My slides from BarcampLondonX, slightly edited to make the bits that featured video and animations work better on static slides.
Here are the slide notes:
Not bumblebees (lovely as they are).
Or solitary bees.
Definitely not wasps.
Honeybees live in much larger colonies.
In the wild they build nests in hollow spaces like trees.
Or sometimes in the open (but not in the UK).
Or, in this case, in a cavity in a house. The nest is made of wax combs.
Here’s a cross-section showing cells on each side of the comb, and small gaps in between.
Proboscis, sting, pollen baskets, honey stomach, wax glands.
Most bees in a hive are workers (female). Two or three hundred male drones, and one queen.
Drones’ only job is to mate. Queen mates once with several drones, which die. Drones thrown out in autumn.
Queen just lays eggs (also emits pheromone which keeps colony cohesive).
Eggs hatch into larvae after three days. Larvae (brood) fed and grow for six days, then sealed for another twelve.
Drones produced by workers making bigger cells. Queen detects them, and lays an unfertilised egg.
Elongated queen cells built when a new queen is needed (emergency, supersedure or swarming). Fed on royal jelly.
Swarm: old queen takes half the bees just before new queens hatch. Rest in tree while scouts find a new home.
Not always a tree.
Oh, OK, that’s not really a swarm. Apparently some people wear bee beards for fun.
Back to the workers. Here’s one emerging from its cell. Progress through tasks (not all bees do all tasks). Clean cells, remove dead bees, nurse brood, attend queen, store nectar & pollen, make wax, seal gaps, Control temperature, guard hive, forage.
Heat by declutching their wings and vibrating flight muscles. Cool by fanning and evaporating water.
Foraging bees returning with nectar and pollen. Also some newly-flying bees learning the hive location.
Nectar regurgitated with invertase to convert sucrose to fructose & glucose, put into cells and fanned to reduce water content from as much as 70% to 17%, then capped. Pollen packed in cells with a little honey for preservation.
As well as nectar and pollen, bees collect propolis (tree sap etc), which they use to glue things together and fill small gaps. It’s also antibacterial and antifungal.
Finally, water is used to reconstitute honey for food, making brood food from pollen, and for cooling.
Waggledance used by scouts to send foragers to food sources. Angle from vertical indicates angle from sun, and speed correlates to distance. Also bring back samples that foragers smell with antennae.
First hives were hollow logs (still used in some places).
Skeps used for 2000 years. Introduce a swarm, let them build comb, then harvest honey in autumn (often by destroying colony with sulphur smoke).
Destroying hive to harvest honey was inefficient (and didn’t allow inspection for disease etc). Need a way to be able to remove individual combs. Key in those spaces we saw earlier.
Rev Lorenzo Langstroth credited with discovering “bee space” – bees will seal smaller gaps with propolis and fill bigger ones with comb. He invented a hive using just the right gaps everywhere.
From the bottom: stand & landing board, floor with entrance block, brood box with frames, queen excluder, supers, crown board, roof.
The big advantage is that individual frames can be easily removed, inspected, manipulated and replaced.
Tools of the trade: bee suit, smoker and hive tool.
Beekeeping year traditionally begins in autumn, after harvesting honey. First task is to feed the colony with sugar syrup to replace the honey you’ve stolen.
During the winter the bees cluster together for warmth. Their temperature is reduced by a few degrees, and the queen stops laying. Workers can live for several months over winter.
One of the main tasks during the active season is preventing swarms, by ensuring bees have enough space, and sometimes artificially swarming. Doesn’t always work!
Artificial swarm.
Remove supers and queen excluder.
Move hive to one side.
Put an empty hive (with frames) on the old site, and remove three frames.
Find the queen, and move her on a frame of brood with two drawn frames into the new hive.
Put the frames removed earlier in the old hive.
Close everything up, and wait a week. By now bees from the old hive will have started flying, and the new one will be getting short of workers.
Move the old hive to the other side, and the flying bees will go back to the new one instead. Wait another couple of weeks and you have an extra colony, or can unite.
Uniting: remove one queen, and put together separated by a sheet of newspaper. By the time they’ve chewed through, the pheromones will have spread and they won’t fight.
They do a pretty thorough job of getting through the paper!
Of course swarm control doesn’t always work. Another swarm that stayed in my garden.
But this one decided it preferred next door’s tree.
And this one perched at the top of the apple tree.
Shake, brush or scoop the swarm into a skep or cardboard box.
Put skep or box on a sheet, and leave until evening to let stragglers and scouts join them. Then wrap the sheet over the top to contain them for transport to their new home.
Rehoming a swarm. After being shaken into a skep or box, they’re tipped onto a board in front of an empty hive, and (hopefully) walk in.
Another important job is controlling disease and pests. Most common is the varroa mite, which lays eggs on larvae, sucks blood and introduces infections.
Varroa mites on bees.
Clearer boards let bees go down from the supers, but stop them coming back up again.
At the end of the summer it’s time to harvest the honey!
Uncap the cells with a knife.
Spin out the honey in an extractor.
Filter into a tank and leave to settle.
Bottling.
The finished product! Honey naturally crystallises – smoothness can be improved by seeding with some smooth set honey before bottling.
There are various rules about what you have to print on labels and how big the text should be.
Hipster label printing with an old letterpress machine.
kerryb
smashingmag
cromwellryan
tenderlove
aleyda
chrislema
maggiecrowley
zakiyama
stephaniewalter
iamctodd
lynnandtonic
geeforr
soudai
