Not All Bees are Created Equal... Honeybee Castes

Today the Land of Bees transports you back a few weeks to early April and it's a return to school at Apiary Central with BeeGuru1.

It's 9*C and looking like rain. The lesson is held outdoors.

LandofSpike is now starting to doubt the wisdom of wearing just a tshirt.

Well, it had been really very warm the day before...

However, he is from the East Coast and therefore dead 'ard. Learning about Bee Castes will keep him warm...
So here we go with a quick introduction to the Caste System of the Honeybee with some bite-size facts which, hopefully, aren't too wide of the mark.

Honeybee Society is highly structured and meticulously organised. It follows a strict Caste System in which there are 3 distinct types of bee:

The Queen

The Worker 

and The Drone

The Queen is a fertile female. She lays eggs.

That's her job. Up to 2000 a day. All the bees in the colony develop from her eggs.

The hive centres around the one Queen. As long as she's still laying. If the Queen weakens or dies the colony can replace her with a newly reared Queen. A part of the Beekeeper's job is to control the changeover of the Queen.

Lifespan: 15 days to emerge from egg. Mature for mating after 20 days. Can live 3-4 years.

The Queen is an Egg-Laying Machine

The Workers are females from a fertilized egg but are themselves infertile. 

They do all the graft and the jobs that the individual Workers undertake within the colony change as they get older.

They forage for pollen and nectar, gather water and propolis, tidy and maintain the hive, regulate the hive's temperature, care for the brood and feed the Queen & the larvae. 

It is the Workers who make the hexagonal honeycomb from wax that they secrete.

They use these cells as chambers in which to rear the brood and as stores for their precious stocks of honey and pollen.

Workers make up 95% of the colony and are all sisters.

Lifespan: 21 days to emerge from egg. Can live for up to 36 days. Over-wintering Workers can live for 6 months.

Out all day foraging then has to come home and look after the kids

The Drones, who are stingless, are fertile males from an unfertilized egg. Their function is to fertilize the new Queens. They do not forage nor do they do any housework. In fact by the end of the summer, once they're no more use and are just lazing around on the sofa watching Sky Sports, the Workers have had enough and boot them out of the hive to die. 

Lifespan: 24 days to emerge from egg. Mature for mating after 37 days. Can live up to 59 days.

The drone has similar life skills to the human male

So, Honeybee Society is pretty nailed down. It works because every bee knows it's place and is hot-wired to carry out its pre-destined task with unerring devotion.

It doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to see the colony as the organism and the individual bees as composite parts of the whole.

It's possible to see it as a bit Orwellian, and Huxley, in a fatalistic mood, would recognise the predetermination of the individuals. 

But bees ain't humans so everything works just fine.

There the lesson ends, but before we leave BeeGuru1 and our alfresco learning zone at Apiary Central there's a short Q&A session with a small prize for the student with the most correct answers.

LandofSpike was hoping the prize might be a jacket.

A Box for the Bees and a Day of Sunshine

Finally, some Sunshine... 

And over at Apiary Central this morning the honeybees are hard at it, foraging for all their worth.

It must be a big relief for them after being cooped up for the entirety of, what is surely, one of the rottenest Aprils on record.

Inside the hive, the last month has panned out something like this...

Worker 1:  "Is it still raining?"

Worker 2:  "I'll go and look."

Worker 2 trawls off to the entrance. A minute later she returns.

Worker 1: "Well?"

Worker 2: "It's still rainin' innit. And it's flippin'  baltic... I hates England."

Worker 1: "Fancy some fondant?"

Worker 2: "OK."

They trudge off to further deplete their stores.

Meanwhile, back at Spike Towers, there's been a bit of shilly-shallying on the choice of hive in which to home the bees.

LandofSpike had always assumed that some version of the vertical hive would be the automatic choice, but an excellently informative session about hive types with BeeGuru1 presented him with a seemingly infinite variety of hives to choose from.
As well as the practicalities of the kit, choice of hive is also guided by philosophy. Oh yes.
Your approach, be it Traditional, Modern or Bio-dynamic, will directly inform which hives will be the best fit for where your head's at.

LandofSpike will cover hive types and philosophies in a later post but for now the best way forward was to keep an open mind and decide what might best suit the particular needs of our first year with bees.

Surprisingly, LandofSpike found himself increasingly favouring a simple, rectangular horizontal hive. 

The Tanzanian Top Bar Hive to be precise.
It's, more or less, the modern day equivalent of a hollow log on legs with bees inside.

A lovely piece of Biodynamic-friendly kit which would look just grand in the grounds of Spike Towers and would, no doubt, give the bees a lot of pleasure.

