Bees!!!

I think I need to take a break from the political stuff and the healthcare problems that I have been dealing with lately.   This is supposed to be "Farmer" Dan's blog anyway so as we near the exciting time of spring I will change over to more agricultural related posts for a while.

Two weeks from now I am going to get some more bees!  I ended up losing one hive this winter - not from the dreaded CCD (colony collapse disorder) that has made headlines - but mainly because of a good old fashioned MN winter.  Both hives got buried two times in snowstorms and that didn't help matters.  So on April 21st I am going to Stillwater to pick up two packages of bees.  Above is what a package of bees looks like.  The bee supplier I use gets his bees from California.  All of this starts back in February when the Almond trees bloom in California.  This is such an intense and big bloom that the bees really increase in numbers.  After the bloom is over the beekeepers there begin to divide hives, this involves brushing extra worker bees into a large container and then they get dumped into a box like the above picture.

Then the bees are put into a mini hive or nuc - at the same time larvae are put into incubators in queen cups and then placed into the nucs.  The bees see this and begin to raise this queen as their own.  The only difference between the queens and the workers is that the queens are kept in the cells for a shorter amount of time (you would think longer) and fed a richer food called royal jelly.  After the queens hatch they spend about one week in the hive and then fly out and mate with the drones of other hives.  They mate anywhere from 2-10 times and receive all the sperm they will need to lay thousands and thousands of more bees during these mating flights.  Tragically the drones die after mating, I'm just glad humans don't operate the same way although I have known of a few females who try to operate in the same way.

I don't have any of my own pictures of the above process, but imagine a large area with about 100 of these small mini hives all in rows and millions of bees flying around and you won't be that far off.

After the queens have been mated the beekeepers go back through the nucs, find the queens and put them into little tiny cages, pack them back into a box like above and then more bees are dumped back into the box with them.  They then have a can of sugar syrup put in the top and off they go!

When I get them they have been in the cages for 3 or more days and are pretty hungry so before I put them into their new home I will spray them with a mixture of corn syrup and water.  This also calms them down a little.  The next step is to pound the cage on the ground to knock all the bees down to the bottom of the box, then I will take the can of sugar and the queen box out.  Before the bees realize what has happened they can be essentially poured into their hive.  The queen still in her box gets wedged in between the frames for now.  After a few days I will go back and check on the hive to make sure they haven't gone looking for a new home and at that time I take out the cork keeping the queen in her little cage and change it for a marshmallow.  The bees will take this out in a few minutes and let her out and then she goes to work laying more eggs for the coming summer.

Just for those of you who may be wondering a pound of bees has about 5500 bees in it and when they get dumped into the box the box rests on a scale and for a few seconds before they start flying the boxes are weighed and will either contain 2 or 3 lbs of bees.  A fully functioning hive in the middle of a good nectar flow in the middle of summer can have up to 80,000 bees.

So now I hoped to explain how much work goes into just getting the bees that I keep here in MN.  There are a number of different breeds of the honeybee, what is interesting is that the main bee used in CA is the Italian bee, the bees that do the best in MN are called carnolian.  All of the bees that come in the package are Italian, but the queen is Carnolian so as she lays eggs the bees that she lays are of a different breed and will eventually outnumber the original Italian bees. 

It is just amazing how much effort and time goes into raising bees, I hope I made it somewhat more clear to someone who has little knowledge of bees to understand just how complicated one part of keeping bees is.  It makes me really appreciate my little fuzzy friends and to really cherish their sweet delicious product that they work so hard to make.