We know our kids have to learn the realities of life. Sometimes the family fish dies, before we can make it to the pet shop to get an identical one to slip in the bowl. (Hang in there Norbert, awesome beta fish of ours, we really like you!) The seeds they carefully plant and tend never come up, and we secretly plant new ones. It is heartbreaking to see them feel sad, and as parents we often try to fix it. We had almost reached that point this week…
Our littlest beekeepers wanted their own hives, so my husband pulled splits from our hives to start a nucleus (nuc) colony for our 7 and 11 year olds. A nuc has several frames of brood, eggs, and larvae, stolen from a larger, stronger hive and placed in a small hive. The nurse bees on the frames can use the fresh eggs/larvae to raise a new queen.
Pretty cool huh?
The girls raise the queen by building a special queen cell around the chosen egg and then feeding the larva extra portions of royal jelly. Royal jelly is milky white, protein rich food for baby bees. Worker bees are fed royal jelly for only three days, but the queen gets it throughout her development. (Thank goodness I’m not a baby bee, because I sampled some and it tastes terrible! Very acidic. Nothing like yummy honey!) The extra royal jelly makes the larva develop into a queen, with ovaries, rather than a typical worker bee. A pretty neat (and useful) trick, isn’t it?
The photo below shows a queen cell built out from the existing cells on the frame. If you look inside the opening on the cell, you can see the developing queen larva inside. The nurse bees feed her for 8 days until it is time to cap the cell with wax and allow her to develop. They may build several queen cells in hopes of getting a healthy one to emerge and mate successfully.
For whatever reason, big sissy’s hive took off like a rocket. Her queen emerged, flew out to mate, and returned to lay eggs like crazy. Little brother’s queen, on the other hand, never appeared. For weeks, he’s been checking his hive for signs of a queen. Each time we’ve added fresh eggs for them to try again, but still no queen to be found. We hypothesize that his queen flew out to mate, and met with some untimely demise on her mating flight, but we can only guess.
We had almost given up hope. A plan was in place to stealthily sneak out and combine his hive with another nuc with a healthy queen. With fingers crossed, last night we peeked in one last time to check how things were going, and lo and behold, there she was. I only got a quick shot of her because the girls were a little annoyed with the red cover on my cell phone. Thank goodness the little guy’s hive has a queen, and we didn’t have to bee sneaky! The right girl is always worth waiting for, and this one is a beauty.
Y’all bee sweet, cause the royal jelly is not!
Valentine’s Day at the Bee Sweet Bee Farm brought Hershey kisses, Reese’s hearts, caramels, and heart shaped boxes of chocolates to the beekeepers. Our junior beekeepers have a bad habit of biting into the filled ones and putting back the flavors they don’t like, but I don’t really blame them for putting back the fruit flavored ones! Not to be left out, the bees got their own version of Valentine candies. This time of year, beekeepers worry that their bees might not have enough honey stores to get them through the winter. It is really depressing to lose a hive of bees for any reason, but we really don’t want to let any of them starve, when we can easily help them out. During warmer weather, we can provide sugar syrup, but when the temperature drops, we swap over to sugar bricks as a way to provide a food source.
Compact the mixture with a rolling pin and cut it into bricks with a knife. Pre-cutting is important because once they are dry, it’s impossible to cut them without destroying the blocks of sugar. Preheat the oven to 200°, place the cookie sheet inside, and turn the oven off. Leave the bricks undisturbed for 24 hours, 
allowing the water to evaporate. Invert onto another cookie sheet or cutting board to allow the bottom to dry completely as well.
t to the honeycomb for later use, so basically we’re making bee lollipops! The sugar has to be in lollipop form because the bees would carry granulated sugar crystals out the hive door, thinking it was trash.
Here in the NC Foothills, we don’t get a lot of snow. So when it happens, we go, well, a little nutty. Ah…the dream snow day… sleeping late and easing into the day with a warm cup of coffee… catching up with my facebook friends… cuddling in on the couch with a pile of magazines and a snuggly blanket. Maybe a little sledding or playing outside and then coming in for some warm cocoa. Sounds pretty dreamy, doesn’t it?
worked to make each little drop of liquid gold. It takes 144 bees their entire lifetime to bring in enough nectar to make 1/4 cup of honey. Wow! What if that were your life’s work? What if it took you and 719 of your closest friends your whole life to harvest enough nectar to fill the jar in the photo. That’s a pretty powerful work ethic for such a tiny creature. Now before you start feeling too sorry for the hardworking ladies at Bee Sweet Bee Farm, remember that these babees will make honey, whether we eat a single golden drop of it or not. That is what they love to do. In fact, if they are trapped inside during bad weather, they get grumpy. (Much like little kids stuck inside on a rainy day with no access to electronics.) We do our best to not even open the hives unless the weather is bright and beautiful, meaning most of the workers are out happily gathering nectar. Nobody wants to open up a box boiling over with disgruntled worker bees unless you absolutely have to.
Bee Farm honey
y favorite things that bees do is to help their friends find the hive again by fanning. It is almost like the bees’ emergency lighthouse beacon. Bees will gather at the entrance, stick their fannies in the air, and flap their wings like crazy. The part we can’t see is that they are releasing pheromones or chemical scents from their body at the same time. The wing flapping, or fanning, spreads the scent into the air for the other members of their colony to smell and be attracted to the hive. If you look closely in the photo, you can see a white area on the tip of her tail end. This is call the Nasonov gland, which is the spot that releases the pheromones. Fanning happens when the bees are upset from the beekeeper opening the hive or when moving bees from a package to a permanent hive. Kind of like they are shouting, “Yes! This is the place! Enter here!”
