Installing Packaged Bees

The spring of the year is the time when honey bees expand their colonies and branch out to new territory. Since beekeepers have to follow the life patterns of the bees, it is also the time that we expand our colonies. Today I helped beekeeper and renowned potter, Agnes Stark, set up two hives using packaged honey bees. Using packaged bees is one of the several methods in which beekeepers establish new colonies. A package of bees is made up by a bee breeder by physically shaking the bees from the frames of established hives into a wooden box with screened walls. The box is about the size and shape of a shoe box. A typical package of bees will contain three pounds of bees, about 12000 bees. The package will also contain one queen bee, confined in a cage. To keep the bees fed and hydrated during their trip from the bee breeder to the beekeeper, there is a can of syrup with tiny drip holes inside the box.

Here, you can see Agnes pouring the bees from the package into the hive that she prepared for them. She placed the queen cage inside the hive, exposing a candy plug to the bees. It will take the bees a day or more to eat through the candy and release the queen. This candy plug acts as a delaying feature for the release of the queen, allowing the bees to get accustomed to her pheromones. Once the queen is released from her cage, she will begin laying eggs; and the packaged bees will function as a colony. These bees were fortunate to have landed in the bee yard of Agnes Stark. Be sure to visit the artist’s web site: starkpottery.com.
--Richard

Home School at the Bees' Home

A group of home school students and their parents and leaders visited the bee farm today. They came out equipped with digital cameras and inquisitive minds. The group is posed in our queen evaluation yard. I explained to these students that whenever I go into this bee yard, I carry a clip board and each colony receives a “report card.” Bad behavior gets bees “expelled.” From the colonies that score the highest on traits involving bee behavior, health, and honey production, we will raise new queens. The children had many questions about how the queen bee produces the eggs to propagate the entire colony. From their home school science studies the group came in with a good background on the nature of insects, the role of pollinators, and the relationship between humans, the flowering plants, the pollinating insects, and the environment. The group also visited the honey house and the queen mating yard. It is almost impossible to fill up a digital camera or an inquisitive mind.
--Richard

The Bee Tree

Memphis is a unique city. Flying over the city, we get the impression that we are over a park instead of a typical large city. The majority of the city is covered with massive oak trees. This week I got a call about a swarm of bees in a shrub in the lawn of one of the city’s one-hundred-year-old neighborhoods. The homeowner explained that this was actually the second swarm to appear in the shrub in the same week. When I arrived at her home a short time later, these bees, like the earlier swarm, had already flown away. This is the typical pattern of swarming honey bees to light on a shrub or structure close to their old cavity home. After a short period of time they move on to a permanent home in another cavity.

In Memphis, the bees have no problem finding a suitable cavity for a new home. Many of the large oak trees have cavities resulting from lightning strikes or storm damage over the years. I found just such a tree nearby. About thirty feet above, bees could be seen entering and leaving the huge oak tree through a hole in the trunk. Often we have colonies of honey bees in our own yard, sometimes for years, without our even knowing it. We share a rich natural environment with people, trees, flowers, and bees. It’s a good thing to have cities that look like parks.
--Richard

Apples in Bloom

Apples are in bloom in the Mid-South. In order for the trees to produce fruit, they must be visited by insect pollinators. These may either be native insects or honey bees. The honey bee is the principal commercial pollinator of apples. This is due to the nature of the honey bee. They live in large colonies that can be transported to the orchard by truck in their wooden hives. Large numbers of bees are needed to pollinate large commercial plantings of apples. Also, honey bees exhibit flower constancy; that is, they continue to forage on the same type of plant as long as it is blooming. Flower constancy makes the honey bee an efficient pollinator of apples. By the honey bee staying in the apple trees collecting nectar or pollen, they transfer pollen from one flower to another. This transfer of pollen is a necessary step in the production of the fruit.

The apple is a member of the important family of bee plants, the roses. Other members of the rose family include the plum, pear, cherry, almond, blackberry, and the hawthorns. In the picture we can clearly see the resemblance of the apple flower to a rose. An apple tree covered with flowers and honey bees is a beautiful early spring sight.
--Richard

Willow in Bloom

In the early spring we see a series of colorful flowering trees. We also see some flowering shrubs and flowers on the ground. For the honey bee, much of its early spring food is out of our easy view. At this time of the year a large portion of the honey bees’ forage comes from trees along the banks of streams and rivers. Much of this area is so remote that it can only be visited in flight, as the bees do. I visited a nearby river and located an elevated road passing through a swamp. Here, I found quite a few honey bees foraging for pollen and nectar high in the tops of willow trees. As we observe the willows in bloom, we see that the honey bees continue to forage from a single type of flowering plant as long as it is in bloom. When its blooming period is over, the bees seek out the next plant to come into bloom. Since most of the plants and trees come into bloom at different times of the year, they share the honey bees’ pollinating service in a type of time-share arrangement. The early spring often finds the honey bees in the river bottoms.
--Richard

The Jesters, Remarkable Beekeepers

I ran into Kevin and Pratima Jester of Jester Bee Company this morning. They had just unloaded four hundred nucleus colonies of honey bees at their headquarters in West Ridge, Arkansas. They drove non-stop through the night from their Florida operation where they had raised these bees. The nucleus colonies will be used by beekeepers in the Mid-South, Mid-West, and New England to establish bee hives. The Jesters raise the bees in the Deep South to get the populations of bees established earlier than is possible in cooler areas.

The Jesters are remarkably imaginative and industrious beekeepers. Like many beekeepers, they lost a large portion of their bees in 2007 to the condition known as Colony Collapse Disorder. While the cause of this condition is not yet known, the Jesters have been working to keep healthy bees and to regrow their business. They have developed some products to help beekeepers meet the honey bees’ nutritional needs. The Jesters are like a number of beekeepers who are experimenting with methods to keep the honey bees healthy. Beekeepers will want to save the address: jesterbee.com.
--Richard

The Queen Bee is Busy

Each honey bee colony has a single queen bee producing all of the offspring of the hive. Here, we see the queen surrounded by her retinue of attendant bees as she prepares to deposit an egg in a cell. The queen is surrounded at all times by a group of attendants who feed and groom her. These bees also regularly stroke the surface of the queen to obtain pheromones to pass throughout the colony. These pheromones, which are odors that the bees can recognize, let the entire colony know that their queen is present. This is the substance that holds the colony together in an organized social group.

Photographer and beekeeper Brandon Dill and I watched this queen fill in the pattern of available cells in the brood nest. She measured each available cell with her front legs then deposited an egg by lowering her abdomen into the cell. A productive queen bee will lay over 1500 eggs each day. This queen is marked by red paint on her thorax, the second segment of a bee’s body. We mark our queens to identify them and know their age. You may see Brandon’s remarkable photographic work at http://www.brandondillphotography.com/. For the majority of his work, Brandon does not have to contend with guard bees trying to take control of the camera.
--Richard