The Bees Knees

“Was it you or I who stumbled first? It does not matter. The one of us who finds the strength to get up first, must help the other.” ― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

May 10, 2014

I do a lot of work with honeybees here in PY and this quote reminded me of the amazing way bees ALWAYS work collaboratively together in the interest of the colony as a whole. We humans could benefit a lot from being more like bees…

Helping some local señoras capture a wild bee colony that was living in a coco tree. The honeycomb in this hive was three feet long!

And since we’re talking bees, here are 15 fun facts about them!

1. It takes the 6-week lifetime of a single worker bee to produce 1/12^th of a teaspoon of honey.
   

   This honeybee found a container of beeswax lipbalm that I made. Here she is stealing it! First, she scrapes the wax from the top with her mouth, then pats it into shape with her front legs. Then she passes the ball of wax from her front feet to her middle feet which pack it into her pollen baskets on the hind legs. She was so heavy with wax that had trouble flying away!

2. A single bee can visit up to 2000 flowers a day. This means they are POLLINATING your future food supply and those pretty flowers you like to display on your table and around your home. No bees=no food for you. Think about it.
   

   Passion fruit flower with a giant bee collecting nectar. You can see all the pollen on her back, which is great for cross-pollinating flowers! This giant bee is very docile and stingless. On the backside of the flower behind the stamens you can see a smaller, common honeybee. The two get along just dandy.

   

   No more Thanksgiving feast!

   

   No more tomatoes or pasta sauce or pizza!

3. Bees must flap their wings 12,000 times a minute to stay aloft when returning to the hive with a full load of pollen. That pollen is HEAVY.
4. There are up to 60,000 bees in a hive and they maintain the hive at a constant 93 degrees F.
5. Bees never sleep.
6. Bees are ‘born’ out of the comb full-sized and immediately begin to work.
7. There is only one queen bee per hive. If two or more queens are in the same hive they will fight to the death. The colony can make a new queen at any time by simply choosing any egg and feeding it royal jelly instead of a regular bee larva diet. The queen cell is easy to detect as it is much larger than a regular cell. Once ‘born’ the new queen will immediately know if there is another queen present by the smell of her pheromones and the fighting will begin.
8. The queen is the mother of all bees in a hive and can live 3-4 years. Her purpose is to lay eggs and give off pheromones that keep the other females sterile and also indicate her presence, which is comforting to the workers in the various messages it relays. She can lay up to 1500 eggs per day or nearly a million in her lifetime. The queen is significantly larger than all other bees in the hive. She leaves the hive only once and that is only to mate shortly after she is ‘born’. She stores a lifetime of sperm in her body. The only other time she exits the hive is if it is disturbed (during a honey harvest or hive renovation) but she normally returns quickly.
   

   Illuvia de Oro tree (Rain of Gold) last summer, pollinated by, you guessed it, BEES.

9. The majority of bees in the hive are females, all sisters, and all work tirelessly. They have different roles based on their age. The newest bees tend the queen, grooming and feeding her; older bees collect pollen and nectar and will evaporate nectar to make honey; they defend the hive as needed, tend the brood and young drones, build the honeycomb, etc.
10. Drones are males that make up a small percentage of the hive. Their sole purpose is to breed with a queen – but not their own! – and they die immediately after mating. They do not have stingers and are unable to defend the hive. Essentially they hang out cruising the local environment for queens and eating the hive’s food supply. They do no other work, not even helping collect pollen or nectar. Nothing. In preparation for winter, the female worker bees often kill off many drones to save the food supply for the working females, queen and brood and then they push the drone bodies out the front door (I’m not kidding).
11. Bees must produce 60 lbs of honey to sustain the colony through the winter.
12. Honeybees produce beeswax from slits in their bodies. They chew these flakes to make them soft then pat them into place to make honeycomb cells. Every cell is an exact replicate of every other 6-sided cell.
    

    Honey harvest! Buckets of fresh, beautiful, delicious honeycomb and honey made from jasmine flowers…the best I’ve ever tasted!

13. When bees make honey from nectar, they fan their wings over the nectar to evaporate the water. Cured Honey is 17% water. When honey contains more water than that, it ferments at room temperature. When harvesting honey you want to look for the capped comb (the cells will be covered with wax- see photo below as an example) which indicates the honey has been cured and can be stored at room temperature indefinitely.
    

    Honey harvest and processing – cutting comb, heavy with honey, from the frame

14. Honey is the only food that doesn’t spoil (as long as no contaminants are introduced) and has been found buried with pharaohs in the Egyptian pyramids and … still edible. Honey is also a great preservative as its high-sugar, low-oxygen content do not allow generally growth of bacteria.
15. Sometimes honey forms sugar crystals due to contact with air but this does not change the quality of the honey. To return to liquid simply place the jar in a pan of warm water until liquefied. Do not boil as this destroys many of honey’s beneficial properties.

*Try a google search for some of honey’s amazing uses and benefits including for swelling and pain from bee stings, cuts and burns, acne, dry skin, hair conditioner, allergies, and more.

**No bees=no food as we know it! **

Fruits of late October: peaches and guavas (called guayabas here)

Without healthy populations of bees our world would become a disastrous (and hungry!!) place. Do your part to help support bees in your area. Avoid use of pesticides. Educate yourself about these amazing creatures. Do not kill honeybees. Remember they only sting when threatened. They will not hurt you unless you look scary (too close to the hive or wearing dark colors), act scary (swat at them or mess with their babies or queen) or otherwise piss them off. If you need a swarm or nest removed call your local beekeepers association. There are always beekeepers looking to capture a hive and take it home. They will love you for it.

***Support your local beekeepers and enjoy the fruits of their bees’ labor. Yum yum.***

All things thrive when bees are alive!