The bees also use this chemical communication when a hive swarms. For me, it’s tricky enough to move the five members of our family from inside the house to the car, much less ten thousand bees moving from one hive to another. The leader that knows where the hive needs to move, sends out the signal that it’s time to swarm. They usually exit the hive and gather in a big cluster on a nearby tree branch. From there the bee leaders take the swarm and the queen to the spot they’ve identified for a new hive. Beekeepers use this to their advantage by baiting swarm traps with similar scents in hopes of attracting swarms that are looking for a new home. Lemongrass is one essential oil that mimics the the pheromone and attracts the bees, so don’t wash your hands with your lemongrass scented soap and go hang by the hive! They’d likely want to investigate you up close. Too bad a little lemongrass oil doesn’t make all my kids want to follow me from one place to another. We seem to have better luck with chocolate. Or me picking up the phone to make a call. Somehow that attracts them immediately from all corners of the house.
Bee fanning can also be used to cool the hive and to cure their honey. That fanning simply moves air through the hive, but doesn’t distribute a chemical signal. You can tell a difference by looking for the Nasonov gland being exposed and how high their bottoms are in the air. For cooling the hive, the ends stay low, but for signaling they really show their tails!
The Bee Sweet girls are normally so calm that they can be worked with little or no protective equipment. My husband and kids usually wear their jackets and veils, in case a bee gets upset, but I just stand in the middle of these girls in my regular clothes to watch and take photos, and I have yet to be stung. (The bees are probably watching me type through the window, and I’m sure tomorrow will bee the day they teach me a lesson.) Now I’m not advocating that you go hang out at any old beehive, up close and personal, cause our girls are probably just weird…everybody else in our family is, it stands to reason that our bees are too.
beeswax, one tiny flake at a time. Ten to eighteen day old bees have the job of making wax for the hive. (Talk about child labor! And my kids think loading the dishwasher is torture.) After they get older, they move on to other jobs. It takes a lot of energy to make beeswax, so to help speed production we’ve been feeding these girls a supplement of sugar syrup. In turn, they make extra honeycomb to store more nectar during the fall nectar flow. They could do some of this on their own, but feeding sugar syrup helps them build comb easier and faster. Much like me after I’ve had my second cup of coffee every morning…I can just make more things happen when I’ve had a little extra caffeine. The photo shows honeycomb cells, some empty, some filled with nectar, and some already full of capped honey. Honeycomb in other parts of the hive is used for eggs, larvae and baby bees.
Bee Wrasslin’: Evidently, the neighbor bees caught wind that the small colony had been fed a tasty ration of sugar syrup and they sent bees over to collect their share. The guard bees alerted the workers, and these girls came out fast and furious to protect their precious honey, making professional wrasslers look calm in comparison. Whoever coined the phrase “like a hive of angry bees” wasn’t kidding! I had the experience of watching these girls in action. From a distance, there were tons of bees flying erratically all around the hive. By looking closer, I could see the outside of the hive was dotted with bees locked in battle.
The first thing a bee tries to do to protect the hive is to bite the foreigner. A bee can bite many times, but as we learned 
sting an intruder and die to protect the hive. I watched, fascinated at how our sweet girls turned into fighting machines. The ground in front of the hive was littered with little bees that didn’t survive the skirmish. Hard to say which side the dead bees were from. (It was our loss either way, since those bully bees are ours too.) Would good prevail over evil? Could the larger hive be stopped? No need to worry! These little ladies had things back under control in just a little bit, and hopefully their neighbors will think twice about venturing next door to steal again. I was amazed at the vicious, head to head combat that our sweet babees were capable of. They could put a professional wrassler to shame! Maybe I’ll think twice before I head out uncovered again!
thank me, I feel certain, for this painstaking endeavor. So I push on, asking for one more smile. Dare I say they dread to see me with the camera? But the bees…they don’t mind at all!! The cool thing about bee photography is that you get clues as to what is happening inside the hive. For instance during my recent Sunday afternoon photo shoot, I saw three distinctly different colors of pollen being taken in the hive. Pollen ranged from bright orange to yellow to pale green, letting us know that the bees are foraging from at least three different types of plants.
Pollen is important to the bees. They make a special mixture of pollen and nectar to feed their babies. Healthy hives raise thousands of babies each year, and that requires a whole lot of pollen. Pollen grains are pretty small, so bees have to visit lots and lots of flowers to get enough pollen to feed each baby bee. (And I think I have it rough trying to make sure we always have milk in the fridge for just three kids!) A worker bee can fly about 500 miles in her lifetime. If she had to make a separate trip for each grain of pollen, that would use up a lot of her flight miles pretty quickly, but thankfully, bees are equipped with pollen baskets. This is a dented, spot on her leg with lots of long, coarse hairs. (Perhaps you know some human legs like that too? I don’t of course, but you might.) She places the pollen there and mixes it with a little nectar so she can efficiently gather as much pollen as possible before making a flight back to the hive to unload. As the bees visit each blossom, they pollinate the flowers as a fringe benefit.
Aside from making you sneeze, pollen is packed with protein and fats for the bees’ diets. Worker bees carrying pollen take it inside the hive and off load in into empty cells in the honeycomb for storage. (Somehow a honeybee knows to do this by instinct, but no matter how many times I mention it, I still can’t get my kids to take their shoes to their rooms. What am I doing wrong?) So local honey contains bits of pollen from the plants that bloom in your area and has been found to help relieve allergy symptoms for sufferers. It has to be LOCAL though, because the bees in other areas don’t visit the same plants that you have a reaction to. So shop local for your honey, and if you see my husband, tell him I need a macro lens for my camera!
beesweetbeefarm.com 