If you were not at the February meeting, you missed a lot of learning. One of the things I promised was to write 25 things I've learned from what is now my favorite book (available on Amazon). I've included it as a file in addition to printing the report here. I hope you enjoy it.
Guide to Bees and Honey by Ted Hooper
For anyone seriously interested in learning about honey bees, this is the best book I have read in my eight years of beekeeping. It was written in 1997 by an Englishman and has had several updates, most recently in 2010. Research may have overturned some of what was thought at the time.
To entice you into reading it, I picked out 25 things I found interesting. There are eleven chapters and I could easily have come up with over a hundred things I either forgot or never knew. It was hard to keep it to just a few items per chapter. Hope you enjoy this synopsis. Much of it is direct quotes without the quotation marks….
Chapter 1 Introduction to the Honey Bee
1. Breathing happens through tubes called trachea and is carried directly to where it is needed. It is not carried in the blood like in humans. So bee “blood” (hemoglobulin) is not red but rather a pale straw color. It fills the entire space inside the bee, bathing all organs. I won’t go into all the jobs bee blood does. Bees have a heart but not like ours.
2. When bees need water and can’t get it, their salivary glands produce it. They need water to dilute honey in winter which is why see them on wet ground. In the early spring, quite a few bees will fly out to bring water back to dilute the available stored honey and keep the colony alive. They will even fly out on very cold days to get water. As long as their wings are beating they will make it back.
3. The differentiation of worker and queen is brought about by the amount of sugar added to bee milk (royal jelly). A worker gets half as much sugar as a queen during the first three days as a larva. The difference in the sugar triggers hormonal differences which decide if it’s going to be a queen or a worker. It cannot be altered after the larva is three days old.
Chapter 2 Bee’s Behaviour
4. Newborn bees can’t sting. After about three days they take a short, few minutes, flight outside the hive.
5. Worker bees do not work all day and rarely work more than a half hour at a time. For a few minutes in between working, they rest or walk about. It’s believed that some of that walking about is to learn the jobs they are going to have to do as they get older.
6. Some of the evaporation of water from nectar happens as the honey bee in the hive holds the drop of nectar on its tongue.
7. We talk about propolis sealing cracks and sanitizing but did you know propolis is also used to varnish and strengthen the comb?
8. We know that bees choose flowers with the highest sugar content. But if bees bring back apple nectar with 25% sugar, kale with 40% sugar, and dandelion at 50%, the house bees accept the dandelion honey first.
9. If a colony is being fed sugar syrup with a high sugar concentration, the foragers divert from collecting nectar to collecting pollen.
Chapter 3 The Bee Community
10. Supercedure appears to occur mainly in the autumn during August. Often the new and old queens are found together on the same comb.
11. There is a pheromone given off by the queen that keeps a swarm together. If the swarm is near the colony it came from and the queen is removed from the swarm, the swarm will return to its original colony.
12. By the time the temperature inside the hive is 55, the cluster is completely formed. The temperature in the center of a winter cluster is about 68 to 86 degrees. The temp on the outside and bottom is about 48. Once the temperature at the bottom of the cluster is 46, those bees fall off and die.
13. I’ve always been curious about how the new spring brood gets fed. Afterall, bees are nurse bees for only a few days of their life. Winter bees are very different from summer bees. In August and September workers feed very heavily on pollen and this brings their hypopharyngeal glands that produce royal jelly back into action. At the same time fat, protein and carbohydrates are stored. So virtually all winter bees can be nurse bees in spring. The same process happens when a colony goes queenless. The last workers born don’t have larva to feed and live for a considerable time. They go through the same anatomical change as winter bees. Thus queenless colonies will go on living for the whole summer, but rarely survive the winter. But this also explains how you can add a queen and have nurse bees to feed the larva even when they are past the normal nurse bee age.
Chapter 4 Getting Started
Much of this is related to the kind of hive boxes used in England.
14. By the second year, a colony should have three honey supers on.
15. Winter losses are higher in exposed sites. Hedges are the best cover as the small amount of wind coming through the hedges prevents areas of turbulence. Chamaecyparis leylandii is a good fast-growing conifer (per the author).
16. Bees returning to the hive appear to be flying blind or at least so fast that by time they see an unexpected object in their path it’s too late to avoid it. In most cases thy bounce off unless they become entangled in hair or wooly clothes. They may hit, bounce off and come back to have a look at what they hit.
17. Worker bees fly at about 15 feet on calm days.
Chapter 5 The Years Work
18. Nosema is one reason colonies fail to build up. In the nosemic colony, the workers are dying early. If the queen is not infected, you will see the brood nest sparsely covered with bees and few if any on the frames with food stores.
19. Clipping queen’s wings means cutting off enough to prevent her from swarming. The queen falls to the ground near the hive and the swarm can easily be taken elsewhere. (We need to get opinions on this from OSU…) When clipping or handling a queen she will never sting you. She is devoid of aggressive instincts except against other queens.
20. Supers containing sealed honey can be removed as soon as you wish. Sometimes parts of honey frames are unsealed not because they are below density but rather because the cells are not filled. To test if a frame of partially capped honey is okay to extract, give the frame a shake over the top of the hive. If any honey flies out, leave the super for a few more days and repeat. When the honey is of the correct specific gravity, no drops will fly out.
I’m close to meeting my goal of 25 interesting facts. So what follows is meager. Buy the book. I won’t be loaning mine to anyone.
Chapter 6 Handling the Bees
21. Dried grass burns nicely with little residue. Wait about two minutes for the bees to fill up with honey after you smoke, before going into the hive.
22. If the temperature is below 50 degrees removing frames from the broodnest will put at risk chilling the brood.
Chapter 7 Controlling swarms and Making Increase
23. If you are having trouble finding the queen try this. Using an empty brood box, move two frames at a time to the new box. Put those frames side by side but away from the edge. Then add two more frames side by side but not too close to the last two frames. Continue like this. Because the queen does not like light, she will likely be inside one of the two frame sets.
Chapter 8 Queen Rearing (not pertinent except to those of us involved in queen rearing.)
Chapter 9 Pests and Diseases
24. The male varroa mite is not seen in the hive because it dies in the cell.
25. One of the possible contributions to dysentery is crystallized honey stores. Author says feed a couple of gallons of sugar syrup per colony in the autumn no matter how much food stores they have.
Chapter 10 Flowers for Food
This chapter is spectacular. It identifies which flowers crystallize fastest, the average percentage of sugar in various nectars, the color of the pollen and much more.
Chapter 11 The Honey Harvest
Lots to learn about the various kinds of sugar in nectar but mostly related to English methods.