Dean Forest Beekeepers

About bees

In British gardens, you can see honey bees, bumble bees, solitary bees, hornets and wasps. Apart from solitary bees, all of these form colonies, which range in size from around 50 for bumble bees to 50,000 for honey bees.
These insects perform vital roles in the environment: one third of the food we eat relies on pollination by bees. As they forage amongst the flowers their furry bodies pick up pollen and pass it from flower to flower. This results in the formation of seeds and fruit.
All types of bees feed on nectar and pollen. Wasps too are beneficial in the garden since they feed on aphids and other insect pests.

The honey bee

The only sexually developed female in the hive is the queen. She is also the largest bee in the colony. Her body is long and has a much larger abdomen than those of the worker bees. Her jaws also contain sharp cutting teeth, as opposed to her offspring, which have no teeth. The queen has a curved, smooth stinger that she can use repeatedly without endangering herself. By contrast, the worker bees are armed with straight, barbed stingers, which cause immediate death to the bee after stinging. A two-day-old larva is selected by workers to be reared as the queen. The lifespan of a queen bee is 1-3 years.

Workers are the smallest bees in the colony and are made up of sexually underdeveloped females. A typical colony contains 50,000-60,000 workers. The workers feed the queen and larvae and are responsible for guarding the hive's entrance. Worker bees also help to keep the hive cool by fanning their wings. The older workers collect nectar daily, which is then used to make honey. The life expectancy of a worker bee is 28-35 days.

Male bees without stingers are drones. Drones do not collect food or pollen. Their sole purpose is to mate with the queen. When bee colonies are short on food, drones are often killed or expelled from hives.

Older worker bees forage daily, collecting flower nectar, which they regurgitate into the mouths of young workers inside the nest. Young workers, in turn, take the nectar and deposit it in cells within the hive. From there, these same bees perform the duties necessary to turn nectar into honey. Once the honey has ripened, the cell is sealed with an air-tight wax capping.

Honey bees go to great lengths to share news with other members of their community through a series of highly involved communication skills. Using sophisticated dance steps, bees are able to direct others to sources of food and warn them of impending danger.

The familiar buzzing noise associated with bees comes from the bee's wings. A honey bee's wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, creating their distinctive buzz.

Today, the common honey bee exists on every continent except Antarctica. Easily adapting to many climates, the honey bee continues to live a complex social life and is still among the most studied and best known insects.

Bumble Bees

'Queen' bumble bees hibernate as separate individuals, having mated the previous autumn. These queens are large and fly about in the spring looking for suitable nesting sites, ranging from a disused mouse or bird nest in a nesting box, to a compost heap. There they rear their first offspring which are always very small compared to their mother. It is not immediately obvious that the large queen and these first tiny workers are the same species.

From this point in its life cycle, the bumble bee is social. With the help of her brood, this queen rears the next batch of worker bumble bees, which are larger. The colony grows in numbers, never totalling more than a few hundred individuals. During late summer and autumn, bumble bee nests produce fully fertile males and females. These mate and the fertilised females hibernate until the next year.

Bumble bees have a sting but rarely use it. There are about 25 species on the British list, but only about six are at all common. As their nesting habitats disappear, so do they. Recently, however, colonies have been produced commercially to pollinate greenhouse crops.

Solitary Bees

Some tunnel into sandy soil or the soft mortar in old houses. Some use existing holes and construct cells from mud or pieces of leaf. Each of the cells is stocked with pollen, only slightly moistened with nectar, if at all. An egg is laid on this and the cell sealed over. The larva which hatches from the egg only has that food supply. It eats the pollen, pupates and emerges the next year. Males emerge first and mate with females that appear later. All the work of cell construction is then carried out by the females. The males play no further part and die after a few weeks.

Many of the solitary bees look like honeybees. They often nest near to each other in ’villages’ and beekeepers receive many 'swarm calls' that turn out to be solitary bees in a lawn or wall. They are all valuable pollinators and only sting if handled roughly.

One or two species, like leafcutter bees, have been used commercially to pollinate crops such as lucerne (alfalfa).

Wasps

There are seven species of social wasps found in the British Isles. They are all superficially alike in appearance, being different only in size and minor details of colour patterning. All common wasps have sharp, tapered abdomens, striped in black and yellow. Their heads and thoraxes are mostly black. The exception to this is the hornet, the largest of our wasps, with a reddish-brown and black patterned thorax. All wasps have a great reputation for stinging.

Mated queen wasps hibernate during the winter and emerge around April, when many insects begin to stir. The queens find a suitable nesting site according to their species' preference and begin to build a nest made from a kind of paper, composed of chewed wood fibres. The queen lays eggs and feeds her larvae on insect prey. The insect bodies are chewed into a liquid which is fed to the grubs. When these first worker wasps emerge, they eventually take over most of the queen's duties, except for egg laying. Wasp colonies increase rapidly in size. In just a few weeks, populations of 20,000 are perfectly possible.

Adult wasps feed on nectar or, in fact, anything sugary. They feed their larvae on insect prey and are rewarded with a drop of sugary liquid. In the garden, they may be seen visiting some flowers for nectar. They may also be seen catching and killing garden pests to feed to their offspring

In fact, they are really much more beneficial to us than most people would believe. One worker wasp can collect over 100 aphids per day.

Wasps cause the greatest problems to us when the adults are searching for their own food. When colonies become large, the normal sources are not sufficient and adults turn to sources such as ripening fruit, jam and beehives, for honey. Wasps do not store food in their nests, nor do they swarm like honeybees. The nest, which grows as the colony grows, is the nursery of the colony.

