III
THE BEEKEEPER’S SPRING
The Beekeeper’s Spring
Spring for bees, and so for beekeepers as well, has nothing to do with the calendar. In protected hollows even in the Missouri winter, bees can find a bit of springtime in flowers with enough pollen to feed the first young bees growing from the eggs the queen has begun to lay.
Various species of maples, all members of the genus Acer, with their delicate blossoms ranging from yellow-green to red, are one of the earliest to bloom. Maples are tall trees, and their blossoms are borne high in the crowns, where they often are not seen by humans. The bees, of course, have no trouble in finding them. The American hazel, Corylus americana, is a smaller tree—hardly more than a shrub—that is another early source of pollen, and easier for us to see. It grows wild throughout most of temperate North America and produces the nuts we call filberts. In late winter and early spring when most other plants are at rest, hazel generously produces pollen on long, dangling catkins. In the winter, I like to stop on my walk down to the mailbox and draw one of the yellowish brown catkins between my thumb and forefinger and watch the powdery golden pollen collect in my palm. On days warm enough, bees, having declared it springtime, will be on the catkins collecting pollen.
Skunk cabbage, Symplocarpus foetidus, with its coarsely sheathed flower and supposedly vile odor, makes spring for bees in February in northern parts of the country. If a walker in the wet woods or swamps takes the time to look inside the skunk-cabbage spathe on a mild day, he will usually find a honeybee there, packing pollen into the carrying baskets on her back legs.
Mature adult bees are carbohydrate feeders. They live on nectar and honey, which are almost exclusively carbohydrate in composition except for a few traces of minerals, vitamins and other materials. But young and developing bees need protein to grow muscles, glands and other tissues, and it is pollen—variously rich in protein, depending on its source—that provides it.
It takes about three weeks for a bee to grow from egg to adult. Three days after the queen bee has laid an egg, it hatches out into a nearly white larva that, throughout its instars, or developmental stages, has a ferocious need for food high in protein. Bee larvae don’t move around looking for food as some insects do in their early stages; they are not wriggly caterpillars as are those of moths or butterflies. They merely lie passively in their cells, growing, changing. They are small animals, with disproportionately large stomachs waiting to be filled by nurse bees—young adults just emerged from pupation. These nurse bees feed on the gathered pollen and produce secretions from their hypopharyngeal glands (glands under the pharynx), which they will use as food for the developing larvae.
In recent years, vendors of nostrums to the health-food industry have been delighted by Ronald Reagan’s public consumption of pollen, and pollen has become a hot item in health-food stores. Claims are made that humans who eat pollen are stronger, sexier, livelier and more cheerful, but there is no good medical evidence to back up these claims so far. And as a matter of fact, some people have experienced severe allergic reactions after eating it. Pollen from a hayfever sufferer’s local area is also said to cure him of his allergy. I have an open mind. I am an empiricist. I have hay fever. And, after all, bee venom does help my arthritis. So one summer, when my eyes were running and I was sneezing exquisitely from ragweed, I gathered and ate pollen from my bees. Pollen has a bitter taste. It is no fun to eat, but in the interests of testing the efficacy of the stuff I dutifully continued to eat it—and to sneeze. It is possible pollen may cure someone else’s hay fever, but it doesn’t cure mine.
I am always too eager to start working with the bees in the spring. I miss them in the winter and want to be back with them again. But I sternly remind myself I can do more harm than good if I open their hives before the daffodils bloom, so when the crocuses flower around my cabin I have to content myself with crouching down beside those purple, white and yellow blossoms to watch the field bees gathering pollen.
Each worker bee is covered with stiff hairs. These catch the granules when the bee brushes against the flower’s pollen-bearing anthers. She is soon covered and stops to use her two front pairs of legs to comb the sticky pollen from her body and pack it into the baskets on her rear pair of legs. When her legs are heavy with their wads of pollen she returns to her hive to unload. House bees arrange the pollen granules in the honeycomb cells around the developing bee larvae, where it is conveniently available to the nurse bees.
