The Buzz

Two days of training in beekeeping...I don't know where to begin.  They are fascinating creatures.  By a stroke of luck, I was able to experience my first swarm on Friday morning just a few hours before the workshop began.

A swarm usually occurs when the queen bee is aging and not able to keep up with her duties to the colony.  She and about half of the bees in the hive will leave in order to allow a new queen to be established.  The new queen is one of the original queen's daughters and those daughters will engage in mortal combat in order to determine who will succeed their mother.  This involves stinging each other to death or chewing open the cells in the comb containing their still developing sisters, which results in their deaths.  This is what is known as a primary swarm.  A secondary swarm occurs when a fight between two queens ends in a draw and one leaves.  It's quite a dramatic time in the hive.  It is also described as a birth because it means the start of a new colony.

The photo I've included, courtesy of intern Kirstin, shows Garden Assistant Megan and Senior Intern Peter preparing to remove the swarm from a tree that was fortunately quite close to the hive.  Sometimes you have to track the swarm over a distance.  Megan climbed onto the taller ladder and gave the branch a quick shake to get the bees into a box (she was stung several times in the process).  The box was then shaken into an empty hive.  From the obvious activity that is now occurring there, it appears that they are happy with their new home.

Here are some other things I learned about honeybees over the weekend:

• That smoke you often see beekeepers puffing around hives distorts the bees' sense of smell so they can't detect your pheromones.   It also makes them think there's a fire which distracts them from the fact that a person is coming into their home.  This makes them easier to work with.
• When working in hives, you shouldn't wear dark colors such as black or brown, nor should you wear anything fuzzy or woolly, because the bees may mistake you for a bear that will rob their hives and attack you.
• Fossilized honeybees have been found in Nevada, so they are not non-native to North America as previously thought.  Apparently, they were here millions of years ago, died off for some reason, and then were re-introduced by Europeans.
• The amount of nectar a bee gathers in its lifetime is the equivalent of 1/12 of a teaspoon.  
• It takes 50,000 nectar-gathering trips for a bee to fill a single cell in the comb.  The nectar is then concentrated to make honey.  
• It takes nectar from 2 to 5 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey.
• Bees also collect 66 pounds of pollen per year, per hive.  They use it as food: it contains protein carbohydrates, enzymes, several B vitamins and vitamins A and C, among other things.

I could go on and on about the bees.  I'm looking forward to gaining more experience working with them this year.  They are quite amazing.

Today, I helped groom the horses, had a eurythmy lesson (a type of dance/performance art that is taught here), and planted lettuce.  We were all a bit punchy having had little downtime due to the annual deep cleaning of the dorm on Sunday.  In the midst of planting the lettuce, an earthworm hit me in the side of the head after having been tossed by Josh.  Kirstin ended up with dirt down her pants courtesy of Peter.   Plenty of taunts and quips followed.  Not surprisingly, we were all given the afternoon off...