The Brood Nest

The honey bee makes a permanent nest. In nature, honey bees build a nest in a cavity of a hollow tree or a hole in a rock wall. Honey bees also find many man-made objects to be suitable cavities: mail boxes, barbecue grills, and the walls of houses. Man long ago learned to house honey bees in hives made of fired clay resembling drain pipes. Woven straw hives, called skeps, having the appearance of inverted baskets, were used by the Europeans who brought honey bee colonies to America. They packed two skeps inside a wooden barrel with ice and sawdust added to lower the temperature of the hives to reduce flying during the three month ocean crossing. The modern bee hive was invented by a Philadelphia pastor, Reverend Lorenzo L. Langstroth in 1851. The Langstroth hive is an open wooden box, structurally similar to a hollow tree. The observant pastor built his hive after carefully measuring the distances between sheets of honeycomb built by bees in the wild. The Langstroth hive contains removable frames holding the fragile beeswax combs. The ability to remove the combs allows beekeepers to inspect the hive for bee diseases and to harvest honey in a non-destructive manner.

Tod and I agreed to assist a new beekeeper set up his hive for the winter. The active colony of bees was housed in a traditional Langstroth hive with two deep hive bodies for the brood nest. These were topped with one shallow honey super. The super and the upper hive body were each filled frames of capped honey. The frames of the upper hive body were stuck firmly in the hive, so we lifted the box as a unit. The honeycomb in the lower box, containing the brood, was not held in frames. Combs collapsed like a house of cards. Beekeepers should never leave empty boxes in a hive for bees to fill with honeycomb. We will repair the hive next spring if the queen survived the implosion.

--Richard

Extracting Honey

The invention of the honey extractor was one of the great advances in beekeeping of the mid-1800s. The honey extractor was developed shortly after Philadelphia pastor L. L. Langstroth built the first modern bee hive. The hive, built around the concept of bee space that Langstroth had observed in nature, held removable frames of honeycomb. With removable frames, the honey could be extracted in a convenient and nondestructive manner. Earlier methods of collecting honey involved cutting or breaking pieces of honeycomb from the colony’s nest in a hollow log or a bee skep made of straw. The honey was obtained by mashing the honeycomb and squeezing out the honey. The method was effective for collecting honey and beeswax, but it destroyed the honeycomb. The honey obtained was often of lesser quality as well, because the comb likely held some brood. Using removable frames and a honey extractor, the beekeeper could harvest honey and save the honeycomb for reuse by the bees in the following year. Reusing the honeycomb saves the bees a considerable amount of time required to draw-out new honeycomb. Also, a great amount of resources in honey must be consumed to rebuild the next honeycomb. For the bees to produce one ounce of beeswax, they consume one pound of honey.

In today’s photo frames of honey spin in the Peace Bee Farm honey extractor. The beeswax cappings covering the honey have been cut away using a sharp knife and scratching tool. Centrifugal force pulls the honey from the open cells of the honeycomb. As the honey flows from the extractor, it is strained of flecks of beeswax and any foreign matter. Traces of pollen remain in the honey. The honey is collected and sealed in honey pails to be bottled as needed. Each pail of honey is sampled for taste and aroma, and the honey’s moisture content is measured. Bee yard, nectar source, date collected, honey color, and weight are recorded.

--Richard

A New Queen Emerges

Still wet, fuzzy, and pale in color, the new queen bee walked slowly and wobbly away from the queen cell on the thirteenth day after I placed the frame of young brood in the bee hive. She emerged from the bottom of the peanut-shaped emergency queen cell that the workers built around a one-day-old larva. The workers were desperate to produce a new queen, but they lacked a suitable larva to feed royal jelly to begin the physiological changes that make a larva develop into a queen rather than a worker. Their brood nest was filled with honey in all available cells. The hive contained no brood, and the colony appeared to be hopelessly queen-less. Without a new queen, the colony would die in about six weeks, the life expectancy of a worker bee.

 Over a hundred years ago, L. L. Langstroth wrote that we can save a failing colony of honey bees by bringing in a frame of very young brood from another hive. I chose a frame of mixed brood having all honey bee stages: eggs, larvae, pupae, and newly emerged adults. The young adult bees have highly developed glands to produce the food needed to feed the rapidly growing larvae. The pupae will be emerging soon to help boost the population of the colony. The youngest larvae and eggs are potential brood to be turned into a new queen. Click on the picture of the brood frame viewed from the bottom. The newly emerged queen is passing empty queen cells built along the lower edge of the frame. Queen cells always hang vertically, while drone and worker cells are oriented horizontally on the brood nest combs. The emergency queen cell that housed this queen during her development is to the right, in the middle of the frame. Workers thinned the beeswax from the lower end of the queen cell to assist her exit the cell. After a successful mating flight, the queen will continue the colony’s reproduction.

--Richard

The Honey Extractor

The honey extractor was one of several great beekeeping inventions that came along in the Mid-1800s. The extractor made the collection of honey a non-destructive task. Previous methods of gathering honey always destroyed the honey comb. Some common methods of collecting honey killed the colony. It was common for groups of people to identify trees with bees living inside in a cavity. The tree would then be cut and the cavity exposed. The bees would be smoked and the comb removed. The comb would be pressed to release the honey. The honey would then be filtered through cheesecloth to remove debris and particles of beeswax. Pressing the honey out of the comb could liquefy proteins if there was any brood present. This altered the taste of the honey and made for a less than pure product.

The 1851 invention of the modern removable frame hive by Reverend L. L. Langstroth, a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania pastor, made honey collection practical. With the new invention, frames of honey, capped in beeswax, could be removed from the bee hive. In the Langstroth hive, honey was stored separately from the brood, separated by a queen excluder. This arrangement eliminated the problem of proteins entering the honey. The cappings were removed by cutting or scratching. Next, the frames were placed in a honey extractor which Langstroth developed in 1867. The extractor spun the frames and removed the honey by centrifugal force. Early extractors were hand operated. Now many employ electric motors. The photo shows frames of honey glistening as the thick liquid honey is spun out. The pure honey is collected, and the frames and honey combs are saved for the bees to use again.
--Richard