Types of Bees

This Thanksgiving we were sitting on the porch at my in-laws and a bee flew in that did not look like a honeybee but didn't look like any other bees I'm familiar with either.  I decided I'd like to do some research on the different types of bees (I found that there are over 20,000 species!) and I figured I might as well share the information with you too!  So, this post is not really related to my becoming beekeepers, but hopefully you will find it interesting anyway.

None of the photographs used in this post are mine.  I found them all via Google Images; however, I tried to credit their rightful owner where possible in the captions.  Also, the information is not my own research, so sources are cited below where I have paraphrased someone else's work.  

The Honeybee

Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita, Superfamily: Apoidea, Family: Apidae, Genus: Apis, Species: mellifera

Currently, there are only 7 recognized species of honeybee with a total of 44 subspecies [1].  They are eusocial, which means that they live in a cooperative group with a caste system.  Honeybees have been domesticated for over 3000 years.  I have a blog post coming about cool honeybee facts so I'll leave this section light.

Photograph by Stephen Buchman via nationalgeographic.com

The Africanized Honeybee

Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita, Superfamily: Apoidea, Family: Apidae, Genus: Apis, Species: mellifera

These bees are also known as Killer Bees as they are the most defensive and will peruse their attack the longest of any other variety of bee.  Although a hybrid of the honeybee we know and love, this bee  is not desirable for the average beekeeper as they swarm more frequently and further, as well as the issue of defensiveness.

The best way to tell the difference between Africanized bees and European bees is in a lab through testing [2].  Although there is a slight difference in size it is very difficult to tell the difference by just looking.  In the picture below, the Africanized bee is on the left, European on the right, however, I don't think the coloring differences are of note, only the slight size differences.

Credit to Scott Bauer, USDA-ARS

The Bumblebee

Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita, Superfamily: Apoidea, Family: Apidae, Genus: Bombus, Species: various

So cute!  Bumblebees are sweet and soft.  I actually pet them because they don't normally sting.  There are over 250 species of bumblebees.

Cute bumblebee from Photos.com?  Sorry, not sure on this one...

Bumblebees are often found foraging for nectar and pollen similar to the honeybee, however, they do not produce enough honey to attempt to farm them the way we do the honeybee.  Also, their nests are different in that they have much smaller colonies (50 bees instead of 50,000), sometimes built in the ground.  The queens hibernate over winter and then form a new colony in the spring.  She does this on her own, building wax posts and laying eggs to begin a new colony. [3]

Bumblebee nest via beneficialbugs.org

The Carpenter Bee

Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera, Suborder: Apocrita, Superfamily: Apoidea, Family: Xylocopinae, Genus: Xylocopa, Species: various 

Carpenter bees are usually found flying around the eaves of houses or near other wooden areas of structures, like a deck.  There are 500 varieties of carpenter bees.  Some live in small nests together, but most species are solitary, living in nests tunneled in wood.

www.buffaloexterminating.com

They bore holes into the wood and use the tunnels to raise brood and store nectar.  It is possible that these holes will be used over years at a time and in those cases, the tunnels can run several feet long.  They do not eat the wood, but reform it to make side walls that are similar in consistency to particle board to raise brood.  In the image below you can see the tunnels and the smaller brood cells.

www.fs.fed.us

 The Wasp (Hornets & Yellow Jackets too)

Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Arthropoda, Class: Insecta, Order: Hymenoptera  Taxon: Aculeata, Superfamily: Vespoidea, Family: Vespidae, Subfamily: Vespinae, Genus: Dolichovespula, Species: various 

This one actually looks kind of creepy to me.  Anson once stepped in a yellow jacket nest and had about 30 stings all over his body.  They kept stinging him until he swatted them dead.  I watched and worried from afar.  He was fine though, and didn't even have much of a reaction.

