Help the Honeybees

Now that you know about honeybees, what can you do to help?

Everyone can help the honeybees.  Here are some ideas:

1.  Plant a "bee friendly garden"
Ask your parents about planting some wildflowers or native plants.  Honeybees visit flowers to get nectar and pollen, why not provide some of their favorites?
Here's a list of some plants that honeybees will visit in your backyard.  It's also very important that you not spray pesticides (especially insecticides- chemicals that kill insects) when the bees are around.

2.  Buy local honey
There are beekeepers in all 50 states that take care of honeybees; for some of them, keeping bees is their full-time job.  We depend on beekeepers, so buying honey directly from them helps keep honeybees in your area.  Honeylocator.com has a listing of honey sources by region, look at farmers' markets, or find a beekeeper through a state beekeeping association.  Try cooking with helpful and wholesome honey!

3.  Learn more about honeybees- and tell your friends about them!
Honeybees are important to our lives, but many children (and adults) don't like them because they sting.  Wow people with your knowldege (start with Bee in the Know trivia)and tell people about how about 1/3 of our food supply depends on honeybees! 

If you have the beekeeping project in 4-H in your county, try making a poster or work with a beekeeper in your area.  Visit your county extension office to find out more.

Become a bee buddy!  This program, offered through the Kids and Bees program, provides you with a membership packet and birthday surprise.  Click here for more information.

Write about it!  You could win $250 in the 4-H Beekeeping Essay contest from the Foundation for the Preservation of Honeybees.  The topic for 2011 is

"U.S. Honey: A Taste for Every Preference"

Spring is Finally Here!

All winter long, you've been waiting to go outside and enjoy the sunshine, right? Well, guess what? The honeybees have been waiting for Spring, too! Honeybees need flowers for pollen and nectar. The forager bees leave the hive to collect the dusty pollen (made by flowers so that they can produce seeds).  This pollen has hooks and spikes that cause it to cling to the bee's hairy body so that it can be carried to another flower. 

After she finds a flower with tasty pollen, the foraging worker bee rolls it around and creates a ball of pollen on her back legs, called a "pollen basket".  With a heavy load of brightly colored pollen, she flies back the hive and passes it off to other worker bees inside the hive.  They store the delicious pollen in the honeycombs so brood (baby bees) and adult bees can eat it later!

"Bee in the Know":  During a trip out of the hive, a bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers.

Dance, Dance!

When you've found or done something great, what is the first thing you do when you get home? You tell your siblings, mom, or dad about it, right? Well, honeybees have a really interesting way to communicate!

To tell their sisters where a source of pollen (see below) or nectar is, honeybees dance! When one foraging honeybee finds a field full of blooming wildflowers, an apple orchard, or strawberry patch, she flies back to the hive, gives the other bees a taste of the nectar or pollen, and begins a "waggle dance". Scientists studied life inside the hive for a long time to discover the waggle dance, a series of circles and shakes to give her sisters directions to that pollen. In the picture, some preschool students are showing me their best bee dances!

"Bee in the Know": Honeybees dance to show other foragers where a source of pollen/nectar is in relation to the hive and the position of the sun.

Beekeepers Who are as Busy as Their Bees!

So, if bees are busy, beekeepers must be pretty busy too!  Some beekeepers only have a few hives, like me!  Others have thousands of beehives (in each beehive there might be about 60,000 honeybees!) and take care of them as their job.  So what does a beekeeper do?

Beekeepers might take their hives from one part of the country to another, and have beehives for pollinating crops. For all of the different plants that need honeybee pollination, the beekeepers don't live in the right areas-  so they move their beehives.  The load up hives on the back of a semi truck, cover them with a net, and drive across the country to flowers that are in bloom.  In February, beekeepers take over half of the hives in the United States to the almond crop in California. 

Some beekeepers are MIGRATORY beekeepers.  They may have more than one home and travel with their honeybees during different parts of the year.  Usually, these beekeepers take their beehives to the southern part of the United States during the winter.

Are you as busy as a beekeeper??

