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.