Yellow jacket: Special thanks to Laura Meyers of laurameyers.photoshelter.com

The term wasp as a species covers over 100,000 insects, including hornets and yellow jackets.  They are actually not even a bee, but I'm including them in this post because, well, I didn't know that and I'm assuming you didn't either!  Another cool thing I learned is that almost every insect has a corresponding wasp that preys upon it or parasites it.  They are sometimes used as a natural form of pest control as they prey mostly on what is considered pest insects, like caterpillars, crickets and flies [5].  Wasps have annual colonies like the bumblebee that is rebuilt each spring.  Wasp queens also go dormant through winter, hiding in wood crevices  until they reemerge.  They do not reuse old nests to start a colony.  Unlike honeybees, the wasp can sting multiple times because they do not lose their stinger in your skin.

www.allcountypestcontrol.com

Because there are so many varieties of wasps there are also lots of forms of nests.  I bet the bees that killed Thomas Jay in My Girl were wasps and not bees if my memory of the nest is correct.  The nest Anson stepped in was a ground nest, which you can hardly tell is a nest at all.  You've probably seen a small grouping of cells under a house at some point.  There are even wasps that make nests out of mud:

Uploaded to wikipedia by a user named Pollinator

Paper wasp nest from www.advancedwildlifecontrolllc.com

A hornet nest from Wikipedia.  I think this nest is really pretty!

Cat Bee

And then there is the little known cat bee.  This bee is also soft but surprisingly unpredictable. 

This is just a joke.  It's from this video:

Citations:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeybee

2. M. K. O'Malley, extension assistant, J. D. Ellis, assistant professor, Entomology & Nematology Department, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 and A. S. Neal, extension agent, St. Lucie County, Ft. Pierce, FL.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee

4. Stephen B. Bambara and Michael Waldvogel, Entomology Extension NCSU
5. Jeff Hahn, Phil Pellitteri, & Donald LewisUniversity of Minnesota Extension 

So I got stung on my neck

Which was no big deal.  I'm a confident beekeeper and stings do not bother me.  Haha. This is only partly true...  Here are some pictures of my neck:

Bee sting on my jugular 20 minutes later

and 4 hours later

As you can see, this sting is really not that big of a deal.  It hurt a little bit and now it's swelling slightly.  Totally manageable.  And so was the one I got a few weeks ago on my thigh.  It didn't bother me and only lasted 3 days.  No worse than a mosquito bite, to be honest.

But having a bee stuck in my hair is a totally different Audrey.  Clearly I did not fasten my veil very securely this morning and a few bees got inside.  I was OK with the situation and walked away to get them out.  When one stung me on my neck I was still relatively calm.  But once I realized there was one tangled in my hair (again -- this had happened before about two years ago) the drama started.  I removed my jacket and went upstairs to a mirror hoping I could get it loose before it stung me.  The buzzing was getting more and more intense.  You can tell by the sound if they are serious about stinging you.  I think both the bee and I started to panic at that point.  I tried to tell myself that the last time this happened it ended up fine as if the scalp was some sort of special zone of skin that isn't effected by stings.  Logic and reason did not convince me to calm down and I ran outside screaming for Anson like a child or a lunatic.  He did not appear instantly, unfortunately, so I screeched louder and shook my head like I was at an 80s hair band concert.  As Anson came over the tears started and I couldn't calm down.  It was a total meltdown.  He just walked over and crushed my hair in his hands until the buzzing stopped.  It had stung me moments earlier and I didn't even care, I just wanted the bee out of my hair.  I am such a baby!  Oh, and our neighbor was outside.  She said nothing.

Anyways, there is more important information to talk about today than these stings which do not even hurt:  We are losing our other hive.  We are so sad about it.  During the check today we only found 4 or 5 brood cells, and if you recall from an earlier post, this is not good news.  We likely have a bad queen and will lose this hive as well.  We could be optimistic and say that she is just slowing down for winter, but I don't think it's normal to slow down this much.  In my first blog post I mentioned that Poppop had requeened both of our hives for us.  This means that he bought new and young queens for us hoping that it would mean we had a strong hive starting out.  We suspect that all of these queens he purchased were bad or weak.  (Poppop is also losing one of his remaining three which he had requeened at the same time.)  We lost the other hive a few weeks ago and now we cannot find enough brood in the second one, likely leading towards its inevitable demise.  Our adventures of becoming beekeepers may have a hiatus through winter.  Once spring comes around we can purchase new bees and queens and try to start over.

