Before I share my experience spending the day with a local beekeeper, I would like to thank the Shenandoah Valley Beekeeper's Association for connecting me with beekeepers in the community, Professor Dorn who shared his knowledge and time with me, and my amazing friend Sara who took all of the beautiful pictures that I use in this blog post.
To begin, Professor Dorn recommended we pick a warm and sunny day so we would have an opportunity to open the hive and get personal with the honey bees! After suiting up, we dove right in to examine the bees.
Smoking the bees is the first step in interacting with them. Professor Dorn collected some pine from the woods and began to burn it. The smoker (left) allows the beekeeper to control the amount of smoke they are releasing on the hive. The smoke blocks the bees natural pheromones to stop them from communicating with each other and possibly swarming. The smoke also tricks the bees into believing there is a forest fire, so they gorge on honey which calms and slows them down.
Smaller hives tend to be tamer since they are often focused on making honey and have fewer guard bees. Once the hive was open I had the opportunity to view the honeycombs made from the royal jelly of worker bees. Professor Dorn also distinguished the difference between honey-filled combs and combs holding eggs or larva.
Professor Dorn has had up to 9 hives at one time. Last winter he lost 6 of the hives despite placing his hives next to a huge patch of Milkweed, a native plant to Virginia that bees love to collect pollen from. He assumes the death of his bees was caused by the confusing winter we had from bitter cold days to hot days, that disoriented the bees and caused them to use up their honey storage before winter was over.
There is also a major issue with hives being taken over by Small Hive Beetles (SHB). This pest, native to Africa, has made its way to Australia and North America. The SHB has also been linked to CCD. You can read more about the effects of CCD here. While the SHB itself is almost harmless, the overpopulation of SHB can cause the hive to search for a new hive due to not having enough worker bees to fight the beetles off.
Professor Dorn shared some fun facts with me as well. I had no idea bees could remember distances up to 20 yards. With help from the sun, worker bees do a waggle dance (yes, that is one of the official terms bee keepers use) to communicate with each other and release pheromones to guide the rest of the hive to pollen and nectar. If bees go to the left of the sun and waggle for a certain distance, it corresponds that the honey is to the left of the sun and x yards away. It is simply amazing that these small insects can use little movements to travel such far distances. Bees visit up to 5,000 flowers in a single day. If you think that's amazing, consider this: to make one pound of honey, a hive of bees must travel over 55,000 miles and visit two million flowers
It was so interesting to understand the differences between beekeepers and how they harvest their honey. To learn more about the honey extraction process for a small scale beekeeper click here.
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