Bob explains what is going on inside the hive, where I see only a mass of bees. A hive is like a city, he would say, with the queen at its heart. Most bees hold a progression of different jobs in the hive and go through a series of physical transformations to meet each job.
One day in a bee’s life is comparable to years in a human life. The life span of a worker bee is four to six weeks, while the queen will live up to four or five years. Von Frisch in his experiments numbered every bee with a dab of colored paint. He monitored the bee’s career throughout its life. He saw that each honeybee acted alone, and had its idiosyncrasies. Yet the population of a hive functioned almost as particles of a single mind.
“You cannot keep just one bee,” von Frisch wrote. “This is not as simple as it sounds.”
…
A hive in summer contains thirty thousand bees or more—a good-sized city. In the spring and summer a queen lays up to fifteen hundred eggs a day—at least one egg a minute day and night. As the infant bees emerge, just as many older workers die, having shredded their fragile wings to pieces in foraging flights.
All a beekeeper can do is offer the bees an artfully arranged substitute for a hive in a hollow tree—wooden boxes stacked up with a hardboard lid. In the controlled, artificial hive a metal grid called a “queen excluder” is laid on top of the second box to prevent the queen from climbing up into the supers—the boxes on top of the stacks—and filling them with eggs. The pure supply of honey in the supers is what the beekeeper is after.
Worker bees easily pass through the queen excluder, moving freely up and down to perform their tasks. The entrance to the hive is at the very bottom of the lowest box.
When we open the hive we rarely see the queen. She lives where the young are hatched and reared, in the middle of the lower combs, surrounded by pollen. The queen wanders through her territory all day long, slowly, regally, surrounded by her changing court of worker bees, which protect and wash her, brushing back her hair, bringing her food, carrying away her excrement. They touch her all the while with their antennae.
As they lick and touch the queen the workers pick up substances secreted by her body. The workers constantly touch one another, and in doing so spread her pheromones throughout the hive, signaling that the queen is alive and well.
The workers create a thin layer of larger cells on the edge of the comb for unfertilized eggs, which the queen lays at will. The unfertilized eggs develop into male bees, drones, larger than the worker bees, even burly. The drones do no work. They wander through the hive as they wish, taking pollen and honey, and making messes wherever they go.
A few thousand drones are produced in the spring and summer. Their sole function is to mate with a queen. The worker bees seem to grow increasingly impatient with the behavior of the drones. After a few months they begin to pinch and push them, and at last they literally drag them out of the hive. The drones cower together and try to hide in the empty cells or in the space between the combs and the inside wall of the hive, but ultimately they are found and driven out, nearly every one.
Most of the worker bees are dead by the end of winter, and the population of the hive has dwindled to around six thousand. The remaining bees cluster together in a ball around the queen. The outer layer of bees in the cluster generates warmth by spasmodically moving their flight muscles back and forth. The outer layer of bees changes continually, as the workers become exhausted and crawl to the stillness and warmth of the inside of the cluster. At the winter solstice the surviving worker bees raise the temperature in the hive to 93 degrees Fahrenheit, the necessary temperature for the creation of young, and the queen begins to lay eggs, bringing the hive back to life again.
The intricate stages of a honeybee’s career:
Maggotlike larvae hatch from the eggs laid by the queen. Young workers five days old or more who have been feeding heavily on pollen produce for the larvae a substance called bee milk or royal jelly. Rich in protein, acidic and bitter, this milky white cream is fed to the larvae and to the queen throughout her life.
The larvae grow rapidly to five hundred times their original weight. In six days, when their bodies have swollen to fill their cells completely, they spin silk cocoons about themselves and begin to pupate. Older workers cap the cells with a covering of fine, light wax. The new bee miraculously evolves, translucent and perfect within the pupa, and on the twelfth day after the capping chews her way out through the lid of her cell.
