The Bees' Hum An Introduction to the Hive
by Aliess Margaret Brady
The waxen walls of a bee’s honeycomb have a gold-tinged translucence, fragile and easily crushed. Yet, left untouched, it can be perfectly preserved. Edible honeycomb was found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, over 3,000 years old.
Seen through the filtered gossamer of a wild hive in the woods, the honey-filled wax might take on a dusky yellow look, though, seen by the bees, it is perhaps a cool range of multi-faceted blues, constructed by their busy bodies working, humming, and dancing the way to fields of flowers reflecting brilliant ultra-violet light during the spring and summer months.
Living and working in the darkness of the hive, female worker bees make wax inside their bodies from the nectar of flowers. When more cells are needed for the growing hive, females, depending on how old they are, will gorge themselves on honey and cluster in large numbers, raising their body temperature and slowly secreting slivers of wax from the four pairs of glands on the underside of the abdomen. Then the bees will harvest these wax scales, forming hexagonal cells with their mouths and legs in the part of the hive that needs it, repeating the perfection of a divine geometry, hexagon upon hexagon, row after row.
At the height of the season, the queen lays up to 2,000 eggs per day in the various cells made for her brood, the bee pupae of thousands of young workers, hundreds of drones and only a few future queens. The young bees emerge just as many older worker bees die, their fragile wings shredded to pieces in flights which in sum would equal a trip four times around the earth. A strong hive will have a population of about 35,000-45,000 bees in the summer, dropping to about 5,000 bees in the winter. One hive can produce 60 pounds of honey in a good season, about 20 to 30 pounds more than they need to make it through the winter. The colony does not hibernate, but stays active, clustering together to stay warm, eating their supply of honey.
Left to nature, a queen bee develops from a normal worker egg, laid in a specially constructed, acorn-shaped, vertical cell. From birth she and a few others will be fed a thick, milky substance called royal jelly. This is fed to all "newborn" bees in the days before they begin to pupate, after which those destined to be workers and drones are fed a regular diet of pollen and nectar. Worker bees are all female. Drones are male bees, which wander through the hive, snacking on honey and pollen, congregating in special flight areas looking for young queens with which they can mate. On her bridal flight, a young queen will mate with 10 or 12 drones, storing their sperm inside her body for the duration of her life, and later fertilizing her own eggs.
In the summer, worker bees only live for about 40 days. When a bee is born, its first job is to clean out the cell in which she was born. She then spends one to two days cleaning the cells with her saliva and keeping the brood warm. When she is three to five days old, she begins to feed the older larvae. Pollen is mixed with water to form a type of bread fed to the growing larvae. At six to seven days old, she is a fully-fledged "nurse," entrusted with the feeding of the younger, more delicate larvae, some of which will become queens. By the age of 12-17 days, the worker bee’s body is mature enough to produce wax, build comb, carry food, and remove dead bees and unwanted matter from the hive. At the ripe old age of 18-21 days, she guards the hive entrance, brushing her antennae over whatever enters, attacking and stinging meddlesome beings. At 22 days old, her foraging begins.
As a mature worker bee, her foraging duties will take her on flights of six miles or more round-trip, at 13-15 miles per hour. She will visit between 50 and 1,000 flowers per day, sometimes pollinating several thousand, collecting pollen, nectar and water for the products which she and other workers will make for the growth and strength of the hive. These products of the hive have been used for human health and healing for centuries by many cultures. Egyptians, Grecians, Romans, and Middle Easterners all revered the bee for the healing capacities of its products as well as the sweetness of its honey, as shown in drawings, carvings and literature.
Bee Pollen
Honey bees are very discriminating; they select only pollens that contain the greatest amount of protein and other nutrients. The pollen collects on the bees naturally, in tiny baskets located on their furry hindlegs, as they wriggle past the stamen of the flower to harvest the plant’s nectar. Bees mix the pollen with their own secretions and nectar to form granules which they will use for food. Rich in vitamins, especially B12 and E, bee pollen is an excellent source of amino acids and enzymes. Granules are gathered by beekeepers through the use of a trap that gently gathers bits of pollen as each bee returns to the hive.
