Apis Mellifera

Now that the hive is installed, the bees are busilly flying back and forth, building up the comb on the frames inside the hive, we can talk about Apis Mellifera or as most know her, the honey bee. If you are like me, Mellifera probably makes it sound like bees are mean or evil, but it simply means "that bears honey", a much sweeter interpretation!

The different castes of bees

A honey bee colony is composed of three types of bees, the worker bee, the drone and the queen. As with just about everything in nature, each creature plays an important role to keep the colony in perfect balance.

The queen is the most important bee in the hive, she is the mother of the bees and represents the unity of the hive. Her role however is limited to producing eggs, she does not "rule" over the other bees as romantic notions would have us believe. In a colony, it is the worker bees who "decide" how the hive is run; this is done through an intricate balance of pheromones in the hive and the bees' natural instinct.

Stages of the develoment of a bee

In the summer, a productive queen will lay about 2,000 eggs each day. Worker bees will then feed the eggs and take care of them through their various stages as shown in the image to the right. The queen inspects each cell with her antennae to determine what type of egg she should lay. Cells destined for drones are much larger than those for regular worker bees, and a cell for a future queen is also bigger, sticks out of the frame and looks like a peanut.

So a queen is born in this "queen cup", but what is it that makes her a queen? Her diet! All bee larvae are given royal jelly for the first three days, after that only a queen will continue to feed on royal jelly, allowing her to develop more quickly and fully, as the only bee capable of laying eggs. On very rare occasions do worker bees develop the ability to lay eggs. This magic happens only because of an inbalance in the hive (accidental loss of the queen for example) which triggers physical changes in certain bees.

Millions of years have perfected the marvellous development of honey bees. Each colony is in fact a living organism, with each bee contributing to its incredible existence. I will never cease to be awed by their magical bodies, mysterious communication and innate solidarity.

Male bees, or drones, also have only one role: to mate with a queen.The drones fly for miles each day to "drone congregation areas" where they wait for a new queen on her "virgin flight". Drones do not collect their own food, they are fed by the workers from their own hive or other hives they may visit. In order to ensure genetic diversity, during the first few days of her life, a queen will mate with over a dozen drones. The sperm will be stored in her spermateca, which will allow her to lay fertile eggs until the end of her life. A drone's reproductive organ is left inside the queen, tearing part of his abdomen and causing him to die shortly after mating. Those drones that do survive the summer are forced out of the hive and no longer allowed back in, for the bees will need to conserve their stores of food to ensure the survival of the working population through the winter.

A drone visiting our hive, just coming for his lunch and heading back out.
These drones seem to have a pretty sweet life, doing nothing all day until
the day they mate and die, but they too play a vital role within the hive!

Drones have big eyes on
the top of their heads to
 better see the queen

Here is a great video of the life cycle of the bees. It is 10 minutes long, but it is quite amazing!




In a future post, I will talk more about the worker bees and the many incredible roles they play within the colony.

For the bees

As the end of the semester nears, I will be concentrating on my final assingments for school. The next blog post will come soon after! In the meantime, please take a look at and sign this petition:

Thank you!

Installing the hive

The garden and house in Callicoon

Sunday morning, April 15, we were up bright and early, excited about the day ahead. The Georgetown Honeybee guys were on their way to deliver our Italian bees and we were the first on the route since we had to drive the bees to their new home in upstate New York, about two hours away. As much as we would have loved to contribute to urban beekeeping, our Brooklyn apartment does not have a rooftop or space to accommodate a hive. The house in Callicoon however, is the perfect setting for the bees!

A package of bees -

Each box contains 3 pounds of bees (about 10,000 bees),

 a can with syrup feed,  and a smaller cage containing

the queen bee and a few attendants.

We came down to meet the guys at their SUV which was tightly packed with hive parts and bee packages. They opened the trunk and there they were... each screened box contained a tight buzzing formation protecting its new queen. The thing about packages is that most often they are made up of bees from many different hives. Fortunately, the bees will only experience this uprooting once in their lifetime. It is in the transportation process however, that they come to know each other and the queen, who emits a pheromone to communicate and bond with them. All bees secrete different kinds of pheromones, but none is more important than that of the queen bee, since it affects the social behavior and inner workings of the hive.

We loaded our car with the hive components and bees and after a few more recommendations from the Georgetown Honeybee guys, we were on the road. We felt a mixture of excitement as well as apprehension, having never done this before. Fortunately, we had thought of calling upon an experienced beekeeper to guide us through the installation. We heard about Claire from Robin, the owner of the Callicoon Wine Merchant and Windy Hill Cheese Shop (Callicoon is such a wonderful little town). Claire keeps many hives, both in the city and in the Catskills, in a town about 20 minutes from Callicoon; she also founded Catskill Provisions, through which she sells honey, mapple syrup and other related goodies.

