Wrapped winter honey bee hives in the Yukon

THE WORKER BEE

Even at this time of year, when there is no nectar and pollen to collect, a worker bee's job is still not done. A winter worker is in charge of climate control in the hive and maintaining that hungry queen. A winter worker may live up to six times longer than her summer counterpart, whose expected lifespan is approximately six weeks.

The worker bee is probably the most recognizable honey bee in the bee hive.

Worker bee checking out the smoker

Most people are familiar with her distinguishable black and orange stripes as she goes about the business of collecting pollen and nectar for her hive. Inadvertently, she is also performing one of the most important jobs on earth, she is pollinating.

Yes, I am using ‘she,’ ALL worker bees are female.

Let’s have a closer look at the amazing worker bee.

LIFECYCLE

Our worker bee starts out her life as a fertilized egg, laid in a sterilized cell by the Queen Bee herself. In three days the egg hatches into a larva. A worker bee larva is fed Royal Jelly by a nurse bee (also a worker) for the first three days. Royal Jelly (the food of the Queen Bee) is high in protein, vitamins and minerals. This gives the larva a kick start to grow and develop.

After the third day, her diet will consist of Bee Bread, which is a combination of honey and pollen. This continues until the ninth day, when a nurse bee will cap the cell by placing wax over the opening. Our worker bee larva will continue through her pupa stage all by herself.

Hatching worker bee (top right)

At 21 days, she chews her way through the capping and emerges as a full grown adult. She is afforded a small amount of time to get her ‘hive legs,’ her stripes and her eyes will finish developing. Then she has to live up to her name ... after all, she is a worker bee.

FIRST THREE WEEKS AS A WORKER BEE

From the moment she emerges from her wax cell, she is known as a house bee. Her duties are numerous, and she is automatically equipped to handle them all. The following is a house bee’s ‘to do list.’

·      Housekeeping Bee – this includes cleaning and polishing brood cells (where the Queen Bee lays eggs) as well as honey comb (where honey will be deposited).

·      Queen Bee Attendant – this is an important job, as there is only one queen bee, and keeping her healthy so she can produce more honey bees ensures the survival of the whole hive – duties include feeding, grooming and temperature control for the queen.

·      Nurse Bee – in this role, she is responsible for feeding larva, and looking after any sick or injured bees in the hive.

·      Construction Bee – there are a few positions as a construction bee, including wax production (wax is produced in glands on the underside of a worker bee’s abdomen), construction worker (chews and shapes the flakes of wax) and the engineering worker (ensures those hexagons are perfect).

·      Honey-making Bee (my favorite bee!) - this is a stage of development where she has specific enzymes in her honey-stomach to actually turn the nectar brought in by the foraging bee into honey.

SECOND THREE WEEKS AS A WORKER BEE

Foraging worker in a crocus

At about three weeks of age our worker bee is refer to as a foraging bee. Foraging is left for the older worker bees as it is a dangerous occupation.

Here are some of the many hazards that may befall a foraging worker.

·      She may get eaten by another animal – in Southern Alberta, skunks are quite a hazard as they like to sit at the step of a honey bee hive, gather up the coming and going workers, and simply eat them.

·      During the summer many vehicle grills are dotted with foraging worker bees who tried to cross the road.

·      A sudden wind or rain storm can leave a forager stranded away from her hive – a worker bee uses honey for fuel to fly, and if she runs out of honey, she can’t fly and is left to walk home. You can help her out by providing a walking honey bee with a drop of honey, she can have a snack and the energy to fly home.

·      Water is essential to the survival of a honey bee hive, but gathering water can be a death-defying act.

·      Somewhere toward the end of her foraging life, our worker bee may become a guard bee. This job becomes of paramount importance towards early fall – when robbing season begins. Not only does she have to defend her hive from robbing workers from other hives, but wasps are looking for a fall snack as well.

Our foraging bees have a few things on their shopping lists.

·      Nectar is the main ingredient of honey. Nectar is collected from flowers and carried back to the hive in a honey bee’s ‘honey stomach.’ The foraging bee starts the process of turning the nectar into honey, but has to transfer the nectar to a younger ‘honey-making bee’ in the hive for the process to be complete.

·      Pollen is what our foraging bee gets covered in while she’s retrieving nectar from a flower. The pollen dust settles on her fuzzy body. As she flies away she cleans the pollen off, adds a little nectar or honey to dry pollen spores, and sticks the granule to her back legs.

·      Tree resin – this is one of the ingredients used to produce propolis. Propolis is a mixture of tree resin, wax and water. It is used to sterilize all cells in the hive. It also serves as a sealant for the hive against wind and rain. Propolis is so sticky, that hive boxes can not be pulled apart without the use of a hive tool!

·      Water – as for all living things, including honey bees, water is essential. Water is also used to help cool the hive down during the hot summer months.

After three weeks as a house bee and an additional three or so weeks as a foraging bee, our worker bee is worn out. Her contribution to the survival of her hive is over. Hopefully, there are many more honey bees to continue where she has left off, and ensure the survival of her species.

Busy workers on top of honey frames

 The Buzz About Bee Pollen

So what’s all the buzz about? 

This week it’s Bee Pollen. That crunchy, slightly sweet tasting, fantastic source of vitamins and energy, that honey bees collect while visiting flowers.

Where do honey bees get Bee Pollen?

