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honey bees

    VIEW FROM THE HIVE

    Swarming Is a Sign of Success

    When honey bees take to the woods, they’re driven by a collective purpose

    By

    A honey bee colony’s plans and those of its beekeeper often diverge, and those disparate intentions of bee and keeper can confuse and confound the objectives of both. At no time during the year is this more evident than in June, when a strong overwintered colony of honey bees is focused on one thing — reproduction.

    honey bees
    Local honey bees building oversize cells for rearing future queens along the bottom edge of a frame of comb. (Photo Eban Portnoy)

    For social insects like honey bees, passing on one’s genes is less about making more bees per se, and more about reproducing the colony. Individual social bees, even queen bees, can’t survive alone and require support from the whole hive — the superorganism. In this way, the proliferation of bees in a colony might be likened to cellular division, with groups of cells (bees) specializing, like organs in our own bodies, to collaborate, communicate, and sustain the whole organism, in this case, the colony. To truly reproduce and spread across available habitat, the honey bee colony must swarm, that is, split off a daughter colony early enough so that it has time to grow and accumulate enough honey and pollen for the upcoming winter.

    Since mid-April, the few thousand “winter bees,” which have made it through the cold months and now work themselves to death in the field, have been joined by a rapidly growing work force of newly minted summer bees. Fueled by the sequential nectar and pollen flows from blooming willow, maple, beach plum, and black locust, a colony’s population typically reaches 30,000 worker bees in May, and will achieve an annual population peak of double that number by the end of this month.

    Swarm of bees
    Swarming bees cluster around their queen while scouts look for a new home. (Photo Nilfanion/Wikimedia Commons)

    From the perspective of species survival, a populous honey bee colony swarms to pass on its genes, but the actual process that motivates the colony to swarm is complicated. During spring’s explosive population growth, the “brood nest,” where the queen lays eggs and emits colony-controlling pheromones, and where new bees are reared, becomes crowded. Fanning workers have more trouble ventilating the brood nest. With congestion and poor ventilation, individual workers receive less queen pheromone, the essential signal for colony stability. This is even more likely if the queen is aging and producing less pheromones.

    Swarming becomes an irrevocable decision, reached by consensus of the colony, when the aging queen is guided by nurse bees to lay eggs in specialized cells, called “queen cells,” which they build along the bottom edges of wax comb. The eggs she lays there are no different genetically from their thousands of sister eggs destined to become workers. But they are fed royal jelly, enriched in fats, proteins, and sugars, once they hatch. This richer diet changes everything: turning on genes that would remain dormant in workers. These awakened genes profoundly redirect development to produce not short-lived sterile workers but reproductively active female bees that may survive in the hive for years.

    Once queen cells are capped and the larvae inside reach the resting pupa stage, a swarm will emerge, always accompanied by the old queen, but definitely not led by her. One of the bees growing in the hive’s queen cells that are left behind will soon enough begin laying to rebuild the colony the swarm has left behind. But that’s another story.

    Swarms happen most often during the middle of a sunny and warm June day and often right after clearing weather. The swarm usually bivouacs temporarily in a nearby tree, commonly in plain view and at sufficient height to frustrate the beekeeper, while it sends forth scouts to find a more permanent home.

    Because the swarm removes perhaps 60 percent of the workforce along with quite a bit of harvestable honey from the beekeeper’s domain (and may cause problems for neighboring humans if the bees take up residence in an attic or shed), swarms are traditionally dreaded by some beekeepers. But swarms can be looked-out for and prevented by beekeepers who make “splits,” where beekeepers set up the emerging queen cells in new hives. Either way, whether managed or lost to the woods, a swarm is a good thing. It’s a sign of reproductive success for the parent colony of bees.

     

    VIEW FROM THE HIVE

    Apitherapy for Anxiety

    Honey bees head out for pollen, offering humans a chance for contemplation

    By

    Connecting with nature is one benign, widely practiced, and evidently very effective way of coping with anxiety. In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Ishmael, instead of “stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off,” went to sea. That’s a tempting invitation for us coastal types, but simpler alternatives happily abound on a rural peninsula thrust into the North Atlantic Ocean. Beekeeping is one on them.

