Barefoot Vegan Magazine March_April 2017 issue

A
fter studying and learning to ‘keep bees’ for
several years, I decided that I was naturally a
‘bee landlady’, not a keeper!
I provide a safe environment for them to live - or lodge
- and the colonies are pretty much left to their own
devices and are allowed to swarm naturally. Of course, I
watch over them and make sure the hives are safe from
woodpeckers and mice and in return, I take great delight
in the observational rewards. I do not harvest honey
from them as I believe it would be like robbing a
neighbour’s larder – and their medicine cabinet, come to
that!
While learning about these magnificent little creatures,
I was particularly captivated by the community aspect
within the hive. They know how things need to be done.
We could learn a lot from them.
A healthy honey-bee hive functions as a polished and
well-oiled machine, thanks to tens of thousands of bees,
each performing their jobs dutifully. The life of a honey
bee is all work and very little play. From the moment it
emerges out of its hatching cell to the moment of its last
breath, a honey bee is working. Functioning as a unit,
bees produce a workforce capable of pollinating
thousands of acres of flowering plants, producing
upwards of 100 pounds of honey per year and
continuously rearing more bees to replace those lost
throughout the season. When you understand just how
hard honey bees work, the phrase “busy as a bee” begins
to take on new meaning.
Honeybees are a highly fascinating, remarkably
organised society. Typically, they live in colonies that
consist of a queen, hundreds of drones and 20,000 to
80,000 female worker bees. A bee colony is known as a
super-organism as no single bee can survive on its own.
There is division of labour and every bee must carry out
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their own duties and co-operate with one another for
survival.
Without doubt, the female worker bees in a honey
bee colony comprise the largest population (about
50,000 female workers to about 500 male drones) and
are arguably the hardest working (aside from the
queen, of course). As an individual bee grows older, its
age dictates its role in the hive. Most female bees will
work in each of the roles listed below at one point their
lifetimes, beginning with nursing—an occupation that
is taken on by newly hatched bees—and ending with
foraging, which is a task reserved for the oldest bees
only.
Nurse and House Bees
Upon hatching, each fledgling bee immediately cleans
out its hatching cell to prepare it for the next egg. Its
first duty as a working member of the hive is to care for
the young: As a nurse, a young bee will feed the brood,
the collective term for honey-bee young, pupae and
larvae.
Undertakers
Honey bees are sticklers for cleanliness. With so many
live bodies coming and going from the hive, there are
sure to be a few dead ones. Undertaker bees are
responsible for carrying out the hive’s dead, cleaning
up bee parts and removing other debris. Similarly,
something I love to show people in an observational
hive is that if you put a small piece of paper in the top
of the hive, the undertakers and cleaners will pass it
down through the hive, eventually evicting it at the
entrance!