Beekeeping
Depictions of humans collecting honey from wild bees date to 15,000
years ago, efforts to domesticate them are shown in Egyptian art around
4,500 years ago. Simple hives and smoke were used and honey was stored
in jars, some of which were found in the tombs of pharaohs such as Tutankhamun.
It wasn't until the 18th century that European understanding of the
colonies and biology of bees allowed the construction of the moveable
comb hive so that honey could be harvested without destroying the entire
colony.
Study of honey bees
It was not until the 18th century that European natural philosophers
undertook the scientific study of bee colonies and began to understand
the complex and hidden world of bee biology. Preeminent among these
scientific pioneers were
Swammerdam, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Charles Bonnet, and the blind Swiss scientist Francois Huber.
Swammerdam and Réaumur were among the first to use a microscope and
dissection to understand the internal biology of honey bees. Réaumur was
among the first to construct a glass walled observation hive to better
observe activities within hives. He observed queens laying eggs in open
cells, but still had no idea of how a queen was fertilized; nobody had
ever witnessed the mating of a queen and drone and many theories held
that queens were "self-fertile," while others believed that a vapor or
"miasma" emanating from the drones fertilized queens without direct
physical contact. Huber was the first to prove by observation and
experiment that queens are physically inseminated by drones outside the
confines of hives, usually a great distance away.
Following Réaumur's design, Huber built improved glass-walled
observation hives and sectional hives that could be opened like the
leaves of a book. This allowed inspecting individual wax combs and
greatly improved direct observation of hive activity. Although he went
blind before he was twenty, Huber employed a secretary, Francois
Burnens, to make daily observations, conduct careful experiments, and
keep accurate notes over more than twenty years. Huber confirmed that a
hive consists of one queen who is the mother of all the female workers
and male drones in the colony. He was also the first to confirm that
mating with drones takes place outside of hives and that queens are
inseminated by a number of successive matings with male drones, high in
the air at a great distance from their hive. Together, he and Burnens
dissected bees under the
microscope and were among the first to describe the ovaries and spermatheca, or sperm store, of queens as well as the penis
of male drones. Huber is universally regarded as "the father of modern
bee-science" and his "Nouvelles Observations sur Les Abeilles (or "New
Observations on Bees") revealed all the basic scientific truths for the biology and ecology of honeybees.
Natural beekeeping
There is a current movement that eschews chemicals in beekeeping and
believes that health issues in bees can most effectively be addressed by
reversing trends that disrespect the needs of the bees themselves. Crop
spraying, unnatural conditions in which bees are moved thousands of
miles to pollinate commercial crops, frequent opening of the hive for
inspection,
artificial insemination
of queens, routine medication and sugar water feeding are all thought
to contribute to a general weakening of the constitution of the honey
bee.
Practitioners of 'natural beekeeping' tend to use variations of the
top-bar hive, which is a simple design that retains the concept of
movable comb without the use of frames or foundation. The horizontal
top-bar hive, as championed by Marty Hardison, Michael Bush, Philip
Chandler, Dennis Murrell and others, can be seen as a modernization of
hollow log hives, with the addition of wooden bars of specific width
from which bees hang their combs. Its widespread adoption in recent
years can be attributed to the publication in 2007 of
The Barefoot Beekeeper
by Philip Chandler, which challenged many aspects of modern beekeeping
and offered the horizontal top-bar hive as a viable alternative to the
ubiquitous Langstroth-syle movable-frame hive.
The most popular vertical top-bar hive is probably the Warré hive,
based on a design by the French priest Abbé Émile Warré (1867–1951) and
popularized by Dr. David Heaf in his English translation of Warré's book
L'Apiculture pour Tous as
Beekeeping For All
Natural beekeeping is characterized by a willingness to hand most of
the control to the bees themselves, and to minimize interference in
their lives. Practitioners expect to take honey only when the bees'
needs have first been taken care of, and the feeding of sugar is
discouraged except as an emergency measure.
Urban or backyard beekeeping
Related to natural beekeeping,
urban beekeeping is an attempt to revert to a less industrialized way of obtaining honey by utilizing small-scale colonies that pollinate urban gardens.