    Looking after bees allows for being outside, keeping one’s social distance, and asking such questions as “I wonder what my bees are doing?” — always a good remedy for insomnia. But we’re at a season when the question is much more engaging than it sounds, and it helps to take us closer to the calming effects of nature.

    bees
    Heath blooms early, attracting bees on their first forays. (Photo John Portnoy)

    Research continues to show how closely honey bee behavior is tied to the local environment. Seasonal and even daily variations in the weather profoundly affect colony activities. With the earliest pollen and nectar now copiously available from willow and red maple, field bees burst from colonies to make the most of this narrow window of resource abundance and return with honey stomachs bulging with nectar and hind legs laden with pollen.

    Willow provides bright yellow, and red maple orange pollen grains; the former are extremely nutritious, having an ideal complement of protein-forming amino acids for the growth of immature bees.

    The field bees’ frantic delivery and processing of new nectar in the hive stimulates the queen bee to lay more eggs, which means more larval bee mouths to feed. Bee larvae and pupae (known collectively as “brood”) in turn emit complex volatile compounds, pheromones, that tell field bees to forage more intensively whenever warm and dry weather permits bee flight. Egg-laying by the queen in spring is so tied to nectar flows that it occurs in fits and starts depending on daily flying conditions. Continuous egg-laying and colony growth doesn’t hit full stride until more consistently warm weather in May, when the hive’s population rapidly grows toward a peak of some 60,000 bees.

    Spring colony growth now is fueled not only by the bees’ hand-to-mouth field work, and by what’s left of honey and pollen collected last summer, but also by “fat bodies.” That is, fat and protein reserves stored in the abdomens of the overwintered bees themselves. After squirreling away these rich reserves in their bodies all winter, and consuming only honey, the long-lived winter bees kick-start spring colony growth by feeding their “fat bodies” to the new crop of larvae. The winter bees’ self-sacrifice involves leaving the hive during sometimes dreary and cold spring days and working themselves to death foraging fresh nectar, pollen, and water for the growing brood.

    A lot of what’s going on with bees in any season can be surmised by informed and careful observations at the hive entrance. In fact, there’s a whole book about this with the fitting title At the Hive Entrance by H. Storch (free at archive.org). A hive of honey bees is not actually required for this kind of contemplation during anxious times. One can watch insects of all kinds on spring flowers, or waves cresting over the bars at Newcomb Hollow, or the progression of plant growth in our woods, wetlands, and gardens — they all beat knocking people’s hats off.

    View from the Hive

    Bees in Boxes

    Built to make tending and harvesting easy

    By

    bee hives
    Today’s boxy hives are based on an 1852 design by a Philadelphia minister, L.L. Langstroth. (Photo S.A./Creative Commons)

    Probably the most common image that comes to mind when someone mentions honey bees are those tidy (classically white) wooden hive boxes set out in a field, orchard, or country garden. But why bees in boxes? People have been eating honey and even tending bee colonies for thousands of years, well before sawmills. And colony-forming honey bees have been around for many millions of years, inhabiting and evolving in nature, where rectilinear construction is completely absent.

    Before the Age of Boxes, honey bees made their homes mostly in hollow trees, and still do: just a few years ago, there was a large colony doing just fine in a massive catalpa tree trunk in Wellfleet center. Unfortunately for the bees, their energetic summer foraging and heavy flight activity was a little much for nearby human residents and they (the insects) had to be removed — to a box, of course.

    honeycomb
    In a hollow tree, bees build gently curved panels of comb. (Photo Adam Jenkins/Creative Commons)

    “Primitive” people, apparently lacking boxes, collected honey and succulent bee larvae from wild bee colonies in forest trees. Beelining, an ingenious method for finding bee nests using captured and temporarily enslaved bees, and which you can no doubt Google, was quite a sport through the last century.