For the first three days of her new life the young bee walks around the brood comb, licking clean the newly emptied cells and polishing them with her saliva. Only if a cell has been prepared in this way will the queen lower her long, slender abdomen into it and lay an egg.
The young bee at first spends her time sitting around, combing her hair (“just like a teenager,” Bob says). After three days the hypopharyngeal glands in her head have fully developed and she becomes a nurse. She begins by feeding the older, bigger larvae, but as she becomes more skilled she feeds the younger, more delicate larvae with the bee milk from her mouth.
At the end of ten days the glands on the head of the nurse begin to shrink; she can no longer produce royal jelly. The four pairs of wax glands on her lower abdomen have now reached their full size, and she begins to secrete wax. The wax forms in scales and slides out from the underside of her abdomen. The bee retreats to a warm, crowded part of the hive, where other bees her age hang suspended.
In the warmer months, when the population of the hive swells, the wax-producing bees begin to build layers of new comb. They gorge themselves on honey and in a few hours secrete immense quantities of wax (consuming six to eight pounds of honey to produce one pound of wax). Workers roll the wax up away from their abdomens with their legs, and chew and soften it with saliva. With their mouths and feet they manipulate the wax to form the mathematically precise sheets of fragile hexagonal cells that honeybees have routinely created for millions of years.
In the second stage of life (between ten and twenty days old) worker bees go to the entrance of the hive and receive in their mouths the nectar that older foragers have brought back in their honey stomachs. A forager bee may visit hundreds of sources of nectar (for example, each of the florets on a head of clover) to fill her honey stomach—a crop, a kind of holding tank—just once. Every teaspoon of honey may require thousands of trips to the field by forager bees.
The receiving bee holds the nectar in her honey stomach as she carries it up to the cells where the honey is stored. When she disgorges the nectar she adds to it fluids secreted from her salivary and now contracted hypopharyngeal glands, filled with enzymes to purify and preserve the honey.
The receiving bees pack the nectar into honey cells. Other workers stand above, thrumming their wings to evaporate excess moisture and thicken the nectar. When a honey cell is filled, a wax-producing bee caps it over with a vaulted lid, and the altered nectar is left to age.
The bees now begin to make their first excursions outside, short flights to familiarize themselves with the territory. Some are responsible for clearing refuse from the hive; they carry the corpses of other bees a distance away from the hive and drop them to the ground. Others stand by the entrance and guard it from intruders, including honey-stealing bees from other hives. The guards run their antennae over every creature that attempts to enter the hive, and attack intruders with their stingers. The stinger of a worker bee is a modified ovipositor, and is used primarily for combat with bees and other insects, like a sword. When a honeybee stings a large animal, such as a human being, the stinger remains lodged in the thick skin of the victim and the bee disembowels herself trying to pull it free.
In the final period of a worker bee’s life, from about the twentieth day until her death, she becomes a forager, collecting water, resin, nectar, or pollen. Her body is ingeniously shaped for the work. Her inner back legs are covered with bristly brushes that mesh together on opposite legs. The bee brushes away the pollen from a flower’s thickly coated stamens
, then forces the pollen through the stiff hairs of one leg with the bristles of the leg opposite, as though combing or sifting it. On the outer side of her back legs are deep indentations called pollen baskets. She moistens the pollen with honey that she has brought from the hive in her honey stomach. She forms the pollen into a ball, like bread dough, packs it into her pollen baskets, then flies back to the hive with bright bulbs of pollen bulging from her legs.
A forager also fills her honey stomach with water. Water is used in the hive primarily as a cooling agent. In summer the bees spread a fine film of water over the comb and stand above, thousands of them at a time, thrumming their wings to evaporate the water and bring the temperature of the hive down. The workers see that the hive always remains at the temperature necessary to sustain life, never too hot or too cold.
