Honey Bee 01/21/18

Beekeeping often starts out as a hobby.

My wife and I need a hobby.

Our children are now young adults in the world. We adopted two dogs to keep us company but they mostly sleep and slobber. We’re prepared to adopt 20,000 additional pets: bees.

Beekeeping often starts out as a hobby, whether it’s to support pollinators or to harvest fresh honey. Bees are social insects that cannot survive for long without the colony. They communicate with chemicals, or pheromones, to direct activities such as nest building and brood rearing. Unlike ants and wasps, also social creatures, bees are vegetarians surviving on a diet of pollen and honey.

Developing young bees are referred to as brood. They start as an egg laid in a hexagonal cell. A grub-like larva hatches. Helpless, larvae are fed by adult worker bees. Eventually, workers cap the cell and the larva transforms into a pupa. After a period of time, an adult bee emerges.

There are three types of adult bees: drones, workers and queens.

Drones are males that develop from unfertilized eggs. As productivity goes, they’re basically useless. They have no stinger or pollen basket. They have one function and that’s to fertilize a new queen. Other than that, they hang around and eat. May as well have a couch and a remote.

As many as 500 drones may be present in spring and summer. When supplies are low or the colony is under stress, they are the first to go.

Workers are female bees that hatch from a fertilized egg. Nothing would get done without them. They make up the vast majority of the colony. They also do all the heavy lifting such as cleaning cells, feeding larva and foraging for pollen. Pretty much everything.

In summer, they live several weeks. In the winter, they can live much longer. They are sexually underdeveloped and do not lay eggs.

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That’s the queen’s job.

There’s only one queen in a colony. She manages the division of labor and lays all the eggs. She often lives two to three years and can lay as many as 250,000 eggs in a year. What differentiates her from a regular worker bee is primarily diet. The queen gets a steady diet of royal jelly. The number of eggs she produces depends on the amount of food she receives.

The queen is most productive her first couple of years. As she ages, young workers can be transformed into new queens to replace her by feeding them royal jelly. A new queen will leave the colony in spring and mate in flight with several drones. Once mated, she can start her colony.

A colony can have as many as 60,000 bees. In April and May, a colony can become too crowded. Overcrowding will lead to swarming. The queen will produce new daughter queens before taking as much as 60 percent of the colony with her. These swarms can sometimes be seen clustering around an object such as a tree branch until a suitable location is found. A tree hollow may serve as the new hive. Once they’ve settled down, activities resume to produce and store honey and pollen for the winter.

Beekeepers attempt to replicate the requirements needed for a successful and productive hive. On the outside, beekeeper hives look like simple boxes. The bottom box, the brood box, is where the queen is located. The extra honey is stored in the boxes above that are called supers. There are multiple things that can go wrong in a hive, such as an invasion of varroa mites or hive beetles. Beekeepers need to be vigilant.

If you’re interested in learning about the methods and equipment needed to start your own hive, there are several opportunities in the Lowcountry. The Charleston Area Beekeepers Association (http://bit.ly/2DnBMeS) hosts weekend workshops.

Trident Technical College (www.tridenttech.edu/ce) also teaches continuing education workshops. Find schedules at their prospective links.

Tony Bertauski is a horticulture instructor at Trident Technical College. To give feedback, e-mail him at tony.bertauski@tridenttech.edu.

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