Honey Run Apiaries-A Beekeeper’s Blog

Are queen honey bees really the key to longer life? At least one researcher thinks so according to this article ‘An age-old question: will wax slow wane?‘, but I doubt it. Unless I’ve failed to learn anything about bees since I started keeping and studying them some 6 years ago, Mr. David Vaux of La Trobe Univeristy seems not to know much about bees and their normal behavior and life span, some of which would draw a big question on the theories presented in the article. (Ignoring the more blatantly wrong facts such as queens can lay up to 200 eggs a day when the accepted estimate is up to 2000 to 3000 egg per day.)

David Vaux notes that most cells of the queen bee don’t actively divide, which is true of worker bees as well. But queens can live up to 6 years where workers live only about 6 weeks. He give no consideration of why bees die. Bees die (workers and queens) when they succumb to disease, are found to be no longer useful to the hive, are injured or simply wearing out (since their cells don’t divide and repair themselves as human cells do). Workers literally work themselves to death when their muscles and wings physically wear out. So in summer they live for some 6 weeks, but when they cannot fly in winter they can live for 6 months or more (until they start flying again). Queens typically live until they no longer lay a consistent pattern of eggs. When this happens the workers will replace the queen or the hive will die out. Since she rarely flies (normally only for mating and swarming), she doesn’t wear out her wings or muscles (and apparently egg laying is a much less strenuous activity than foraging) Her life span is basically determined by how many eggs she can lay and how long it takes for her to lay those eggs. In cooler climes with longer winters when the queen doesn’t lay eggs, a typical life span may be 2-3 years. But in warm climates or migratory beekeeping operations that follow the blooming flowers a queen may only last a year.

We know diet, stress and the environment can have a significant effect on the health and life span of many animals including insects (and humans). But this research seems to discount the facts that queen bees are feed different food starting when she hatches from an egg, and as an adult she is constantly cleaned, fed and tended to by many workers, and isn’t normally exposed to the sun or weather. Even the temperature and humidity of the hive she lives in is controlled by the workers. Even when mating she won’t fly until it’s 68 degrees Fahrenheit, much warmer than temperatures workers will fly in. She simply is not subject to the same stresses that workers are exposed to. Instead La Trobe seems to think the magic is in the semen that comes from the most fragile inhabitant of the beehive, the drone.

Thus David Vaux proposes inseminating queens with semen and saline and comparing the two groups. I can already tell you the results of this trial. The queens inseminated with semen will life longer, much longer. This is because queens inseminated with semen will be able to head a productive hive and will be well taken care of by the workers. The saline inseminated queen will only lay eggs that will yeild drones and the workers will attempt to replace her as soon as possible before the hive collapses. Without constant infusions of new brood from another hive the hive lead by a drone laying queen will fail. Even when if the queens are banked (stored in hive but not allowed to lay) the workers will favor the semen inseminated queen.

But should the research actually show there is some magic in drone semen that’s great news for me and the few others out there that have the equipment and training to collect it. At $5 per microliter (somewhere around $2.3 million per pound), it’s much more valuable than royal jelly and the demand is sure to drive the price up

We have official begun harvesting honey, nearly 2 weeks behind schedule. Normally I would take off the week of the County Fair to spend time pulling honey and extracting. But this year I simply did not have any time left to take off of my day job. Plus we spent more time at the fair than we normally do because we gave a live bee show as part of the Northwest Ohio Beekeepers Association. It was a good time and I’ll have to post pictures of it later, but it has put me considerably behind.

Our extracting setup is fairly simply. A 20 frame stainless steel Cowen extractor, 8′ stainless uncapping tank, 100 gallon tank, and a 15 gallon bottling tank, all from Kelly’s. We use the bottleing tank most of the year for it’s intended purpose (bottleing honey), but when harvesting we use it to feed honey though a strainer in the 100 gallon tank. Last year we also added a vibrating knife (not pictured), also from Kelly’s, which helps speed things up and reduces the strain on my wrists as compared to the manual electric heated knife. It wasn’t cheap but was definately worth the expense. (The previous year I ended up wearing a wrist brace for 2 months after harvesting and I was seriously worried I might need carpel tunnel surgery).

With this setup we extracted over 6,000lbs in 2005. Some day we’ll add a sump and a pump to move the honey from the extractor to the top 15 gallon tank. But for now I use a step stool and 5 gallon bucket to carry the honey and pour it in the top tank. It’s really not that bad.

I noticed today that the goldenrod has just started blooming. I’m hoping the bees will bring in a good amount of necter to help build up for winter after the last 4 days of rain. By the end of this weekend I hope to pull all the honey off the hives and at least have it in the honey house, but I’m afraid it will take several weeks before I’m done extracting because I can only extract in the evenings and weekends this year and I have to get other beekeeping tasks done… more on that later.

In some recent posts to two mailing lists I regularly read, BEE-L and beekeeping, there was an article posted about the Himachal Pradesh government encouraging the production of ‘sugar free’ honey. If you read the article they seem to be telling a much bigger story without meaning to, and also demonstrate a severe lack of knowlege about beekeeping.

It’s not enough that the market is already flooded with cheap, poor quality honey (that probably actually is honey), but the Himachal Pradesh government admits that beekeepers in that country are producing honey by feeding their bees sugar, at least in lean years. I’m not sure how they are getting away with producing and presumingly selling honey produced from sugar as no legal definition of honey I’m aware of would classified sugar syrup stored in comb as honey.

The sad part is that the most important attributes of honey to packers are it’s color and water content. And dry, water white honey (the lightest color on the scale) typically brings in the highest price. Something easily produced from feeding sugar syrup, if you could call it honey at all.

Perhaps I’m reading into it too much assuming that this sugar produced honey is being sold. But then why would the government want beekeepers to switch production methods to produce another product intended for sale?

I’m not sure if bees would even care about stevia. They may be tricked by it’s sweet taste, but a hive fed only stevia when other food sources aren’t availabe is sure to starve because it lacks any significant value as a carbohydrate. Certainly they would still have to be fed some sugar syrup along with the stevia just to stay alive, which would also mean their ‘sugar free honey’ would not be ‘sugar free’ or ‘honey’. So much for truth in advertizing! Hopefully the Himachal Pradesh government has done enough hard research on this before they invest in some 100,000 behives that are sure to be doomed.

(Ignore this, It’s just some fod for the spiders –Technorati Profile)

So I’ve finally gone and joined the crowd. I started a blog. Of course I’m far from the first beekeeper to keep a blog, journal or diary. Some have kept on paper for years, and Allen Dick has kept ‘A Beekeepers Diary’ before blogs became popular.

But in spite of it’s current popularity, this format does seem to fit my purpose pretty well. I often find myself wanting to post less formal articles than I typically post on my website. Those formal ones take quite some effort to write, spellcheck (something I’m bad at), format, reformat, edit, proofread and gather the appropriate pictures to complement the article. But the blog format really lends itself to a much less formal journal or diary style. Hopefully someone will still find the information in these posts just as usefull as my formal website in spite of the blog buzzword. (It’s even on NPR so I guess that makes it ok?)