    So, again, why boxes? The big breakthrough in honey harvesting, from the adventurous search, discovery, and pillage of wild bee colonies to more staid bee culture in apiaries, pretty much paralleled the general transition of human societies from hunter-gatherers to farmers starting about 10,000 years ago. It was easier (though perhaps less fun) to give the bees a home so that they could be reliably found and “farmed,” meaning protected from predators, propagated, and periodically robbed of some honey.

    Lots of artificial bee homes have been tried over the last few hundred years, from bee “gums” (chunks of hollow trees), to straw skeps, to the currently most-popular wooden box. The popularity of the last-named hinges on its acceptance of wooden frames, on which the bees build their honeycomb, and which can be easily removed by the beekeeper for colony inspection and honey harvesting without destroying the insects’ colony or even the honeycomb.

    Skeps of woven rye
    Skeps of woven rye were easily raided. And for beekeepers to extract honey, the hive had to be destroyed. (Illustration courtesy University of Florida)

    Meanwhile, it’s well past the winter solstice and Cape honey bees, though still rarely leaving home and dependent on food collected last year, have begun rearing new workers to replace the dying “winter bees” that carried the colony through the dark months. Watch this month for foraging honey bees on any of the earliest blooming spring flowers like crocus, heath, hazel, and willow, on those (increasingly common!) March days when the sun shines and air temperature pushes 50 degrees.

     

    VIEW FROM THE HIVE

    In Winter, Bees Become a Superorganism

    A strategy to conserve energy and food

    By

    Hive entrances are eerily vacant and quiet this frigid November morning, but an ear to the boxes reveals lots of life inside. A healthy cluster of wintering honey bees emits a low and steady hum — the sound of thousands of bee-muscle contractions, fueled by stored honey and generating heat to share.

    Unlike our native social bees, which overwinter as solitary hibernating mated queens, European honey bees pass the winter in large colonies that are metabolically active. With the queen always in the center, the honey bee winter cluster shrinks and swells with falling and rising outside temperatures. In this way a healthy colony thermoregulates, maintaining a nearly constant central temperature in the 50s F, despite wild swings in air temperature and wind chill just inches away.

    Caption: Photos taken with thermal imaging devices reveal the warmth within a winter hive. (Photo courtesy Phillip Cairns/Mudsongs Beekeeping)

    The coordination involved is intricate: bees in the center of the cluster do most of the heat generation, while others form an insulating shell around them. When these bold outside workers start to chill to a critical temperature, they save themselves by diving deep into the warm cluster’s interior, to be replaced by warm nestmates.

    The strategy is to conserve fuel: 40 to 60 pounds of honey that a strong colony has stored for a flowerless Cape Cod winter. Honey bee scientists view those thousands of individual bees in the wintering cluster as a single organism, or “superorganism,” when it comes to the way thermoregulation works. Their studies have shown that the colony’s minimal metabolic rate, and maximum honey conservation, occurs at about 40 degrees. Below this temperature, honey consumption and heating must increase to prevent the entire cluster from freezing. Temperatures above the low 40s cause the bees to become more active and burn more energy.

    Ever since the invasion of the parasitic mite (Varroa destructor) on Cape Cod in the late 1980s, maintaining honey bee colonies here through the fall and winter has gotten a lot more complicated. Gone are the halcyon pre-mite days when even incompetent beekeepers, so long as they left enough honey on the hives in the fall for the bees, could count on live colonies in the spring.

    The problem is that until recently the western honey bee, Apis mellifera from Europe, and the varroa mite from Asia had never met, so the two haven’t had a long period of co-evolution to develop a happy or, rather, adaptive, host-parasite relationship. Mite infestations of honey bee colonies in North America are currently virulent and often lethal. Besides feeding on wintering bees’ fat and protein reserves, otherwise essential for the rearing of healthy bee offspring in late winter and spring, varroa mites transmit debilitating bee viruses.

    Nature will eventually find a way for bees and mites to live together: some honey bees are already becoming more mite-resistant, and mites may become less virulent; it’s not smart for a parasite to kill its host. But in the meantime the successful beekeeper has to intercede.

