The BBKA Guide to Beekeeping, Second Edition

Glossary

1 Bees and beekeeping

Keeping bees has become very popular in recent years with the number of beekeepers in the UK increasing rapidly over the last five years. In 2007 the British Beekeepers’ Association had 13,000 members; by 2014 this had increased to nearly 25,000. Beekeeping suppliers have all seen a rapid increase in the sales of equipment and all this has happened alongside press stories about the plight of the honey bee with major losses occurring across the world.

Sealed honey stores surrounding cells of pollen, maturing larvae and sealed workers awaiting emergence.

We now realise that all bees are vitally important to the environment. If humans do not care for them by conserving their habitats and protecting them from the effects of modern living, we will suffer in the long term.

Almost a full load of pollen, being collected from a Ceanothus (Ceanothus cordulatus) before returning to the hive.

The essential insect

It has been suggested that Einstein predicted that if all the bees in the world disappeared then mankind would follow in four years. This quote is wrongly attributed to him but life would be much poorer without the vast army of pollinators of which honey bees are crucial members.

Worldwide the honey bee is extremely important as a pollinator of many crops. In California for example, the honey bee is critical to the production of almonds and over recent years, there has been concern that there may simply not be enough honey bees in the USA to pollinate the crop. If the almond blossom is not adequately pollinated the tree will be unable to produce almonds!

In the UK it has been estimated that all insect pollinators contribute more than £400 million to the agricultural economy at farm gate prices. This probably represents in excess of £1.5 billion, once the food reaches supermarkets. Honey bees are a significant contributor to this figure and it has been suggested that this one species could contribute up to 50 per cent of the pollination value. In fact, it is fair to assume that most flowering plants need a pollinator in order to propagate. There are some exceptions, but life would not be as pleasant – or as productive – without the vast army of insects that pollinate our flowers.

Hedgerow flowers – here Red Campion (Silene dioica), require the services of pollinators in order to flourish.

Most species of bees are in decline and the most effective way to reverse this trend is to improve their habitat, in large part by not practising agriculture in such an intensive way that all wild flowers and hedgerows are destroyed. These are the countryside features that favour the pollination force. Urban areas tend to be very good sources of food for bees because the variety of plants in gardens and parks provide an extended season for bees to collect food and provide a varied diet.

Colony losses

Colony losses have devastated bees and beekeepers around the world in recent years, a phenomenon that many people have tied to the use of insecticides widely used in agriculture. However, records show that over many decades there have been similar incidences of major losses and it cannot be assumed that current agricultural practices are the only reason for large losses. Indeed, bee populations vary from year to year and are closely related to weather.

Some European and US scientists suggest that losses of biodiversity and food resources, due to climate change, have intensified the problem.

Others believe that a rise in single-crop farming and the modification of landscapes, as well as pathogens causing diseases like foulbrood, nosemosis and Varroosis are responsible for the problem.

Honey bees are just one species in a vast range of bees. Most people know that bees produce honey, live in colonies and are pretty furry animals with a sting in the tail. In fact there are about 250 species of bee living in the UK. There are about 225 solitary bees that do not have a colony but tend a few larvae each year to produce a new generation and then die. Together they provide a major pollination force and, although they are wild and not tended or managed by us, are very important to the agricultural economy and the environment. In addition there are about 24 species of bumblebees; these are our furry friends that are seen working hard collecting pollen and nectar from a wide range of plants. Most are wild and survive by producing small nests each year. Whilst they collect nectar and store it in the nest the amount is very small and not harvested by us. However they provide an important pollination force and are bred to supply small colonies that remain in glasshouses to pollinate crops, mainly tomatoes. In these circumstances honey bees would not survive and be capable of providing an effective pollination force.

Colony Collapse Disorder

While so called Colony Collapse disorder (CCd) appears to have multiple interacting causes, some evidence points to pathogens and sub-lethal pesticide exposures as important contributing factors.

Laboratory studies show that some insecticides and fungicides can act together to be many times more toxic to bees than they would be if used alone. They can also affect the sense of direction, memory and brain metabolism, while herbicides may reduce the availability of plants bees need for food.

Agricultural and horticultural chemicals need to be used with care but should not always be blamed for bee losses.

Then there is just one species of honey bee in this country and throughout Europe, America and Australasia (Apis mellifera). There are other species of honey bee living in Asia but this book will not deal with them in any detail. The honey bee is different from other bees in that it lives in a large colony and has strategies to survive through winter and periods when there is no food by storing excess when times are good. Whilst no one bee lives for long the colony can survive for many years. They are a bit like the old adage about the axe that has been in the family for many years and has had a number of heads and handles. Given the right conditions the colony can replace every component over time and continue to thrive.