Bad Bee News

Anson says we had a beemergengy, that we had to act beemediately and that it was unbeelievable but I just said you've got to bee kidding me.  A little less creative.  We indeed had some bad bee news this weekend.  It started out on Friday for our first real beekeeping activities.  Like I said in a previous blog post, the main responsibility a beekeeper seems to have is to ensure the queen is alive and well.  The way to check for this would ideally be to find her but that is challenging among tens of thousands of bees.  The other way is to find eggs, larva or caped larva.  This evidence of brood would lead the beekeeper to the conclusion that there was a healthy queen laying recently.  Well, on Friday when we checked we did not see any evidence at all of brood.  We called Poppop and then a mentor from the Wake County Beekeepers Association and determined that there was no queen and that the only option we had to save the remaining bees would be to combine the hives down to one hive.  Anson and I are both so disappointed.  However, this has been and will continue to be a good learning experience!

Where did our queen go?  Well, it seems we never actually had a queen.  We can conclude this by looking at the development cycle of a worker bee:

Poppop told us that he had replaced both hive's queens before giving them to us.  To do this, you can make a new queen or you can buy one from an apiary.  Poppop buys his from Mr. Tapp of Busy Bee Apiaries in Chapel Hill.  They mail him a queen in a tiny box.  First, he has to locate the old queen and remove her.  Then there is a process to introduce the new queen.  For our hive without a queen he said that he was never able to actually locate the old queen and that obviously the bees must have rejected the new queen.

A hive cannot survive without a queen.  So, what we had to do was combine the hives.  The upside to this is that the one hive will be more populous, stronger, and get an earlier start in the spring.  We can then divide the hives back into two.  My bee mentor said he'd come help me do that.  We'll have to buy or make a queen. I have no idea how to do any of this so it will be fun to learn.

The hives we started with each had 2 boxes.  To combine them we had to break down the weak hive into just one box and introduce it to the strong hive.  Each box has ten frames.   We chose the ten choicest frames that were the heaviest with honey to leave with the bees and were supposed to remove the other ten and store for the winter.  Before storing, however, Poppop recommended we leave the frames in the freezer overnight to sort of sanitize them.  We have a very small fridge and we had plans so we decided, stupidly, to leave the box of frames on the porch to deal with when we got home later.  Well, oh my god, was that a mistake.  We came home to a cloud of bees.  It was insane.  It was actually very alarming.  Our awesome neighbors said they could hear the roar of bees buzzing from their porch.  I took a 15 second video of the feeding frenzy that was ensuing on our porch to share with you:

Luckily the bees all go home at night so we let the chaos continue and went to have dinner and see Batman with friends.  We came home later and the box was free of bees.  We put it in a trash bag, took a couple out for the freezer and put the rest in the shed.  Everything is much calmer now.  And still no stings for either of us.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of dead bees out by the hive.  It makes us sad.  I'm not sure why there are so many dead but there's enough I probably need to sweep them all away.  Hopefully everything is going OK and there will bee no more problems.

Why keep bees?

You may be wondering why someone would want to keep bees.  Anson and I asked ourselves that question during the bee-filled van ride home to Raleigh.  Comedian Eddie Izzard has some funny things to say about keeping bees:

Well, there are many reasons one would want to keep bees.  Here are the top reasons Anson and I are interested, listed in order of importance to us:

1. Honey -- The benefits of honey are plentiful and there's even a website dedicated to the benefits-of-honey.com but to name a few:
• Immune system booster; Antioxidant; Probiotic
• Potential allergy immunity 
• Sore throat relief
• Good for your skin: heals wounds and burns, moisturizes 
• Delicious
2. Connect with nature
• I've read that beekeeping reduces stress (but I have no stress!)
• Anson and I saw a new bee emerging from its cell today.  They have to chew their way through their wax cell to get out as adults.  It was almost emotional to watch.
3. Education
• Bees are fascinating! I'll make a blog post on why later.  I've been making a list of cool facts to share.  I'll also try to take pictures of bees doing bee things.
4. Easy and rewarding hobby
• Bees are low maintenance and require minimal effort and time to keep
• Honey is a great gifts for loved ones
• Beeswax can be used to make candles, lip balm, hand salve, and more.  I think we'll likely make candles and not the latter two but we could if we were so inclined! 
5. Pollination
• I heard in a documentary that 40% of our food is dependent on bees in some capacity.  75% of the US's fruits, nuts and vegetables are pollinated by bees.  Pollination is so critical to our food supply that bees are shipped all over the US to crops as they come into season.  This has become a $15B industry.  If you think about the need for pollination for our food sources, you'll see that bees are critical to our world.  For example, without bees to pollinate alfalfa we would have no hay to feed cattle.  Circle of life stuff.  But Anson and I are just happy that our gardening neighbors will benefit.  We also want to plant blueberries next year.
6. Bees are in trouble and need our help! 
• In 1940 there were more than 5 million managed bee colonies.  Today there are less than 2.5 million. The following things are putting bees at risk 
• Colony Collapse Disorder
• Increased use of pesticides 
• Invasive parasitic mites and beetles
• Other theories abound for the vanishing bees (such as cell phones) but I won't name them all

Citation 

Citation II

And of course lots of wikipedia

Are you going to make honey?

Telling people we are going to be beekeepers prompts some interesting questions.  My favorites so far are, "Are you going to make honey?"  (alternative includes "Did you make honey?"), "Does wearing yellow make them want to attack you?", and "Are you going to name them?".  I'm 90% sure the last one was a joke, especially considering that one came from a very fun friend.  So, if these are the types of questions you might have, don't feel bad, you're not alone.  I also am learning.  And Anson learned the hard way that the color of your clothing does matter but that it's dark colors, not yellow, that seems to anger bees.  Also, polarized lenses in sunglasses or scented deodorant or shampoo are no-nos in beekeeping.  We did name our hives: we have the White one and the Green one.

The question "Are you going to make honey?" seems the most common of the questions and I've been asked it several times.  It's similar to asking someone with chickens if they are going to make eggs.  Bees make the honey and essentially we take some once (in some cases twice) in the summer in exchange for a well-kept place to live.  This also gives the bees more opportunity to work and pollinate more plants instead of ending the season early with enough honey reserves to last the winter season.

While I am learning, these things I already knew.  This weekend was filled with new learnings though as my Poppop gave us some hands-on training.  He showed us how to check for a queen, which seems to be a beekeepers main task throughout the year.  One way is of course to find her.  She is longer and has a different shaped body than the rest of the bees.  Another way is to spot her eggs or larva.  If you can spot eggs or larva you know that she is laying and therefore exists.  Our hives both have queens, however the laying pattern of the green hive is scattered and weak so we will have to feed them in an effort to increase the strength of the hive.  I'll do this tomorrow.  The food will be a sugar water solution 1:1.  Or was it 2:1?...  I'm still learning!

Poppop teaching us about the laying pattern

Anson and I are having a lot of fun already!  We've gone outside just to look at the hives about 6 times in the last 24 hours.  This has also increased the cat's interest in the area.  She may have to learn the hard way not to sniff around there!

Driving with Bees

So yesterday was the big day!  We drove the hives the 2 hours from Hampstead to Raleigh with Anson wearing his bee suit the whole way.  It was an experience neither of us will forget any time soon.  I laughed so hard my abs hurt, just laughing out of the sheer ludicrousness of the whole idea.  Who drives a van full of bees?   We must be crazy.  But we are crazy awesome.

Anson and I ready for the drive to Raleigh

Anson with his full bee suit to Raleigh

At first, we noticed about 10 or so bees flying around but this was only about 10 minutes down the road.  At about 30 bees and15 minutes in we decided to stop and see what was going on.  We stapled down the screen blocking the hive "front porch" and kept going.  After about 5 minutes there were another, say, 30 bees.