In the springtime, a typical frame of brood—as beekeepers call developing bees—contains a large central semicircle of cells containing eggs and larvae in various stages. The eggs and larvae are there to see, but the oldest brood, stomachs full, have spun themselves cocoons in which to pupate, and are hidden from human eyes, sealed in their cells by a tough, velvety brown covering, from beneath which they will emerge as adults. The entire semicircle of brood is bordered by a ring of pollen-filled cells, which in turn is surrounded by honey, or, as the season progresses, nectar.
In this part of the country most of the early pollen collected is yellow and makes a bright ring around the fuzzy brown sealed brood area. But as the season advances and the days lengthen, more pollen sources are available. Serviceberry, Amelanchier arborea, frosts the slopes of the hills near the rivers with white blossoms. Redbud, Cercis canadensis, flourishes in the wood’s understory, with dramatic purplish red clusters of blossom. Henbit, Lamium amplexicaule, which everyone except beekeepers think of as an unwelcome weed, covers the ground with a low-growing thatch of purple-blue flowers. The wild fruit trees—plum, cherry and peach—bloom extravagantly. These flowers all have different-colored pollens, and the pollen cells ringing the bees’ brood are as various: scarlet, pale green, yellow and orange—as beautiful as a stained-glass window.
Typical brood frame with sealed brood in center, surrounded by uncapped brood, pollen and honey
In early springtime, the bees’ need for pollen may be greater than what is available, and then they will compulsively gather up almost any fine granular material—sawdust, bits of plastic packing material, ashes—whether it is useful to them or not. I often see them at the bird feeder, picking through the wild bird feed. At that time of year, I often get a telephone call from a dairy farmer who lives near one of my beeyards.
“Hey, Sue,” he says. “How about coming over and feeding your bees? They’re in the calf feed again.”
He’s always a little embarrassed. The first time he called me, years ago, was on a day in autumn. There were, he insisted, bees flying all around the inside of his milking shed. He didn’t want to spray them with insecticide, but he was going to have to do that unless I could lure them out.
It sounded like an odd way for bees to behave, but I drove over to his place. There they were, golden-striped fuzzy insects flying around inside his barn, darting here and there. They looked like bees, but they didn’t act like bees, so I captured one in my hand. The creature did not sting me as a honeybee would have done and on close scrutiny its beelike appearance disappeared. Moreover, the insect had only a single pair of wings, not two sets, as a bee has. The two wings, a single pair, puts any insect into the zoological order Diptera (which means two-winged), the order of flies. Honeybees belong to the order Hymenoptera (or membrane-winged), which includes not only all the bees but also wasps, ants and other similar insects.
I wasn’t sure which flies these were in the milk barn, because I don’t know much about Diptera, but I knew that there were a number of fly species that mimic bees in appearance. I showed the fanner the single pair of wings and told him that this and the others in the air were flies, not bees. He was interested, and asked more questions than I could answer. When I got home, I photocopied as much information about bee-mimicking flies as I could find on my bookshelves and sent it to him. Now when he calls he always makes sure that the insect about which he is lodging a complaint is indeed a honeybee.
The first time he found bees in his calf f
eed he was worried that they were after the calves, and might sting and frighten them. I assured him that the bees were not the least concerned with the calves but were looking for the pollen they needed as food in the springtime. As soon as some pollen-bearing flower bloomed, I told him, the bees would disappear from the calf feed, but in the meantime I’d try giving them a pollen substitute that might satisfy them.