"Bee in the Know":  There are around 2.5 million honeybee hives in the USA

Honey- That's All It Is!

Honey.  Pure and Simple.
Honey doesn't have anything added to it.  Let's look at how honeybees make honey and how it gets to the bear-shaped bottle in your cabinets. 

Step 1: Foraging honeybees go to the flowers, where they suck nectar through their proboscis (straw-like tongue) into their honey stomach (we just have one stomach- honeybees have two).  The nectar is very watery.

Step 2:  In their honey stomach, special ingredients called enzymes are added.  This officially makes it into HONEY! 

Step 3:  When they bring it back to the hive, the worker bees put the honey into a hexagon cell made out of wax.
Step 4:  With their wings, the worker bees inside the hive fan the honey, removing most of the water so it turns out sticky and thick.

Step 5:  When the honey is ready, they cap it over with wax for storage until the winter. 

That's the end of the honeybees' job.  Beekeepers take extra honey that the bees don't need for the winter.  This process is called extracting.

Step 1: Beekeepers cut off the wax cappings.  These are saved for use in candles, chapstick, and crayons!

Step 2:  The frame of honey is then put into an extractor.  This basically looks like a large metal can with baskets hanging in it.

Step 3:  The honey spins to the outside of the extractor and drips to the bottom.  There is a honey gate at the bottom of the extractor that a beekeeper opens and the honey flows out.

Step 4:  The honey is filtered and bottled.

So there you have it!  Honey is straight from the honeybees to your shelf.

"Bee in the Know":  There are over 300 different varieties of honey in the United States (these come from the different flowers that the bees visit)

Historical Honeybees

I wanted to share some more history about honeybees.

Since the earliest days of civilization, honeybees have been an important part of history! 

The Egyptians kept honey bees 3-5,000 years ago in the Nile River Valley.  This very advanced civilization contributed several key ideas to modern beekeepers; they kept the honeybees in pots, used smoke to calm the bees,  and used rafts to move hives to different nectar flows (we use hives for bee homes and semi trucks instead of rafts, but these concepts are still used today!).  The bee was a symbol of royalty and kingship, and in tombs of high-ranking officials, the Egyptians often left honey and other food for the afterlife. 

In more recent times, Napoleon (a French leader in the late 1700's) used honeybees as one of the symbols of his empire.  He wasn't the first to use this idea, or the last.  Many people have admired the honeybee's work ethic ("busy as a bee")!  This had led to the honeybee's appearance on official state seals and the first money of the United States. 

Utah is the BEEHIVE STATE, and has a skep in the middle of their state seal and flag.  A skep was an early beehive, usually woven out of straw or waxed rope.  It was used until the mid-1800's.  Learn more about why Utah is the beehive state here. 

In the 1850's, beekeeping changed forever with some new inventions.  But that is a story for a different time!

"Bee in the Know":  The earliest record of humans collecting honey from wild colonies or "honey hunting" is from 7000 BC (or 9,000 years ago!)

A Swarm in June...

Many beekeepers have a saying:

"A swarm in May is worth a load of hay,
A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon,
a swarm in July isn't worth a fly!"

Both a load of hay and a silver spoon are pretty valuable, but what is a swarm?  A SWARM is when the honeybee hive gets too crowded- there are too many bees and not enough space!  So the queen leaves the hives with some of the worker bees to go look for a new home.

After eating up tons of honey in the hive so they have energy to fly away, they will quickly land in a tree, bush, or other somewhat sheltered location.  There have even been swarms land in the engines of airplanes!  While they're waiting, scout bees go out looking for a more permanent location.  Hollow trees and logs are perfect places for honeybee homes-- but those are hard to find! 

Many beekeepers will come collect swarms in their area, so if you see a swarm, you or your parents can call a beekeeper and see them put the honeybees into a warm, dry, beehive.  Some of the beekeeping organizations are listed here.

Maybe there will be more swarms this June!  I hear they're worth a silver spoon...

"Bee in the Know":  Honeybees are extremely gentle when they swarm because they have eaten so much honey!