As a nutritional product, bee pollen promotes energy and endurance, containing five to seven times as much protein per ounce as meat-based proteins. Athletes have been using bee pollen since before the first Olympic games, for added energy as well as an accelerated return to regulated breathing and a normal heart rate. It is also used as a nutritional supplement to retard hardening of the arteries and strengthen the immune system. People with allergies and hay fever often take bee pollen before and during allergy season to prevent the onset of symptoms. It has also been used as a disinfectant, a natural sleeping tonic, for sore throats, urinary system revitalizers and muscle invigorators. It has, in addition, been the subject of studies to determine if it can control the runaway growth of cancer cells. So far, the results have been positive.
In the fullness of summer, when fruits and vegetables are blossoming, the bees from an average hive might visit 225,000 flowers per day, pollinating everything from clover, melons, and cucumbers to tomatoes, peppers, apples, and most other fruits and berries. Without the bees, we would be eating mostly grains. Approximately 50 commercially grown crops depend upon direct pollination by the bee for abundant food production, equaling about one-third of the American diet. An inadequately pollinated plant will yield small and misshapen fruit, unacceptable at the supermarket. Reitveld’s Farm in Bourbonnais, Illinois purchased ten hives four years ago to pollinate their melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. Without the bees, Rhonda Reitveld said, they’d have ten blossoms per plant. With the bees, they get 40, dramatically increasing their yield.
To the bee, that field of honeydew or watermelon is a landscape in shades of gray, each blossom a burst of radiant ultraviolet color. Bees see primarily the blues in the short end of the color spectrum. They are completely blind to red, and greens appear gray. The eye of the bee is made up of thousands of tiny light receptors, each eight-petaled, like a lotus, with light penetrating its center. The perception of light and color therefore is multi-faceted, enabling the bee to read angles of sunlight like a roadmap, and effectively communicate, through dance, the location of great fields of nectar and pollen to the rest of the hive.
Propolis
During the last part of her life, a worker bee stops gathering nectar and pollen and instead gathers tree saps and resinous substances from buds, leafy stalks and the twigs of young trees. This she mixes with bee secretions to make propolis, which a younger worker will use to coat many surfaces in the hive, protecting it from infection. The entrance to the hive is liberally coated with propolis, rubbing off on bees as they come and go, protecting them against bacteria and viral infection. Taken from Greek, propolis means "for the city," or "in defense of the city." It is aptly named. Propolis is just as effective an antibiotic for humans. It is even believed to increase the effectiveness of other antibiotics such as penicillin and the myacins. Credited with antifungal, antiviral, analgesic and anti-oxidizing properties, it is believed to be particularly effective against circulatory problems including high blood pressure. It is also used to fight sinus and bronchial ailments, gastrointestinal and skin problems, and many oral infections including those that cause bad breath.
Royal Jelly
Each hive has only one ruling queen, who may live up to five years, laying as many as a quarter million eggs in one season. Unlike workers and drones, the queen is fed royal jelly her entire life, a blend of two glandular secretions made by nurse bees. She lives where the young are hatched, wandering regally through her court, attended by workers who protect and wash her, bring her food, brush back her hair, and carry away her excrement. All the while, the queen emits pheremones which brush off on the workers that attend her, spreading through the hive, sending the message that she is alive and the hive is well. Royal jelly contains 18 amino acids, eight enzymes, 16 vitamins, 15 minerals, nucleic acids, essential fatty acids, flavonoids, and lecithin. Experts surmise that her productivity, as well as her life span, have to do with her diet. The action of royal jelly is systemic, generally affecting overall biological function. It has been used to retard the aging process, aid in the emotional problems of adolescents, help with menopause, and act as a tonic for the nervous system. It has also been used to improve sexual function, glandular and vascular diseases and general well-being.
