Stinging Insights

They say bee stings are more painful in the fall, and without having the slightest ideas why that might be, I'm beginning to think it's true. Got a couple of stings on my hand while checking the very crowded Green Hive the other day and couldn't believe how different these stings felt from those received earlier in the summer.

My experience throughout the summer has been that the sting "zaps" for a moment, then subsides. The real problem comes the next day, with heavy-duty itching and minor swelling. My stings have typically bothered me, itch-wise, for 2-3 days, but never actually hurt. It's been surprising to find the bee sting is more about annoyance than pain.

The stings I got the other day were a different story. My hand swelled up in a major way and really bothered me for 24 hours—not only itching me to the point of insanity, but somewhat painful and "hot" as well. Then, in hour 26, nada. A completely different pattern from the previous stings.

Either my bio reactions are changing as my body begins responding to periodic low doses of venom or there's something different about bee stings in autumn or something was different about the way these particular stings were delivered.

Could it be that as autumn comes and the fruits of the bees' labor accrue, the bees develop an ability to inflict more pain on those who would tamper with their precious winter stores? The beeyard is now redolent with the scent of honey. It is intoxicating and magical to smell from 10-15 feet away the warm, wafting aroma that just a few weeks ago could only be discerned by standing directly beside the hive. The aroma is an attractant to be sure. Perhaps the bees somehow know it and have enhanced their defense mechanisms accordingly.

A Tour of the Hive

Two weeks ago, I paid a visit to the bee yard to confirm that the (previously) virgin queens had mated and were laying "the next generation" in Hive Orange and Green Hive, both of which swarmed on June 21, taking with them the old queens and leaving newly raised, virgin queens behind. I was pleased to find plenty of evidence that all was well, reproduction-wise, in both hives. Here's a quick tour of what I found. (Click the photos to view them in a larger format.)

In these two combs, you see just what a beekeeper hopes to find: plenty of capped worker brood—the cells covered by the tan-colored, porous-looking caps in the middle of the comb. Notice that these capped cells form a nice pattern filling in the majority of cells in the the comb. This is suggestive of a good queen who has laid each of her eggs in a efficient pattern along the comb. Bordering the top of the comb, the bees store nectar (note the pale or yellowish uncapped cells) and capped honey (whitish caps).

Below that are some dark, uncapped cells in which pollen is being stored. Both food sources—honey for carbs, pollen for protein—are conveniently located above the brood cells to make it easier for the nurse bees to mix "bee bread" (pollen + nectar/honey) to feed the larvae numerous times a day over a period of several days. During this time, the larvae grow at a rapid rate. Once they are ready to morph into the winged creature we know as the honeybee, the cell is capped and the magical rearrangement of the bee's molecular biology begins.

Here you see larvae being fed and attended to by nurse bees. You also see some capped cells inside of which are larvae undergoing metamorphosis.

Once the bees have built out enough combs for a nice, big broodnest, they start building honeycombs—combs with larger cells for storing honey and pollen that will be used during times of dearth and, of course, during wintertime when nothing's blooming and it's too cold for the bees to fly. The dark cells in this lovely bee-composition contain pollen. Along the top and upper-middle right is capped honey. There are also some as-yet empty cells and cells containing uncapped nectar.

After the bees bring nectar into the hive and deposit it in the cells, it takes some time (and effort on the bees' part—mainly through the fanning of their wings) to reduce the moisture level to the point where it becomes honey. Once it does, the bees cap the cell with wax, keeping the precious substance clean and protected for future use. As William Longgood observes in his great book The Queen Must Die, "To the bee, honey is the ultimate reality."

Here's a closeup of the pollen, capped honey, and open cells. By the way, the pollen colors vary enormously as different plants come into bloom and are visited by the bees. I can't be sure, but I suspect this pollen is from white clover.

When I look at a closeup like this—and every time I visit the hive and watch how hard the bees are working—I can't help but think about how many dozens of trips by dozens of bees it takes to fill a single cell with honey or pollen. Truly, every teaspoon of honey and every grain of pollen represents a herculean effort on the part of the honeybees.
And that's leaving aside the genius of the comb itself...