The queen bee develops from a normal worker egg, laid in a specially constructed, large, acorn-shaped cell, and is fed from birth huge quantities of food. A hive in brood season always has a few developing queen larvae. If the population of a hive becomes too large, the colony splits and the old queen flies away to found a new colony with a swarm of worker bees. This leaves the original colony without a queen. But in a few days a new queen emerges, in a brutal drama of succession that might have been described by Frazer in The Golden Bough. The first queen to come out of her cell walks over the comb and makes a shrill piping noise by crouching and vibrating her wings. She is warning the other queens that she is abroad. They respond with an answering vibration. If another queen emerges from her cell the first queen fights her to the death with her stinger. Then the surviving young queen goes through all the queen cells, bites through their lids of wax, and kills the potential rivals within.
Now it is time for the new queen’s nuptial flight, the only time she will ever leave the hive. The workers prepare her, shake her bodily, and then push her out of the hive. She ventures some distance away, and her scent entices males to follow.
The Dadants’ The Hive and the Honeybee describes the mating of the queen: “Reports mention a comet-shaped swarm of swiftly flying drones weaving hither and thither, presumably chasing a virgin queen which was supposed to be at its apex. Observers have reported hearing a sharp crack at the time that they believed that copulation occurred and that the queen broke away from the drone which fell dead or dying to the ground.”
On her bridal flight the queen mates with ten or twelve drones. She has a sac in her abdomen, a spermatheca, in which she stores the collected sperm for the duration of her life and from which she fertilizes her own eggs. The mix of sperm from the drones of different hives provides the genetic diversity necessary to maintain the health of the colony, for a colony of thirty thousand honeybees has only one mother.
…
Bob and I walk up to the hives in our bee suits. The curious guard bees come out to explore, dancing before the mesh around our faces. They land on it and relax a little, combing back the blond fur on their backs with their long red tongues. With our hive tools we crack the propolis sealing that holds the lid of a hive in place. Propolis is a material the bees make from plant sap and pine resin. It is filled with antibacterial agents and drives insect pests away. In a natural hive honeybees paint the whole inside of a hollow tree with propolis, as though to sterilize it, before building the comb within. Bees use propolis to cover up disagreeable foreign agents, like beetles, that are too large to carry out of the hive. In winter propolis is hard and brittle. In summer it is warm and sticky. To the beekeeper it is a pain in the neck. And there is a sense of pleasure in feeling it crack. We separate the frames. Now we are in.
Immediately we hold up Bob’s old tin smoker, which is filled with twine soaked in kerosene. We light the twine with a match, and as it smolders we blow the smoke up with the smoker’s bellows and funnel it in among the frames. The bees think the hive is on fire and start filling their honey stomachs to carry the precious honey out of the burning hive. Soon the heaviness in their bodies makes them sleepy, and they become too confused to attack us.
Bob tells me that in Africa they set fire to whole trees to get at the honey. “That’s why,” he says, “they call them African killer bees—they’re just so mad.” We are always joking about the “African killer bee,” Apis mellifera scutellata. In 1956, a few scutellata queens were imported from South Africa to Brazil in an attempt to improve the local stock of honeybees. The African killer bees have been moving steadily north ever since at a rate of one to two hundred miles a year; they have recently been seen in Texas, California, Arizona, and Nevada.
The scutellata are easily prompted to sting, and do so in large numbers. A friend of mine who was in the Peace Corps in Zaire once jumped into a river to save his life after he accidentally walked by one of their hives. Within moments, he said, the bees had completely covered him.
