Dear Friends,
I think it’s an appropriate time for our quarterly bee update.
Fall is here and the bees are busy as you would expect, and taking advantage of any nice weather that comes their way. Now is the time when they must prep the hive for survival over the winter by stocking up on honey stores. These stores will feed and nourish the colony over the dark and cold winter months until they can once again search for nectar and pollen in the spring.
Making honey is an energy intensive process for the bees. One worker bee will make around 1/12 of a teaspoon and visit, and over the course of one foraging trip a worker bee will visit 50-100 flowers. To make a pound of honey requires roughly 55,000 miles of flying and visiting two million flowers! (PBS The Buzz About Bees A Flush Fund of Fascinating Facts by Maureen Dolan) Bees collect and bring back nectar, not honey. The nectar “…gets broken down into simple sugars stored inside the honeycomb. The design of the honeycomb and constant fanning of the bees’ wings causes evaporation, creating sweet liquid honey. Honey’s color and flavor vary based on the nectar collected by the bees.” National Honey Board on Honey
Our fecund Queen has been laying eggs like the hive’s survival depends on it, because it does! As mentioned above, it takes a lot of bees to make enough honey to maintain the colony over the winter and she must lay enough eggs to make this possible. But bees have some special, and ruthless strategies to help them over the dark and cold months.
This fall, our queen will time her laying to provide the workforce necessary to build up the hive, but these bees will eventually die off. As that occurs the Queen will begin laying eggs to produce “winter bees”, or bees that will live several months as compared to two to five weeks of an average summer worker bee. The long life of these winter “Methusalah” bees is thought to be due to physiological differences between the seasonal populations, as well as a commensurate reduction in danger and wear and tear inherent in a life lived within the hive. NIH Evolution and mechanisms of long life and high fertility in queen honey bees
Workers will also begin culling the hive of unneeded bees as well–we’re looking at you, drones. Drones have one purpose in a hive, that we know of. They live to inseminate queens. Accomplishing this great honor actually results in that drone’s death. You may see groups of drones hanging out in our hive together over the summer. These drones, the ones that have not mated with a queen, are usually just napping, eating, and getting in the way of the workers. Once fall comes around and mating is no longer necessary, their presence becomes a drain on the hive and the workers escort them outside and (forcefully) request they not return. It’s great to be a drone until it isn’t!
Whoa! Apologies for the length of this note. I do like to talk about bees! Please come in and check out our hive if you have a chance, and consider the complexity and detail of their lives as you watch them. Stay tuned for a winter update!
Be well,
Matthew
Matthew Graff
Executive Director
Skidompha Public Library