What's the Buzz?

Our bees had a productive spring, and our beekeeper, Don Rota, presented us with seven pounds of ravishing, golden, lucid, liquid gold. On Thursday afternoon, we bottled the honey in six- and twelve-ounce glass jars in the farmhouse kitchen.

But what exactly is honey? When bees gather nectar from the flowers, they receive a jolt of energy in the form of carbohydrates (sugars) to keep them going in the hot sun from flower to flower, but the excess is stored in their nectar stomachs. When they return to the hive, they regurgitate the nectar and offer it to another bee. As this nectar is passed from bee to bee, an enzyme in the bees’ stomachs begins the process of turning it into honey. Then the consolidated nectar is put into cells in the hive. Fanning completes the water evaporation process and what’s left is honey. Bees make honey so they can survive the winter.

Bees have been on the planet for 120,000,000 years. A bee was found preserved in amber from Myanmar dating back 100,000,000 years. Despite the longevity of the species, individual worker bees, all female, only live a month in the summer. It’s hard work to be a worker bee, but then they do have the glory of visiting flower after flower, and gorging on lovely nectar. In winter, however, their physiology changes and worker bees live up to three months.

Drones, the male bees, live longer, do no work, just laze around the hive waiting for a queen to be born. After her birth, the virgin makes a maiden voyage outside the hive, sending out a pheromone to attract the opposite sex. The drones mate with the nubile queen and then die soon after, completely spent after such their lovemaking. She stores this lifetime supply of sperm to use as needed, controlling fertilization of her eggs by releasing sperm as the egg passes through her oviduct. Come fall, any drones still hanging around are booted out of the hive, and left to starve to death.

Queens can live for five years. If the hive’s queen is old or ill, the new queen may fight her and possibly take over. Sometimes worker bees bring a new queen into a hive because it is large and needs a queen so part of the hive can swarm. It’s the decision of the workers to feed royal jelly to larvae bees to make new queens. The worker bees democratically decide about everything that happens in the hive. Depending on the size of the cells the worker bees create, the queen lays unfertilized eggs to become drones (male) or fertilized ones to become worker bees (female).

Some people consider bees to be mammals. They view the hive as an animal without its ‘skin bag.’ The different kinds of bees are like cells in a body with different functions. The ‘swarm’ is the offspring. I like this notion because the hive becomes a larger system, one creature, one body, one ecosystem. 

In summer the hive may grow to over 30,000 bees, but in the winter they drop down to a thousand bees as they conserve resources to survive the winter. The life of the honey bee is one deep and abiding concern for their food supply. Surely this is why they have survived on the planet for so long. In comparison, our ancestors have occupied the planet for only six million years, and we have become dangerously complacent about our food supply.

Humans have a long desired honey. A drawing on a rock face in Spain dating back to 6000 BCE shows two people climbing a rope ladder to get to a hive high up on a flat rock wall. Another drawing found in Zimbabwe from 8000 BCE shows the wavy lines of natural honeycomb with a person approaching it holding some kind of smoker. People in remote areas of Nepal and Macedonia still ‘hunt’ for hives, sometimes climbing steep rock faces to gather prized honey. In Romania, bee hive trucks follow the flowering from the South to the North, parking for a few weeks off highways, giving their bees lots of wild forage. I imagine the colors and shapes help the bees return to their own hives.

Bee hive truck near Vitri, Romania, 2016

The Egyptians described keeping bees for the medicinal properties of the honey in paintings and writing. They used honey for all sorts of sicknesses from diabetes to contraception. There are even paintings depicting ritual circumcisions with the wound being dressed with honey. Today we know there are high levels of antimicrobial activity in raw honey.

Beekeepers are dedicated to their hives. They also are enthusiastic to share information and help each other. Melissa Ljosa used to keep two top bar hives here until she moved to Vermont a few months ago.

Don Rota is the one without the bee suit. Melissa (left), is checking a top bar hive. We miss her!