Despite my initial preconceptions this was starting to look like a real contender.

However, some time later that day and after more consultation, it transpired that the Tanzanian Top Bar Hive isn't sold in the UK.

There are plenty of excellently detailed plans telling you how to build one though.

LandofSpike can certainly build a box but isn't sure that he should be building his own bee-specific box in his novice year.

There are enough unknowns without adding "Good-Intentioned-But-Not-Quite-Right-Hive" to the list.

So it's back to a vertical model and, at the moment, even though those Thermo Hives look tasty, it looks like LandofSpike might go for an EPS Langstroth.

A nice, off the peg, cheerfully budget-conscious Beebox.

It seems to have the seal of approval from BeekeeperJuniors1&2, although they also liked the Thermo Hives and the Top Bar with equal enthusiasm.

And it'll require a lick of paint. 

Just the thing to lure Mrs LandofSpike, the esteemed Colourist and Artist of Note, into the Land of Bees.

Season of Mists and Mellow Forgetfulness. Part 1: Ghastly Beasties

Last Autumn's Teachings now seem like they took place a geological age ago. So ahead of this Saturday's Actual Bee Encounter, LandofSpike has been retracing his steps back into the mists of time... well, as far back as last October at least.

LandofSpike has divided this account of Apiary Central's Autumn module into two separate Posts, theory and practical. 

Theory first, so stand by for LandofSpike's flimsy and lightweight rememberings of BeeGuru1's introduction to Parasites, Predators and their Treatments.

BeeGuru1 waded straight in with tales so grisly that if bees had ears to hear, and could understand the Queen's English, then their blood, or more precisely their haemolymph, would have frozen instantly in their little veins, if they had veins, rendering them stone cold dead from terror in the time it takes to say "Chalkbrood Mummies".

Poor old Mister Honey Bee, there are things that'll eat yer from the outside inwards and things that'll eat yer from the inside outwards. Dismemberment, Infestation and a Ghastly Death lurk round every dark, hexagonal corner.

The current most popular unpopular menace is the Varroa Destructor Mite, a nasty little spod which puts itself about a bit. The clue is in the name, the Destructor bit. It'll destroy your colony if you aren't on the ball with your beekeepery skills and potions.

The Varroa Destructor Mite is a nasty little spod

Among the other dangers, Wax Moth and Chalkbrood look pretty horrible, European Foul Brood isn't as bad as the American variety and Braula Coeca looks like it'll be under control if you get your Varroa treatment right. 

The ever-lovable Wasp will raid the hive for honey and will also dismember and drag off live bees to feed their own brood.

A dishonourable mention goes out to the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, and Mice aren't above a bit of hive destruction when they fancy a free feed or a warm and dry larder in which to spend the winter.

Also beware the hungry Woodpecker who can make a devilish mess of a hive in short order.

The ever-lovable Wasp prepares to raid the hive of the unsuspecting Honey Bee

Not all threats to the bee are deadly though and thankfully BeeGuru1 also detailed the many and varied treatments which the beekeeper can use to keep his hive happy and healthy.

However, the treatment for the horror that is American Foul Brood is pretty brutal in itself... Dig a big pit, chuck in yer bees, hive and bee gear, pour on the petrol and lob in a lighted match. You can stop short of burying the remains at a deserted crossroads and driving a stake through it but you get the picture. AFB is pretty nasty. 

Well, that's it for an extremely sketchy précis of last Autumn's introduction to Bee Botherers.

LandofSpike will be covering individual Predators, Parasites and How to Treat Them in greater detail and in glorious technicolour later on in the year when he gets some hands-on experience, and a bit more knowledge, of the little blighters.

The unhappy Apis mellifera mellifera infested with Varroa Mite

Didn't even mention pesticides... or destruction of habitats either.

Plenty of time for that later though.

Part 2 of last Autumn's Teachings, which will be along shortly, will cover what LandofSpike can remember about preparing the Bees for their winter break.

Countdown to some Hands-On Bee Action

The first 2012 module of LandofSpike's course is set for this Saturday.

The weather has been glorious all week. It's warm and sunny and spring seems to have got its feet firmly under the table. 

LandofSpike checked out Apiary Central this morning and bees are definitely out and about but they're still restricted to just the one bee-sized winter doorway. 

Saturday's itinerary includes expanding their entrance so LandofSpike suspects that he should soon know all about mouseguards.

We're also going to be giving the hive a springtime healthcheck and we'll be topping up the feeders.

Theory-wise we'll be learning how to identify bee castes, how to feed and what plants honey bees love to visit.