Honey
The type of honey made by bees depends upon the types of foliage and flowers available. Honey is a natural sweetener, containing riboflavin, thiamine, ascorbic acid, and minerals. It has been used as a topical remedy for skin irritations, open wounds, burns, cataracts, and ulcers. Honey can also act as an anti-inflammatory and expectorant with beneficial effects on bronchitis, asthma, rhinitis, and sinusitis. Antioxidant-rich honeys may also find a role in skin care products, as well as in the kitchen as a baking aid or snack.
Another interesting development relative to honey and industry is its discovery as a preservative. Bacteria will not live in it. Clemson University scientists in South Carolina have been testing different varieties of honey for their level of antioxidants and their ability to slow the oxidation of fats. If honey gains popularity as a preservative in processed foods, there will be even greater demand for the produce of the Apis Melifera, the honey carrier from Europe.
Valuable and heathful as it is for adults, however, honey is not good for infants. The spores of lostridium botulinum it harbors are harmless to adults, but dangerous — even deadly — for infants, who cannot digest it. Infants who ingest honey can wind up with botulism, leading to dehydration, pneumonia, and even death. Some doctors recommend waiting eight months until you feed your baby honey, but many suggest wating a full year.
After that first year, though, you and your child can both delight in a sweet the ancients loved. You can relate to the Greeks, who described bees as the "birds of the Muses," or give praise to Prophet Mohammed, who once called honey "a remedy for every illness."
In fact, beekeeping is an ancient art which has influenced the entire Mediterranean region. It’s been a viable profession in Egypt for almost 5,000 years, later extending east to the Middle East and south into Africa. Ancient pictorial records from 1800 B.C. show the beekeeper harvesting honey from the back of a cylindrical-shaped hive, while his assistant drives the bees to the front with puffs of smoke. And the sign of the bee in Egyptian hieroglyphs seems to signify royalty, epitomizing the ideals of industry, creativity, and wealth. Indeed, many ancient cultures considered the bees to be the messengers of the gods. If they are, they still speak to us today.
--------------------------------------------
The Honey Industry and the Fate of the Wild Hive
Though the agricultural relationship between humans and bees is perhaps the oldest on record, traditional beekeeping is rarely practiced in this country any longer. Like most other food products, honey and beekeeping have gone the way of agribusiness — a controlled science of bee management rather than a subtle relationship between human and bee.
All too often, bees are killed in the production of honey. Many beekeepers leave sugar water in place of the honey they take, assuming the bees can do well enough on that. The whole hive may be destroyed if the keeper doesn’t wish to leave any honey with which they might winter over until spring.
Perhaps worse, artificial insemination involving death of the male is now also the norm for generations of new queens. According to the Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Lab of Columbus, Ohio, "Today, the use of instrumental insemination is practical and highly successful. Our increasing knowledge of bee genetics, mating designs, and practical field selection methods, combined with the improvements in equipment design and technique, offers an exciting future in honey bee stock improvement. Instrumental insemination is an essential skill. The ability to control your breeding stock will open new opportunities to develop and maintain selected lines."
Perhaps the best solution for buying harmless honey is to support small beekeepers at your local farmstand, or get in touch with the companies who sell the brand names you like. Ask them if they let their bees "over winter," not just with sugar water, but with at least 20-30 pounds of the bees’ own honey. While you’re at it, ask the companies who package bee pollen, propolis, and royal jelly how they harvest these products, whether and how they might protect the health and vitality of the colony. In this way you can be a conscious consumer, and perhaps change the tide of harmful consumption. — Aliess Margaret Brady
Resources
"My Honey" brand honey takes good care of their bees and is sold at Whole Foods.
