Bees : The Colony and its Operation.

 In my previous post, we looked at the history of bee-keeping and beehive design. Today our focus will be on the colony itself and how it operates. Each hive will have worker bees, usually one queen bee and drones, each social group design differing and directly related to its function within the colony.

                                 

 The DRONES are sexually developed males and each hive will have around several hundred of them on board. When the queen is ready to mate, drones can identify her location by sensing special chemicals, or pheromones, which she emits. Drones die after mating in the air as they have fulfilled their function in the hive which has no further use for them.

A few larvae are fed royal jelly which helps produce a larger bee more quickly. The first virgin QUEEN to emerge from the cell will eat honey, groom herself and then search for rival queens in the hive. Should there be others, they will fight to the death to decide who reigns in the colony. Once the victor is about one week old, she will fly at a distance from the hive, attract the drones to mate with her then, alone, she returns to the hive as the new queen mother. She is now especially well looked after by nurse bees and within three to four days she starts laying her eggs - usually in early summer.

Her main roles are to produce the eggs and she can lay up to 1,500 egg each day at peak time - that number depends on the amount of food that is made available to her. Since she does not forage as do the worker bees, her design lacks some of the components they require to carry out their duties. Her other responsibility is to maintain unity within the colony by virtue of her specific identity and her production of queen substance, the mandibular pheromone which she feeds to her nurses and who in turn share with the rest of the  colony.  This secretion helps drones identify an unmated queen as well as inhibits worker bees from developing ovaries and from rearing new queens. Her usual life span is about two to three years. As her capabilities decline, worker bees will begin feeding larvae, one of which will be reared to take over her role

There will be several thousand WORKER BEES  in each hive and their life span is generally only between 5-6 weeks, but over winter can survive for 4-6 months, thereby ensuring the continuity of the colony for the next season, as they keep both the brood and the queen warm and fed in the  cold weather. The workers are sexually undeveloped females since, as fertilized eggs, they have been fed more of a honey and pollen mix and less royal jelly than those destined to be queens.  Worker bees are the smallest in size but more complex in design, which reflects the diversity of duties they may have to perform.

Their main duties are to:

• Gather pollen and nectar
• Make wax, build honeycomb and produce honey
• Clean and defend the hive and regulate the inside temperature
• Care for the brood and the queen bee.

Their duties are dependent on their age and the needs of the colony. Only in the last few weeks of their lives do worker bees go outside the hive.

Their foraging outside is what produces the bees’ food store. They collect nectar, which is the excess plant sugar found at the base of flowers. They store nectar in their stomachs till they return to the hive; during this trip an enzyme in their stomach turns this sugar into diluted honey. This they deposit in the comb cells which other worker bees will fan with their wings until the excess water evaporates, leaving pure honey, their carbohydrate food store.

But worker bees are not purely honey harvesters.  To ensure theirs is a balanced diet, bees also collect pollen which contains both healthy fats and proteins. Pollen is the powder produced by the male part of the plant. Since plants cannot fertlise themselves, the bee helps perform this task by scattering pollen onto the female plant parts during the collection process.   

                                      

Bees also produce propolis which has as its base a resinous substance they collect from tree buds. When this is mixed with their saliva and beeswax it produces a sticky substance which they use as glue.  With this they seal cracks in the hive as well as reduce the entrance size to keep out the cold in winter months. Propolis is said to have anti-bacterial properties and has been found to help wounds heal.

In order to create worker bees and queens, one final substance is required: royal jelly.   Bees working as nurse bees eat fermented pollen and add gland secretions to produce it. This is fed to the larvae at critical times and determines how their development will proceed.

                              

Above we see   how the worker bees tend and help to produce a healthy brood. Next time we call someone ‘a busy bee’, perhaps we can appreciate more fully the full semantic import of the metaphor!                                     

Bee-keeping throughout history.

 We are becoming increasingly aware of how important bees are. Undoubtedly they are important for our food production: as well as supplying us with honey, their pollination activities are required by 30% of the world’s crops and 90% of all plants in the world. However, because of climate change, increasing use of pesticides as well as loss of habitat, the number of bee colonies is in decline.

Our neighbor has recently begun keeping bees, which prompted me to look a little closer at these beautiful, fascinating insects.

                                         

We see early depictions of man collecting honey from wild bees around 10, 000 years ago. He began to keep colonies of wild bees and wooden boxes, pottery vessels and straw baskets served as hives. The domestication of bees probably began around 4,500 years ago in Egypt as evidenced in their art form. Tomb inscriptions of around 650 BC outline in detail the production of honey, featuring cylindrical hives and jars containing honey. This was clearly a valuable commodity: sealed pots of honey were found in Tutenkhamun’s tomb. Below we see examples of 14^th century hives.

                                                   

The Ancient Chinese were aware that the quality of honey was affected by the quality of wood used in the hive boxes. Around 2000 BC the Ancient Maya had actually domesticated a species of bee which was stingless and today such species are to be found in Australia.

In prehistoric Greece, apiculture was fairly well developed in the Mycenaean culture; in Knossos hives, smoking pots and instruments to extract honey were found. Later on, Aristotle outlined in-depth information about bees and bee-keeping.

 It was clearly, then, a valuable industry.

                                          

 However, early bee-keepers were destructive, using the same collecting methods as hungry bears. The wild hives were broken up and honeycomb was procured at the expense of everything else: eggs, larvae, the entire colony – all destroyed.

Perhaps the most important role in apiculture was that of the mediaeval monasteries, institutions which were then like universities in that they maintained great stores of knowledge. For the monks, bees’ wax was particularly important for their candle-making, while honey, as well as being a natural food-sweetener, was used to make mead, an alcoholic drink created by fermenting honey with water. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, monks developed methods whereby bees’ lives were preserved during the harvesting process.

The Swiss naturalist, Francois Huber is generally regarded as the father of modern bee science. There were two major developments that greatly assisted beekeepers and their art.

1) Improved beehive design

This allowed for the parallel array across the hive of suspended wooden frames where the bees could fix the comb to be filled with honey; this comb could be removed with little disturbance for the bees.

 The bottom board holds the entrance to the hive and above it we see a series of boxes called supers. The deep super contains the queen, the bees and the babies. Above this is the excluder, to prevent the queen accessing the honey stores above, yet allowing the smaller worker bees to go back and forth about their business.                                   

The honey supers are their production units – and the bee-keeper’s harvest. Final covers protect the entire hive.2)The bee-space concept was the final development step. It was discovered that the distance between the suspended frames needed to be at least one centimetre.  A larger space would encourage the bees to build honeycomb, but a smaller space would be filled with propolis, a glue used to construct their hives. This was not preferable since it distracted bees from honey production and hampered the removal of the comb.

Delving into how a bee colony operates, we can appreciate the true complexity of nature!