Honeybee Tour 2

keepin' bees

In my September 23rd post I discussed the Honeybee tour I attended in Grey County, and some beekeeping and farming organizations in the area. Today I’m going to share a bit of what I learned on the tour, things about bee colonies, honey extraction, and beekeeping basics. It’s fascinating stuff – read on!

Bee Basics

Honeybees live in colonies made up of three types of bees: workers, drones, and the queen. The most common type of bee is workers, who are all female, and take care of everything necessary to keep the hive going, collecting pollen, making honey, cleaning, feeding, defense – everything!

Drone Cells (centre)

Second most common, drones are slightly larger, and come from specialized drone cells. They are male, and basically laze around the hive all day eating honey until at one point they mate with the queen and die. Those who don’t get the chance to mate get thrown out of the hive when winter comes to save resources and are left for dead. There is only one Queen, and she is selected as a larva and fed royal jelly so that she becomes extra large. When she mates with the drones she stores sperm inside her body,  allowing her to produce new bees for the next 2-7 years.  To survive the winter, the bees huddle around the Queen, moving their wings to create warmth. They eat up their honey stores to stay alive through the winter, though in large-scale beekeeping facilities the majority of the honey is harvested and the bees are fed sugar water. Whether or not this is good practice is open to debate, some argue it’s healthier as it causes less waste buildup over the winter, while others say it’s not natural.

Honey Production

Honey Varieties

Honey is made from pollen that bees harvest, partially digest and store in cells. The bees fan their wings over the cells, causing water to evaporate from the nectar, until the point where it turns to honey. Then they cap the cells with wax, allowing the honey to store without fermenting. Because bees only travel within 3-5 km of their hives to gather pollen, it is possible to produce different varieties of honey depending what plants are in the region. Honey from different flowers have different colours and flavours, for example blueberry honey being light and thin, orange honey (my favourite!) medium colour and extra flavourful, and chestnut honey being dark, thick, and very strong-flavoured. The average honey you buy in the grocery store is wildflower honey, meaning the bees have foraged from a variety of sources.

Yellow Brood Boxes and green Honey Supers

In order to ensure that the hive is creating surplus honey for harvesting, beekeepers provide a brood box on the bottom for laying eggs and a honey super on top for storing honey. A Queen Separator is included between the two to ensure that the Queen cannot get through and lay eggs in the super. Some colonies are more productive than others, so when the first super is 3/4 full, another may be added.

Honey Extraction

Smoking the hive

When extracting, you want to consider the mood of the bees. If the hive has recently been attacked or weather has been bad, there’s a good chance they’ll be agitated, but generally a hive with a good queen will be docile. Light the smoker with wood shavings or pine needles, and approach the hive from the side so you don’t enter the bee’s flight path. A hive tool is used to crack the top cover open, it will usually be sealed with wax and propolis. You can begin to smoke the hive,

Hive Tool

which signals to the bees that they should start eating honey rather than stinging you. If the honey cells are capped they are ready for harvesting, and can be brushed free of bees and taken for extraction. It’s important to extract at a good distance from the hive,

Robbed Honeycomb

because bees rob honey – they will try to steal it back from you by eating it! (take a look at this picture of comb left near the hive – this is a great way to clean off honey extraction tools with little effort).  Moving farther away means less bees will follow you and less honey can be robbed.

Commercial Comb Cutting

The first step in extraction is removing the caps from the honey, either with a sharp tool or with heated blades, as in the commercial system. The room must be kept at at least 30 degrees C for honey to be extracted, though it shouldn’t spill out of the uncapped comb as the cells are sloped at a 15 degree angle which keeps the honey inside. The comb is then put in a centrifuge, forcing the honey to spin out and collect at the bottom, to be released by a spigot, or pumped elsewhere in larger operations.

Look at that 15 degree angle!

Honey can then be directly bottled,  innoculated with “seed” crystals to form creamed honey, or pasteurized, an unnecessary step that gives honey a longer shelf life without crystallizing, but removes some health benefits. Unpasteurized honey can be reliquified by placing the jar in boiling water for a few minutes. An interesting fact I learned from Catherine at Chatsworth Honey was that honey from different sources crystallizes at different rates; canola honey can crystallize in the comb, whereas honey from fireweed won’t crystallize for five years!

I was going to go into bee diseases and hive problems in this post, but I’ll save it for another day, this post is long enough! Please feel free to email or post with any bee-related questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them!

Honeybee tour 1

Last weekend I was lucky enough to participate in a beekeeping tour being held by FarmStart up near Owen Sound.  FarmStart is a fantastic organization that I had heard a great deal about but never worked with before. It is an Ontario-based non-profit which works to support and encourage a new generation of farmers to develop viable and environmentally sustainable farms. I really appreciated meeting Gayl Creutzberg who led our workshop because she had the perfect mix of enthusiasm and realism that I think defines the entire organization. FarmStart is very committed to fostering small scale, environmentally conscious farms, but they put just as much emphasis on ensuring that these farms remain economically viable. After all, what good is an organic farm that goes out of business after one season? Economic sustainability is a key part of environmental sustainability, and one which is all too often forgotten by those of us who spend our time envisioning a clean, green, future.

FarmStart runs many different training programs and two incubator farms  (the McVean farm in Burlington and the Ignatius farm near Guelph), which provide land and increasing support for new farmers. For those considering starting farms or diversifying their existing farms, they host workshops focussing on a wide range of topics. Beekeeping, or apiculture, was the topic last weekend, and on Sunday I, along with about 15 other bee-enthusiasts visited two farms keeping bees in Grey County.

Honeybee collecting pollen

Bees are fascinating. I thought so before the workshop, and now I could talk about them all day. I’m interested in learning how to keep them in an urban context, an idea which has recently been gaining in popularity.  The Toronto Beekeepers Coop, who keeps bees at the Evergreen Brickworks and on top of the Royal York Hotel have been featured in the Toronto Star (here), and have done great work making urban beekeeping more accepted and understood.

A little background on bees will help explain why they’re important, both in urban and rural areas. The first thing to keep in mind is that there are many, many different kind of bees out there. There are solitary bees, who live alone, and social bees. There are bees who make nests, and mining bees who live underground. There are leaf-cutter bees, squash bees, and bumblebees (learn more here). Some of these bees are native to Canada and have specialized diets, surviving on only a few plants, while others have been introduced from other countries.  Honeybees (Apis Mellifera), are one such introduced species, originally brought over from Europe.

Honeybees doing their thing

Honey-producing bees, along with all other bees and wasps, are a critical part of our ecosystem. They are the primary pollinators of most crops, helping plants to reproduce while they forage for pollen, and without them many of our native species and food crops wouldn’t survive. We depend on them for our survival which makes it all the more frightening when they are threatened, as they have been lately. Many native bee populations have been declining as a result of habitat loss due to urban sprawl and increased pesticide use on farms and lawns. In my next post, I will discuss  Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)  and varroa mites, two serious problems affecting honeybee populations specifically. I will also go further in depth about beekeeping, honeybee colonies, and honey production, for any aspiring beekeepers reading out there.  Stay tuned!