While a foraging bee moves around a flower collecting nectar to make that sweet product called honey, that we all love, the stamen in the flower releases a fine dust called pollen. Anyone who suffers from hay fever knows all about pollen!

On closer inspection, a honey bee is quite fuzzy. This released pollen gets caught in the hairs on her body. She is conveniently equipped with combs on her legs to ‘brush’ her hair. She places the pollen in her mouth, adds a little bit of nectar to create a sticky ball, and packs it onto her back legs to be transported back to the hive.

What do bees use pollen for?

In the hive, she will deposit the pollen into a cell close to the brood. The nurse bees use the pollen to feed the worker bee and drone larva. A few worker bees also eat pollen. These bees turn the pollen into precious Royal Jelly to feed the queen.

How is Bee Pollen collected?

When a beekeeper wants to collect pollen, a pollen collector will be attached to the front of the hive. The foraging bees have to wiggle through the narrow holes of a pollen collector. While doing this, the pollen is scraped off her back legs and falls

into a collection drawer to be removed later by the beekeeper. Not all pollen collected is used for human consumption. It can also be stored and fed back to the bees in the spring before flowers have started to bloom, or in the winter (weather permitting) to boost pollen stores in hive.

Why is Bee Pollen different colors?

Every flower produces its own color of pollen. Pollen colors can range from white, yellow, orange, brown and grey to shades of red and blue!

Why use Bee Pollen?

Bee Pollen has been described as Mother Nature’s Multi-Vitamin. Bee Pollen is packed full of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and coenzymes that are so beneficial to the human body. (For a complete listing visit www.beepollenbuzz.com)

I take a teaspoon every morning for the almost instant energy it provides. Some people like it with their lunch to offset any thoughts of an afternoon nap! It’s not recommended for evening consumption … unless you’re a shift-worker!

Bee Pollen, just one of the many benefits honey bees bring to our lives!

Meanwhile in New Zealand …

While Canadian honey bees are hopefully staying warm in their hives, honey bees in New Zealand are in the peak of their honey collecting season. This also includes the phenomena of swarming.

The above picture is a beautiful example of not one, but two honey bee swarms in a tree. Each swarm contains thousands and thousands of bees.

So why would honey bees leave the comfort of a hive and strike out on their own to hang, unprotected, in a tree?

The original queen, in the original hive has created so many bees that they have become overpopulated. At this point, the worker bees begin to create new queens. Before these new queens hatch, the original queen will leave the hive, and swarm. When she does this, about half the bees in the colony will accompany her. Once out of the hive, she will pick a location (like a branch in a tree) and her dedicated workers will surround and cover her for protection. She will wait here until a suitable new home has been found.

Numerous scout bees go right to work. A scout bee’s job is to scope out new digs. Upon finding a plausible location, she comes back to the swarm and performs a waggle dance giving directions to a possible new home.

When everyone agrees on a location, the swarm as a whole, will move to the new location and set up house.

Or ... a lucky beekeeper discovers the swarm and proceeds to ‘catch the swarm.’

One plan of action is to set a brood box under the swarm. This is where you want the bees to land when you ‘snap’ the branch. If at all possible, grab the end of the branch, and literally give it a good snap down. This will dislodge the bees and they will fall into the box. Some usually stay, but more than a few will take exception to the disruption and you end up in a cloud of not so happy honey bees! Full bee suits are generally appreciated at this point!!

An inspection of the box to see if you can spot the queen is imperative. This is the secret to swarm catching. Once you have the queen, you have her bees. You can gently scoop, or brush the remaining bees from the branch into the box. Leaving the box in place, as long as the queen is there, gives the scouts time to rejoin their colony. The box, with the swarm inside, can be moved after dark to a suitable location.

Liz and Jordan, our New Zealand beekeepers, are proud owners of three hives! All acquired by skillful swarm catching!

That’s A Wrap

If you happen to come across bee hives this time of year, they tend to look a little different! Most, at least here in Canada, will be wrapped, either singling or as a group. This is a beekeeper's way of ‘tucking’ her bees in for the winter.

Honey Bee hives are wrapped, or insulated, in the fall with hopes of increasing their chance of winter survival. Honey bees are warm-blooded and need all the help they can get to stay warm during our long, cold winters.

After the beekeeper has done his part, those worker bees are left to do the rest. The queen honey bee needs to be kept warm (about 30^oC) and alive so she can lay eggs for the new spring workforce.

So, what exactly are those worker bees doing in there?

They are going to cluster around their queen. The workers closest to her will flex their wing muscles to create body heat to keep her warm. The workers rotate through the cluster eventually ending up on the outside. Here they will stack their bodies and seal the cluster between the combs trapping the heat in the cluster. The temperature at the edge of the cluster will be around 10^oC. A little chilly for our heat loving bees! After a bit of a break, they head back into the center of the cluster and start all over again.

It’s critical that enough honey has been stored (and left by the beekeeper) to provide fuel for the worker bees. There also needs to be enough pollen in the hive for worker bees to consume and create royal jelly to feed to their queen.

Once the temperatures drop, and the bees go into a cluster in their hive, you may not see them again until spring. Each worker is capable of spending months in the hive without going on a ‘relief’ flight. I think, by the end of the winter, they have all six legs crossed!

This is a tough time for a beekeeper, as winter it is a time to wait and hope.