Honey bees: the queen

Now for the most important member of any beehive: the Queen.

There is only one queen bee in every hive, and she is responsible for the production of all other bees. She is easily spotted in the hive if you know to look for her long abdomen.
A queen starts out as an egg, identical to the rest of the eggs of all the other female bees of a hive. What makes this egg develop into something special is that as a larvae she hatches and develops inside a larger sized cell in the honey comb- called a queen cell or a supercedure cell.

This extra room allows her to grow larger and she develops over a longer period of time. The large cell signals that bees who feed her to give her extra protein in the form of pollen, and an extra dose of royal jelly. Royal jelly is fed to all baby bees, and this substance is made up of protein, sugar, water, fats, vitamins and minerals. It is this extra royal jelly and the large queen cell that allows a bee to have fully developed sex organs. The queen exudes with these sex organs a group of pheromones which allow her to control the behavior of the rest of her hive. These pheromones have many different effects, from keeping the hive calm to telling them how healthy the queen is, and how to develop the new comb they are making.
As many of you know, we have several of our own hives, including a hive that my Honey and I caught as a swarm in our neighborhood. This hive has not been dong well, due mostly to the terrible weather we had while the swarm was transitioning into their new home. In the massive die-off of the hive we lost more than 75% of the bees, including the queen. It was awful, but we decided to keep an eye on the remaining hive and see what would happen.
When the weather changed and the bees began to emerge again in their new home, they quickly started to realize that their queen was gone. Her pheromones had worn off, telling the workers to prepare new queen cells. They built these cells outside of the typical comb, pointing the openings downward. Then they simply took unhatched eggs and placed them in the new queen cells. We watched as they did this, and soon we had a couple of capped queen cells.

When there are more than one of these queen cells, it's a battle for the fittest when the new queens begin to emerge. The virgin queen who survives the fight will leave the hive to mate with the male bees of another hive before she returns to spend the rest of her life laying eggs and being fed and groomed by the workers, her daughters. She only mates one time, but may mate with many males. She will carry that sperm with her the reset of her life, using it only to fertilize the female worker bees of her hive.
When a new queen returns to a hive without a queen, she begins to restore life of the hive back to normal.
We monitored our new hive, and a little more than two weeks after we discovered we needed a new queen, there she was- furry in her newness. She quickly began filling the ready comb with eggs, and the hive is recovering rapidly in this warm weather.

This queen here in the center is newly hatched, and you can tell this because she is unusually fuzzy.  As she ages the fur will wear off and she will become more shiny.
Now this new queen-making is not just confined to those hives who may have lost queens. The making of a new queen is the way this super-organism reproduces itself, and the hive gets the urge in the spring to split and make two. Some beekeepers say this need to reproduce can be minimized by giving the bee hive extra room in the spring as their numbers increase, but even with extra hive boxes the wary beekeeper should be checking her hives every week during the spring for those queen cells.
If a new queen hatches into a hive that already has a queen, when she returns mated her mother will sense she is there by the extra pheromones. The old queen will take half her workers and leave the hive to her daughter as a legacy ensuring her survival. The flight of the old queen with her bees to a new place is the swarm. In nature this urge to swarm allows bees to reproduce and meet the pollination needs of the land, and bees would move into dead trees and rock crevices nearby. But in the city bees can move into places they aren't wanted, so it is important for beekeepers to keep an eye on their hives by checking regularly for those queen cells. Any cells must be removed before they hatch, the cycle taking a total of 16 days.

Tune in to the next article for more about swarms, coming soon.

Honey Bees: Life of a worker bee

For the next article in this series on honey bees I'll be describing their life cycles.
First, each bee in a hive is not considered an individual in the way we think of, say, a human in their community. We think of each hive as the individual, or superorganism. Queens and the males- drones, have specific jobs that do not change as they age, their roles being the female and male sex organs of the hive. The rest of the bees, the female worker bees, are responsible for a step in the series of roles as they develop through the stages of their lives.
All worker bees hatch from a fertilized egg that has been laid in an empty cell of the honey comb. These cells are usually grouped in clusters located in the center of a frame of comb, with cells full of pollen and then honey surrounding them on the outside edges of the frame.

