An Ancient Tradition Repeated

The death of Elizabeth II, the Queen of England brings public expressions of sympathy conveyed in traditions dating back hundreds of years. It also brings about a private expression of sympathy that also dates back through the centuries. John Chapple, the queen’s royal beekeeper, quietly notified the bees of the queen’s death, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/world/europe/bees-queen-elizabeth.html. John travelled to Buckingham Palace and Clarence House to notify the bees that their mistress had died and that they would have a new master, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11199259/. Aware of the significance of the loss of a loved one, it was Queen Elizabeth who told us, “Grief is the cost of love.”

 

As summer ends, goldenrod comes into bloom and attracts bees and myriad native pollinators. Today, a honey bee collects pollen: protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals to feed her colony’s brood. Flowers bring rebirth. Reassuring, along with Elizabeth’s words.

--Richard

Insecticides Kill Bees

 

Honey bee foragers bring flower nectar and pollen into the hive as food. The nectar is carbohydrate that the bees convert into honey. Pollen is primarily protein; it also contains fats, vitamins, and minerals. When honey and pollen are combined in the hive, the food is called “bee bread.” Yeast and bacteria from the bees’ gut microflora cause fermentation of bee bread, breaking down the hard shell around pollen grains and exposing the proteins. Fermentation also preserves bee bread. Young worker bees consume bee bread, and glands in the workers’ head produce brood food that nurse bees feed to developing bee larvae. Bee bread is also used to produce royal jelly, a high-energy food fed to all brood in its first day and fed to the queen bee throughout her life.

When honey bee foragers visit flowers, pollen grains adhere to the bees’ hairy bodies. The bees groom the dusty pollen into pellets that they carry on “pollen baskets” on their hind legs. Honey bees at times pick up environmental dusts that adhere to their bodies similarly to pollen. Grain dust from poultry feed is commonly collected by honey bees. Chemical pesticides in dust form are also accidentally collected by bees and brought back to the hives. Carbaryl, an insecticide sold under the name “Sevin,” is particularly deadly to honey bees when applied to flowers in dust form. Insecticides may kill honey bees rapidly on contact or ingestion. However, they may kill bees more slowly if the poison is stored as pollen and later converted into bee bread. When the bees feed their brood secretions from poisoned bee bread, they kill the developing bees. Likewise, they can kill the queen by feeding her poisoned royal jelly. Beekeepers look for larger numbers of dead bees on the ground near the hive entrances, seen in today’s photo. I, and other area beekeepers, lost brood and queens in a number of hives. Those using insecticides should use caution and be prudent applying chemicals.

--Richard

Honey Bees in the Winter

The honey bee is well adapted to live in diverse environments. Honey bees are found from the hottest equatorial regions to extremely cold temperate regions. In the temperate zone, bees are able to regulate the atmosphere of their hive from the heat of summer to the cold of winter. Honey bees have adapted behaviors to accommodate abundances of food as well as dearth. When flowers are in bloom, bees make honey; when no flowers are blooming, bees eat that honey. Bees regulate the temperature of the brood nest at 95 degrees Fahrenheit. In the summer they often need to cool the hive; in the winter the workers generate heat to keep the bees warm. To stay warm, the bees form a round cluster, a three-dimensional ball of bees divided by sheets of honeycomb. Tightly packed bees on the outside of the cluster insulate those inside. Bees on the inside eat honey, a high-energy food, and generate heat in their flight muscles. Honey bees don’t waste energy warming their entire hive, only the brood and bees. It would be wasteful to warm unoccupied corners of the hive.

Certain honey bee races, particularly those that evolved in the colder regions of northern Europe and Asia, exhibit behaviors that further conserve precious honey reserves needed to warm and feed bees over lengthy and severe winters. Since adult bees can survive at lower temperatures than brood, these cold-hearty bees force their queen to stop laying eggs in the winter. Without brood in the hive, bees only warm the cluster to about 70 degrees.  The longer that the hive remains without brood, the less food is consumed. However, the queen may begin laying eggs anytime after the winter solstice. Egg laying is stimulated by workers bringing in pollen. On warm days, like today, workers seek pollen. Here they are mistakenly collecting dust from cracked corn and grain sorghum that I am feeding to ducks. Many people find honey bees in their bird feeders in the winter.

