10 May
2014

Posted in: apiculture, bee keeping, bees, BioBlitz, Eastern Apicultural Society, National Audubon Society, Natural Science, Uncategorized, URI, US Fish and Wildlife, USFW, Writing
By Hugh    No Comments

The Buzz on Bees

The author works on his fear of bees by holding roughly 7,000 at once.

“…the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.”
Winnie the Pooh, by A. A. Milne

The yard contains about a dozen white boxes, each standing some four feet tall. A wrangler, whose job it is to move the living contents from one area to the next, approaches the white structure. He uses a tool to puff smoke into the box and then removes the wooden lid. He reaches in barehanded and removes a rack, which resembles a wooden window frame. Every square inch of the rack is covered with thousands – thousands – of wriggling, waggling, buzzing honey bees. He holds up the rack and says, “One thing you never want to hear a bee keeper says is, ‘Oops’!”

Jeff McGuire (L) remove a rack from a hive.

The Eastern Apicultural Society (EAS) bee keepers’ convention has come to town. It’s a gathering of roughly 400 members at a hotel in Warwick. Bee keepers have come many parts of the US, several from overseas, to teach each other, learn from each other, exchange honey recipes, and generally enjoy the fellowship of an interest that reaches back thousands of years: keeping honey bees.

The interest is reflected on the walls of an ancient cave near Valencia, Spain which hides a painting scientists have determined is 8,000 years old. In the stark manner of such paintings, several vertical lines depict what is thought to represent the side of a cliff. The figure of a human is perched on the side. One hand carries the unmistakable outline of a bucket. The other hand reaches into an area depicted as numerous dots in concentric circles. Around the figure swirl dashes with oblique lines off the body: swarming bees. The illustration is considered the oldest depiction of someone actively harvesting honey from a hive.

Tombs of the pharaohs uncovered by archaeologists have contained jars of honey. More remarkably, the honey stored there was still good thousands of years later. “Once honey is stored and the moisture is removed, it will keep for years,” says “bee wrangler” Jeff McGuire. Yet just producing that jar of honey in the first place is a far more daunting task than it seems. Each aspect of honey bee society is distinctly divided, with elements dependent upon each of the others for the survival of the hive. The most populous element of hive society is the worker.
The worker bee is always female. (In fact, nearly the entire population of the hive is female; more about that shortly.) As simple as the name is, “worker” is a perfect title for this smallest hive resident. They are charged with feeding the larvae, tending to the queen, protecting the hive, building “combs” (the waxy substances that house honey or larvae within the hive), and of course gathering nectar. There may be as many as 50,000 workers in a hive, and they may live as little as a month before they literally die of exhaustion. Then again, not every hive resident leads such a hectic life.

Perhaps you’ve heard people refer to a dull person as one who “drones on and on”? It refers to one whose ideas are essentially useless. That, unfortunately, arose from a reference to the males of the hives. Drones do not make honey, tend to the pupae, or even sting in the hive’s defense. Larger than a worker, the drone’s only purpose in life is to mate with the queen. That’s it. Of course, such a seemingly effortless existence comes with a price: shortly after the male mates with the queen, it dies. Any drones remaining in the nest once the cold weather arrives are driven from the hive to either starve or freeze to death.
At the top of the hive order is the queen. To wax anthropomorphic for a moment, she is at once a beautiful and ruthless monarch of the hive. She is larger than the rest of the bees, the absolute center of attention from the moment of her birth until her death. As pupae, some females are fed a substance known as royal jelly, an extremely rich mixture that causes them to become queens. The first of them to hatch quickly kills the unhatched queens. She secretes a pheromone which signals the rest of the hive to immediately begin to feed her and attend to her needs. After mating with many of the drones in her hive, she returns and begins the staggering job of laying up to 3,000 eggs a day. If the hive becomes too crowded, she may leave, prompting a large group to leave with her and establish a colony elsewhere. Those left in the hive await the rapid arrival of the next queen (development from pupal stage takes only a few days) and will resume customary activities then.

Bees are about to make their way to a portable hive.

Of course, like a human movie star, all that adulation comes at a price. After four or five years of nonstop egg laying, the female will begin to lose her fertility, stop producing the all important pheromones, and will be killed off by the next queen. “There are no retirement homes for old queens,” says Jeff McGuire.

The bees follow one another to the transport hive.

Ed Laferty, member of the EAS board of directors for Rhode Island, says that keeping bees is surprisingly simple. “It’s not like having a cat,” he explains. All you have to do is visit the hive every couple of weeks to see how it’s doing.” “That’s true,” says McGuire, “we’re less like bee ‘keepers’ than bee ‘have-ers’. Bees pretty much take care of themselves.” Hobbyists check the hive to stave off disease or other problems, but most of the work is done by the bees themselves. This may be part of the reason everyone spoken with at the EAS convention has multiple hives, with McGuire and Laferty each having over 20.

We handle the rack covered in bees and wax without mishap, and the rack is placed back in the box in the order it came. Bees build their hives in a specific order, so replacing the rack properly is important.
Although the teeming multitude allows us to visit peacefully, there is one question that all visitors have on their minds: the sting. “Honey bees are much less aggressive than they’re given credit for,” McGuire says as I remove the protective suit after the hive visit. “Still, I have to admit I get stung once in a while. But that’s really not a big deal, and the benefits are really worth it.” Winnie the Pooh would no doubt agree:

“I don’t much care if it snows or thaws,
Cos I’ve got a lot of honey on my nice clean paws!”