BEE COLONY
• A single hive often contains 40-60,000 bees. Hives will split when they get cramped for space as opposed to a certain size. A single hive can produce hundreds of pounds of honey in a single season. 300#'s is epic. 10 full supers.
• Queens will lay almost 2000 eggs a day at a rate of 5 or 6 a minute equalling her own body weight. Between 175,000-200,000 eggs are laid per year. Eggs are only laid during the nectar flow.
• Queens are fed exclusively royal jelly.
• Communication around where the nectar flow is happens with a dance. The enthusiasm, duration and repetition signify the size of the flow, the direction/distance and how big the score is respectively.
• Hives regulate protein stores and occasionally will tell foragers to gather more pollen rather than protein. When pollen sources are low, nurse bees will encourage the queen to slow down laying or can actually eat baby larvae to recycle the protein storage of the hive.
SEASONAL CYCLE
Beehives come to life in spring as the weather rises above 45 degrees and flowers blossom offering nectar and pollen. The over- wintering bees have huddled and eaten honey reserves to stay warm. They use their pollen stores to start the next generation of babies and to begin to grow their numbers for the nectar flow of summer. The queen begins laying brood in the bottom chamber ideally in the smallest cells (4.9 mm)(all cells are the same size in Langstroth hives). These bees can be smaller as nursing and wax are more important than foraging at this point in the cycle. As the hive grows, and there is more protein/pollen and more workers to do different tasks, so too the brood cell size grows. As spring turns to summer, the hive has grown from perhaps 10 or 20,000 bees to 40 or 50K bees and the brood cell size has grown from 4.9 mm to 5.4 mm. As nectar flow peaks in mid summer, the hive is at it's maximum bees (80K) and cell size (6mm) so that they produce the largest, strongest workers at the end of summer when they need strong foragers the most. This results in good protein/pollen and honey/nectar reserves as the fall comes. Colder weather/less bloom signal the queen to slow down/stop laying. The last generation of brood for the season that normally would become the nurses for the next generation don't give away their vitellogenin. They store vitellogenin and protein as themselves for the winter. . . vitellogenin increases their longevity (and it doesn't hurt that they aren't out working themselves to death gathering honey.) They will then nurse the first generation of brood next spring.
START YOUR HIVE
For around $250 dollars, you can buy all the equipment ($150-200) and a starter set of 3# or 10000 bees. ($80)
Start your hive in the springtime when nectar flow is maximum and they have a long glorious summer to store food before hibernating in for the winter.
Buying packaged bees is a great way to start a hive or Catching a swarm. Swarms usually happen in the springtime as well and having your hive and tools ready in march/april gives you a jumpstart if you want to buy some bees or catch a wild swarm. Some people recommend requeening wild swarms as there is no guarantee that a swarming female has been fertilized although often the swarming queen is the old queen who is leaving her babies with some new queens in a well established home while she braves the world outside.
Equipment you will need to Start
A starter kit for less than $200 will usually include a few tools for the beekeeper and a ready to assemble hive for the bees to live in: 2 hive boxes (hopefully one brood, one super), the bottom board, inner cover, telescoping cover on top, and removable frames (10 per box) often with plastic foundation (guide) for the one or two boxes that come with your kit. Often an entrance reducer is a nice way to let a hive build up its strength and reserves without spending a lot of energy on protecting the hive.
Tools included are a smoker (necessary), all purpose hive tool (mini crowbar - necessary), and frame grip (useful), a bee brush (useful) and protective gear from a full bee suit to a veil with gloves depending on your level of involvement and trust.
Get yourself a couple of boxes - Bottom box on a hive is referred to as brood chamber and is where the babies live. Each "super" put atop the brood chamber is more space in the hive for babies, pollen or honey. I recommend at least 2 boxes. Eventually, you can put a queen excluder between layered supers to prevent the queen from laying babies in exclusively honey supers (ease of extraction)
http://www.dadant.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=90&products_id=942
http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/10-Frame-Beginner-Beekeeping-Kit/productinfo/110/
History of Beekeeping
This nectar of the gods has tantalized humans sweet tooths for millennia. Pictures of humans gathering bees from wild honey dates back 15000 years and evidence of domestication is in cave painting of Egypt from 5000 years ago. Earliest attempts at domestication included setting up a hollow home to attract the bees to build their comb within: logs, baskets, pottery and wooden boxes. 3000 years ago in Israel, beekeepers housed millions of bees producing over 1000 pounds of honey. In1850, Lorenzo Langstroth revolutionized beekeeping through the design of removable frames which meant we no longer needed to destroy comb in order to access honey. Langstroth struck on a brilliant design based on the bees naturally leaving "bee space" to travel between comb. This mathematical awareness afforded the possibility of guiding where the bees will build comb on frames that are removable.