One day Bob was up on Bean’s Hill, high above Geneva with views of the countryside all around. He was carrying a truckload of hives with his son Shawn. Bob’s nephew Scott was in another truck with another load of hives. They passed through a construction site where the road was rough and full of potholes. The hives in Scott’s truck were shaken loose, and as he turned a corner four hives, which were bound together by a rope, fell off the truck and were smashed open. Two hundred thousand angry bees flew up into the air. Scott was no longer in his bee suit but, without stopping to think, jumped out of the truck to see what had happened. The bees plastered him at once. He screamed in pain and jumped face-first into a ditch with the bees covering him. Bob was struggling to get back in his bee suit in the cab of the truck and get to Scott. Bees were pouring into the windows of cars all along the road, through the doors of banks and restaurants and grocery stores, where people were trapped for hours that afternoon, waiting for the masses of bees outside to settle down. A man in a freezer truck grabbed Scott and threw him in the back. Within a minute the bees fell off in the cold. Scott’s eyes were swollen shut, his tongue was so swollen he could not talk, and he was rushed to the hospital. Had he been left much longer to the mercy of the angry bees he could easily have died.
…
Honeybees came to the American continent with European colonists as early as the sixteenth century. They came in skeps, upside-down baskets made of woven straw or twigs.
The traditional method of beekeeping was to allow a colony of bees to fill a skep with honey, then to force them out into an empty hive, or sometimes to kill them by filling the skep with sulfur smoke, or dropping it into boiling water.
In 1851 an American clergyman in Philadelphia named L. L. Langstroth discovered that honeybees will move around between the inside edges of a hive and the combs themselves in a space that is between a quarter and three eighths of an inch wide. This created the possibility of movable, hence removable, frames. Individual frames matted over with sheets of comb could be fitted, suspended into boxes, and lifted out without damaging the hive. The frames could be replaced, they could be periodically checked, and the beekeeper could monitor the life of the hive and remove the excess honey that is produced every year without harming or displacing the bees. Langstroth’s “bee space” and removable frames revolutionized bee keeping, and allowed for the first time the in-depth study of the lives of bees.
In the large supers Bob uses there are nine frames in a box. We pull the frames up one by one, brushing off the disabled bees with a soft brush, and examine the combs. A hive ordinarily produces fifty to eighty pounds of honey in a season and can make up to four hundred pounds if conditions are good. Bob checks the cappings on the combs—thin, slightly translucent swirlings of white over the honey when the combs are healthy. He judges by the heaviness of the frames, and of the supers themselves, how much honey he can safely take off. If a super is filled with good, honey-packed frames, he takes the whole box.
If half the frames are full, Bob takes a portion of them, moving the frames into an empty super at his feet. When the super is full, we load it into the back of the truck. It is very heavy work. After a
while we feel like we are standing on a sidewalk in scuba gear. “Hottest work in farming,” Bob says. We cannot, of course, touch our faces through our masks, or our hands through our thick gloves.
Bob goes around with a bag of white sugar. He leaves a heap inside the hive lid wherever we have taken supers away. The bees convert the sugar into honey to replace what we have taken. Bob is always careful to leave enough honey for the bees to get through the winter, and says that it is heartbreaking to come back in the spring and find that a hive has starved to death, the cluster of bees all stiff and dry.
In the afternoon we take a break and go to Sweet Sue’s for a beer, “just to scare everyone.” We are still in our bee suits, and bees swirl around us here and there.
At the end of the day Bob sometimes says, “Why does anyone go into this? That’s what I want to know. I mean, it’s such hard work. And I’ll tell you why. It’s in your blood. It gets in your blood.”
…
Ten years later our bee talk was about the varroa mite, which had wiped out virtually every hive of wild bees in the United States in a decade, and devastated the American beekeeping industry.
“It makes you sick,” Bob said, telling me about the time in 1995 when he first opened one of his hives and found the young bees half eaten away, yet still alive, the older workers struggling to drag the crippled bees out of the infested combs and destroy them. The varroa mite is not much smaller than a deer tick. A beekeeper can see in the hive the mites attached to the bodies of the bees, living on their blood.
A female mite rides around on a worker bee in the brood comb. Just as the worker is about to cap a cell in which a larva is pupating, the mite jumps in. Inside the sealed cell the mite lays her eggs. The eggs hatch and the young mites feed on the trapped, developing bee, first chewing off its legs and wings.
Wolves & Honey Page 9