Beekeeping-supply companies sell a commercial pollen substitute made of a combination of protein-rich materials such as soy flour and brewers’ yeast. This powder can be mixed with honey to make into patties, which can be squished down between the top bars on the frames of the upper hive bodies. Many beekeepers recommend the feeding of pollen substitute as a regular routine, and for a number of years I made up patties and fed them to all my hives. In some parts of the country where there is not a dependable source of pollen this may be a good practice, but I have concluded that it is not worth the expense or time here in the Ozarks. Bees prefer the real thing—fresh pollen—and although a day or two in these hills may pass when they can’t find any, something usually bursts into bloom and they scorn the substitute, leaving it to molder inside the hives. So I stopped feeding pollen substitute, and find that productivity of my hives is no poorer for doing so. Indeed, the perhive yield of honey from my bees has grown greater in what appears to be a direct relationship to the decrease in the number of times I open the hives. The less I disrupt and fiddle with the bees, the more they can concentrate on making honey.
Now when the dairy farmer calls, more as a public-relations gesture then anything else, I go to the health-food store and buy fifty-nine cents’ worth of soy flour, take it over to the hives near his place, lift off the outer cover of each hive and sprinkle some of it on the inner cover. I did that a few days ago, and today I stopped by his place to give him a jar of honey as a recompense for the nuisance my bees had caused him.
I asked if the bees had stopped coming to the calf feed.
“Yep. They’ve left. Thank you kindly for feeding them.”
“No trouble. Thank you for calling me and letting me know. I don’t like the bees to be a bother to you.”
Then I drove over to the hives and lifted up the telescoping covers. The soy flour stood unused on the inner covers, and I shook it off on the grass. The bees had not wanted it. Flowers have begun to bloom somewhere, and the bees, their rear legs wadded with golden pollen, are flying into the hives so heavily loaded they find it hard to stay airborne.
The farmer is happy. The calves are happy. The bees are happy.
I sit down beside the end hive and watch the bees flying in with their loads of pollen, which will assure the development of the thousands of young bees needed to gather nectar and make honey in the months to come.
The sun is shining on my back as I watch, and I can feel its warmth. The air is fragrant. There are flowers in bloom everywhere today.
And I am happy.
The daffodils finally do bloom. They do every year, of course, although in some years when I want to get out among the bees it seems as though they never will. The golden blossoms surround my cabin, but they also march off in straight lines through the underbrush and scrubby sumac, wild cherry and farkleberry which are the first advance growth of the woods that is closing in around my place. The widow from whom I bought this farm fifteen years ago laughed when she told me about those straight rows of daffodils. She had bought a a burlap sack of bulbs, and had given them to her husband to plant.
“He tried digging holes for ’em by hand,” she said, “but after a few he decided he weren’t going to bother that hard, so he just hitched the cultivator to the mule and make him some long straight furrows and dropped in them daffodils. I thought they looked pretty funny, but I never did say anything, and now they make me think of him and his mule and that day and wish it were all now.”
When I see those daffodils striding into the young woods, I like to try to create in my mind that day of theirs, too, and remember the good things they did to establish this farm where I have had bees and been happy. I’ve come to the belief that we manufacture whatever immortal souls we have out of the bits of difference we make by living in this world. It seems no bad thing to have a soul of yellow daffodils in lines across an Ozark hilltop.
The next several weeks after daffodils bloom are the busiest ones for a beekeeper. I’ll spend every day working with the bees from early morning until the sun sets. If I had just a few hives, I could save the work for the middle part of sunshiny warm days. Bees are easiest to work with then, because most of the older bees are out foraging. The ones who remain are young house bees, less likely to take offense at having their hives opened, less likely to sting. But because I have many hives to work through, I must risk irritating the bees and take some stings. I’ll be opening the hives early and late and on rainy days as well as fair ones. During the weeks to come, I’ll visit every one of my beehives at least twice. I’ll be checking to see that each hive is strong and healthy and I’ll medicate them to prevent disease. I’ll be feeding those I must and preparing some of the strongest hives for division into two. I’ll be cleaning up any mouse damage I find and replacing worn beehive parts and combs that have become distorted and dark from use over the years. I’ll be doing everything I can to make sure I have strong populous beehives by the time the wild blackberries—which include dewberries and several other species of the genus Rubus—bloom. Those blossoms produce the first major nectar flow, and from it the bees will make honey that I will be able to take from them at harvest time. Before the blackberries begin to bloom, the bees must use up all the scattered nectar-producing sources in order to keep the colony going and to build up its strength. In other parts of the country the first strong nectar flow comes from other flowers; a beekeeper must be something of a botanist in order to learn the blossoming patterns of flowers that represent significant nectar flows for the bees.
