Bee college brain leakage

Ok, I couldn't just NOT tell you some of the things I learned. I HAVE TO TELL SOMEBODY. IT'S SO NEAT! And I already told my husband once if not twice and I don't think he wants to hear it all yet again. This post is long and wordy with no pictures, so feel free to ignore this post if you don't want to learn some really neat bee things but omg why would anyone ever make that kind of decision!? Ok. With me? Here we go...

There are about 20,000 species of bee in the world. Of those, there are only NINE species of honey bee. And of those, only ONE has the ability to self-regulate their hive temperature making them the honey bee world hackers and giving them the ability to live almost anywhere. That is Apis Mellifera or Western Honey Bee. This is the honey bee that beekeepers keep. It doesn't matter if it's 30 degrees or 130 degrees outside, the Apis Mellifera colony has the unique ability to self-regulate the temperature in the hive, keeping it at a perfect 95F degrees year-round, day and night. There are somewhere around 20 subspecies of Apis Mellifera, one of them being Apis Mellifera Liguistica, or Italian honey bee, and specifically these are the kind I keep. They are known to be very docile, gentle, and easy to keep. Another is the African honey bee which is the kind you hear people freak out about, calling them "killer bees". They are typically a hardier bee, more resistant to disease, and more prolific with honey production, but they are also much much more aggressive and prone to attacking. And when one African bee attacks, a large portion of the colony will attack. When my Italian girls attack, I only need to walk away about 15 feet and she forgets me and goes back to being awesome. If African bees attack, you should RUN 100 yards or more. Despite this, there are beekeepers who successfully keep African honey bees. Good for them. Not me, no thank you. I don't like running thanks.

The queen bee's ovaries hold roughly 250-300 eggs that are ready to lay at any given moment, with new eggs continuously growing. How do they know that? As Dr Ellis happily answered, "That's why God made grad students. Give em a microscope and tell em to count, and they'll count." The eggs pass through the oviduct where the queen has the ability to fertilize them at will. She holds sperm in a separate sac. Eggs that are fertilized will grow into female worker bees, or even another queen if the workers decide to feed it royal jelly. Eggs that are not fertilized will grow into male drones.

I'm sure you've seen that bees communicate by doing a waggle dance. The direction of their dance relative to up is the same degree as the relation of the sun to the hive. With the sun being 0°, if the source is 60° from the hive, they will dance at a 60° angle relative to what is level, with directly up being 0°. The length of time they dance indicates the distance from the hive. A one second long waggle at 60° says "Hey girls, there's good stuff 60° that way and about 750m away." Two second waggle would be about 1500m away. Flying bees calculate distance by using visual cues as they watch the ground while flying. It's not 100% accurate, but it gets them close enough to then use sight and smell to find the source. When they do a waggle dance, a very excited dance says "omg the nectar is soooo good!" A slower less enthusiastic dance says "eh, it's food, but not the greatest".

Bees have a preference for caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, all which occurs naturally in various flowers. If a bee finds a caffeinated flower, they will return home to do the waggle dance to tell others. Their waggle dance is often exaggerated and hyped up, because they are high on caffeine. They may also feast on fermented nectar if they find it. They can get drunk, and might not even be able to stand up. Drunk bees will sometimes even forget their way home. Unfortunately, there is no Uber service for drunk bees and they are often doomed to regret their decisions.

When a colony swarms, it is the essence of bee reproduction. It's not the queen, the mating, the eggs or brood. It's all about the swarm. Everything a bee does in its life is with the goal to swarm. Build up a really strong colony, swarm, start again, repeat. A swarm is a colony reproducing itself. Watching a hive swarm is like watching it give birth.

Just before a colony decides to swarm, they have a very important matter to deal with. They want to take their queen with them, but she is FAT with a heavy diet of royal jelly and she is too heavy to fly. A laying queen can not fly. Her only job is to look in a cell, determine it's good, and plop an egg in there. But now they want her to fly. So the nurse bees who feed her will begin reducing her food allowance. They will also get on top of her and buzz her (not sting, just sorta vibrate while on top of her) which annoys her into moving around. Bees literally put the queen on a diet and exercise program to get her to lose weight so she will be able to fly. No joke.

When bees swarm, they will cluster on a tree, or fence, or anything. While they are clustered, scout bees take off in all directions to find a new home. If they find a cavity, like an old hollowed out tree or that hole in the side of your house, they will fly inside and check it out. The scout will fly up and down and side to side and measure the space. If it is suitable, she will fly back to the swarm and do a waggle dance on the surface of the swarm. She will communicate "hey family, this place is perfect" by dancing excitedly. Another scout may return and indicate by dancing a bit less excitedly that the spot she found isn't great, but it'll do. Other scouts will take off to go check out the locations for themselves and come back to also dance saying that it's perfect or not. Other bees will vote by touching the dancing scouts and joining in with an excited dance. As more and more bees join in the dance, a majority will agree and the swarm will take off. The scouts that know where they're going will fly above the swarm, sprinting in a fast direction which points to the location. As they pass the swarm, they will drop down, move to the back, fly up, and again fly fast above the swarm pointing them the right way. Eventually they will arrive at the new location and begin building comb and making their home so they can do nothing else but build up their colony and swarm again.

I'll admit that I hate wearing the big leather beekeeper gloves. First of all my hands are small and they never fit, plus it's really hard to feel what I'm doing. I've squished way more bees with gloves on than I do bare handed. I HATE bee stings on my hands or fingers but I 100% prefer working bare handed, so I do most of the time. However, I always wear a veil. It's super important for beekeepers to always wear, at minimum, a hat with a veil to protect their head, especially their eyes. Angry bees are attracted to dark colors, and the holes on our face are dark. A bee sting on the eye would be not only be OMG!!! incredibly painful, but the cornea will begin to disintegrate within minutes, and blindness can occur in as little as 10 minutes. (Ugh the stuff I learned at Bee College!) Corneal transplants are possible, and recovery has been successful, but really.. don't be stupid. Just wear a veil. I mean eye patches look cool and all, but.