--Richard

Pesticides in Pollen

One of the intriguing aspects of beekeeping is the complexity of the honey bee nest. Beekeepers spend their first year observing the way bees build their nest by secreting beeswax and constructing honeycombs. The combs contain the three stages of developing brood and pollen and honey for food. The pollen is of different colors. Some is wet and darker in color; this is bee bread, food for brood made of pollen mixed with honey. Honey is stored in open cells or cells capped with beeswax. Beeswax cappings vary in color from white to brown. The surface of the cappings may be textured to resemble hieroglyphic writings. Capped brood is similar in appearance to capped honey, but the texture is somewhat gritty. Drone brood cells are dome-shaped; some call them “bullets.” Queen cells hang vertically and resemble peanuts in shape and texture. Queen cell cups are empty bowls facing downward.

After a while one feels that he has seen everything in a bee hive. I was surprised to find frames unlike any I had seen before. They contained cells of sunken, brick-red cappings. When I opened the capped cells, I found that they contained pollen. Pollen is not normally encapsulated in the cells. This condition was first reported by researchers looking for causes of honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD. The researchers found that bees “entombed” chemically contaminated pollen. See http://ento.psu.edu/pollinators/publications/Entombed. The most frequently detected contaminants were the miticides coumaphos and fluvalinate and the fungicide chlorothalonil. Combinations of certain pesticides are quite toxic to honey bees. The miticides fluvalinate becomes 1000 times more toxic to honey bees exposed to fungicides commonly used to treat cropland, orchards, and home gardens. Studies conducted with hives having entombed pollen found higher rates of mortality. This research did not associate entombed pollen with CCD.  Finding frames of entombed pollen in my Peace Bee Farm hives that are not chemically treated indicates that contaminants are brought into the hive by the bees. Today’s photo: entombed pollen.

--Richard

Products of the Bee Hive

Honey bees are managed for pollination service and for production of honey. The honey bee hive also produces a number of other valuable products. The Tennessee Beekeepers Association conducts a series of workshops across the state to train beekeepers in techniques for harvesting other bee hive resources and for making useful products from them. The beekeepers examine various pollen traps used to collect pollen. The traps work by brushing some of the pollen pellets from the pollen baskets on the legs of worker pollen-foraging bees. The collected bee pollen is a complete protein containing all of the necessary amino acids as well as all known vitamins and 25 trace elements necessary for mammals. In North America, the majority of collected bee pollen is fed to livestock. Some trainers feed large quantities of pollen to race horses. The beekeepers also discuss various methods of collecting propolis, the antiseptic, antimicrobial, and detoxifying bee glue that has been used for at least 2000 years. Propolis, the material that honey bees use to varnish their hive to inhibit wood-rotting fungi, disinfect cells before the queen lays eggs, and reduce the growth of numerous strains of pathogenic bacteria, is collected and sold for use in the production of medications.

The text that the beekeepers use in the sessions on producing value-added bee hive products, Health and Healing with Bee Products by C. Leigh Broadhurst, also lists health benefits of honey. The author, a USDA research scientist, explains that honey is a broad-spectrum antibiotic; it is antifungal and antimicrobial; and it is sometimes mixed with propolis for wound treatments. Broadhurst also reveals that the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes present in honey aid in metabolism. The beekeepers also use beeswax to make candles and skin-care products. In today’s picture beekeepers pour beeswax into candle molds. The training sessions are funded by a grant from the Tennessee Department of Agriculture which recognizes the importance of increasing beekeeper income to ensure continued honey bee availability for crop pollination.

--Richard

Ultrafiltration of Honey

Honey bees use enzymes that they produce in their bodies to convert the sugars from the nectar of flowers into a concentrated, high-energy food that we know as honey. Along with sugars, honey contains enzymes and pollen from flowers growing in the area. That pollen can be used to identify the source of the honey. A recent report concerning the removal of pollen from honey brought considerable public discussion about the deliberate removal of pollen from honey by unscrupulous importers of foreign honey. The report by investigative journalist Andrew Schneider appeared in Food Safety News at http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/. Schneider reported that independent testing of samples of honey found that three fourths of the honey on grocery store shelves could not even be called honey because pollen, a component of natural honey, had been removed. To hide the country of origin, some honey is highly processed by ultrafiltration to remove all pollen.

Responding to the discussion brought about by Schneider’s report, Dan Charles writes in NPR’s food blog, http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/11/25/142659547/relax-folks-it-really-is-honey-after-all?ps=cprs, in defense of honey on the grocery store shelf. Many in the public understand the deceptive practices of a few, but a number of citizens are confused about what real honey truly is. Many seek out a local beekeeper and purchase honey produced in their area. However, at almost every farmers market or honey sales event that we attend, we have individuals ask for sugar-free honey. Hearing that there is no such thing as a sugar-free honey, one lady exclaimed that she knew that there was because she had seen it on the grocery shelf. I assured her that the product did not come from a bee hive. Adulterated products are sometimes labeled to appear to be honey. Some contain high fructose corn sweetener and are labeled as “honey sauce.” Many processed food items boast on the label to contain honey while it is only a minor component. For information about honey, see the National Honey Board’s web site, http://www.honey.com/nhb/about-honey/. Enjoy real honey.

