Kicking Up Words And Phrases: The Foreign Language Of Beekeeping

The vocabulary of beekeeping is vast and vivid, and, at first, foreign.

Some of my favorite bee terms so far:

Let's start with royal jelly. Royal jelly: In my imagaination I see a handful of prissy worker bees wearing their Betty Crocker aprons, buzzing about the kitchen preparing the queen's breakfast...a toasted English muffin with a big scoop of royal jelly.  Okay, so it doesn't happen exactly like that. Royal jelly is the superfood the worker bees feed the would-be queen egg(s) so that they develop queenly anatomy and have queenly skills, including the ability to round up sperm from the drones, lay hundreds of thousands of eggs in her lifetime, and the ability to rule the hive with her super power pheremores.

Pheremones. What's a pheremone, you ask? In simple terms, pheremones are a sort of magical potion. They  are a chemical excreted by the queen to initiate certain behavior among the worker bees.  The queen, for example, exudes a pheremone that tells the workers to go forage and another when its time for the colony to swarm. She even has one that prevents workers from developing fully functioning ovaries. 

Here's a funny one: waggle dance. Can you see it? Two bees blinged out in their sleekest black and gold beewear, out on the Dancing With The Stars dance floor doing their best waggle dance.  The bees "dance" as a form of communication, telling the other bees, for example, how to get to a nectar-rich harvesting spot.

Queen right.  Nothing to do with politics or winning an argument or a trivia contest.  Rather, when a colony is queen right, that simply means the colony has a healthy queen who is performing her queenly duties. If the colony isn't queen right -- or fast getting queen right -- it's in danger of extinction.  No queen, no fertile eggs, no worker bees, no honey.

Wet capping and dry capping.  Again, my imagination runs wild...straight to the wild, wild west. Bees "capping" each other with their Smith & Wesson water pistols.  But not so much. These two terms describe the ways the bees close up or "cap" the cells that contain the honey.  One looks dark and wet, the other looks white/tan and dry.

Brood pattern.  Not talking about charting the mood of a bunch of pouty honey bees. Instead, brood pattern refers to the pattern in the drawn out comb where the queen lays her eggs. A good brood pattern contains bees at varying stages of development, from egg to larvae to emerging bees. Beekeepers monitor the brood pattern as a clue about the overall health of the colony.

The colony and the hive. There's a distinction to be drawn here.  The colony is the family of bees that live and work together and include the queen, the workers and a few drones.  The hive is the man-made contraption where the bees live -- the boxes and frames that the beekeeper manipulates.

Like I said, it all sounds like a foreign language right now. They say with enough time and patience, it will all start flowing...the words, their meanings AND, alas, the honey.

 

Beekeeping: A Numbers Game

I am, in fact, bee fuddled with honey bee information right now, having just spent two days at a beekeeping workshop in the Upstate of South Carolina. One day in class, a half-day at the bee yard. And days, weeks, months, yes, even years of bee things still to learn.

If I had to cull what I learned in these two days to a single idea, it would be this: beekeeping is a numbers game, and by that I mean, there are a slew of important numbers for a beekeeper to remember.  Settle in. I've got more than a few examples to offer:

• A honey bee colony has two goals – to reproduce and to survive through the winter.
• Don’t open your hive when the temperature falls below 55 degrees F or you risk killing your bees.  70  or above is ideal.
• A honey bee’s body has three segments – the head, the thorax, the abdomen. 
• Honey bees have five eyes – three on the top of their head, two on the sides.
• Honey bees have four wings and six legs.
• Honey bees have two stomachs – one for their own digestive process, the other for transporting collected nectar to the hive.
• A queen bee takes 16 days to mature from egg to adult.
• A worker bee takes 21 days to mature from egg to to adult.
• A drone bee takes 24 days to mature from egg to adult.
• After birth, a worker bee spends 21 days working in the hive, and then, on average, another six weeks foraging before dying of exhaustion.    
• A hive knows within 30 minutes if its queen is missing and begins to take action to replace her.
• When a new queen goes on her mating flights within her first two weeks of life, she mates with up to 20 drones. The drones die in the act of fertilizing the queen.
• A queen lays 1,500 eggs a day, and about 200,000 eggs in a year.
• Ideally, a queen should be replaced every two years to insure strong bee reproduction, according to a queen breeder who taught part of the workshop. He says  best to re-queen in August in my area (South Carolina) – after the nectar flow and before winter.  
• When feeding sugar syrup to honey bees in early spring, use five pounds of sugar to a gallon of water.
• When feeding sugar syrup to honey bees in winter, use 10 pounds of sugar to a gallon of water.
• Hive woodenware is available in several sizes - the traditional 10-frame and the more modern 8-frame and 5-frame.  While it would make sense for each frame-count system to be a standard length, width, height, etc., they are not. Sizes can vary from brand to brand.  Each frame-count system has its own advantages and disadvantages.
• A nuc has five frames. A nuc is one of several common ways to acquire a new hive.  Among other are buying and installing a package and collecting and installing a swarm. A nuc, a package and a swarm are each assembled differently, but each usually are comprised of a queen, workers and drones.
• Swarming is a natural method of reproduction for the colony. When the queen leaves the hive, 40 to 60 percent of the original colony leaves with her.
• Honey bees collect four things– pollen, nectar, water and propolis for use in the hive.  
• Honey is nectar from which the bees have dehydrated most of the water content. Honey is considered safe from fermentation when the water content is 18.6 percent or less.
• During the harvest, a worker bee makes about 10 journeys a day and works a 12-hour day.
• The average forager makes 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
• Worker bees have to visit 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey.

I know! Lot's of numbers. Surely, you see why I have associated beekeeping with numbers. Numbers are everywhere. And I'm just getting started at this!