Maybe 30 bees on the back window after our first stop

We tried again to staple the screen down, Anson much more serious this time, me laughing so hard I was doubling over and pretty much useless.  We got them to where there were seemingly no bees able to escape and continued on to the highway.  Well, not long later the bees appeared again! My Poppop had said this would be an "impossibility"!  We decided to just keep going and hope for the best.  By the time we got home to Raleigh there were about 150 bees.  Anson says that number is closer to 300-400 but it's tough to count, as you can imagine.  We'll just say an alarmingly uncomfortable amount.

I joined Anson in our bee suits and we unloaded the hives and pulled off the screens.  And now we are officially beekeepers!

Little Beekeeper Audrey

I've been my Poppop's little beekeeper-helper for as long as I can remember.  He started beekeeping while living in Connecticut and continued after he moved to North Carolina in about 1989 or so.  I'd spend weeks with my grandparents over the summer and we'd do all sorts of fun activities such as pottery, painting, craft projects like making a paper-mache clown, gardening, learning new musical instruments, and obviously, beekeeping.  

Poppop and Little Audrey keeping bees 1989

Grandma, the paper-mache clown, and me maybe 1991

Last year my husband joined the process to help Poppop extract 600 pounds of what my grandma calls liquid gold.  This year we extracted another 500 pounds.  Poppop had at least 9 hives, 3 of which he had at a friend's blueberry farm for pollination.  This year he's decided to reduce his efforts to 3 hives by selling most of them and giving me 2.  And thus begins my adventures of becoming a beekeeper!  We'll be transporting 2 hives to our house on September 23rd.  

Anson joining the beekeeping activities 2011

The purpose of this blog will be to take you along with me through the learning process of beekeeping and to possibly teach non-beekeepers a bit more about the hobby.  So far my knowledge all comes from what Poppop has taught me.  When he proposed the idea to me of keeping bees myself just a few months ago I immediately joined Reddit's r/beekeeping (an online community), began reading the book Storey's Guide to Keeping Honey Bees and I'm looking forward to joining the local Beekeeper's Association to learn more and extend my mentoring network after the kickball season ends. 

So, I'd say I'm well-informed but certainly a novice.  This excites me mostly, but I'm also somewhat nervous about a few things.  The most concerning aspect being swarms.  It's not that I fear the swarm itself, it's that I don't feel I have the necessary experience to know how to make my hive appealing to the swarm after it's captured.  Thankfully, Poppop has requeened both hives for me, so hopefully this will reduce that possibility.  

Another aspect that concerns me, but much less so, is friends, family or neighbors fearing our bees.  I wouldn't want anyone to be worried about spending time with us in our backyard.  So far, everyone has been something like indifferent, interested or supportive.  Our sweet neighbors to the right even thought to offer to cancel their mosquito spray service.  The neighbors down the corner were pleased to have pollination for their garden and the neighbor's across the street joked they didn't have anything agricultural to offer the street and said they were going to get an alpaca.  That joke is because there are about 3 houses on our street with chickens.  We're a very eco group I'd say!  

Anyway, I informed most everyone nearby besides the house behind us.  This is probably the house I should inform the most as we intend to actually face the hives directly towards them.  Our backyard is fairly small and we do all sorts of activities in it such as yard games, brewing beer, lawn maintenance, friends' dogs play, our cat plays, our cousin's baby runs around the yard, etc so it really wasn't a good idea to have the hives facing inward in that small space.  With Poppop's consulting, we decided the best location would be behind our shed giving the bees 3 feet to fly up and out and little room for babies and dogs to get in the front.  The shed has a nice wooden platform already built to the side of it which we will keep the 2 hives on. 

Shed location for the hives facing the back fence

We've purchased a couple items but the majority of our equipment Poppop is giving us.  He had duplicates of almost everything we need to get started.  This saves us a lot of money and also helps encourage us to pursue this endeavor.  Even still, we're keeping a log of expenses, inventory and eventually other metrics.  What kind of metrics, I don't know yet, but if you have ideas let me know!  Yield would be a good one when the time comes.  

So, this is the beginning!  We're on our way to becoming beekeepers!