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Now available at Happy Hollow Farm Market located in Public Square - Carrollton. happyhollow@eohio.net
As a city kid, I must say bees are too cool. We embarked on the bee journey a couple of years ago thinking that they would provide a great source of sweetener (honey), pollination for our fruit crops, wonderful bees wax for candles and other uses--and we were right. What we didn't expect is how much we would learn and enjoy the ways of their very regimented society.
Here are some cool facts about the 4 bee hives we have at DBN farms.
- Bees will travel up to 5 miles to gather nectar and pollen (food) for the hive. They also know which hive they came from and can tell fellow hive mates by their smell (kind of). Even more amazing, the foraging bees can do a little dance that helps to tell other bees where they have hit the jackpot on flowers with good nectar.
- Bees have a definite hierarchy in their society. New born female bees are the worker bees. They start by cleaning the hives. Older, "teenage" bees take care of the larva (baby bees). Young adults carry nectar from the hive entrance to the comb cells. They finally at the end of their short little lives, they get to fly out to look for honey. Then they die.
- Unlike British royalty, queen bees are made not born. The general gist is that the worker bees feed one of their fellow females this special food called royal jelly. It transforms the larva from an infertile female into a fertile, much larger queen.
- Queen bees mate only once in their lives. They can determine the sex of their offspring by either joining the egg and sperm to create a male or laying only the egg to create a infertile female.
- If you are a male, you have it made, at least for a while. You hang around the bachelor pad area in the hive, being fed by the females, probably smoking tiny little cigars. Their sole purpose is to wait for an unfertilized queen to go scooting past for her virginal flight. On this flight the males zoom out to catch her high in the air. They lock together in a mating clutch to exchange the sperm. Once completed, the male is launched like a scud missile from the underside of a B-2 bomber. If the male is so lucky to die at the hands of his queen, come winter time his sisters will drag him out into the snow because they don't want to feed him all winter. Humm...I think I like being a human male.
So what have we learned...
- If you try to take a quick peek under the hive's inner cover you are likely to get stung in the forehead...which I did. Until you are an experienced beekeeper, use your protective gear.
- When appropriately motivated, it is possible to removed an entire bee suit while running. Mad bees will find ANY hole in your clothing or head netting to get at you. Once in they love to go straight for your hair...of course that is the hardest place to get them out!
- Dogs can actually swat at bees...even above their heads. PS - they learn very quickly to stay away from the hives...even in the winter.
- Bees can find, and swarm around, honey or honey supers very quickly, and, they don't want to leave even it it gets dark or cold. Even funnier is that while in the barn, at night, if you turn on the lights, they become active again as if it is daytime. Well, sometimes this is not so funny when your barn is filled with honey craving bees and you are trying to work on some other project. When you remove honey supers for processing, make sure they are stored somewhere that is "bee tight".
- Honey doesn't like to get cold, so don't store it in an unheated barn. It will crystallize very easily in cold wea
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