This is one of the most enjoyable aspects of beekeeping, but it took me several seasons to convince myself that I was doing genuine productive work when I walked out into wild places with field guides to the wildflowers and shrubs, a notebook and a picnic lunch (and, if I could persuade a friend to come along, a bottle of wine) in a knapsack. It seemed like too much fun.
The day before I go out for my first trip to the beeyards I prepare the medicine I’ll need for each hive and the sugar syrup I may need for some.
Of the number of bee diseases that can have a debilitating effect on a colony, none are as serious as American Foulbrood. It can be prevented by medicating bees beforehand; it cannot be cured once they have it. Bacteria are ubiquitous and occur in immense number and variety. Most of them are helpful and benign. Few cause disease but one, Bacillus larvae is the agent responsible for American Foulbrood in bee larvae.
The bee larvae become infected by eating food contaminated with the spores of the bacteria, which is so persistent that it can remain infective for thirty-five years. The only remedy for a hive with American Foulbrood is to burn it—bees, honeycomb frames, hive parts and all—for after the bees have died out in a sick colony, as they will almost surely do, any healthy bees put into the hive will become infected themselves.
From time to time, bee breeders have worked to develop strains of bees resistant to American Foulbrood. Right now, Steve Taber, a West Coast entomologist of great skill and wisdom, is working on this particular problem, but so far a beekeeper’s best defense is to medicate all of his hives with Terramycin as a preventative. I have medicated my hives each year and have never had a case of American Foulbrood in them, although it is common in this area. The bees belonging to beekeepers who fail to medicate, and wild bees in trees, are potential reservoirs of infection. When any colony of bees, wild or hived, begins to sicken, it becomes too weak to defend itself from robber bees, and foraging workers from healthy hives steal honey from a hive ill with American Foulbrood and carry the bacteria back to their own brood.
Affected brood die after they have spun coc
oons and are sealed in their cells. They turn brown, putrefy and give off a fetid odor. The cappings over such larvae become dark and moist, sink inward and are sometimes marked by holes made by adult bees that try to clean out the infected cells. The test for suspicious-looking brood is to dip a matchstick or twig into the putrefying larva within a cell; if the fluid residue stretches out into a ropy thread, the chances are that the bees have American Foulbrood. Sure identification, however, is possible only from laboratory analysis. Most states have inspectors who can help with identification of bee diseases, and the federal Bee Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, can provide positive identification from fragments of diseased comb.
There are a number of other bee diseases that can have a debilitating effect on a colony, even though they are not as serious as American Foulbrood. European Foulbrood is similar to American in some of its symptoms, but can usually be cured by reducing stress on a colony and requeening. Terramycin also helps to prevent it. Bees succumb to other bacterial diseases as well as to those caused by viruses, protozoa and fungi. Parasitic bee mites have, in recent years, spread to North America, which had been free of them before. They are harmful to bee colonies and researchers are investigating medicines and methods to keep them in check. One of the most interesting is work on the development of a mite-proof strain of honeybees, possibly by using the Africanized bee, which, it has been discovered, has an inborn resistance to at least one of the mites, Varroa jacobsoni. (The bug that headline writers like to call the killer bee and entomologists call the Africanized honeybee belongs to the same species, but represents a different strain, one that is moving northward from South America, where it was imported from Africa. In many ways these bees are the same as their gentler cousins, but they are quicker to anger and will follow for a greater distance someone who has disturbed their hives. My beekeeping magazines are full of conflicting reports about them. At this time, there is no real agreement on how they will behave if and when they become established in temperate latitudes.)
A Book of Bees Page 6