Honey bees and humans

The honey bee is a special case. Like all other bees it is a wild animal, but humans have found it an advantage to work with colonies of bees. Although beekeeping has been practised for many thousands of years worldwide, recently honey bees have suffered major losses of numbers of colonies. New diseases have devastated colonies while modern farming practices may have exacerbated the situation.

Honey bee collecting pollen from Greengage (prunus) blossom in the authors’ garden.

Of particular note is the Varroa mite (Varroa destructor). This pest has infested virtually all honey bee colonies across the world. Untreated colonies seem to succumb to the mite and die out within two to three years. There is no simple solution to the problem and, whilst some strains of honey bee are more resistant to the Varroa mite, it continues to be a major cause of colony death. The mite has also survived human attempts to eradicate it. It may be that in a couple of hundred years the honey bee will be able to coexist with this new parasite but in the meantime we need to help the bees to survive. The effect of the mite has been a dramatic decline in naturally occurring (feral) colonies and in general all honey bee colonies are now managed by beekeepers. Today’s honey bee needs more humans to learn how to look after colonies and become beekeepers.

Keeping bees is an ancient tradition that is of great interest to young and old. If you go to a party and admit to being a beekeeper you will be inundated with questions about bees and may be in danger of blocking out all other conversation. Whenever beekeepers take a stall at a country show the public will be keen to buy honey and fascinated to see the bees in an observation hive where children will love to find the queen bee.

Beekeeping is essentially a practical skill that virtually anyone can learn given time. As with most practical skills, it is better to understand the reasons behind the various management techniques before actually starting to keep bees. Knowing why you are carrying out a particular technique will give you more pleasure and will also ensure that, with time, you can become a competent beekeeper.

What is a honey bee?

A honey bee is an insect; it has three components to its body: head, thorax and abdomen. It lives in a community known as a colony that exists through the winter and can continue to for many years.

A colony will normally have only one queen who will lay all the eggs that produce new bees. In the summer there may be 1000 to 2000 drones (male bees). Once autumn comes, the drones are ejected from the colony and will die. The majority of bees in the colony are workers (females) that carry out all the work required to maintain the colony. The queen is mainly an egg-laying machine while the operation of the colony is controlled by the workers, acting not as individuals, but collectively. These little insects carry out the most amazing and complex tasks requiring close cooperation including swarming, or defending their colony from predators.

Colony size

Although the average size of a colony varies greatly – they can have between 10,000 in winter and 60,000 individual members, at the height of the summer – the proportions of different bees are as follows:

A queen

1000 – 2000 male drones in summer

10,000 – 60,000 female workers depending on the time of year.

The greatest number of bees will be in summer when the queen is laying well and there is the maximum amount of pollen and nectar available for the colony.

The queen. Note the larger (longer) size of the queen by comparison to her attendant workers.

In the UK honey bees are unique in that they continue to live as a colony throughout winter when there is no food to be collected from the flowers. They have evolved to be able to store food in the form of honey so they can survive when there is no other source. This remarkable development to get through difficult times means that bees store honey and, under the right conditions, will store more than they need. This ‘excess’ provides us with the honey that has been so popular with humans – and many other animals – for thousands of years.

Solitary bees

Solitary bees, as the name suggests, are a group of species where the adults live as individuals. The females lay eggs and then provide each one with nectar and pollen in underground hollows or tubes. The eggs hatch into larvae, which develop by consuming the food, placed around them by the adult female that laid the egg. Fully-grown larvae then pupate and eventually emerge as adult bees. Male and females will mate and the process will start again in the following year. Depending on the species, winter is spent as either a fully-grown larva or adult. In collecting pollen for their larvae they pass pollen from one flower to another and thus pollinate them.

A Common Carder Bee (Bombus pascuorum) taking nectar from a Blue Spiraea (Caryopteris).

Bumblebees

Bumblebees live in a small community during spring and summer. In autumn, the colony will produce a number of queens and drones (male bees). These will mate and the fertilised queens will then spend the cold winter months sheltered in a protected place such as an uninhabited mouse hole or other relatively ‘warm’ place. In the spring the queens will emerge, feed and start a new nest where they will raise worker bumblebees that take over the duties in the nest. The nest will eventually break down in autumn after producing a new crop of queens and drones. Bumblebee nests are only used for one season.