    When varroa mites first arrived on the Cape, many beekeepers turned to strong pesticides, but these stressed the bees, accumulated in beeswax and became ineffective as the mites fairly quickly developed resistance. Now there are more benign alternatives that rely on regular mite monitoring, complicated hive-management strategies, and the application of naturally occurring acids and essential oils that kill mites with less stress to the bees.

    The need to manage varroa has made beekeeping a lot more work. The chance to see thousands of healthy worker bees bursting from the hives in spring makes it worth the effort.

    view from the hive

    The Bees Are Busy Getting Ready for Winter

    Fat winter bees will jump-start the colony in spring

    By

    Unlike some bipeds I know, honey bees never seem to procrastinate in their preparations for the big chill of an Outer Cape winter. The bees take advantage of every warm day, coming and going at the hive entrance at a seemingly frantic pace. Like people, they need to ensure a source of heating fuel that will last through the cold flowerless season. For bees, that means collecting, processing, and storing enough honey to eat until the first willows and maples bloom in late March and April.

    The field bees, older workers who boldly venture up to several miles from the hive to collect nectar, carry it back in their honey stomachs and pass it on to younger “house bees” for processing.

    Raw nectar will quickly ferment to alcohol and vinegar, reducing or destroying its caloric yield to the bees. But nectar evaporated to 18 percent or less water — that is, honey — is too dry for the growth of fermenting bacteria and fungi. That’s why people have used honey to disinfect wounds, and why it will last in the honeycomb almost indefinitely.

    The bees don’t just wait around for the water to evaporate from the nectar. The work of making honey falls to thousands of hive-bound bees, who manipulate the nectar across their mouth parts and fan the comb surface with their wings to dry it.

    Honey is the energy source that powers all bee activity. The most important is flight during the warm months, which as you might imagine is a highly energetic exercise. In winter honey takes on another role at least as critical to colony survival: thermal balance of the wintering honey bee cluster.

    Most colonies here run through 40 to 50 pounds of honey each winter; those that have stored less fuel than that in the fall often die.

    Bumble bees gather pollen from a dahlia
    Bumble bees gather pollen for protein, too. But they don’t overwinter the same way honey bees do. (Photo John Portnoy)

    Unlike all other social bees, honey bees survive the winter as an intact colony of thousands of worker bees and one queen; in contrast, all those teeming colonies of other familiar bees (including bumble bees, wasps, and hornets) die out in the fall. Only their newly produced and mated queens overwinter, hiding in a state of cold torpor under bark, shingles, or maybe an abandoned mouse nest.

    Honey bees cluster inside the hive in winter, but remain fully metabolically active, consuming honey to fuel the contraction of their wing muscles to generate heat. Think of each bee as a tiny space heater, collectively heating the core of this “superorganism,” the winter cluster, to a quite stable minimal temperature of about 50 degrees F.

    Their hives have been winterized to help keep out cold winds. The bees do that with propolis, which they make, starting with tree resins. The Cape Cod pitch pine forests sure seem like a great place to collect that.

    The bees make propolis by combining the resins with wax from their bodies, essential oils, pollen, and a bit of bee saliva. Besides being an excellent caulking material to fill cracks and keep out pests, propolis has antiseptic properties. You may have seen it in health food stores; humans have used it medicinally throughout history. It figures prominently in a bee colony’s immune system against parasites like mites and bacterial and fungal pathogens.

    Unlike longer-lived animals, individual honey bees around in the fall can’t count on living to become productive members of their community next spring. For the colony to survive the winter and prosper it must produce fat “winter bees” in the fall.

    That’s where pollen comes in as part of the colony’s preparations for winter. Fat winter bees will have the protein reserves to jump-start the colony the next year. To produce winter bees, there is a surge in egg-laying by the queen, followed by copious feeding of the resulting bee larvae with protein-rich field-collected pollen from late August through September.

    Watch the entrance to a beehive on a warm mid-October morning and you will see workers still returning to the hives with legs laden with bright yellow goldenrod pollen. You know this means that inside the hive the winter bees are emerging to fulfill their role as the colony’s bridge to spring.

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