Beekeeping

A mysterious problem called Colony Collapse Disorder has beekeepers becoming more and more alarmed. Over a period of weeks or even days, foraging bees from the afflicted colonies are flying away and simply not returning. Eventually the hive is empty and dead. The cause of this odd behavior is not known, but pesticide use is suspected to play at least a minor role.

The reason that this should concern us all is best explained through this paragraph from the Mother Nature Network website: Just how important are honeybees to the human diet? Typically, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these under-appreciated workers pollinate 80 percent of our flowering crops which constitute 1/3 of everything we eat. Losing them could affect not only dietary staples such as apples, broccoli, strawberries, nuts, asparagus, blueberries and cucumbers, but may threaten our beef and dairy industries if alfalfa is not available for feed. One Cornell University study estimated that honeybees annually pollinate $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the U.S. Essentially, if honeybees disappear, they could take most of our insect pollinated plants with them, potentially reducing mankind to little more than a water diet.

This inspired my wife and I to get a couple of hives of our own. The more we learn, the more we are amazed about bee society. And we get tasty honey from the hives, too! Fortunately, no serious issues (Colony Collapse Disorder or anything else) have plagued us yet.

(Update: Over the winter of 2014/2015 we lost both hives depicted in these pictures, due to unknown causes. We have a temporary hive in our backyard, but we hope to relocate them soon.)

Our two hives are on the property of some Texas City friends of ours. We built a deck to support the hive boxes over the marshland adjacent to the bayou. We can stand on the deck and access the hives from the back, so as not to block the entrance as the bees come and go.

Here is a view inside the right hive, at a time when we were adding a new box to accommodate colony growth. Each hive consists of a stack of open-top and open-bottom boxes. A vented cover is placed over the top-most box to keep the rain out (the tools are resting on the cover of the left hive), and a base underneath the stack gives the bees their main entrance while keeping intruders out. The boxes are filled with around ten frames, each of which has a hexagonal-patterned sheet hanging from it (think of a painting hanging in a picture frame) upon which the bees build their honeycomb. In this photo a new frame is about to be put in place for the bees to get to work on.

Here we have lifted out and are examining a frame that the bees have completely built out with honeycomb. The cells along the top, capped in white, are filled with honey. The yellow-capped cells in the middle are filled with pupating young. Between the two are uncapped cells, some of which are packed with orange pollen. The other uncapped cells either contain unfinished honey (nectar that hasn't yet lost enough moisture to be capped as honey) or bee eggs/larvae that are not yet ready to be sealed off to pupate.

This frame has the queen on it. She's in the very middle of the photo, without stripes, about twice as long as the other bees (clicking will enlarge the photo, and you can do that twice to get a good look at her). She's inspecting the brood cells, possibly looking for an empty one to lay an egg in. The queen keeps her brood in the bottom parts of the hive, which leaves the top parts for honey. As the workers fill all the frames in each box, the beekeeper adds new boxes to the top of the stack. The more prolific the colony, the more boxes that get stacked and filled before harvesting. As a general rule of thumb, the bees need two boxes in order to have enough cells for their brood and honey to get them through the winter. Any boxes upward of the first two are extra, and that's what the beekeeper harvests.

This last photo shows honey-filled frames that have been removed from the top parts of the hive, cut open to expose the honey, and loaded into a centrifugal extractor. They will be spun around for a couple of minutes, which flings the honey out for collection in a bucket at the bottom. The empty honeycombs will be given back to the bees next season, so that they can save energy by not having to start their honeycomb construction over from scratch.