Urban apiculture has undergone a renaissance in the first decade of the
21st century, and urban beekeeping is seen by many as a growing trend;
it has recently been legalized in cities where it was previously banned.
Paris, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Melbourne and Washington DC are among beekeeping cities.
Urban bees may fail to find forage, however, and homeowners can use
their landscapes to help feed local bee populations by planting flowers
that provide nectar and pollen. An environment of year-round,
uninterrupted bloom creates an ideal environment for colony
reproduction.
Bee colonies
Castes
A colony of bees consists of three castes of bee:
- a queen bee, which is normally the only breeding female in the colony;
- a large number of female worker bees, typically 30,000–50,000 in number;
- a number of male drones, ranging from thousands in a strong hive in spring to very few during dearth or cold season.
The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of
the female worker bees and male drones are her offspring. The queen may
live for up to three years or more and may be capable of laying half a
million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding
season, late spring to summer, a good queen may be capable of laying
3,000 eggs in one day, more than her own body weight. This would be
exceptional however; a prolific queen might peak at 2,000 eggs a day,
but a more average queen might lay just 1,500 eggs per day. The queen is
raised from a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of
royal jelly
than a normal worker bee, resulting in a radically different growth and
metamorphosis. The queen influences the colony by the production and
dissemination of a variety of pheromones
or "queen substances". One of these chemicals suppresses the
development of ovaries in all the female worker bees in the hive and
prevents them from laying eggs.
Mating of queens
The queen emerges from her cell after 15 days of development and she
remains in the hive for 3–7 days before venturing out on a mating
flight. Mating flight is otherwise known as 'nuptial flight'. Her first
orientation flight may only last a few seconds, just enough to mark the
position of the hive. Subsequent mating flights may last from 5 minutes
to 30 minutes, and she may mate with a number of male drones on each
flight. Over several matings, possibly a dozen or more, the queen
receives and stores enough
sperm
from a succession of drones to fertilize hundreds of thousands of eggs.
If she does not manage to leave the hive to mate—possibly due to bad
weather or being trapped in part of the hive—she remains infertile and
become a
drone layer, incapable of producing female worker bees.
Worker bees sometimes kill a non-performing queen and produce another.
Without a properly performing queen, the hive is doomed.
Mating takes place at some distance from the hive and often several
hundred feet in the air; it is thought that this separates the strongest
drones from the weaker ones, ensuring that only the fastest and
strongest drones get to pass on their genes.
Female worker bees
Almost all the bees in a hive are female worker bees. At the height
of summer when activity in the hive is frantic and work goes on
non-stop, the life of a worker bee may be as short as 6 weeks; in late
autumn, when no brood is being raised and no
nectar
is being harvested, a young bee may live for 16 weeks, right through
the winter. During its life a worker bee performs different work
functions in the hive, largely dictated by the age of the bee.
| Period |
Work activity |
| Days 1-3 |
Cleaning cells and incubation |
| Day 3-6 |
Feeding older larvae |
| Day 6-10 |
Feeding younger larvae |
| Day 8-16 |
Receiving honey and pollen from field bees |
| Day 12-18 |
Wax making and cell building |
| Day 14 onwards |
Entrance guards; nectar and pollen foraging |
Male bees (drones)
Drones are the largest bees in the hive (except for the queen), at
almost twice the size of a worker bee. They do not work, do not forage
for pollen or nectar and have no other known function than to mate with
new queens and fertilize them on their mating flights. A bee colony
generally starts to raise drones a few weeks before building queen cells
so they can supersede a failing queen or prepare for swarming. When
queen-raising for the season is over, bees in colder climates drive
drones out of the hive to die, biting and tearing their legs and wings.
Differing stages of development
| Stage of development |
Queen |
Worker |
Drone |
| Egg |
3 days |
3 days |
3 days |
| Larva |
8 days |
10 days |
13 days :Successive moults occur within this period 8 to 13 day period |
| Cell Capped |
day 8 |
day 8 |
day 10 |
| Pupa |
4 days |
8 days |
8 days |
| Total |
15 days |
21 days |
24 days |
Structure of a bee colony
A domesticated bee colony is normally housed in a rectangular hive
body, within which eight to ten parallel frames house the vertical
plates of honeycomb that contain the eggs, larvae, pupae and food for
the colony. If one were to cut a vertical cross-section through the hive
from side to side, the brood nest would appear as a roughly ovoid ball
spanning 5-8 frames of comb. The two outside combs at each side of the
hive tend to be exclusively used for long-term storage of honey and
pollen.
