Tag Archives: bees

Sep 19 2012

The Annual Driving of the Drones

Driving of the drones, the movie

Each year the drone bees are driven from the beehive in preparation of winter. Since the males serve no purpose to the hive other than mating services, as winter approaches they are quickly identified as consumers and are driven away to preserve the food set aside for winter.

Some specifics of a drone bee:

The drones are male

They are larger than the female

The drone typically has a dark or black abdomen

Only about 2 to 4% of the total hive population is male

The drones have large eyes

The main function of a drone bee is to mate with a queen bee. Since mating happens “on the wing” the large eyes allow a better chance for the male to spot the queen in the air so that he might mate with her. This is his only function. The drone bee does nothing in the hive, no house keeping, rearing of the young or foraging. In fact the male does not even have a stinger. A honeybee hive is a female dominated society.

What you will see in the video:

Bees coming and going

Some of the bees will be carrying pollen in the pollen baskets on their rear legs.

The largest bees are the male or drone bees.

You will see the females chasing drones out of the hive or over the edge of the landing platform.

You will see females riding the drones, though they typically do not sting the drones they are known to damage the drones wings and inflict damage on them that will disable them.

It is not uncommon to see females drag undeveloped male larvae out of the nest as fall approaches.

The driven drone will usually only last a few days outside of the hive. The cooler temperatures, predatory birds and other insects will typically aid in the final chapter of a drones life. It is not until next spring that the queen will once again begin laying male eggs to begin the cycle anew.

Watch carefully as the large male bees are escorted, driven, herded and cajoled out of the hive by the females.

 

Honey bees seem to love scotch broom. Beekeepers see this annually in the pacific northwest.
Jun 15 2012

Cheeto Bees

Scotch Broom a plant that flowers in May and covers honey bees to look like Cheetos

Cheeto bees are a common site this time of year in the Pacific Northwest. You do not have to look far to see a field of scotch broom in bloom. Once thought of as a good idea to   plant along our freeways now many people see this as an invasive plant that is not native to our area.

I’ve read several articles that indicate that honey bees do not like scotch broom, yet the ones I see in our neighborhood usually have bees around them and they sure come back to the hive covered in yellow, almost like they had been playing in a bag of Cheetos.

A bee from the beekeepers digest apiary

Cheeto bee

May 11 2012

Honeybees with mad cow disease?

No, these honeybees do not have mad cow disease….they are doing what is known as a waggle dance.

Bees use the waggle dance to communicate the location of food or lodging to her colony mates. As they circle you will see them waggle in a specific direction. The top of the circle, or 12 o’clock, is the location of the sun. So if they are waggling to the left of 12 o’clock the direction they are communicating is to the left of the sun. If they are waggling say at 2 o’clock then she is telling her nest mates that there is food at about a 45 degree angle to the right of the current position of the sun.  The length and veracity of the dance communicate the quality of the food source as well as the distance to the food.

Waggle dances are also used to communicate the new location of a nesting site when a colony swarms. If you took the time, and had the inclination to snuggle up to a swarm you would be able to watch as several bees fly back to the swarm and begin doing different waggle dances as they try to win over their sisters as to which location is best suited for the swarm. They have already made a recon flight, found what seems to be a good location based on factors like, entrance size and size of the cavity, made their way back to the swarm and begun telegraphing this information to the others in the swarm through the dance. You would also be able to watch other bees take note of the dance and fly out to look at the proposed location for themselves. As time goes by more and more of the bees become convinced that one of the locations is better than the rest, at which point the swarm moves as a whole, protecting the queen as they move to their new digs.

Honeybee Democracy by Dr. Thomas D. Seeley makes for a great read on this whole fascinating topic.

Apr 29 2012

Second bee package installation

This second installation went much smoother than my first. Some points that made it smoother:

1) I put the feeding bottles in the attic and closed it all up before starting the installation. This kept bees from getting into a no bee zone. When done I just picked the whole thing up and put it in place.
2) I put a cloth over the package when I removed the feeding can. This kept a cloud of bees from forming…making it a little less hectic for me.
3) I put the cloth on the top of the hive before putting on the attic. This encouraged the bees to move below the top of the top bars to reduce squishage. (technical term :))
4) This was my second time so I felt a little more confident.