Unless a wasps' nest has been threatened or disturbed, wasps will tolerate quite close observation by humans. However, any disturbance of the nest is likely to result in extensive and determined defence, which is so great that at times there seems little to distinguish it from aggression.

Nesting sites can be in hollow trees, roof spaces, compost heaps, rockeries, hedgerows, trees or shrubs. A successful nest produces fertile males and females and the mated females hibernate while the rest of the colony dies out by the onset of winter.

Hornets

The largest European social wasp, usually 30-40 mm long, is the hornet (Vespa crabro). This impressive insect occurs in Britain, but is relatively uncommon here and largely confined to the south. Queens, which can be up to 50mm long, are the sole survivors of nests of the previous year. They hibernate in rotten or hollow trees, sheds, outbuildings, roof spaces and other similar places, and appear between March and May.

Hornets are less aggressive than other social wasps and much less likely to attack and sting. Like other wasps they are considered a gardeners friend by predating a large variety of adult and larvae insects that are considered pests of fruits, vegetables, plants and shrubs.

All have their part to play and, with a little tolerance by us, can be accepted and welcomed into our gardens.

Stings

Wasps and bees sting as a defence mechanism - it is their way of warning you off if you have disturbed them. Wasps can sting repeatedly. Hornet stings are no worse than other wasps, despite their size.

Honey bees also sting if but usually leave the stinger part of their body in the skin, so only sting once and normally only sting if they or their hive are threatened.

If you do get stung by a bee, scratch the sting out rather than pulling it, and move away from the hive as quickly as possible. In most cases the sting causes pain and slight swelling, but has little other effect.

Treatment for either a bee or a wasp sting:

• Scratch out the sting as quickly as possible
• Wash the area with soap and water
• If you have some, apply an antihistamine spray or cream or take antihistamine tablets
• Apply an ice-pack (a pack of frozen peas or similar will do) to reduce swelling - always place a cloth between the ice pack and the skin to prevent an ice burn!
• If you know that you have severe reactions to insect bites, seek medical attention

There is more detailed information on insect stings on the NHS web site

There is also a lot of information here: http://www.insectstings.co.uk/

Honey - questions and answers

Why do bees make honey?

Honeybees are special in that they over winter as a colony, unlike wasps and bumblebees. Bees store honey so that they will have ample food supplies in winter.

The colony does not hibernate but stays active and clusters together to stay warm. This requires a lot of food stored from the summer before. Although a hive only needs 20-30 lb of honey to survive an average winter, the bees are capable, if given the space, of collecting much more. This is what the beekeeper wants them to do.

Bees have been producing honey the same way for over one hundred and fifty million years

How do bees make honey?

Bees take nectar, which is a sweet sticky substance exuded by most flowers and some insects (Honey dew), and mix it with enzymes from glands in their mouths. This nectar/enzyme mix is stored in hexagonal wax honeycomb until the water content has been reduced to around 17%. When this level is reached the cell is capped over with a thin layer of wax to seal it until the bees need it. This capping indicates to the beekeeper that the honey can be harvested. Capped honey can keep almost indefinitely. Perfectly edible honeycomb was found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, over three thousand years old!

How much honey can one beehive produce?

One hive can produce 60lb (27kg) or more in a good season, however an average hive would be around 25lb (11kg) surplus.

Bees fly about 55,000 miles to make just one pound of honey, that’s 1½ times around the world!

How does a beekeepers get honey from the bees?

The queen bee is kept below the upper boxes in the hive (called ‘Supers’) by a wire or plastic grid that the queen is too large to fit through (called a ‘Queen excluder’). As the bees cannot raise brood above this queen excluder, only honey is stored in the supers. As the season progresses the beekeeper adds more supers until the time to harvest the honey.

A special one way valve is then fitted in place of the queen excluder and gradually all the bees are forced into the lowest part of the hive, the beekeeper can simply lift off the ‘super’ boxes containing the honey comb.

The honey is extracted from the comb using centrifugal force in a machine called a spinner looking much like an old-fashioned upright spin dryer.

Do the bees miss the honey that is taken?

No. A strong colony can produce 2-3 times more honey than they need. If necessary the beekeeper can feed sugar syrup in the autumn to supplement for the loss of honey.

Why are some types of honey clear and runny and some are opaque and hard?

The type of honey made by the bees is dependent on the types of foliage and flowers available to the bees.

Crops such as oil seed rape (the bright yellow fields in the spring) produce large quantifies of honey that sets very hard, so hard even the bees could not use it in the winter, garden flowers tend to give a clear liquid honey. If the beekeeper wants to produce a mono honey i.e. clover, orange blossom etc. the beehive is put out of range from other sources. This can be difficult for the small hobbyist and a blend of the season’s honey is usually the result.

In the autumn some beekeepers move their hives onto the moors to harvest only the nectar from wild heather. Heather honey is thought to be the king of honeys and has a clear jelly consistency.

Other hive products

In the 10,000 years mankind has kept bees, there has been plenty of time to find a variety of uses for honeybee products.

Beeswax has many and various uses in polishes, cosmetics, and in the food industry. It was the traditional material for church candles.

Royal jelly is produced in a particular gland in bees for feeding the larva of the bee colony. Although there is no evidence that royal jelly is in any way beneficial to humans, it continues to be marketed as a “health food” supplement and an ingredient for cosmetics.

Propolis is a sticky resin that seeps from the buds of some trees and oozes from the bark of other trees, chiefly conifers. The bees gather propolis, sometimes called bee glue, and use it to seal gaps in their hive. It is believed to have some antiseptic qualities.

Acknowledgements

The questions and answers on honey are taken from the FAQ section of the BBKA web site.