they are without stingers. Studies into the science of the honey bee appear to indicate that the Drone is considered the least valuable of the colony members, and if food supplies ever run short, he may be forced out of the hive, tho recent study suggest that the colony will live or die as a complete colony.
Worker Bees are all female, but they can’t have babies, and their name is an accurate description of their business in life. They collect nectar and pollen, feed the larvae and Queen, construct the honey comb, guard the hive and control the temperature of it by beating their wings to form a sort of air conditioning. Their life span is short - some 8-12 weeks, Worker bees do different things depending on how old they are. They take care of the babies, make wax, build the honeycomb, clean up the hive, store pollen, make honey, guard the hive, and collect pollen or nectar. When someone says "busy as a bee," they are definitely talking about the workers. If a worker (sterile female) is born in the spring, she probably only lives 4 or 5 weeks. If she’s born in the fall when there’s less work to do, she may survive the winter. They are the smallest member of the honey bee colony. A colony usually contains 30-50,000 worker bees. Tho a hive can contain many more.
The highly developed and intricate social structure of the honey bee kingdom requires that every member know his or her place, in order that the colony may survive. It would be correct to say that, considering the thousands of years over which honey bees have been working and living in this unique manner, they have come up with a system that works exceedingly well.
The varieties of honey produced by honey bees are as varied as the number of flowers in a given area. Wildflower honey is a combination of many flowers, whereas more specific types such as Clover honey occur when the bees do their gathering in fields of clover. Apple blossom, Raspberry blossom and Blueberry blossom are collected from pollinating fields & orchards for farmers. Each variety has its unique flavor.
What do bees eat? Bees eat nectar (sugary water) and pollen (yellow protein powder) which are made by flowers. Babies are fed lots of pollen, because they need the protein to grow. Since there are lots of flowers in the spring (and lots of pollen), most bee babies are born in the spring. Nectar is what the worker bee uses to make honey. When she gets to a flower, she drinks as much nectar as she can hold. Then she passes the nectar to another worker bee (who holds the nectar on her tongue) so the water in it can evaporate. When most of the water has evaporated, the sweet nectar becomes honey, which is stored in the hive. During winter, when there aren’t many flowers, bees use this stored honey for food.
In the spring and summer, when there are plenty of flowers, bees tell each other where to find nectar and pollen. If a worker finds a grape vine with lots of flowers, she marks it with a pheromone (scent). Then she flies back and dances in the hive. This dance tells other workers what direction to fly in and how far to go. Then they fly off to find her scent, the grape flowers, and the food.
What is pollination? Flowering plants need to get pollen (the powder in the flowers) from one plant to another one. Once the pollen is on the new plant, that new flower can make seeds (baby plants). This is called pollination. When a bee visits a flower to get nectar or pollen, it has to get really deep in the flower to reach these foods. If she is collecting nectar, the bee slurps it up with her long tongue. If she is collecting pollen, she stuffs the powdery pollen into little sacks on the back of her legs. While she’s doing this, she gets the dusty pollen all over her body. When she flies to the next flower, some of the pollen falls off. Presto, the new flower is pollinated. Because of this, flowers try to attract bees by having brightly colored petals, pretty smells, and very sweet nectar. Bees and flowers help each other. This kind of relationship in nature is called symbiosis.
How do bees see? Bees cannot see the color red. But they do see a color we can’t: ultraviolet (UV). UV is what gives us a sunburn. But to a bee, it’s a whole different color. Since bees can’t see red, red flowers are pollinated in other ways, by bats, butterflies, birds, or the wind. Flowers that want to attract bees have colors that bees can see. Often, white flowers, which look plain to us, actually reflect UV light, so they look very pretty to the bees.