The baby bee hatches first as a grub-like larvae. She will stay in her individual cell as she grows. These babies are fed by their sisters until they are ready to pupate, at which point their older sisters cover up the end of their cell and they metamorphose into the adult while
closed away.

When the new baby bee emerges from her cell, she has her adult body like her older sisters, but is covered in a fuzzy fur that makes her easy to spot in the hive. Her first role in life is to tend to various tasks in the hive, from feeding her younger sister larvae to tending the queen or cleaning the hive. These bees do not leave the hive yet and haven't yet learned to fly, and so they tuck their new wings close to their bodies.

As the bees age they change roles again and become field bees. In the hive the bees are easy to spot, since they look like your quintessential bee- less hair and wings held out ready to fly.   You'll see these bees as they leave the hive their first time, where they fly up circles in a flight to orient themselves to the hive and their surroundings. As they become accustomed to the outside world, these bees venture further and further in search of nectar and pollen to bring back to the hive, traveling up to three miles. When they find it, they return to the hive laden with their treasures.

When a field bee has found a particularly tasty spot, she reports it to her hive mates with what we call a 'waggle dance'. This communication is not completely understood by humans, but we do know that is a representational language they use to tell other bees where the sweet spots are. I think it looks like the happy dance I do when I get a new contract for work.
When these field bees return with pollen they are met by hive bees who take the pollen and store it in comb. When they return with nectar they exchange it with the hive bees who deposit it in a different section in the comb.
As a bee ages and gets closer to the end of her life, her role changes again. She uses her flight experience to protect the hive, acting as a guard bee. When we go through the hives it is the guard bees who fly against the hoods of our bee suits. Funny thing though- the guard bees are programmed to fight off attackers such as bears, and so they don't go for our hands but our eyes. With a hood and a docile hive, I usually go gloveless so I can add touch to the experience- this way I crush fewer bees and I can feel the temperature of the hive. The hive bees will simply move out of the way of my fingers, while the guard bees buzz around in the air. A bee who stings ends her life for the sake of her hive, so it is rare that honey bees, who are accustomed to people tending their hives, will be aggressive towards humans.

 This is my hand, and I'm holding a cage with one of my queens in it, covered by her worker bees.  (No humans were harmed in the making of this photo)

Next article: the queen bee

Honey bees: the hive boxes

Last night at a fundraiser for the Headlands Center for the Arts, I ran into a friend who has been reading my postings on Facebook on my beekeeping. She confessed to knowing almost nothing about bees. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who find it a mystery. So I've decided to go through the basics so that more people can be informed.

First, beekeeping has undergone changes in the centuries up to now, and the traditional round beehive image that most people associate with bees and honey is no longer in widespread use. Instead, most beekeepers, commercial and amateur alike use a system of stacked boxes with frames in them. The frames can be removed for inspection and honey extraction.

The frames have a distance between them that calculates the space bees need to form a single layer of honeycomb on the frame and then ha e enough space to pass through. This is called "bee space" and is typically 3/8 of an inch. Frames are molded to have a preformed honeycomb impression and then dipped in bees wax to give the bees a headstart on making comb. It is part of this boost we humans give the bees that frees up more time for them to make extra honey for us.
This frame in the photo here is a perfect brood frame, with the spacing of baby bees in the center of the frame with honey on the outside.


The boxes for the frames are stacked on top of one another and have different depths depending on what use they will have. Typically the bottom frame and box assembly is what we call a deep hive body, and this is where the heart of the bee colony lives. The queen moves freely throughout the box laying eggs and making new worker bees. The hive body is sometimes all the beekeeper starts out with in the spring, and the bees have lived in just this one box all winter.