Within the central brood nest, a single frame of comb typically has a
central disk of eggs, larvae and sealed brood cells that may extend
almost to the edges of the frame. Immediately above the brood patch an
arch of
pollen-filled
cells extends from side to side, and above that again a broader arch of
honey-filled cells extends to the frame tops. The pollen is
protein-rich food for developing larvae, while honey is also food but
largely energy rich rather than protein rich. The nurse bees that care
for the developing brood secrete a special food called 'royal jelly'
after feeding themselves on honey and pollen. The amount of royal jelly
fed to a larva determines whether it develops into a worker bee or a
queen.
Apart from the honey stored within the central brood frames, the bees
store surplus honey in combs above the brood nest. In modern hives the
beekeeper places separate boxes, called 'supers', above the brood box,
in which a series of shallower combs is provided for storage of honey.
This enables the beekeeper to remove some of the supers in the late
summer, and to extract the surplus honey harvest, without damaging the
colony of bees and its brood nest below. If all the honey is 'stolen',
including the amount of honey needed to survive winter, the beekeeper
must replace these stores by feeding the bees sugar or
corn syrup in autumn.
Annual cycle of a bee colony
The development of a bee colony follows an annual cycle of growth
that begins in spring with a rapid expansion of the brood nest, as soon
as pollen is available for feeding larvae. Some production of brood may
begin as early as January, even in a cold winter, but breeding
accelerates towards a peak in May (in the northern hemisphere),
producing an abundance of harvesting bees synchronized to the main
nectar flow
in that region. Each race of bees times this build-up slightly
differently, depending on how the flora of its original region blooms.
Some regions of Europe have two nectar flows: one in late spring and
another in late August. Other regions have only a single nectar flow.
The skill of the beekeeper lies in predicting when the nectar flow will
occur in his area and in trying to ensure that his colonies achieve a
maximum population of harvesters at exactly the right time.
The key factor in this is the prevention or skillful management of
the swarming impulse. If a colony swarms unexpectedly and the beekeeper
does not manage to capture the resulting swarm, he is likely to harvest
significantly less honey from that hive, since he has lost half his
worker bees at a single stroke. If, however, he can use the swarming
impulse to breed a new queen but keep all the bees in the colony
together, he maximizes his chances of a good harvest. It takes many
years of learning and experience to be able to manage all these aspects
successfully, though owing to variable circumstances many beginners
often achieve a good honey harvest.
Formation of new colonies
Colony reproduction: swarming and supersedure
Main article:
All colonies are totally dependent on their queen, who is the only
egg-layer. However, even the best queens live only a few years and one
or two years longevity is the norm. She can choose whether or not to
fertilize an egg as she lays it; if she does so, it develops into a
female worker bee; if she lays an unfertilized egg it becomes a male
drone. She decides which type of egg to lay depending on the size of the
open brood cell she encounters on the comb. In a small worker cell, she
lays a fertilized egg; if she finds a larger drone cell, she lays an
unfertilized drone egg.
All the time that the queen is fertile and laying eggs she produces a
variety of pheromones, which control the behavior of the bees in the
hive. These are commonly called
queen substance, but there are
various pheromones with different functions. As the queen ages, she
begins to run out of stored sperm, and her pheromones begin to fail.
Inevitably, the queen begins to falter, and the bees decide to replace
her by creating a new queen from one of her worker eggs. They may do
this because she has been damaged (lost a leg or an antenna), because
she has run out of sperm and cannot lay fertilized eggs (has become a
'drone laying queen'), or because her pheromones have dwindled to where
they cannot control all the bees in the hive.
At this juncture, the bees produce one or more queen cells by
modifying existing worker cells that contain a normal female egg.
However, the bees pursue two distinct behaviors:
- Supersedure: queen replacement within one hive without swarming
- Swarm cell production: the division of the hive into two colonies by swarming
Different sub-species of
Apis mellifera exhibit differing swarming characteristics that reflect their
evolution in different ecotopes
of the European continent. In general the more northerly black races
are said to swarm less and supersede more, whereas the more southerly
yellow and grey varieties are said to swarm more frequently. The truth
is complicated because of the prevalence of cross-breeding and
hybridization of the sub species and opinions differ.