Reitveld’s Farm Stand is located on Larry Power Road in Bourbonnais, three miles east of Illinois Highway 50. Call and ask them about their honey, 815-932-6208.
http://www.consciouschoice.com/1995-98/cc116/beeshum1106.html
by Aliess Margaret Brady
The waxen walls of a bee’s honeycomb have a gold-tinged translucence, fragile and easily crushed. Yet, left untouched, it can be perfectly preserved. Edible honeycomb was found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, over 3,000 years old.
Seen through the filtered gossamer of a wild hive in the woods, the honey-filled wax might take on a dusky yellow look, though, seen by the bees, it is perhaps a cool range of multi-faceted blues, constructed by their busy bodies working, humming, and dancing the way to fields of flowers reflecting brilliant ultra-violet light during the spring and summer months.
Living and working in the darkness of the hive, female worker bees make wax inside their bodies from the nectar of flowers. When more cells are needed for the growing hive, females, depending on how old they are, will gorge themselves on honey and cluster in large numbers, raising their body temperature and slowly secreting slivers of wax from the four pairs of glands on the underside of the abdomen. Then the bees will harvest these wax scales, forming hexagonal cells with their mouths and legs in the part of the hive that needs it, repeating the perfection of a divine geometry, hexagon upon hexagon, row after row.
At the height of the season, the queen lays up to 2,000 eggs per day in the various cells made for her brood, the bee pupae of thousands of young workers, hundreds of drones and only a few future queens. The young bees emerge just as many older worker bees die, their fragile wings shredded to pieces in flights which in sum would equal a trip four times around the earth. A strong hive will have a population of about 35,000-45,000 bees in the summer, dropping to about 5,000 bees in the winter. One hive can produce 60 pounds of honey in a good season, about 20 to 30 pounds more than they need to make it through the winter. The colony does not hibernate, but stays active, clustering together to stay warm, eating their supply of honey.
Left to nature, a queen bee develops from a normal worker egg, laid in a specially constructed, acorn-shaped, vertical cell. From birth she and a few others will be fed a thick, milky substance called royal jelly. This is fed to all "newborn" bees in the days before they begin to pupate, after which those destined to be workers and drones are fed a regular diet of pollen and nectar. Worker bees are all female. Drones are male bees, which wander through the hive, snacking on honey and pollen, congregating in special flight areas looking for young queens with which they can mate. On her bridal flight, a young queen will mate with 10 or 12 drones, storing their sperm inside her body for the duration of her life, and later fertilizing her own eggs.
In the summer, worker bees only live for about 40 days. When a bee is born, its first job is to clean out the cell in which she was born. She then spends one to two days cleaning the cells with her saliva and keeping the brood warm. When she is three to five days old, she begins to feed the older larvae. Pollen is mixed with water to form a type of bread fed to the growing larvae. At six to seven days old, she is a fully-fledged "nurse," entrusted with the feeding of the younger, more delicate larvae, some of which will become queens. By the age of 12-17 days, the worker bee’s body is mature enough to produce wax, build comb, carry food, and remove dead bees and unwanted matter from the hive. At the ripe old age of 18-21 days, she guards the hive entrance, brushing her antennae over whatever enters, attacking and stinging meddlesome beings. At 22 days old, her foraging begins.
As a mature worker bee, her foraging duties will take her on flights of six miles or more round-trip, at 13-15 miles per hour. She will visit between 50 and 1,000 flowers per day, sometimes pollinating several thousand, collecting pollen, nectar and water for the products which she and other workers will make for the growth and strength of the hive. These products of the hive have been used for human health and healing for centuries by many cultures. Egyptians, Grecians, Romans, and Middle Easterners all revered the bee for the healing capacities of its products as well as the sweetness of its honey, as shown in drawings, carvings and literature.
Bee Pollen
Honey bees are very discriminating; they select only pollens that contain the greatest amount of protein and other nutrients. The pollen collects on the bees naturally, in tiny baskets located on their furry hindlegs, as they wriggle past the stamen of the flower to harvest the plant’s nectar. Bees mix the pollen with their own secretions and nectar to form granules which they will use for food. Rich in vitamins, especially B12 and E, bee pollen is an excellent source of amino acids and enzymes. Granules are gathered by beekeepers through the use of a trap that gently gathers bits of pollen as each bee returns to the hive.