A Buff-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) collecting pollen from a bramble (Rubus fruticosus).

Animal husbandry

Anyone who takes up beekeeping must remember that they are taking responsibility for caring for animals. Bees may be small and somewhat alien but they are still animals with needs and a beekeeper must ensure that bees are kept in the best of health and in conditions that are acceptable to them. It has been shown many times that bees may become difficult to handle if the conditions under which they are kept are poor. We will deal with all the aspects of good husbandry later in this book but it is important to consider the following factors before you start beekeeping:

Are you ready for a fascinating new activity in your life?

Are you prepared to learn properly how to manage bees?

Will there be enough forage for the bees to prosper?

Could the bees become a nuisance to neighbours and other members of the public?

Are you prepared to spend time regularly attending to your bees?

Will you ensure that the bees have sufficient honey stores and that you will not take more than they can afford to give you?

Are you prepared to collect a swarm if required?

Are you prepared to get stung on the odd occasion?

Will you always wear clean and appropriate clothing when working with bees?

Are you ready for friends and neighbours to ask endless questions about beekeeping?

At this early stage it will not be possible for you to answer all these questions so it is always recommended that you join a local beekeeping group who can help you to get started and teach you the basics of the craft.

There are over 300 groups in the UK who are there to help. They are usually locally based and run by amateurs (people who love bees and beekeeping). Even after you have been keeping bees for a few years something will happen to your bees that may be difficult to understand, such as a colony that is not thriving when it should be or a queen that is not doing what is expected of her.

This is when a local group can be very helpful because you will always be able to call on another beekeeper that will have experienced your problem and can give advice. You will also learn that if you ask three different beekeepers about your problem you will get at least four answers! Probably all four answers are correct and you just need to find the approach that suits you and your bees.

As with all animal husbandry the bees do not read beekeeping books and will decide quite independently what they need to do when faced with a particular circumstance.

Inspections

In winter you will only occasionally need to take a look at your hives to ensure that they are in good shape and not damaged.

In summer, more time is required and you will have to monitor your bees weekly when the colony is strong and nectar is in full flow. This may only take 15 to 20 minutes per hive as you look carefully through all the frames in the brood box checking for stores – honey and pollen – and any signs of pests or diseases.

A quick inspection of a full brood frame of bees. It will be necessary to shake off the bees over the brood box to check more carefully for any signs of disease.

The anatomy of a honey bee

There are male bees (drones), and females bees (queens and workers). The following anatomical descriptions apply mainly to workers and include some information about the differences between workers and the queen and drones where appropriate.

The head of a worker bee from an illustration produced in the late 1880s. a, antennae (feelers); e, eyes; m, mandibles (outer jaw); mx, maxilla (inner jaw); lp, labial palps; p, proboscis (tongue)

The head

This includes the eyes, antennae, mouth, mandibles, the brain and a food production gland all neatly packaged into a hard casing that is about 3mm square and about 2mm deep.

The eyes are compound with each eye consisting of between 6500 to 9000 facets (depending on whether the bee is a queen, a worker or a drone). Each facet can receive light from a narrow field of view that is different from all the other facets. This gives the bee the ability to perceive the world somewhat like looking at a digital photographic image made up of only a few pixels.

The bee can perceive colour, although it cannot receive red light. Instead it is able to see ultraviolet light (light we cannot see). The compound eyes are also able to perceive polarised light in the same way as humans can when wearing polarised sunglasses. This gives the bee the ability to sense direction relative to the sun even when the sun cannot be seen! As the eyes cannot move with respect to the head, the bee must turn its head to see in another direction (similar to headlights on a car). The honey bee can see a wide field of view from each side and vertically. The male bee (drone) has larger eyes that meet in the middle and is able to see well straight ahead. In addition to the two compound eyes, the bee also has three light sensors on top of its head. It is believed that these allow the bee to accurately determine where ‘up’ is and help to maintain stability during flight. They may also be used in some way to control the more complex compound eyes.

Honey bees also have a pair of antennae. They are attached to the front of the head and can be moved by the bee. They are covered with an array of sensory organs that allow the bee to sense its environment. The primary sense is smell and there are about 30,000 sense organs on each antenna. It is thought that some are specific to the smell of just one chemical compound that play a part in bees’ extremely sensitive perception of pheromones (chemical messengers that are used to communicate between the bees).

A bee’s sense of smell is so sensitive that it is used to provide warnings of illegal drug transport or explosives. They are even being used to detect cancers in humans through smell! The antennae also provide the sense of taste and touch and there are other sensors on the antennae that allow the bee to measure wind speed.

