Bees Are Interesting Insects

We all know that bees make honey but there is more to bees than honey.  Sunday July 8^th, John Aebischer and Sheldon Dyck of Blue Mountain Honey invited a group of beekeepers and other interested individuals out to their place while a bee inspector Clarke Kumpala, from Quesnel came out to inspect some of their hives.  Like other animals bees are subject to parasites and diseases.  Mites and foulbrood are two main problems that inspectors and beekeepers look for when inspecting a hive.

When working with bees one can wear a bee suit with a screen over one’s face.  However another trick to calming bees is to use a smoker.  When wild bees are faced with a forest fire, they naturally gorge themselves with honey because they don’t know how long it will be again before they eat.  “Tame” bees have this same instinct to eat when they encounter smoke.  When they are full, they cannot bend their bodies easily which they need to do in order to sting.  Did you know that male bees, drones, don’t have stingers?

Each colony of bees has only one queen.  Her role is to lay eggs.  Occasionally a colony will have lost their queen and one of the worker bees will begin to lay eggs but all of her offspring will be drones.  Since the average life of a worker bee in summer is only about six weeks a colony that is only producing drones cannot survive long.  Queens are necessary for the production of replacement workers, drones and a replacement queen.  They are larger than the other bees and beekeepers can easily recognize the queen in a colony but they also take the time to mark a queen with a yellow dot to make it easier to spot the next time that they inspect the colony.

Bees produce honey to feed on over the winter.  Beekeepers harvest the extra honey that the bees make but leave them enough to survive the winter months.  In winter a worker bee may live as long as four months which means that those that are in the colony ion fall have all passed away before spring.  Honey is not the only thing that beekeepers harvest.  In some hives they also put screens in the bottom of the hive to take pollen off the bees as they enter the hive.  Bees wax is another product that they use.

Jon Aebischer places a queen in a small box for transporting to a new colony.

All dressed up in bee keeping garb to watch an open hive being checked out .

Clarke Kumpala inspecting a hive.