Bee Keeping

Bee Keeping

Keeping bees in an ancient art, and an important one in our modern world. We depend on bees for the pollination of many of our food plants, and without honeybees, much of our ecosystem will collapse. Bee keeping is a science, with more books written about it than any other human endeavor, but it is also an art, a sense for the colony that is honed with time.

To keep bees, a beekeeper must have hives. In the 1800s, a man named Langstroth invented a new type of hive. Before the Langstroth hive, bee keeping was done in skeps, dome shaped hives made of woven straw. To harvest honey, the beekeeper had to kill the entire colony. With the new hive boxes and removable frames, the colony could be kept over winter, and nurtured into a stronger colony.

In a Langstroth hive, the frames are a rectangle of wood, usually with a sheet of foundation, a specially pre-marked wax that gives the bees a head start on making honeycomb. The individual boxes of the hive are called supers, and they come in three different depths, each used for different purposes. Once the beekeeper has the hives, the bees can be obtained by purchasing bees and a queen, or by capturing a swarm in their hive.

One the bees are in their new home they will begin to fly out and gather nectar and pollen, but they will also need fed for a time to help them get strong enough to survive. Feeding honeybees is done with fondant, also called 'bee candy' or with sugar syrup. The first year of bee keeping should not be expected to yield any honey, the new hive will need all of it to grow large enough to survive the winter. The beekeeper will want to keep a close eye on his hive even after they have stopped taking sugar syrup, to ascertain if the queen is laying properly, and to prevent any pests from damaging the hive. Mice, moths and other bees are all problems.

When the beekeeper wants to take a peek inside the hive, he will need light colored clothing, a veil and gloves, and a smoker. The smoker tricks the bees into thinking their home is on fire, and they rush to fill their bellies with honey to fly away and survive as best they can, distracting them from the intruding keeper.

A honeybee cannot survive on her own. Most workers only live for 21 days from hatching out of the brood cell, but a worker that loses its way from the colony will die within 24 hours. A bee colony is a superorganism, only able to survive by all the components working together. Bees have their own language, and function on many instincts to do some amazing things. For each teaspoon of honey, the bees will have flown 25,000 miles, a trip around the world flown in a straight line. The queen hatches from an egg just like any other worker bee, but the food fed to the larvae at only three days old dictates her genetic makeup. Bees are the only known organism that can voluntarily change their DNA.

Modern bee keeping has many challenges, from the marauding bear who can toss hundred pound supers around like leaves, to the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder. The CCD appeared just a few years ago, and beekeepers started to find hives where almost all the workers had vanished without a trace. The workers left behind and the queen display signs of agitation and confusion. Somehow the worker bee’s instinctual direction finding that enables a bee to never get lost has ceased to function, leaving behind a dead hive. Between this threat and the mites that attack and weaken bees until the colony cannot survive the winter, there are very few if any wild bee hives left in the temperate world. The honeybee as we know it survives only with the help of the beekeeper.

Despite the difficulties, the new beekeeper will find his hobby of bee keeping it is also richly rewarding, not only in the improved yield of his garden and orchard, and the sticky sweet honey he harvests, but in learning the fascinating ways of the honeybee.