What is a hive? A hive is the bees’ home. It is made mostly of wax. Worker bees can make wax from the bottom of their abdomens. They use their legs to shape this wax into the cells of their honeycomb or hive. Each cell is hexagonal or six-sided. The hive usually has several layers of cells. Some cells are just for baby bees. Near the baby bee section, there are cells for storing pollen. In other parts of the hive, there are cells just for storing honey. The queen stays in the hive for her whole life except when she flies off to mate or leaves with a swarm to form a new colony. All the bees stay inside the hive at night tho they don't really sleep. Bees also only fly out of sight of the hive if there is a patch of blue sky, they seem to need a patch of blue sky to navigate by. Wild hives can often be found inside hollow trees branches.
How does a bee sting? A bee has a poison gland in her abdomen. When she stings another insect (like a wasp), she can pull the stinger out of the wasp’s body and get away. So if a bee is fighting another insect, she can sting many times. But if a bee stings a person or a large animal (frog, raccoon, etc.) the stinger sticks in the animal’s tough skin and keeps pumping poison. The bee flies away, but she gets torn in half and dies. Bees only sting if they think they or their hive are in danger. If one bee is buzzing around you, she may smell perfume, soap, or hair spray and think the smell is nectar (food). She will check you out to see if she can find the nectar, but if you stand very still, she will realize there is no nectar and go away.
What are some dangers to bees? Right now, almost all of honey bees live on honey farms called apiaries (ape- ee- air- ees). There aren’t many wild bee hives left because a tiny pest, called a Varroa Mite, is killing them. Some bee farmers can use special chemicals to stop the varroa mite on their farm, Some, like me use all organic "help" including essential oils and special plants, but no one can help the bees hiding in the wild. If a new queen leaves a bee farm with her swarm of workers, the varroa mite will destroy her new hive. When a bee farmer takes honey from a hive, he always leaves enough for the bees to eat over the winter. It is important to take care of bees. Beekeeping is on the decline. In the 1980s, there were 2,200 beekeepers in Maryland, today there are about 900. In Virginia, the number dropped from 3,000 to 2,000 in the same period. Virginia lost 46 percent of its hives, compared with the normal winter loss of about 10 percent. This is mainly from mites that have been imported from overseas. It scarred off many small beekeepers and devastated a few large commercial ones. Without bees, many of the fruits and vegetables won’t be able to grow. To give you an idea, some 35% or more of the food you eat is available because of bee pollinization. This includes meats, as the beef and other farm animals eat food that was pollinated by bees. The only major plant not pollinated by bees is corn. If honey bees all died off tomorrow, the population of humans would be cut by more than half within 10 years, due to starvation. Now on top of all this, you have to add in the "new" CCD or Collapsed Colony Disorder as it is being called. The cause of this has been a long list of things, from Al-Qaeda to cell phones to pesticides to alien abduction to just bad genes in bees and many more in between. What is the real cause? Well that all depends on whom you talk to. Little has been proven at this point, tho many have been ruled out.
What about killer bees? These are Africanized Honey Bees or AHB’s. These bees are a mix of European (Italian) bees and African bees. but they don’t live well in really cool or cold areas, But that works here in New England. African bees were brought over to South America because they do like to live in the heat and they reproduce fast. When these two kinds of bees mated, the new bees (AHB’s) were smaller and very defensive/aggressive. AHB’s act like normal bees while they are foraging for food, but if they feel their hive is in danger, they will defend it, attacking the people and animals for at least 100 feet around the hive. The AHB’s traveled up into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. They have taken over many places left empty by the hurricanes. It will be a few years before they get to the Carolina's but should not get any farther north than that because of the cold winters. We already have yellow jackets, small wasps that are almost as defensive as the AHB’s. To give you an idea how aggressive AHB can be, a Italian hive will send out 3-5 bee's to protect the colony, Russian hives 4-7. AHB hives sent 300-3,000 bees. But not to worry, they will never make it to New England. We have Buckfast bees from England here at Black Cat. They were bred by Brother Adam at Buckfast Abby. They seem to thrive in damp cool climates. Sounds like New England to me... Most Apiaries use Italian & Russian bees in the US.