Deep, package and tools

As soon as we arrived, we set out to find the perfect spot for the hive, somewhere not too close to the house, but not too far either, somewhere with enough shade to keep them cool in the summer months, but where the morning sun could warm the hive in winter months. We prepared a spray with sugar water, laid out our tools, and readied the main part of the hive (or "deep super"). Once the deep was steadied, we proceeded to the release of the bees.

The queen and her attendants -

The queen is in a small screened box which allows the other

bees to see her, smell her and feed her. This will go on until

the bees have been installed  in their new hive and the bees

 have released the queen by eating through a small piece of

 candy that acts as a stopper. 

A can of sugar water (syrup feed) keeps the bees from flying
off. The bees huddle around the can and the queen bee in a
large mass that rotates constantly, giving the ones on the
outside a chance to also eat from the syrup.

The box with the queen is placed between two frames, but with nearly 10,000 bees in the box, it takes some time for all of them to figure out what is going on. So the beekeeper must shake them into deep until most of the bees are out, this does not hurt them. The rest follow eventually, attracted by the strong pheromone emitted by the queen. Most of the bees are dazed and tired from the voyage, and a bit sticky from being sprayed with some sugar water. In the end however, they all find their way to their new home, as can bee seen in the image below. 

The bees happily discover their new home

 

A hitchhiker bee

What I find amazing about the bees, is their social behavior. They always work for the good of the colony and can count on each other for survival. This hitchhiker bee was probably hanging on to dear life on the outside of the box, all the way from Georgia. The only reason she survived is that the bees inside the box, who had access to the can filled with syrup, fed her through the screen, as there were no other sources of sustenance available!

The beginning of our beekeeping adventure!

 It takes time to warm up to the idea of keeping bees, but once you've been stung (only metaphorically), it develops into a passion. We heard somewhere along the way that about two years ago, it became legal to keep bees in New York City (check out this NYT article from March 2010). We thought this was a fantastic idea, with all the rooftop gardens and farms sprouting up all over the city, why not hives too!

Then one day we chanced upon the guys from the Georgetown Honeybee Company who have made it their business to promote urban beekeeping throughout the east coast from DC to Boston. So in February, we ordered a package of bees and some equipment from them. They of course recommended that we buy a book on beekeeping and learn about our future roles as beekeepers.

Eagerly, we set out to buy the book (The Backyard Beekeeper) and to do our homework. Simply reading the book heightened our sense of amazement and wonder about these tiny creatures who play such an important role in our lives. They not only provide us with delicious honey, but they also pollinate the plants and trees that produce so much of the food we eat. Did you know that bees can travel up to 3 miles (or maybe more) to forage for nectar and pollen? That a honeybee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers on each collection trip? Or that a hive of bees will fly 50,000 miles to collect 1 pound of honey? How about the fact that they fly at 15mph? (I could go on with incredible bee facts... so I will just infuse them into future posts.)

Along the way we learned from many wonderful beekeepers and associations willing to share their knowledge through blogs, websites and videos. There are a myriad of resources online and it was through these that we discovered the one day beginning beekeeping workshop offered by the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Delaware County in Hamden, NY. At the training, on April 14, we learned more about all the basics of beekeeping, which gave us the confidence to face the next day's hive installation!





From our workshop, an experienced beekeeper teaching us about the bee dance, which we will talk about later... :)

Why beekeeping?

Do you wake up one day and decide to become a beekeeper? Probably not.

However every day, it seems that we see new ways in which we are hurting the world we live in. Most of us unfortunately, remain unaware of the realities of the environmental impact our everyday actions have. G and I have had to make a conscious effort to be informed and be more mindful of how we lead our lives. We believe that even the slightest step in the right direction can change the world, for this reason we decided to become beekeepers!

So what does beekeeping have to do with saving the planet? Bees, a few other insects and bats have the very necessary and important role of carrying out pollination. Buzzing their way through their amazing lives, bees are responsible for pollinating 30% of the food we eat. Unfortunately many factors have contributed to the disappearance of honeybee colonies; you may have even heard of the documentary The Vanishing of the Bees. (If you haven't, please check out the website and find out more.) This very unfortunate occurrence is a worldwide threat to the population of honeybees and in turn our food supply.

A wild bee hive

Beekeepers give honeybees a home and look after them to ensure the survival of the colony(ies) in the hive(s). In return, the bees pollinate the surrounding areas and provide the beekeepers with some amazing goodies such as honey, wax and pollen. Also, bees are fascinating and complex creatures that are fun to learn about. They have a perfectly organized social structure within each colony and live in complete symbiosis with nature.

Through this blog, we hope to share our beautiful journey into the world of bees, as well as some of the knowledge we acquire along the way and to raise awareness about the plight of the honey bees.

Next post: The beginning of our beekeeping adventure!