More Bee News

Aren't bees interesting?

Here are some more words about bees that didn't fit into the day at the farm bee experience blog. . .

Beekeeping Options

Allen Larson, the beekeeper from GetBees.net, who delivered the bees to Tara Firma Farms, maintains beehives all over Northern California. He's from Redding and travels far and wide to maintain hives (although not to Idaho). If you would like one, he'll come and set it up and then he'll come back and maintain it. And, you get the honey when it's ready. What a deal! The cost is $570 for the first year and $470 for the next years. This is a great option for those who would love to have increased garden yield or who would just like to assist with the re-population of bees but aren't really interested in beekeeping on a daily basis. And, Allen is just a really nice guy. He's happy to have you invite your friends over for a bee party when he's there. He'll loan out as many suits as he has and talk about bees and show them off while he works. He'll also do a honey tasting!

Another option is to take a beekeeping class, buy the stuff and keep your own bees. Beekeeping classes are offered by Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper, the shop in the Mission at 3520 20th Street. They just finished a round and will be starting up again in August. I'm pretty sure that Mr. Green and I will be in one of those classes. The classes are $20 each (a steal) and getting started with bees is about another $300 total. Cameo Wood, the owner, is an extremely knowledgeable beekeeper and has all the gear you will need. It's always nice to buy local. I like the idea of stimulating business in the Mission.

Bee Mites

One of the things that is killing bees that you will have to deal with if you decide to become a beekeeper is Bee Mites. These little white insects live on the backs of bees and breed by laying eggs in drone cells right before they are sealed. They cause a decrease in the bees' immune systems and make them more susceptible to disease. These will wipe out your hive if you don't do something about them. There are three ways that I've heard of so far to get rid of mites.

One is you put sticky paper in the bottom of your beehive, then sprinkle your bees with powdered sugar, which is a food source. They will groom the mites off of each other as they eat the sugar and the mites will fall to the bottom of the hive, and stick to the paper and die. Seems fairly logical, but sticky in a multitude of ways. . . especially out here in the foggy Sunset District!

Another is you can insert a special drone cell frame into your beehive. The bees will build drone cells, the queen lays eggs in them, the mites lay eggs in them, they get sealed and then you take the frame out of the beehive and freeze it for three or four days, which kills the mites. After it's been frozen you can give it back to the bees for food or scrape it and feed it to your chickens (assuming you have a few around). This seems like a lot of wasted bee effort to me. Both the creating and the clean up. . .

You can also use aromatic essential oils that are a scent the mites don't like. . . such as wintergreen or patchouli. I guess you won't find bee mites on gum chewers or old hippies.

Or, you can do the conventional (and not recommended by me) thing and hang a pesticide strip in your beehive.

As a potential backyard (or roof, as the case may be) beekeeper, I won't use the pesticide strips or the aromatics. They would affect the honey. Probably would do the drone frame or the sugar. NO PESTICIDES.

Why Bees Aren't Flourishing or Colony Collapse Disorder

There are lots of theories about why bee populations are dying. . . the most obvious cause is insecticides. There is a place in China called Sichuan where, for the last ten years people have been pollinating the fruit trees! They have killed off their entire bee population with insecticides. Now, each spring, they crawl through the trees with bottles of pollen and little brushes made with chicken feathers and "pollinate" every blossom. This is outrageous! It occurs to me as something from a post apocalyptic novel or movie! And they've been doing it for ten years!

There are also BT crops. These crops contain, bacillus thuringiensis in their DNA (it's inserted at the seed level) which means they are "bug resistant" or in regular words, it means they have insecticide bred into them. Seems logical to me that these plants would contribute to the death of bees. They certainly have contributed to the decimation of butterflies. Which, by the way, was intentional. Here is an interesting article that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle a while back about BT crops and bees.

There is also the monoculture planting with no ditch banks that big farms do now. Remember the days of collecting bugs (and asparagus) on ditch banks? Now there are no ditch banks. Water is piped underground as a water and space saving technique and every inch of usable space has been converted to field. Bees, like the rest of us, need variety in their diet in order to be healthy. Corn, corn, corn does not a rounded meal make. Maybe there's a link between Colony Collapse Disease in bees and Obesity in humans. It's not too far fetched if you think about it. It is possible that bees shouldn't eat massive amounts of corn and soy products either. . .

Why Raise Bees?

I spend time in my garden. Even though there are over 200 beekeepers in the Sunset District, I could count the bees I've seen in my garden this year on two hands. Not more than six or eight. How sad. Helping to re-establish the bee population in any area is a contribution to society. We need bees. Bees and insects should do the necessary pollinating in our neighborhoods. I (and you, I'm pretty sure) am not interested in doing it myself. If the neighbors' gardens have an increased vegetable and fruit yield because of the bees on my roof, how cool is that?!

Bees are pets with a purpose. Just think of all that honey! And the sound is calming, stress-relieving, meditative. A low hum is a good thing. I can tell you I'll be sitting by my bee box on a regular basis if I get one.

Becoming a beekeeper would bring me closer to nature. I've always been in touch with the earth through plants and gardening. Being responsible for something that is not rooted in the ground and that is producing something from my neighborhood for me is an exciting idea!

There are few things more beautiful than witnessing a bee doing her work as she flies from flower to flower, crawling inside to gather nectar, bobbing through the air from one to the next and then moving on with purpose to another plant. This experience brings me into the present and leaves me smiling.

Beekeeping is just another way to be a steward of the earth. . . I want to know what my neighborhood tastes like. Aren't you curious about yours?