Top Bar Hive
Top Bar Hives mimic hives in nature and beekeeping from the ancients. In 1853 Langstroth "industrially revolutionized" beekeeping with movable frames and stackable supers that made harvesting honey more efficient as no comb was destroyed.
PROS
• Mimics natural bee construction of hive as opposed to forcing bees into standardized boxes that work for industrial beekeeping.
• Bees get to choose the size of the cells. Langstroth hives had to choose a set 'bee space' for the moveable frames. They settled on 5.4 millimeters. Recent studies suggest that due to numerous factors, bees cells shift from 4.9 - 6 mm through the course of the summer: nectar flow, hive strength, time of season.
• Less expensive as there are fewer components and less equipment needed.
• Easier on body (no 30# boxes to lift)
• Beekeeper gets more beeswax as a product
• Heathier Bees
CONS
• Efficiency is reduced.
• Less honey produced annually as more bee energy must go into comb construction (i.e. beekeeper gets more wax. You can't harvest top bar hives without harvesting the wax.)
Downloadable article on swarming
Downloadable article on Neo-nicatinoids
Slideshow on BEE TREATS and COLONY
Click here to enjoy a keynote/powerpoint slide. Play as you would a powerpoint presentation using the arrow or the space bar to move the presentation forward.
In addition there are two wonderful movies on bees: catching a swarm and starting a hive starring me in supplemental videos.
LIFE CYCLE
Bees spend over two week in their cells (as brood) being fed by nurse bees and growing. The first several days as an egg, then a week as a larva and another week as a pupa. After emerging from the jelly rich cells, they are fed 'worker jelly' for 3 days. Her tasks include simple hive cleaning and grooming of other bees for the next 7 days and her protein/vitellogenin rich bee bread diet develops her body and hypopharyngeal glands; which when functioning she moves on to her next role as a nurse bee until she can no longer produce 'worker jelly' for the brood. Then at about day 12 she moves into wax production and begins building comb cells for several days. From about day 16 through 20, a worker can function as a guard or a nectar receiver from the foragers. They hold it in their stomach and enzymatically translate some of the complex sugars into simpler sugars – then put the thin honey/nectar into cells to dehydrate until it reaches 80% water 20% water. After the 20th day, when the hive needs another forager--communicated by the foragers through the dancing--she will leave the hive to spend the rest of her life as a forager. About 3/4 of the foragers are looking for nectar while 1/4 is looking for pollen and a miscellaneous few seeking propolis and water. The population of a healthy hive in mid-summer can average between 40,000 and 80,000 bees.
Industrialization & Colony Collapse Disorder
Western science is baffled finding the direct cause for Colony Collapse Disorder. Many factors have been postulated from malnutrition, mites, fungus, pesticides (especially neo-nicatinoids), migratory beekeeping practices, electromagnetic radiation. The challenges of industrialization of the beekeeping/agriculture and the planet is creating a systemic problem in which a single causal agent removed will not heal the earth and the bees. In our typical allopathic causal mindset, scientists are seeking the cause for CCD. Like so many things in nature, perhaps we can turn to a more holistic attitude to realize that there is no magic bullet to cure CCD. Basically, Bees are stressed and weakened. The problem with industrialization is that the cheap and easy solution often is the best SHORT term solution. In order to make some money this year, beekeepers are better off buying new nucs and feeding them high fructose corn syrup and using miticides, fungicides and antibiotics and buying new packages/nucs when needed. Our short sighted is compromising the health of our bees who are just the canary in the coal mine of the entire pollination and agricultural relationship with our food system.
INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE
1. Migratory Beekeeping -- Beekeepers are following a circuit of money because wild pollinators are no longer sufficient to pollinate moncultured cash crops covering acres of land. Honey is a 150 million dollar business in USA. Pollination is close to a billion dollar industry. There is no food for wild pollinators in these food deserts 50 weeks a year. CA Almonds Feb --> WA Apples March --> SD sunflowers and canola May --> ME blueberries June --> PA Pumpkins July. In addition to the stress of constant motion, there is an added challenge of the hive beeing 'revved up' in order to be at capacity for pollination time. This 'revving up' generally involves lots of High Fructose Corn Syrup.