As spring begins, the queen starts laying more eggs to ramp up for the summer. Beekeepers begin adding more boxes to the top of the first hive body. Frames that are for honey are shallow to be more lightweight, we call this box and frame assembly a medium super. The queen is excluded from these boxes, and without eggs in the comb the bees fill them with honey.
Honey is basically processed nectar from plants. The bees collect nectar and pollen from flowers and bring it back to the hive. Nectar is gathered into the bee's mouth, where it mixes with enzymes from the bee that start the process of becoming honey. The nectar is then deposited into the cells of the honeycomb and then dehydrated to remove the water. This finished product, honey, is the main source of food for the adult bees.
Pollen is like protein, and this is fed to the growing baby bees. While most Native bees do not make honey, all bees eat pollen, and they have a few different ways of carrying the pollen. If you look at a honey bee, you can see pollen carried in the special pouches on their hind legs. This pollen, like honey, is also stored in cells.
When a beekeeper is extracting honey, they take the frames out and with a hot knife they slice the caps off the honey cells and use an extractor to spin out the honey into buckets before then pouring the honey into jars. The frames are then put back into the hive boxes where the bees repair the edges and fill them with honey again.

Design for Wildlife part 1, Design for Bees

Honey bees have been getting press coverage lately with Colony Collapse Disorder, a yet undetermined affliction that has killed more than a third of the US bee population every year for the last four years. Honey bees have co-evolved with humans for centuries, and a collapse of these pollinators would mean a reduction by 1/3 of all the food produced in the United States. This is a serious matter that is just one piece of evidence of how broken our national food production is in this country, but I'll save that for another blog entry. What's certain about this is that we will become increasingly more dependent on the pollination of native bees for our crops. Most people are familiar with honey bees and bumble bees, but many of the small flying insects who frequent flowers are also bees. In fact, 3/4 of the planet's plants need insect pollination for reproduction, an evolution that occurred long before humans domesticated honey bees.

There are over 1600 species of native bees in California, with over 80 in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. They come in all color ranges, from metallic shades of blue and gold to fuzzy red, stripey green and black. The female Valley Carpenter Bee, reminds me of an orangutan with her gorgeous orange fur. Her mate is blue and shiny.

This bee in the poppy in Halictus escholzia, a sweat bee. 
Bees have a wide size range, from smaller than your pinky nail to the length of your thumb, often in the same family. The little bee down here is the smallest of San Francisco's carpenter bees, Ceratina acanthus.

Recently I had the pleasure of catching a bee called Megachile while at a friend's garden, and it buzzed with more ferocity than a cellphone on vibrate in my fingers but did not sting me. Why not, you ask? Honey bees and bumble bees have stingers, but these bees, like many animals, rely on bluff to protect them, since they sacrifice their own life to sting. If you think bees are dangerous then you have them mixed up with their cousins the wasps and hornets, who are aggressive and sting multiple times. Bumble bees and honey bees are social and live in hives of many thousands of individuals, meaning that they have a reason to protect the rest of their sisters in their hive by stinging. As a beekeeper I can assure you that even when opening up the lid of their boxes these bees rarely sting. They've been selectively bred to be gentle.
The rest of our native bees are solitary, most not even possessing a stinger at all. The solitary bees differ from honey bees in more ways than just that. Solitary bees have a shorter season when they're actively pollinating flowers, and have often evolved to coincide their life cycle with the flowering cycle of the native plants they pollinate. Many bees are specialists and feed only on one plant or one family of plants, such as the Sunflower bee Diadasia enavata, who pollinates many plants in the sunflower family. Scientists and farmers have been experimenting with these and other specialized pollinators such as the megachile family of bees. The short season of the bees can be be extended by staggering the times bees hatch, they do this by keeping sone of the nests in shade, and bringing them out to warm in succession, and as the nests warm the baby bees hatch.
If you want to have these amazing creatures in you garden, it isn't the size of your planting bed that will entice them- as most only need 16 square foot of space to lure them in to explore.  What bees need most are plants that have evolved to time their flowering to the bees, habitat, and water.
Gordon Frankie and his Berkeley Bee Garden group have been working to give the public more information on native bee habitat.  Check out their website for hours of information, including plant lists and beautiful photos. 
Link