AUTHOR NOTE: The information above was gleaned from articles I've read and information from beekeepers and is just my opinion. I didn't do any scientific research for this article. lol. I encourage you to find out about bees in your area and in the world by doing your own research in the manner you enjoy most. Happy bee watching!

Beautiful Bees

This morning I had the privilege of learning about bees first-hand.

When we arrived at Tara Firma Farms, Allen Larson, owner of GetBees.net, aka rawhoneyguy on twitter, was already there. I could see the bee boxes, belted in and wrapped with a bright orange tie-down, on the passenger seat of his vehicle.

The weather was perfect. Cloudy and cool compared to last Sunday's mid-90's. Tara greeted us and we met Allen. Then we walked out past the barns to the old milking shed to get started. Allen handed around bee suits and Tara, Elijah and I suited up in full costume. Mr. Green just wore a jacket with hood so he could take pictures. . . I have no idea what the bee-keeping vocabulary is for these get-ups, but they are interesting. The hood with hat that protects the face zips to the collar of the jumpsuit so there's no chance of upset bees getting in underneath. Which is a good thing. Then there are the elbow-length industrial strength gloves. Once dressed, I felt safe. . . and wondered briefly about my tennis shoes, figuring if I was going to get stung, the netting over the toe box would provide good access to the tops of my feet. Ouch.

I didn't need to worry. The bees were well-behaved the whole time we played with them. You can hear when they are agitated. The volume and intensity of the buzzing sound increases quickly and dramatically. When this happened, Allen would just give them a few puffs from the little smoker which was filled with dry grass and they would calm right down. The smoke blocks their sense of smell so they can't smell the pheromone that is released when they are feeling threatened.

Allen carried the two bee boxes, still strapped together, to their new home at the edge of the vegetable garden. He removed the tie-down and then he peeled the duct tape off the bottom of the hive. As he peeled it off, giving the bees access to the outside world, he pumped smoke along the opening. I was expecting bees to come boiling out, but they didn't. A few came out and crawled around on the edge of the box. They he opened the lid. There were a lot of bees crawling around on the lid, going about their bee business. He set it aside.

Then he removed a new frame from the box and showed us that the bees were just starting to build it up with wax. The frames come with the cells already established on them. That way the bees build cells the size that will produce worker bees. Sometimes the bees make bigger cells. These cells produce drones. The queen decides to lay either a fertilized egg (which produces a worker) or an unfertilized egg (which produces a drone) by sticking her head into the cell to see what size it is.

The queen is a very busy woman. She lays between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs per day. When she flies out to mate, all the drones are waiting 100 feet up in the air. This is all the drones do. Once they leave the hive, they are not allowed back in. They fly around at 100 feet waiting for a female. Once they mate, they die. If they don't mate, they die. That's it. A drone's life is short and to the point.

The queen mates about 20 times a day for up to three days and then goes back to the hive to lay eggs. That's what she does. She can't feed herself, so the other bees feed her as long as she is laying well. If her egg laying slows, the bees will create another queen from a larvae by feeding it royal jelly and then will kill the current queen as soon as the new queen is ready.

The workers? Well, they work, work, work. Worker bee life is driven and four months long.

One gets to enjoy twenty to thirty pounds of honey from a hive in a year. It takes 2 million flowers to make a pound of honey. Bees fly over 55,000 miles to make that pound of honey. Each bee visits 50 to 100 flowers on a trip from the hive and makes 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in their lifetime.

There are 50,000 to 80,000 bees in a hive. Once it starts to get over-populated the bees will make a new queen and stop feeding the old queen so she slims down. When she is ready, she will fly out, taking about half the bees with her. They will swarm to a new location.

We spent some time looking at the frames full of bees. I was sharing one with Elijah and I asked if he thought there were three hundred bees on the frame. He said, "No, at least five hundred." It was about 2/3 covered on one side. The bees are beautiful. We saw one do the bee dance, letting the other workers know what was needed in the area where she was working.

We held a frame that was already full of honey. It was heavy. It weighed at least 5 pounds probably more like seven.

I only had one bee hit the front of my hood. They were calm the whole time we played with them. Allen told us that if we ever ended up in a swarm of angry bees to run and swat, don't stand and swat. Bees are territorial and if you run you will get to the edge of their territory and they will leave you alone. Same with wasps or yellow jackets. If you do get stung by a bee, scrape the stinger out with your fingernail as quickly as possible. Don't bother looking for a credit card.

Allen tried to find the queen, but she was illusive. She is pretty easy to spot if she is on a frame. She's twice as big as a worker bee and has a shiny upper back. No fuzz. We didn't see her.

The sun came out and things started to heat up. Allen put the frames back in the hive and we left the bees to get used to their new home. Back at the old milking barn, Allen got out four jars of honey and let us taste them. Each one was completely different. He had raspberry honey, which was light in color and did taste slightly of raspberry. Spring flower had a little citrus to it. Wildflower was darker and richer tasting with just a hint of molasses. And alfalfa, which is the most common type, reminded me of home. When I was in grade school we used to get alfalfa honey every once in a while from a bee grower in Rupert. I liked the wildflower the best. Yum.

Being with the bees was peaceful. Their hum is calming and pleasant. It was an amazing experience to see them working, learn about them and enjoy the morning with new friends. There is a lot of thistle blooming on the farm right now. And vegetables and blackberries. It will be interesting to see, next summer,what Tara Firma Farms tastes like. I'm looking forward to it.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Allen will be maintaining the hive over the course of the year. There will be bee parties each time he comes to the farm. If you are interested in knowing when these bee parties are happening, send Tara Firma Farms an email. Tara and Craig would love for you to come out and experience the bees.

If you'd like to see the rest of my Bee pictures there they are.