Supersedure is highly valued as a behavioral trait by beekeepers
because a hive that supersedes its old queen does not swarm and so no
stock is lost; it merely creates a new queen and allows the old one to
fade away, or alternatively she is killed when the new queen emerges.
When superseding a queen, the bees produce just one or two queen cells,
characteristically in the center of the face of a broodcomb.
In swarming, by contrast, a great many queen cells are created —
typically a dozen or more — and these are located around the edges of a
broodcomb, most often at the sides and the bottom
.
New wax combs between basement joists
Once either process has begun, the old queen normally leaves the hive
with the hatching of the first queen cells. She leaves accompanied by a
large number of bees, predominantly young bees (wax-secretors), who
form the basis of the new hive. Scouts are sent out from the swarm to
find suitable hollow trees or rock crevices. As soon as one is found,
the entire swarm moves in. Within a matter of hours, they build new wax
brood combs, using honey stores that the young bees have filled
themselves with before leaving the old hive. Only young bees can secrete
wax from special abdominal segments, and this is why swarms tend to
contain more young bees. Often a number of virgin queens accompany the
first swarm (the 'prime swarm'), and the old queen is replaced as soon
as a daughter queen mates and begins laying. Otherwise, she is quickly
superseded in the new home.
Factors that trigger swarming
It is generally accepted that a colony of bees does not swarm until
they have completed all of their brood combs, i.e., filled all available
space with eggs, larvae, and brood. This generally occurs in late
spring at a time when the other areas of the hive are rapidly filling
with honey stores. One key trigger of the swarming instinct is when the
queen has no more room to lay eggs and the hive population is becoming
very congested. Under these conditions, a prime swarm may issue with the
queen, resulting in a halving of the population within the hive,
leaving the old colony with a large number of hatching bees. The queen
who leaves finds herself in a new hive with no eggs and no larvae but
lots of energetic young bees who create a new set of brood combs from
scratch in a very short time.
Another important factor in swarming is the age of the queen. Those
under a year in age are unlikely to swarm unless they are extremely
crowded, while older queens have swarming predisposition.
Beekeepers monitor their colonies carefully in spring and watch for
the appearance of queen cells, which are a dramatic signal that the
colony is determined to swarm.
When a colony has decided to swarm, queen cells are produced in
numbers varying to a dozen or more. When the first of these queen cells
is sealed after eight days of larval feeding, a virgin queen pupates and
is due to emerge seven days later. Before leaving, the worker bees fill
their stomachs with honey in preparation for the creation of new
honeycombs in a new home. This cargo of honey also makes swarming bees
less inclined to sting. A newly issued swarm is noticeably gentle for up
to 24 hours and is often capable of being handled by a beekeeper
without gloves or veil.
A swarm attached to a branch
This swarm looks for shelter. A beekeeper may capture it and
introduce it into a new hive, helping meet this need. Otherwise, it
returns to a
feral state, in which case it finds shelter in a hollow tree, excavation, abandoned chimney, or even behind shutters.
Back at the original hive, the first virgin queen to emerge from her
cell immediately seeks to kill all her rival queens still waiting to
emerge. Usually, however, the bees deliberately prevent her from doing
this, in which case, she too leads a second swarm from the hive.
Successive swarms are called 'after-swarms' or 'casts' and can be very
small, often with just a thousand or so bees—as opposed to a prime
swarm, which may contain as many as ten to twenty-thousand bees.
A small after-swarm has less chance of survival and may threaten the
original hive's survival by depleting it. When a hive swarms despite the
beekeeper's preventative efforts, a good management practice is to give
the depleted hive a couple frames of open brood with eggs. This helps
replenish the hive more quickly and gives a second opportunity to raise a
queen if there is a mating failure.
Each race or sub-species of honey bee has its own swarming
characteristics. Italian bees are very prolific and inclined to swarm;
Northern European black bees have a strong tendency to supersede their
old queen without swarming. These differences are the result of
differing evolutionary pressures in the regions where each sub-species
evolved.