If you think you want to keep bees, know this, at some point, you are going to get stung. If you've ever been stung by a bee, you know it hurts. It hurts for new beekeepers and it hurts for old beekeepers. It doesn't matter how many times you've been stung, bee stings hurt, some more, some less, but they all hurt. In my own short experience, the stings on my hands hurt the most and swell the most. The sting on my thigh hurt a little and turned bright red. The sting on my side barely hurt at all. Dr Ellis said he has been stung thousands of times, on every part of his body (except his eyeball), and every sting hurts. He was once stung on his forehead and it swelled up like a baseball, then drained causing him to get two swollen black eyes, which also drained into his lip area and gave him a massive swollen top lip. This was after he had been beekeeping for years. Also it happened 2 weeks before his wedding. (Yes, it cleared up before his big day. LOL) Every sting reaction can be different. One might not swell at all, while another swells up like a golfball. Or a sting on your hand could make your entire arm swell up. It might turn pink, or dark red, or purple. It might cause little red dots. It might itch, it might not itch for a few days, or it might not itch at all. It might itch so bad you want to cut the appendage off. These are all normal reactions to bee stings and not an indication that you're allergic. Very few people are truly allergic to bee venom. However, if you get stung on your hand, and your leg swells up, that's an allergic reaction. Or if you get a rash on your back after a sting on the knee. These are non-life threatening reactions, seek medical attention if you feel it's necessary. If you feel nauseous or have gastrointestinal issues, that might be an allergic reaction, and would be advisable to see a doctor. If you have trouble breathing, fainting, weak pulse, etc, seek medical attention immediately. Anaphylaxis can kill you. Bee stings can kill you. It's also important to note that while many beekeepers develop a resistance to bee venom and their symptoms lesson over the years, a life threatening reaction can develop at any time. You've been warned. All in all, bee stings are not a big deal to me, so far. I've been stung on the finger while holding a full frame of bees, and still calmly and slowly put the frame down before tending to the stinger left in my finger. The last thing you want to do when stung is anger a whole frame of bees. When a bee stings, she releases an attack pheromone saying to the others "hey, come sting this thing right here!" Be calm, put down any bees you're holding, grab your smoker and give it a puff or two, and remove the stinger.

Speaking of stingers, almost everyone says "you have to remove venom sac". If you've been stung, or seen a sting, you know a little ball thing is left and you're told you need to scrape it out so you don't inject more venom. One of the most surprising things I learned from Dr Ellis was that that little ball you see is not actually the venom sac. The venom sac is a much thinner and delicate membranous sac that is usually torn and/or destroyed when it's ripped from the bee's body. Whats left, and what you see, is the stinger and a group of muscles. That little thing that is pulsating on your hand is the muscle group, the stinger and two barbed lancers. And it is contracting and walking the barbed lancers further and further into your skin. So yes, still, pull it out. But don't call it the venom sac.

(This is bee related, I promise) In Africa, farmers have a hard time keeping elephants from trampling and stealing their crops. Their farms are their livelihoods and as such, sometimes they are forced to kill and poach elephants to protect their farms. However, researchers have discovered that African elephants are afraid of African honey bees. If an elephant so much as hears the buzzing of African bees, they will back away and vocalize to other elephants to warn them. The Elephants & Bees project helps African farmers by setting up a beehive fence around their farms. Hives are suspended and connected by a wire so that when an elephant walks into the wire, it will jiggle the hives next to it, setting the bees into a frenzy, alarming the elephants and sending them back where they came from. This saves not only the farmers crops, but also the elephants from being killed by the farmer.

Honey bees have been trained as sniffer bees, to indicate things like explosives, narcotics, and even certain cancers or illnesses. While they are super good at sniffing, and easy to train in as little as 10 minutes, bees don't live long so you're probably not going to see sniffer bees replace the sniffer dogs at the airport any time soon.

Back in 1982, NASA conducted an experiment by sending bees into space. However, they definitely weren't beekeepers in any sense of the word. They sent a total of 14 adult worker bees, along with moths and flies, in the same box, to space on the Space Shuttle Columbia. They wanted to test the insects ability to fly etc in space. All of the bees died because no one thought to feed them. They had a control box on Earth. All those bees died too because no one thought to feed them. So aside from learning a little about how they move around in space, they also learned that bees starve to death in space the same way they do on Earth if they aren't fed. Who knew!? They tested again in 1984, and sent 3400 bees in a special space worthy bee box. The bees did build comb, and the queen even laid a few eggs. They didn't learn much else, but the astronauts enjoyed being able to observe the bees.

Bees can surf. When a bee lands on water, the water tension causes the water to stick to the underside of their wings, but not the top. They will slowly pump their wings which creates tiny little waves that they sorta surf on moving across the surface until they reach solid ground. Unless of course the water is too cold and they get paralyzed from the cold and drown. Surf little bee, surf!

Ok, if you've made it through all of that, and enjoyed it, you are my kind of people. I think all of this is super interesting, and it's only a small portion of the things I learned. Bees are incredibly complex, sophisticated, and wonderful little creatures. I don't think I will ever get tired of learning about them and I love to share things I've learned. Thank you so much for being here and reading my blog and joining me on this beekeeping journey. I hope that maybe I inspire you to keep bees yourself, and if not, that's ok. My bees are OUR bees. ❤️ 🐝

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