Rebel Rebel's Queen

Last week, during a "check in" on Rebel Rebel, I was fortunate enough to see (and hear!) the queen. Below, you can see some of the workers gathered around her, kind of encircling her. She's the larger "redder" bee below them. This stance, whereby the bees face inward toward their queen, is one of the easiest ways to spot a queen. Maeterlinck describes this encircling as looking like a grandmother's brooch, while a more recent book describes it as a daisy, with the workers as the petals and the queen at the flower's core.
Here's a better shot of the queen as she makes an all-too-brief appearance, only to be subsumed again moments later by her attentive and protective compatriots.

A Drone (And Mystery) is Born

Today we inspected Hive Orange from top to bottom, since I'd noticed some oddly shaped cells through the observation window and was concerned that we might be heading for a swarm. It was our first time using the new top bar holder I'd assembled in the tradition of Dada on Friday. This contraption is super-handy and made today's inspection (and photo shoot) very easy.


Our visit to the hive brought a few interesting surprises. We saw several drones entering the world by chewing their way out of their capped cells. We saw a bees carry a dead bee out of the hive (just picked her up and flew off with her—an image evocative of the flying monkey whisking Toto away.) And we saw the bees attack a hapless fly that wandered into the hive.

We also found seven of these unusually shaped cells, a possible sign that the colony intends to swarm.
Swarming is a natural thing for the bees—that's how they divide their colonies and reproduce in the wild. It's also how they cope when the population outgrows the space inside the hive. Basically, they raise several new queens in these special cells. Whichever queen emerges first goes around and kills off the other queens while they're still in their cells. Meanwhile, once the new queen emerges, the old queen takes off with a portion of the colony to find a new home, leaving the new queen with the remainder of the colony.

I don't mind in the least if our bees swarm once the colony is strong and established (i.e., next spring). But I'm a little concerned that since this colony was hived 8 weeks ago and is just getting underway, having half the population jump ship might leave the rest under-staffed in terms of gathering enough food and building to appropriate population size going into winter.

We found a total of seven of these cells. The thing is, they may be swarm cells...or something called "queen cups," which apparently don't present any risk of swarming at all.

To my untrained eyes, the difference is unclear. Therefore, the implications of all this excitement are as yet unknown. I've posted a query to my Top Bar Hive discussion group and am hoping they can solve the mystery. Stay tuned....

Nectar drop

During our inspection of Hive Orange today, a bit of nectar was spilled from one of the combs as we lifted it out of the hive. Right away, one of the girls came by to work on clean-up--you can see her red proboscis sipping the nectar. Also, a bit of pollen somehow ended up on here as well. This lipstick-red pollen may be coming from our horse chestnut tree, which is now in bloom, and covered with honeybees.



Here is a close-up of the horse chestnut's blossoms and pollen. Irresistible, no?


Here's the tree, which has a pretty magnificent form. The family who owned this house from the 1950s through the early 1990s planted this tree. (The story goes that they transplanted the sapling from a public park in Newburgh, NY--which, coincidentally, is where my grandmother worked in a hat factory during her youth. Perhaps she strolled beneath the shade-inducing branches of this tree's ancestors....).

To the right of the chestnut, you'll see a tiny plum tree with an old wooden box around the base of its trunk. The previous owners put the box there to protect the plum from the lawnmower. On close examination, I realized it was part of an old Langstroth beehive. The previous owner briefly experimented with beekeeping, probably in the 1980s.

Drone comb & drones

Drones are little bigger than worker bees, and the cells in which drones develop show the difference. Marked in black is some capped drone comb. Marked in blue is a drone. Drones have bigger eyes than workers (the better to spy the queen during mating flights, perhaps). Drones also lack stingers, so if you're trying to show off your beek coolness, you can pick up a drone with your bare hands.


Here's a better look. Inside the capped cells, the drone larvae are undergoing metamorphosis.

Comb Inspections

By May 11 (the bees' fourth week in the hive), the size and number of the combs being built in Hive Orange and Green Hive had doubled from the previous week. We briefly removed and examined each comb in each hive to check that both queens were alive and laying eggs. The darker, burnt-orange portions of the comb are where pollen is being stored. In some of the cells above, where you see shimmery white, that's curled up larvae: bees-to-be.

Here's a closer look:

We were pleased to see evidence of a laying queen in both hives and to actually glimpse the Hive Orange queen during our inspection.