As a nutritional product, bee pollen promotes energy and endurance, containing five to seven times as much protein per ounce as meat-based proteins. Athletes have been using bee pollen since before the first Olympic games, for added energy as well as an accelerated return to regulated breathing and a normal heart rate. It is also used as a nutritional supplement to retard hardening of the arteries and strengthen the immune system. People with allergies and hay fever often take bee pollen before and during allergy season to prevent the onset of symptoms. It has also been used as a disinfectant, a natural sleeping tonic, for sore throats, urinary system revitalizers and muscle invigorators. It has, in addition, been the subject of studies to determine if it can control the runaway growth of cancer cells. So far, the results have been positive.
In the fullness of summer, when fruits and vegetables are blossoming, the bees from an average hive might visit 225,000 flowers per day, pollinating everything from clover, melons, and cucumbers to tomatoes, peppers, apples, and most other fruits and berries. Without the bees, we would be eating mostly grains. Approximately 50 commercially grown crops depend upon direct pollination by the bee for abundant food production, equaling about one-third of the American diet. An inadequately pollinated plant will yield small and misshapen fruit, unacceptable at the supermarket. Reitveld’s Farm in Bourbonnais, Illinois purchased ten hives four years ago to pollinate their melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. Without the bees, Rhonda Reitveld said, they’d have ten blossoms per plant. With the bees, they get 40, dramatically increasing their yield.
To the bee, that field of honeydew or watermelon is a landscape in shades of gray, each blossom a burst of radiant ultraviolet color. Bees see primarily the blues in the short end of the color spectrum. They are completely blind to red, and greens appear gray. The eye of the bee is made up of thousands of tiny light receptors, each eight-petaled, like a lotus, with light penetrating its center. The perception of light and color therefore is multi-faceted, enabling the bee to read angles of sunlight like a roadmap, and effectively communicate, through dance, the location of great fields of nectar and pollen to the rest of the hive.
Propolis
During the last part of her life, a worker bee stops gathering nectar and pollen and instead gathers tree saps and resinous substances from buds, leafy stalks and the twigs of young trees. This she mixes with bee secretions to make propolis, which a younger worker will use to coat many surfaces in the hive, protecting it from infection. The entrance to the hive is liberally coated with propolis, rubbing off on bees as they come and go, protecting them against bacteria and viral infection. Taken from Greek, propolis means "for the city," or "in defense of the city." It is aptly named. Propolis is just as effective an antibiotic for humans. It is even believed to increase the effectiveness of other antibiotics such as penicillin and the myacins. Credited with antifungal, antiviral, analgesic and anti-oxidizing properties, it is believed to be particularly effective against circulatory problems including high blood pressure. It is also used to fight sinus and bronchial ailments, gastrointestinal and skin problems, and many oral infections including those that cause bad breath.
Royal Jelly
Each hive has only one ruling queen, who may live up to five years, laying as many as a quarter million eggs in one season. Unlike workers and drones, the queen is fed royal jelly her entire life, a blend of two glandular secretions made by nurse bees. She lives where the young are hatched, wandering regally through her court, attended by workers who protect and wash her, bring her food, brush back her hair, and carry away her excrement. All the while, the queen emits pheremones which brush off on the workers that attend her, spreading through the hive, sending the message that she is alive and the hive is well. Royal jelly contains 18 amino acids, eight enzymes, 16 vitamins, 15 minerals, nucleic acids, essential fatty acids, flavonoids, and lecithin. Experts surmise that her productivity, as well as her life span, have to do with her diet. The action of royal jelly is systemic, generally affecting overall biological function. It has been used to retard the aging process, aid in the emotional problems of adolescents, help with menopause, and act as a tonic for the nervous system. It has also been used to improve sexual function, glandular and vascular diseases and general well-being.
