Honeybees' In-flight Services

Today's New York Times has this: "Why Wait for the Hive? Honeybees Get to Work In Flight, Study Says."The new research, conducted in South Africa, suggests that honeybees begin evaporating the water in nectar immediately after collecting it, while en route back to the hive. It was previously thought that the process of evaporating the water occurred strictly within the hive itself.

How do they do it? Check out this short and sweet little article on the marvelous efficiency of the honeybee to find out.

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...

Spring Honey: an edible time machine owned, operated (and yes, patented) by a honeybee colony near you

Pop quiz: Which of these objects provides a shortcut through the time-space continuum?

The other day, while moving some of the top bars around to improve the ventilation in Hive Orange, I inadvertently dislodged a bite-sized piece of honeycomb and couldn’t resist the temptation. I carried the sweet dollop a few feet away on the tip of my hive tool, unzipped my head veil, and unceremoniously popped it in my mouth.

Still warm from the hive, the honeycomb’s flavor imploded on my palate, a chewy, exuberantly sweet detonation of spring. Reveling in the thrill of my first hot-off-the-press honeycomb, I had the following epiphany: Honey is a time machine.

This strange substance—a product of the honeybee’s physiology, labor, and skill—is a form of liquefied time, a distillation and preservation of this particular spring in this particular place, never to be repeated.

Spring honey is a unique composition based on the botanical realities within a three-mile radius of the hive, what the weather was up to, and where the bees’ own propensities guided them during nectar collection. For while the bees have well established seasonal foraging patterns—including visits to the springtime blossoms of dandelions, berry bushes, and fruit trees—it’s also clear that choices are made and preferences expressed.

For example, I’ve heard that honeybees “love” strawberry blossoms, but all week I’ve watched these bees choose the miniscule asparagus flowers over the incisive white blossoms in a good-sized strawberry patch. The only honeybee I’ve seen in the strawberry patch was there to gather water droplets from a strawberry leaf. It looks to me like the solitary bees and flies have been pollinating the strawberries with little or no support from their honeybee brethren.

In other words, honeybees aren’t automatons going for a set type of blossom at a set moment in time. Like the rest of us, they’re making choices based on a complex and mysterious amalgam of influences unbeknownst to us, such as scent, color, shape, curiosity, a lust for something new and different, aesthetics, mood, happenstance.

Why would the honeybees select the asparagus blossoms over the perfectly lovely strawberry flowers just a few yards away? The reason might be pedestrian, its mystery squelch-able by science (e.g., the asparagus nectar is flowing more, or more alluringly—or this particular strawberry cultivar is not to the bees’ liking).
But maybe there’s more to it than that: perhaps the bees prefer the shadier, sexier environment of the asparagus bed, whose branches crisscross in jungle-like effect of wild abandon. Or maybe the girls take pleasure in dangling from the tiny bell-shaped asparagus flowers—I know I would. Perhaps a wizened scout bee whose opinion they trust recommended the asparagus bed over the strawberry bed, and it’s a simple case of follow the leader. Or maybe I just heard wrong about the bees and the strawberries. To paraphrase that old-timely radio broadcast, Only the Shadow knows!

Whatever the bees' reasons may be, their creation—honey—offers us a chance to physically commune with a lost moment in time: warm, sunny days whose place-character and botanical psychodramas the bees have taken in and transformed. This is something human beings are incapable of creating. In spite of our technological prowess, honey—that simple, ubiquitous substance produced by honeybees alone—is, to us, as unfathomable and potent as a magical elixir.

When we eat spring honey, we’re tasting time.

Bloomin' Asparagus

There's no getting around it: talking about bees means talking about flowers. The asparagus blossoms have been getting lots of attention from the bees this week, both for the nectar and the pollen.

Blackberry Blossoms

Just as the plum blossoms gave way to the apple blossoms earlier this spring, the hawthorns are now passing the nectar-torch to the blackberry blossoms. Yesterday, I took a scratchy walk among the brambles to see whether the bees were on the case and of course they were, gathering pollen and riding this latest nectar-flow wave.

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.