A Tribute to the Bees of 2009

As I mentioned in my earlier post, my honey bees did not make it through the cold weather in January. We aren't exactly sure if they froze or starved to death first. My feeling is that they got so cold they couldn't think clearly enough to make it up to the feeder tray full of sugar water at the top of the box, but who really knows. They were alive the day that I fed them, and dead the day I went back to check them. Stubborn little bees. While Mark (my brother-in-law) and I cleaned out the hive, I thought it would be appropriate to use this tragedy as a learning experience. So here's a little lesson in beekeeping for all of you.

Here's the setup...1 hive stand (table looking thing in the back), one brood box with 10 frames (taller box on the left with the taller frame), and then supers with 10 frames (smaller boxes on the right).

The way it works is that you get your bees, they come in a small box container 3 pounds or so of bees (about 12,000 bees), you shake your bees out of the shipping container and into the brood (big) box. You put a queen excluder (basically a special screen) on top of the brood (big) box to keep the queen from going up into the supers (small boxes). This ensures that the queen only lays eggs in the big box at the bottom and all the supers should, in theory, be filled up with honey. I'll have to post this spring about the process of putting it all together when I get my new bees. That should make for a good video.

Bee hives are composed of one queen bee (large female), a couple thousand or so drones (males), and then tens of thousands of worker bees (females). The exact numbers all depend on the size of your hive, but a healthy hive will have in upwards of 60,000 bees. Here is a picture of a worker bee on the left and the queen bee (marked with a green dot on her head) on the right. The queen is substantially larger than all the other bees.

So, let's skip forward to the winter part. In the winter, the worker bees which are female kick out the drones which are male. Ha, that part makes me laugh. So, it's just the queen bee and all her worker bees in the hive for the winter. They clump together in the middle and should eat from the feeder box that the beekeeper fills with sugar water on top of the hive and any honey that they've stored up in the supers. Here are my bees all clumped together like they should be (we all know the problem with this picture is that they are already dead. :( my poor bees.)

This picture shows a few cells filled with pollen. The bees collect nectar, pollen, and honey in these cells to keep the hive going.

This picture is rather odd, and you'll need to click and enlarge it to get the full effect, this is one frame of a super completely filled with honey bees. I'm not sure if they were looking for food or trying to get warm. All you see in the picture is striped honey bee tails.

Here are the beekeepers, taking one last look at all the dead bees trying to figure out what might have happened. You can see the one with the ball is really concerned!

Here is my little beekeeper looking over his hive one last time before we pack it away for the winter. We're planning to have two hives this spring, a ton of honey this summer, and hopefully a lot better luck with making it through the winter next year.