I was at first concerned that I was not able to shake all of the the bees out of the package and into the hive. I found that by just placing the open package by the entrance of their new home that they migrated nicely into the new hive. I came by a few hours later and just picked up the empty box that the bees arrived in. Of course I’ll want to return this to Steadman’s so they can recycle the bee package for next year.

Since it will probably be a while before I do another package installation I’ll want to review this video and notes to get back up to speed before doing the next one.

Apr 25 2012

Spring Bee Packages Arrived, Installation of bees into a new hive


 

FINALLY…..it seemed a long wait for the bees to arrive. I started reading, studying and researching everything about bees since October or so and now I’m finally a “beekeeper”. I can tell you first hand, despite all the research and discussion, nothing prepares you for the first time you unleash 10,000 bees into an open hive. Even with the bee suite on I kept thinking…..what if they turn on me????

Well, of course they didn’t. They are every bit as gentle as you treat them. I did get stung twice but both were my fault. One girl stung me because she got trapped under the wrist band of my watch (lesson..don’t wear that again) and the second bit me because I was not looking at what I was grabbing. I turned to pick up the top of the hive, grabbed it without looking and got stung for my carlessness.

This video is the installation of the first package into a new Warre hive. These are Italians. I also purchased a package of Carniolans which I installed the next day. I’ll post that video in the next week or so.

They have both settled nicely into their new homes and are drinking lots of sugar water as it is still pretty rainy.

Please feel free to comment below and link back if you have a website about bees that you have found interesting.

Feb 24 2012

Sex and Honey Bees

When talking with children about sex, why do we often refer to it as “The Birds and the Bees”? I can tell you that from what I’ve been learning about how bees reproduce …… it has nothing to do with human sexuality.

Most of the bees in a hive are female. What makes one female a queen when the rest are worker bees is what they are fed (another fascinating story).  Once the pupae emerges from its comb as a queen it first goes in search of other queens in the hive. If there are several queens being reared by the colony the one that emerges first and is the strongest will kill off the others and after spending 5 to 10 days getting her bearings she goes in search of mates.

Honey Bee LoveThe virgin queen fly’s from the hive some distance and into a zone, often refereed to as a mating yard, where males hang out hoping to meet up with a female. Nature has already figured out the correct distance from the hive she must fly so that she has a higher chance of mating with drones that are not from her hive or surrounding hives, thus diversifying her hives genetics.

Over the course of several flights she will mate with, on average, 12 males, or drone bees. The queen collects and stores sperm in her spermatheca. Once her spermatheca is full she will return to the hive never to mate again. The now mated queen begins laying eggs. From here on out she will lay between 1500 and 3000 eggs per day.

Though that my sound like a lot of eggs please keep in mind that a strong colony, in the summer when necter is flowing, will contain between 60,000 and 80,000 bees. The average worker bee during the busy season will only live for 6 to 8 weeks before working herself to death.

When the queen lays an egg she chooses, depending on the needs of her colony, to either fertilize the egg, which produces a female or to not fertilize the egg which will result in a male. A typical hive will have between 10% and 15%  drones in its population.

A hives health, cleanliness and attitude all come from the queen bee. She emits pheromones that drive the needs and personality of the colony. Queens can live up to 5 years but typically beekeepers will replace the queen after a season or two to ensure the health and vibrancy of the colony.

So, next time you hear someone say, we need to have the talk…you know, the one about the birds and the bees…..well, at least you will know better.

Sources for this information:

The Beekeepers Handbook

WA State Beekeepers Association Apprentice Beekeepers Handbook

 

Feb 4 2012

Getting started in beekeeping, the season is upon us.

From a new beekeepers prospective spring is fast approaching and I can’t get my bees fast enough. I know that those who have bees are still trying to get them through the balance of this winter. Feb, March and April can be like miles 23, 24 & 25 of a 26 mile marathon….almost there but it can all crash with the slightest oversite.

Beekeeping classes start in a couple of weeks through Westsound Beekeepers Association.