Antennae

The main sense organs of the honey bee – the antennae – are very adaptable, so much so that bees have been trained to detect explosives by the USA military.

However their primary use is in sensing the pheromones of the queen and in communicating with other bees in their home colony.

Bees have a very good sense of smell and with two antennae they can perceive smell in ‘stereo’. In effect, they are able to recognise small differences in the concentration of a smell from each antenna and so work out the origin of a smell.

Life of a worker

It’s a tough life and a short one for a worker bee.

Workers raise young, build the comb, take care of the queen, carry out guard duty at the hive entrance, remove any dead bees, provide heat when required and cool air when it’s hot – they also go out and forage for nectar and pollen.

What makes worker bees all the more interesting is that their tasks within the hive change as they age.

The mouth is similar to a tube with a suction pump in the head. The proboscis – the tube through which the bee can draw up liquids – is normally folded away beneath the head but when the bee wishes to drink nectar or water the proboscis is brought forward and held by the mandibles like a straight drinking straw. On the end there is a brush so that if the food is not liquid the bee can drop saliva onto it to make a liquid by brushing before sucking it up into the head. The pump in the head is then able to push the food back into the stomach. Adult bees normally only consume nectar, honey, water and pollen. The first three are naturally liquid and the last is mixed with diluted honey before being ingested. Sometime bees will consume any sweet liquid such as honeydew from aphids or even molasses spread on fields by farmers.

Bees by nature are very clean insects and will deal quickly with any honey or syrup that a beekeeper accidentally spills. You can clearly see the tongue of the lower bee – the orange tube like proboscis – seen sucking up the liquid honey.

Bees have a very narrow waist between the thorax and the abdomen (where the stomach is located). For this reason a bee is only able to ingest liquids (solids would get stuck in the oesophagus). The mouthparts are therefore designed for collecting fluids only.

The mandibles are two hard shovel-like plates on each side of the mouth. When the proboscis is retracted, the mandibles can be used to ‘chew’ any appropriate material. They are frequently used to shape pieces of wax when building honeycomb.

When bees fight they sometimes use their mandibles to cut the legs off their opponents or tear pieces off their wings. They also use their mandibles to chew and form propolis (an antiseptic sticky substance collected from the buds of flowers) which is used to fill holes in the nest and cover the surface of honeycomb cells prior to the queen laying an egg in a cell.

Protection

A strong colony of bees will protect both their stores and their larvae from marauding invaders.

Weaker colonies may suffer badly from robbing by other bees and invasion by wasps and hornets who are after larvae to feed to their own young.

Beekeepers need to ensure that with weaker colonies, suitable wasp or hornet traps are used at vulnerable times during the season if they are to preserve the colony.

When baiting wasp traps – ensure that you don’t use your precious honey. A little jam or marmalade is preferable, and will help to contain the spread of any disease.

Details of hornet traps and how to deploy them are available from the BeeBase website – www.nationalbeeunit.com

The brain is well protected inside the head and comprises two lobes that process the information that comes from the eyes, antennae and other sensory cells. As with human brains there is an area that will analyse these inputs and apply logic to the subsequent actions. In the honey bee this is done by a few hundred cells – a remarkable feat of miniaturisation.

Unlike humans the honey bee has ganglia (groups of nervous cells) strung along the body. These cells provide autonomous action for local parts of the bees and thus reduce the load on the brain.

The food production gland is called the hypopharyngeal gland and is located in the head. The gland is very important as it produces some of the food essential to raise new bees. This very rich, high protein food is mixed with a substance produced from the mandibular glands. These are the essential ingredients of royal jelly, the food fed to larvae that are intended to become queen honey bees. As a worker bee ages, it will complete its duties in the hive, feeding larvae and protecting the hive to become a forager (a bee collecting pollen and nectar from the environment). At this stage the hypopharyngeal gland will evolve to produce enzymes that are essential in the process of making hone from nectar.

The head, like the rest of the outer surface of the honey bee is made up of a number of plates – formed of chitin, a material similar to human nails (keratin) – that are connected by softer membranes. This means that the shape of the head can be varied slightly but also that the hard outer structure provides a framework for ‘suspending’ internal organs and obviates the need for a skeleton.

The head is connected to the thorax by a flexible tube, also made of chitin. Muscles connecting the head to the thorax allow some movement of the head relative to the thorax and the bee can move its head to be able to ‘see’ in different directions.