--Richard

Honey Contains Pollen

Honey is harvested as the bees make it, one drop at a time. To make a tablespoon of honey to pour over a hot buttered biscuit requires the full life’s work of 32 honey bees. Producing a jar of honey is the result of considerable effort by both the bees and their keeper. Unfortunately, there are those who take advantage of the appeal, reputation, and health benefits of honey to unscrupulously produce a lesser product and sell it as honey. They do this by adulterating the product by mixing in cheaper sweeteners or by altering the honey to hide its true origin.

In Andrew Schneider’s Food Safety News report, “Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn’t Honey: Ultra-filtering Removes Pollen, Hides Honey Origins,” the investigator writes that pollen is being removed from honey to hide whether the honey came from legitimate and safe sources. Honey is being produced in distant lands, shipped to intermediate countries, repackaged, and stripped of pollen to hide the true origin. According to Schneider, “Food scientists and honey specialists say pollen is the only foolproof fingerprint to a honey’s source.” Schneider explains that in the US the Food and Drug Administration says that a product that has been ultra-filtered and contains no pollen is not honey. One major honey packer describes ultra-filtration as “a deceptive, illegal, unethical practice.” Unfortunately, the FDA isn’t checking honey to see if it contains pollen. Food Safety News purchased honey and had it tested for pollen. They found that three fourths of honey purchased at groceries or big box stores and all honey purchased at drug stores contained no pollen. All honey purchased at farmers markets and “natural” stores, however, contained the expected pollen. Read this informative report at http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/. In today’s photo, honey from late summer wildflowers and Arkansas Delta cotton flows in the Peace Bee Farm honey house. We appreciate those loyal customers who support the beekeeping tradition of producing real honey as the bees made it.

--Richard

Searching for Pollen

Whenever weather conditions allow honey bees to fly from the hives, scout bees go looking for available nectar and pollen. A warm day in early January finds worker bees making cleansing flights and a few scouts searching for food. Without flowers in bloom, the scouts converge on the food bowls of our domestic chickens, ducks, and geese. The bees detect the grain dust in the feed comprised of cracked corn, wheat, and grain sorghum as being granules of pollen. Within minutes, the scouts convey their findings to long-idle foragers. Soon, each food bowl holds dozens of worker bees. The bees roll and tumble across the surface of the grain, covering their hairy bodies with dust. They pay no attention to the geese gulping the grain. Periodically, the bees stop and groom their bodies using the rakes and combs on their legs to gather the dust into pellets which they form by mixing granules of dust with honey that they carry in their honey gut. The worker in today’s photo carries pellets of grain dust on her hind legs.

Honey bees cannot determine the quality of the pollen that they collect. When pollen is not available in great quantities or from diverse sources, the bees may gather food of lesser nutritional value. Indeed, today the bees are not even gathering pollen; they are mistakenly gathering another product of a similar size and texture. Honey bees often mistakenly bring powdered insecticides, fungicides, and other small-particle chemicals back to the hive. Pollen provides the honey bees protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals. The dust from the poultry feed probably provides the bees some nutrition. The sight of the bees actively foraging in the grain tempts me to put out some pollen substitute, but I feel like the time is too early. When the bees start bringing pollen back to the hive, it will stimulate the queen to start laying eggs. We still have too much winter facing us to stimulate the hives now.

--Richard

Feeding Pollen

Recent years have highlighted the need for good nutrition in the bee hive. Supplemental feeding of heavy syrup in the fall was often done to provide extra stores of food for the winter. A feeding of light syrup in the spring was used to stimulate foraging to support the build-up of the honey bee population prior to the major nectar flows. Now, there is considerable interest in providing a more complete diet to the honey bee colony throughout the year. Not only are beekeepers feeding carbohydrate syrups to supplement nectar, they are feeding pollen substitutes to provide proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals. When honey bees have available honey and pollen from a diverse array of plants, they have complete nutrition. Mono-culture agricultural practices, migratory pollination work, the clean-up of weedy areas, and adverse weather may each lead to nutritional stress on the bees.