2. MONOCULTURE doesn't support wild bees because there is no food except during bloom.
3. MONEY -- Sex Sells. Honey has become a byproduct of the labor-intensive migratory beekeeping pollination industry that sacrifices the health of bees. Almond growers alone paid 200 million for pollination; honey in the US is a 150 million dollar business.
4. INDUSTRIAL PESTICIDES Any number of pesticides in the constant small dosages that we are poisoning are earth and are plants could be affecting the bees. Crop dusters were long hated by beekeepers for their girls caught in a sweep would die instantly 30 years ago was seen as a nuclear explosion killing tens of thousands of bees in a single ill timed sweep when nectar was flowing and the bees were out pollinating. But even smaller dosage from the nectar and rubbing with the flowers could have longer term effects more difficult to track. Today neo-nicatinoids are the number 1 suspect in CCD and they insidiously are not sprayed on plants but the seeds are soaked in this nerve Even this may have been better than the neo-nicatinoids which functionally are a . All this and we haven't even begun to test synergistic effects of these toxins. A common fungicide mixed with neo-nicatinoid increases toxicity a thousandfold.
5. BEE BORDELLO migratory beekeeps all show up to spread diseases from around the world at pollination events like the almond crop in CA. So labor intensive, every hive in USA wasn't enough for the almond growers and they got dispensation to bring in Austrailian hives.
6. GMO Some postulate that the GMO nature of our current food system is affecting the bees on a microscopic level.
INDUSTRIAL BEEKEEPING
1. QUEEN REARING -- Queen bees used to live for 3-6 years. Current industrial thinking encourages requeening each year with unhealthy stock that is "farmed" on queen farms.
⁃ Texas queens don't perform as well in Vermont or California
⁃ How are scientists selecting the 'fittest' drones and good diversity (if any). Hives keep their queen proportionally to how many drones she mated with.
2. SWARMING = BAD The industrial model sees swarming as Bad. Beekeeper loses half of their hive. I see swarming as a piece of the wildness and a true evolution of this superorganism. Swarming bees also spend more time producing comb which I see as a way to cleanse fat soluble toxins from their cells. Genetic diversity of apis mellifera is going down with queen rearing and limiting swarming.
3. ANTIBIOTICS in the Hive With continual growth of varroa mites on bees, beekeepers like doctors before them with antibiotics and farmers with insecticides are attempting to combat the villainous varroa mite rather than strengthen the hive. This logic never wins as penicillin is practically useless and stronger and stronger antibiotic and then antibiotic resistant germs appear. The varroa mite evolves faster than the bee. How do you kill one arthropod (mites) without weakening another (bees)?
4. AFRICANIZED KILLER BEES
5. MALNUTRITION Bees are suffering from the equivalent of diabetes; we feed them mineral-less High Fructose Corn Syrup rather than their preferred honey and pollen. Foragers possibly can survive on cheap energy (like truck drivers living off of gas station food) but babies absolutely must have protein /pollen/bee bread in order to build strong bodies.
6. MIGRATORY Beekeeping/POLLINATION Industry -- Overworked, Constant movement, Corn syrup feeding to ramp up colonies to get ready for nectar flow, Seasonal/weather challenges
7. LANGSTROTH INDUSTRIALIZATION These hives worked for hundreds of years without significantly harming the bee population. I would however contend that since the advent of industrial efficiency and single cell size (5.4 mm); we have taken away the bees ability to adapt to changing conditions seasonally and through their hive cycle.
8. MONO-BEE-ING -- The Italian Bee has become the industry standard for beekeeping rather than selecting bees for regions as we would with seeds. Specialization comes at the cost of resiliency.
9. MICROBIAL EXPLOSION--Partly an indicator of the poor health of bees and a reaction to allopathic chemical warfare and a function of the bee bordello symptom of migratory beekeeping/pollination. Stronger and stronger strains of microbes.
⁃ Parasites, viruses, bacteria: IAPV, nosema (currently highest coreelation with CCD hives), small hive beetle
INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
1 URBANIZATION -- loss of habitat and wildflower/food sources.
2 Cell phone towers and microwave towers potentially have impact on navigation systems of bees
3 Global warming
4 Illegal honey trade (Much honey coming from China is either highly toxic or not even honey in the first place)