Learn
Three things worth knowing.
Three things worth knowing about bees, each one built so you can play with it rather than read about it.
Game one
Decode the waggle dance
A returning forager dances on the vertical comb. The angle she waggles away from straight up is the angle of the food away from the sun. The length of the waggle says how far. Read her, then set your bearing and distance.
The arrow shows the sun. Watch her waggle, then guess.
Game two
Bee or not a bee
Nearly everything people call a bee is not one. Hoverflies mimic them and wasps get blamed for them. Six rounds.
Score of
Game three
The foraging run
One worker, one tank of energy. Visit flowers, fill both pollen baskets, get home before it runs out. Arrow keys, or tap where you want her to go. She does this about fifteen times a day.
The questions people actually ask
Is it a bee or a wasp?
Honeybees are furry, slender and golden brown. Wasps are hairless and glossy, with a narrow waist and sharper yellow and black markings. Bumblebees are the third one people mean: much larger, rounder, and heavily furred. If it is on a flower and dusted with pollen it is a bee. If it is on your beer it is a wasp.
What should I do if I find a swarm?
Do not disturb it and do not spray it. A swarm has no honey to defend and is usually docile, and if left alone it will normally move on within 24 to 72 hours. If it settles somewhere awkward, use the BBKA swarm collector register at bbka.org.uk. A local beekeeper will almost always come and take it away for nothing.
How do bees actually make honey?
Foragers collect nectar, pass it between bees, and mix it with enzymes that break the complex sugars into simpler ones. Then they fan it with their wings until the water content drops below about 20 per cent, and cap the cell with wax. One kilogram of honey takes roughly two million flower visits and a combined flight distance of about twice around the Earth.
How much honey does one hive give you?
In a good year a well managed hive might give 9 to 18 kilograms, which is 20 to 40 pounds, of surplus. In a poor British summer, which is not rare, you may take nothing at all and have to feed the colony syrup to get it through the winter. Anyone promising you a fixed number of jars is guessing.
Do bees die when they sting?
Worker honeybees do. The barbed sting lodges in skin and tears away from the bee with the venom sac attached, which kills her. Scrape the sting out sideways rather than squeezing it, which pushes more venom in. The queen has a smooth sting and rarely uses it, and drones have no sting at all.
Are honey bees in trouble?
Managed colonies fell sharply through the twentieth century and have recovered modestly as more people took up beekeeping. The BBKA puts the current figure at around 270,000 managed hives in England and Wales. Wild colonies, though, remain scarce, and disease, habitat loss and pesticides all still bear down on them.
What is the single biggest threat?
Varroa. It is a parasitic mite that feeds on bees and their brood and carries viruses with it, chief among them Deformed Wing Virus. Left untreated it will usually collapse a colony within two to three years. It arrived in the UK in the 1990s and is now in virtually every managed hive in the country, including mine. Managing it is most of the job.
Can I keep bees myself?
Yes, and no licence is needed in the UK. Join a BBKA affiliated association and do their beginner course first, register free on BeeBase at nationalbeeunit.com so the National Bee Unit can inspect and advise, then get your first colony from a local beekeeper. Start with one or two hives. Most people who begin without a course give up in year two.
Who is who in the hive
The three kinds of bee
Queen
One per colony, and everything depends on her.
- Lays up to 2,000 eggs a day at the height of summer, more than her own body weight
- Lives three to five years, where a summer worker lives about six weeks
- Longer abdomen that extends well past her wingtips, which is how you pick her out
- Her sting is smooth, so she can use it more than once, and almost never does on you
Worker
Female, sterile, and doing every job in the hive by rota.
- Works through a career: cleaning, then nursing brood, then wax, then guarding, then foraging
- Makes about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life
- Barbed sting, which tears away when she uses it and kills her
- Thirty to fifty thousand of them in a hive at midsummer
Drone
Male, stingless, and with exactly one job.
- Eyes so large they meet on top of his head, for spotting a queen in flight
- Cannot sting, cannot forage, and cannot even feed himself properly
- Mates once, in the air, and dies doing it
- Thrown out of the hive by the workers before winter, every year, without ceremony
Wondering about the name? The Easter Exsultet praises the work of bees because their wax makes the Paschal candle, and St Ambrose, who had a swarm settle on his face as a baby, is the patron saint of beekeepers. The longer version is on the front page.