Feeding pollen to bees in the fall helps insure that the young bees will have fully-developed glands necessary for them to make the brood food needed in the late winter and early spring. The queen is stimulated to start laying eggs when the workers bring pollen into the hive. For this reason I like to place some dry pollen substitute in a feeding station in the bee yard where I will be raising queens. Supplemental feeding of pollen can also be done inside the hive by making patties of pollen substitute and syrup. These patties are useful for feeding the brood during build-up. They should be placed directly above the brood nest. If the patties are not consumed rapidly by the honey bees, small hive beetles are attracted to their protein. The picture shows a simple arrangement for feeding dry pollen substitute. A pet feeder is placed inside a five gallon pail, which is open toward the east. The feed is pollen substitute mixed with natural pollen that I trapped and froze last summer. Some powdered sugar is added as well. Bees love this mix.
--Richard

The First Pollen Arrives

Honey bees break out of their winter cluster and fly when the temperatures rise to 50 degrees. A warm period brought the pollen foragers out in great numbers. The vast majority of the honey bees returning to the hives were carrying pollen. The presence of pollen being brought into the hive is a stimulus for the queen to lay eggs and produce brood. The brood production causes the worker bees to seek out more pollen. When I opened the hives, I found that the colonies have begun producing brood. Judging from the age of the brood it is evident that the queens were laying eggs even during early January when the temperatures were well below freezing for days on end. The beekeeper can tell the age of the brood by observing the different stages. Worker brood remains as an egg for three days. Next, the brood is a larva for six days. During this time, the larva will expand from a tiny c-shaped, worm-like creature to a large worm that fills the honeycomb cell. On the tenth day of brood development, the workers cap the larva with beeswax; and the bee develops for 12 days as a pupa.

The health and life expectancy of the young bees developing early in the year is largely dependent upon the quality of the pollen that they bring into the hive at this time. Pollen quality also affects worker bee gland development and helps determine the ability of the young workers to produce food for the next generation of bees. The bees do not have a mechanism for determining the pollen quality, and they often gather substitutes before flowers bloom in abundance. We can help our bees by feeding protein supplements in the form of pollen substitutes. We can also help ensure good bee health by encouraging weedy growth to provide a diversity of pollen sources. Most of today’s bees were returning to the hive with light gray colored pollen; others carried yellow pollen.
--Richard

Bees in the Chicken Yard

We are three weeks into our calendar year, and the honey bee is well into its year. It is still the middle of the winter, but the weather is unseasonably warm. Yesterday, with heavy rains and thunderstorms sweeping across the Delta, I held the chickens inside their house. The fuzzy little Silkies rolled about and dusted their feathers in the sand and hay covered floor. Today, with warm weather and breaks in the skies, I released the chickens. Shortly, I noticed dozens of honey bees inside the chicken house. The bees were wallowing in the dusty sand where the chickens had done the same the previous day. Other bees were landing in the chickens’ grain feeder. An equal number of bees were outside the chicken house wallowing on the ground in grains that we feed on the surface. The bees were digging through cracked corn, wheat berries, and grain sorghum that the poultry scratch through in their daily foraging. No, honey bees don’t feed on grains like chickens do; these bees were collecting dust.

Honey bee colonies may begin producing brood anytime after the winter solstice, December 21. Brood production requires a considerable amount of protein to feed the larvae. While honey bees derive their protein from pollen, very little is available early in the year. The bees often mistakenly gather dust from various sources while searching for pollen. The bees do not have the ability to tell the quality of the protein they collect. They may be collecting an incomplete protein from a flower or a completely different substance, like the chicken feed dust. It is common for people to find honey bees in bird feeders in the winter and early spring. These bees are collecting dust from the millet seeds. In response to the bees’ desire for pollen, I gave a supplemental feeding of pollen substitute, a fermented protein food based on soy flour and brewer’s yeast, to my bee yard which will be producing this year’s queens.
--Richard

Trapping Honey Bee Pollen

A beekeeper must always be planning well in advance. Beekeeping involves a continuously changing series of tasks based upon honey bee biology. In temperate regions, like the Arkansas Delta, the bees are continuously changing their activities based broadly upon a schedule of collecting nectar and making honey in the spring, summer, and fall to be eaten in the winter. Queens lay eggs throughout the year, stopping only in the middle of winter. Colonies expand rapidly in the spring, often swarming to propagate new colonies. To stimulate drone production next spring in advance of raising new queens, we will feed the bees pollen. We collect bee pollen in the summer in traps located at the entrance to some of the bee hives. The summer pollen, collected from diverse sources, will be quite valuable late next winter for honey bee nutrition. Nutrition is a key factor in the production of high quality queen bees as well. We will feed the colonies producing next year’s queens pollen throughout the queen's development.

