How Much Smoke?

Cave and rock wall paintings from around the world depict our ancestors working with honey bees for thousands of years. The pictures show these earliest honey robbers using smoke as they approach bees in cavities along rock cliffs. While cliff climbers burned smoking torches to control the bees, modern beekeepers use the smoker invented in the mid-1800s. Our smoker is a metal firebox with a bellows similar to that used in blacksmith shops at the time of its development. Beekeepers build a smoldering fire inside the firebox to produce a cool smoke to calm the bees. An explanation of how the smoke works is often told like this: Honey bees, living in cavities in hollow trees, smell the smoke and sense the forest is on fire. Anticipating the need to flee their home, the bees gorge themselves with honey to be able to take it with them. The bees, bloated with honey, don’t have much fight left in them. It’s an imaginative story, but it probably does not happen. Worker bees do drink up stored honey when beekeepers smoke the hive, but the more likely hive-calming effect probably comes from blocking the bees’ pheromone communications within the hive. A little smoke masks alarm pheromone distributed by guard bees and calms the hive. Too much smoke excites the colony. Beekeepers can tell if they are applying smoke appropriately by watching the bees and listening to the hum of the hive. Applying too much smoke brings an immediate buzz from the bees.

Beekeeper Crystal Anderson builds a smoky fire of pine needles in her smoker prior to working her Tennessee bees. She lights a fire in the bottom of the smoker, then smothers the flame by adding pine needles to produce a heavy smoke from the smoldering fire. Slowly packing in large amounts of fuel, her smoker will stay lit for a long time. Learning how much smoke to apply is a lesson often taught by the bees themselves.

--Richard

The Smoker

Paintings in Spain dating back at least eight thousand years show men harvesting honey from bees living in cavities in cliffs. These honey hunters carried smoking torches to help control the honey bees. From the earliest recorded images it appears that man has used smoke while working with or robbing honey bees. A common explanation for the use of smoke proposes that the honey bee, whose natural home is a hollow tree, perceives the smoke as a warning that the woods is on fire and that evacuating the tree is imminent. A more likely occurrence is the smoke interferes with the bees being able to detect the odor of alarm pheromone spread through the hive by the guard bees. No matter what the reasoning behind the effectiveness of smoke in beekeeping, the result is the same. If properly applied, smoke tends to calm the honey bee colony. When bees have been smoked, many of them will immediately begin sucking up honey into their honey gut. It is this action that leads some to believe that the bees are preparing to move in advance of the fire.

The smoker used by most beekeepers today is virtually identical to the smokers built in the mid-1800s. The smoker was one of four inventions of the 1800s that led to the beekeeping industry that we know today. These were the removable frame bee hive, foundation for the bees to use to build honey comb, the extractor to remove honey from the comb, and the smoker. If you look at the smoker that I use daily, you can see that it is made of a metal firebox and a wood and leather bellows. The bellows is similar to the one used to fan the fire in blacksmith shops. A smoldering fire emits a cool smoke and calms the bees. If too much smoke is applied, it has the opposite effect; the bees are angered. I burn readily available pine needles for smoker fuel.
--Richard