Its late winter and the beginnings of spring are apparent in the neighborhoods of Seattle. Crocuses are flowering. South facing cherry and plum trees are blooming. Birds are starting to pair up in anticipation of nesting season. Yes, even bees are starting to fly about.
Patti manufactures honey in her backyard. Her honey factory is a beehive. Bees do not hibernate, but they do get very lethargic during the winter months when there are no flowers available to raid for nectar. The bees must live off the honey they have stored in their hive. Do Patti’s bees have enough food to make it through the rest of the winter?
Cindy and I have been invited to ‘help’ check the hive to make sure that the bees can make it until spring. This entails opening up the hive to examine the health of the bees, making sure the one and only queen is still alive and checking that sufficient honey to feed the hordes during the next few weeks is still available in the hive.
We have waited for an unseasonably warm winter day. Opening the hive on a cold day could shock the bees and result in their death. As you can see the hive is very active today.
We start from the top and work our way down. The hive is a collection of sections, each section containing a number of slats that house the comb. The comb stores the honey and is the place where eggs are laid and babies are raised.
An adult bee is one of three types; queen, drones or worker bees. There is only one queen. Should the hive grow beyond its limits a new queen will bee raised and the hive will split, one group going off to start a new hive. This is called swarming. I took this photo of a swarm at one of my campground presentations on bears.
Drones are male bees. I don’t know what they do. You can Google that yourself. Rumor has it they are males hanging around in the hope they can mate with the queen. Worker bees start off at the bottom and work they way up the corporate ladder. At first they clean and maintain the hive. Then they help with the young before becoming guard bees. Finally they are promoted to foragers who go forth and find nectar. Domestic bees can travel up to five miles from the hive in search of bounty but usually they stay within a mile. Returning to the hive with their payload the successful bee will give directions for other bees to follow their flight plan. Workers live about six weeks in the active months, but longer in the lethargic winter months.
We remove each section of the hive. Notice the attention to protective clothing. One does not want a zillion angry bees attacking at once. We move slowly to avoid agitating the bees. Smoke is used to quiet the bees and get them to go into the hive and hide. Patti forgot to tell me to wear white clothes. Dark clothes have a tendency to upset bees. Thanks Patti! Cindy keeps her distance, yet is the only one to get stung. A direct hit through the thin pants she wore when she accidently brushed a bee actracted to her dark clothing. Obviously, there is a learning curve to beekeeping.
The queen starts winter at the bottom of the hive and works her way to the top over time. The laying of new eggs and the eating of honey is therefore from the bottom up. The first few sections are full of honey. Then we begin to find newly laid eggs. That’s where the queen is located. She is the biggest, baddest bee. Her back has been painted with a bright yellow dot so she can easily bee located in the squirming mass. Queens can live 4 years or longer, but most bee keepers replace their queen every year to get the most from the hive during the summer production months.
The bottom sections are spent. When the hive is reassembled, the top sections including the queen will bee placed on the bottom, and the bottom sections will bee placed on the top. It’s like rotating the tires on your car to ensure even tread wear.
This hive is very healthy and the bees are active. Enough honey remains for them to eat, otherwise Patti would feed them a sugar supplement. Patti’s second hive was not so lucky. That hive was infested with deadly bee mites and the hive will need to bee replaced. Fortunately, the bees from each hive do not mingle heavily, althrough they do drift some. Most beekeepers keep at least two hives in the event this very thing happens. They may lose one hive but they have another to keep going until the affected hive is replaced.
Patti harvested her honey last fall after a season of honey production. She kept 80 pounds of honey from just two hives, but she can’t bee greedy. Enough honey must bee left behind to feed the hive during the coming winter months.
Bee amazed, Denny