Honey
The type of honey made by bees depends upon the types of foliage and flowers available. Honey is a natural sweetener, containing riboflavin, thiamine, ascorbic acid, and minerals. It has been used as a topical remedy for skin irritations, open wounds, burns, cataracts, and ulcers. Honey can also act as an anti-inflammatory and expectorant with beneficial effects on bronchitis, asthma, rhinitis, and sinusitis. Antioxidant-rich honeys may also find a role in skin care products, as well as in the kitchen as a baking aid or snack.
Another interesting development relative to honey and industry is its discovery as a preservative. Bacteria will not live in it. Clemson University scientists in South Carolina have been testing different varieties of honey for their level of antioxidants and their ability to slow the oxidation of fats. If honey gains popularity as a preservative in processed foods, there will be even greater demand for the produce of the Apis Melifera, the honey carrier from Europe.
Valuable and heathful as it is for adults, however, honey is not good for infants. The spores of lostridium botulinum it harbors are harmless to adults, but dangerous — even deadly — for infants, who cannot digest it. Infants who ingest honey can wind up with botulism, leading to dehydration, pneumonia, and even death. Some doctors recommend waiting eight months until you feed your baby honey, but many suggest wating a full year.
After that first year, though, you and your child can both delight in a sweet the ancients loved. You can relate to the Greeks, who described bees as the "birds of the Muses," or give praise to Prophet Mohammed, who once called honey "a remedy for every illness."
In fact, beekeeping is an ancient art which has influenced the entire Mediterranean region. It’s been a viable profession in Egypt for almost 5,000 years, later extending east to the Middle East and south into Africa. Ancient pictorial records from 1800 B.C. show the beekeeper harvesting honey from the back of a cylindrical-shaped hive, while his assistant drives the bees to the front with puffs of smoke. And the sign of the bee in Egyptian hieroglyphs seems to signify royalty, epitomizing the ideals of industry, creativity, and wealth. Indeed, many ancient cultures considered the bees to be the messengers of the gods. If they are, they still speak to us today.
--------------------------------------------
The Honey Industry and the Fate of the Wild Hive
Though the agricultural relationship between humans and bees is perhaps the oldest on record, traditional beekeeping is rarely practiced in this country any longer. Like most other food products, honey and beekeeping have gone the way of agribusiness — a controlled science of bee management rather than a subtle relationship between human and bee.
All too often, bees are killed in the production of honey. Many beekeepers leave sugar water in place of the honey they take, assuming the bees can do well enough on that. The whole hive may be destroyed if the keeper doesn’t wish to leave any honey with which they might winter over until spring.
Perhaps worse, artificial insemination involving death of the male is now also the norm for generations of new queens. According to the Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Lab of Columbus, Ohio, "Today, the use of instrumental insemination is practical and highly successful. Our increasing knowledge of bee genetics, mating designs, and practical field selection methods, combined with the improvements in equipment design and technique, offers an exciting future in honey bee stock improvement. Instrumental insemination is an essential skill. The ability to control your breeding stock will open new opportunities to develop and maintain selected lines."
Perhaps the best solution for buying harmless honey is to support small beekeepers at your local farmstand, or get in touch with the companies who sell the brand names you like. Ask them if they let their bees "over winter," not just with sugar water, but with at least 20-30 pounds of the bees’ own honey. While you’re at it, ask the companies who package bee pollen, propolis, and royal jelly how they harvest these products, whether and how they might protect the health and vitality of the colony. In this way you can be a conscious consumer, and perhaps change the tide of harmful consumption. — Aliess Margaret Brady
Resources
"My Honey" brand honey takes good care of their bees and is sold at Whole Foods.
Reitveld’s Farm Stand is located on Larry Power Road in Bourbonnais, three miles east of Illinois Highway 50. Call and ask them about their honey, 815-932-6208.
http://www.consciouschoice.com/1995-98/cc116/beeshum1106.html