The pollen trap brushes the pollen off the pollen baskets of foraging worker bees as they enter the hive. The pollen falls into a screen basket and is removed daily. The pollen is immediately frozen and remains in the freezer until used. Pollen traps are designed to not be completely efficient. If they captured all of the pollen being brought into the hive, the colony’s brood would starve. When the pollen trap is set to collect, the bees compensate for their loss of pollen by recruiting extra pollen foragers. Many people like to eat honey bee pollen, as it contains protein, vitamins, minerals, and lipids, or fats. One of my favorite breakfast meals is a cup of McCarter's chicory coffee and a banana sprinkled with honey bee pollen.
--Richard

Summer Wildflowers Add Color

With the change of seasons we find a change in the wildflowers coloring the undisturbed margins of fields and woodlots. The yellow, white, and purple flowers of spring have been replaced by different yellow flowers plus reds and whites. Among coffee weed and spires of Johnson grass, an overgrown ditch bank reveals several bright and colorful varieties of coreopsis plus white and yellow summer asters. Here at Peace Bee Farm, we collect and freeze pollen in the summer to feed to the bees next spring to ensure a good variety of nutrients at queen-raising time. We can tell that there are numerous pollen sources available just by observing the collected pollen. The color and taste of the pollen pellets changes almost daily. This summer diversity of proteins, lipids, vitamins, and minerals will be most valuable in the early spring when pollen is not abundant.

A group of home school students from northern Mississippi visited the bee farm today. The students have been studying entomology along with their parents. Again and again I am impressed by the understanding that young children have of their natural world. They ask the most pertinent questions. They came to the bee farm with considerable knowledge of insect and honey bee biology. They asked how bees find flowers, how they know when they need a new queen, and how they go about raising a new queen. Both the children and their parents were eager to discuss ways of introducing a new queen to a colony. They could foresee many of the problems of queen acceptance. Honey bees fascinate people of all ages and open their imaginations.
--Richard

The Mustards are in Bloom

Throughout the delta yellow patches of knee-high, yellow flowers define the cool-season kitchen garden that is being left to go to seed. The yellow flowers are the next stage of the salad greens eaten from fall through spring. The greens are members of the important bee plant family, the mustards. These plants provide nectar and pollen for the bees. As well as the greens, the mustard family includes broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, mustard, and radish. Rape is another mustard, which is often known by its other name, canola.

Click on the photo and you can see that the honey bee is collecting pollen from the flowers of collards. She has the pollen packed onto her pollen baskets on her hind legs. The pollen provides proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals for the bees to use to feed their developing brood. When pollen is mixed with honey, which is carbohydrate, the honey bees have a complete diet. Collard greens are often cooked with turnip, mustard, and kale greens to make an enjoyable dish.
--Richard

Foragers Return with Pollen

With the changing of seasons from winter to spring, the honey bees take advantage of any warm day to forage for pollen and nectar. The pollen is of particularly great importance for feeding the developing brood. The best nutrition is derived from a mixture of pollens from various sources. Here, we see the foraging honey bees entering the hive with their pollen baskets loaded with pollen from multiple sources.

Some readers of my posting of Wednesday, March 18, 2009 questioned what they were seeing in the photo of the frame of bees with cells filled with pollen. Let me reprint Wednesday’s picture from inside the hive. Here is an explanation of some of the objects we see: In the center we see one foraging bee with pellets of pollen on the pollen baskets of her hind legs. Across the lower portion of the frame we see cells packed with yellow, orange, and red pollen. The black, shiny cells are filled with honey. The tan-colored cells with a “damp” appearance are filled with “bee bread,” made of pollen mixed with honey. Finally, the loose yellow flakes are recently collected pieces of pollen that have not yet been packed by the bees into the cells. Click on the image for a larger view.
--Richard

Bees Bring Pollen into the Hive

On this warm late-winter day the bees bring in pollen in large volumes. On the landing board at the entrance of the hive we see large numbers of foraging bees returning with their pollen baskets loaded with bright yellow pellets of pollen. A few others carry bright red or tan colored pellets. The pollen baskets are on the bees’ hind legs; in the sunlight, the bright pollen makes the bees look like cars with their tail lights shining. Inside the hive, the bees pack the pollen into cells using their heads as rams. Other bees mix in some honey with the pollen to make “bee bread” to be fed to the developing honey bee brood. The bees’ honey is pure carbohydrate. With the pollen, the bees are adding protein, fats, vitamins, and minerals to make a complete food for the developing brood. The hive is having a population explosion at this time of the year in anticipation of the flowers to come in the spring and summer. It takes a lot of pollen to feed the rapidly growing colony.
--Richard