Here is what I’ve done so far to prepare for my new hobby:

1) Read The Beekeepers Handbook by Diana Sammataro & Alphonse Avitablile

2) Read Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley

3) Joined my local beekeeping organization, West Sound Beekeepers Association (WSBA)

3) Subscribed to and read cover to cover American Bee Journal magazine

4) Subscribed to and read cover to cover Bee Culture magazine

5) Belong to and follow yahoo groups; Organicbeekeeping, warrebeekeeping and westsoundbees

6) Read endless resources online….not just US but a lot of good stuff out of Canada and the UK

7) Purchased 2 warre beehives, 3 boxes deep plus one extra box

8)Christmas was good to me for tools; bee smoker, beehive tool, beekeeping suit, bee friendly flower seeds.

9) Placed my order for two bee packages, one Italian and one Carniolan, should arrive first two weeks of April.

Whats left:

Paint hives

Place hives in yard

Attend Classes

Be prepared to feed new bees

Install Packages when they arrive

So, all in all I’m the new guy who thinks I’m ready to start keeping bees, I’ve gone through my check list, checked it twice….class starts in two weeks and I don’t know what I don’t know…….all part of the adventure.

Starter Kit that you might find helpful

 

Jan 19 2012

How do bees fly?

This is a discussion thread I found on Quora.com:

How do bees fly?

I’ve heard that bees’ wings are proportionally way too small to be able to fly. Studying the aviation field and looking at pictures of bees, it seems plausible that their wings are too small to support them in flight. Yet they fly. Do bees’ wings meet the lift/drag ratio needed for flight, and if not, how do they fly?
Graeme Shimmin, Bsc. Applied Physics and Electronics….
Short answer: Bees use different phenomena to fly than a plane does – translational, rotational, acceleration-reaction, and wing-wake interaction forces produced by the flapping of their wings.

Longer answer:

Most insects are thought to fly by creating a leading-edge vortex that
remains attached to the wing throughout a relatively slow, long stroke, bees do not follow this model.

The secret of bees ability to fly is a combination of short, choppy wing strokes, a rapid rotation of the wing as it reverses direction, and a very fast wing-beat frequency (230 beats per second).

This is the result:


The top red/blue lines show the wings going up and down, the middle lines show the angle of attack of the wings (basically vertical on the way up, and horizontal on the way down) This movement creates lift (the black line) greater than drag (green line) almost all the way through the stroke.

And as lift > drag, the bee flies (yay!)

The mechanisms by which the bee is generating lift are thought to be translational, rotational, acceleration-reaction, and wing-wake interaction forces. However, because of the way the forces scale with velocity, and acceleration, the contribution of the non-translational forces is greater for
shorter amplitude strokes .

This is very different to other insects where the lift is predominately translational at mid-stroke. This gives us the reason other insects seem to be ‘theoretically’ able to fly whilst the bee can’t. The other insects lift mechanism is better approximated by the aerodynamics of an unmoving wing.

The scientist who investigated (Michael Dickinson, an insect flight expert at Caltech) stated:

It is the more exotic forces created as the wing changes direction that
dominate, Additional vortices are produced by the rotation of the wing. It’s like a propeller, where the blade is rotating too. Also, the wing flaps back into its own wake, which leads to higher forces than flapping in still air. Lastly, there is another peculiar force known as “added-mass force” which peaks at the ends of each stroke and is related to acceleration as the wings’ direction changes.

Answer summarised from the paper available here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/…

Nov 30 2011

Supporting the Bees without becoming a beekeeper

By now you have  heard of the sever downturn in bee population in the United States and for that matter the world. If not check out this video.

Bee friendly flowers


So what is an average person to do? With environmental and world problems we often ask ourselves “what can I do to help” or you come to the conclusion that this is too big of a problem for one person to help out with, and, after all I don’t know anything about bees and I certainly don’t want to have a box full of them in my yard….so what can I do?

Here is a solution for those that don’t want to get into beekeeping but yet want to have a nice yard or planter box…Plant some bee friendly flowers. Now it is a win-win. You get the benefit of enjoying beautiful plants and flowers and the bees have what they need to feed and support their colony so that they can continue to do the heavy lifting of pollinating our fruits, vegetables and flowers.

Here is a link to a source of seeds that bees love. The variety pack also has a fact book included that has information about the plants as well as bee facts.

Seed Packets        Seed Collections