Don now takes care of ten hives at Old Frog Pond Farm. He loves to keep them here because we are committed to organic practices, and the farm grows healthy forage all season long for the bees. Don told me one spoon of honey takes twelve bees their entire lives to gather. I think of them each morning with my dollop of honey in my morning tea.

A few of Don’s more colorful hives at the farm. Yellow for the sun and blue for the dome above.

And what’s the buzz? As the bee beats its wings, we hear the vibration as buzzing. But the flower feels the buzzing as movement. Pollen may fall off the flower and onto the bee’s body. Some is carried to the next flower the bee visits; the rest is stashed in the bee’s pollen baskets on its hind legs. It will travel back to the hive for the nurse workers who stay in the hive to feed the young.

Pollen Baskets are Full

There’s so much more I could write about bees—but perhaps best to stop here and invite you to stop by our farm stand for a taste of local, raw honey. Its truest secrets are only conveyed by the spoonful on the tongue.

Raw honey for sale at our self-serve farm stand.

Bloom Follows Pink: Orchard Pollination

Bloom is the stage when the closed pink flower buds open to pale, white papery blossoms. This is when the party in the orchard really gets going. You can hear the swoosh of long dresses, the honeybees’ buzz; and follow the flight of the bumblebees, recklessly circling, then landing, the honeybees alighting on flowers, drinking in sweet nectar.

Bees visit a lot of flowers to gather this ambrosia, logging between several hundred and fifteen hundred flower visits on each trip through the orchard. They suck in the sweetness with their long proboscis, then store these sugars in their nectar stomach. Upon returning to the hive with a full belly, another bee will withdraw the nectar, process it, and transfer it into individual cells.

When the bees gather nectar from inside the apple blossoms, they brush across the pollen sitting on small pillows supported by stamens. The pollen grains attach to Velcro-like hairs on the bees’ bodies. When the bee visits another tree, the pollen from one tree is brushed from the bee onto the sticky female stigmas in the center of the blossom of another tree. The pollen grains travel down tubes to reach the ovary. There, sperm in the pollen grain meets the ovules in the ovary. These fertilized ovules become seeds, and the apple grows to protect the growing pips. We find this flesh delicious!

Honeybees need pollen and water, as well as nectar. The bees will divide up these responsibilities for the hive – some gathering pollen, their main source of protein; while others gather nectar for the sugars, and still others water. Some bees including honeybees have ‘pollen baskets’ on their hind legs formed by woven hairs. The bees also have hairs on the inside of their legs that they use like combs to gather the pollen sticking all over their bodies and push it into the basket, mixing in a little sticky nectar, so the pollen packs tightly. You can see the bees sporting bright yellow Turkish pants if you wander through the orchard when they are flying.

This year I am worried about pollination. I can’t remember a bigger bloom in the orchard — or this much spring rain! The bees don’t fly until the temperature reaches fifty-five degrees. In the last week, we’ve only had about five hours of honeybee pollinating temperatures without rain. Fortunately, the native pollinators, like the bumble bees, will fly in cooler temperatures.  Only about five percent of apple blossoms need to be pollinated for a good harvest; the tree produces that many ‘extra’ flowers. But, maybe we should not consider them ‘extra.’ These flowers feed the many pollinators. The tree practices generosity. Giving and receiving are one.

If the apples practiced self-pollination, that is one flower on a tree pollinating other flowers on the same tree, it would require less flying. Peanuts, peas, tomatoes, and sunflowers are examples of self-pollinating plants. However, many plants, like most apples, have evolved to require cross-pollination to ensure genetic diversity. In scientific terms, this type of pollination is referred to as self-incompatible, or “unable to survive without another.” These plants all need another plant or tree in their life to bear fruit.

Cross-pollination is critical to a life cycle that ensures the continuity of the species. Maybe human beings aren’t so different. We are not self-compatible either. We need to interact with people different from ourselves to learn and grow. The cross-pollination of cultures, experiences, and ideas may be the ambrosia we need for a healthy, peace-filled world.

A Baltimore Oriole enjoying sweet nectar from a Macintosh tree.