Inside the Hive: Honey Bees and Beekeeping Program Recap

Thank you to Jean Miller from the Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Hunterdon County for a wonderful presentation on honey bees and the ins and outs of beekeeping.  Beekeeping can be a very rewarding past time, yet requires an intricate knowledge of honey bees, including their behaviors.  Subtle differences or changes can result in boom or bust for bee husbandry so its important to have a solid understanding of nature’s hardest worker.  So let’s pull the lid off and see if we can’t get some delicious honeycombs of knowledge that can help us in our beekeeping efforts.

Fast Facts About Honey Bees

There are about 400 different types of native bees to NJ, but the honey bee is not one of them.  Bees, as a species, often get confused with other insects such as wasps, hornets, and yellow-jackets, but there are some very distinct differences:

• Honey bees have amber colored stripes and are fuzzy (helps collect pollen) while the others have yellow/white and black stripes with no hair
• Bees make honey (and at times may steel other colonies’ honey) while the others do not produce any honey, they only steal it
• Honey bees sting only once and die (only females have stingers) while the others can sting repeatedly
• Honey bees exude wax from their bodies to build their homes while the others use items in nature, like mud, chewed wood, or holes in the ground

Honey bees also go through 4 stages of development, all within their own individual tube in a honeycomb:

1. Egg – once an egg is laid, it takes 3 days for it to hatch
2. Larvae – they look like little, white grubs and feed on royal jelly (created and brought by female worker bees) for about 9 days
3. Pupa – looks like a bee, but has the same white color as the larvae.  After 21 days, if its a female worker bee (as a vast majority are), she will eat her way out and clean up her honeycomb tube.
4. Adult – Adult bees are either queens (about a dozen), female workers (about 90-92%), or a male drone.

Female worker bees go through job transitions are they age.  First, they tend to be nurse bees that care for the eggs and larvae, making royal jelly from pollen fed to them from other bees.  They can also serve the queen by feeding her royal jelly and cleaning her waste or are tasked with building and repairing the honeycomb.  After about 3-4 weeks, these bees then transition and become foragers, bringing back pollen and water to the hive, before dying out in another 3-4 weeks.

Some Interesting Facts

Did you know:

• While regular honey bees eat pollen and honey, queen bees are feed only royal jelly, secreted from 2 glands on the bee’s head?
• Nurse bees vibrate their wing muscles to keep the larvae warm?
• Use those same wing muscles to turn their nectar solution into honey by evaporating most of moisture out?
• Bees release pheromones and do special dances to alert other bees to the colony, threats, and sources of food?
• Queens only take 16 days to hatch, but the first one will go and kill the others with her stinger?
• Queens can lay up to 1,500 eggs a day during peak months
• Male drones only have 1 job – to mate with the queen and die immediately after?

So You Want to Start Beekeeping

If you are interested in beekeeping, there are a variety of ways to start.  You can buy bees from wholesalers or other beekeepers or find a swarm of bees during their relocation efforts and transport them to your boxes (don’t worry, they are not aggressive in this state!)

If you don’t purchase bees that are already in pre-fabricated boxes, you will need to create a box tower.  Usually consisting of 4 – 5 specially designed boxes, the first (and sometimes second) generally being deeper boxes where the queen, nurse bees, and larvae will reside.  The other boxes are where the bees will build honeycombs to house their honey supplies and generally contain 10 frames.

Some materials that you will need include a hat, veil, hive tool (only way to pry out the frames), and smoker (helps distract any guardian bees).  However, before venturing into any beekeeping efforts, please be sure to do your research and educate yourselves to ensure the safety and productivity of your bees!

More Information

If you would like more information about beekeeping, especially in New Jersey, please visit the NJ Beekeepers Association at https://www.njbeekeepers.org/.  You can also view a recording of this program on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/8FwPc6txqnA.  If you have any questions or would like information on beekeeping courses, please contact Jean Miller at jeanbmiller63@gmail.com.