Me, Ray & the Bees ( An Agricultural Field Trip)

My fellow farm loving friends, meet Ray.

Well, actually, meet Ray when he was muuuuuch younger. Say, like 20 years ago. I failed to get a picture of Ray's face upon my visit with him, so this will have to do. It's quite an intriguing photo though, isn't it? You probably have a couple of questions running through your head about this photo of a photo.

First off--Yes, those are bees. Real bees. And no, Ray did not get stung. How is that possible? The reason is the technique. It's all about the mechanics of the beehive. To learn Ray's secret, keep reading.

Ray has been beekeeping for 30 years. He used to have over 30 hives, but at present has about six. A retired shop teacher, he built all of his hives by hand. He doesn't wear any special clothing to work with his bees.  He just carries his smoker with him. He told me that he thinks it helps calm them down. I asked him if he gets stung and he said that he usually doesn't. I, however, got stung right below my lower lip. I'm can't lie, it was a bit painful and I had a bit of a fat lip for a couple of days. I have no picture of my fat lip.

You probably already know this, but bees are pollinators. They carry the pollen of a male flower to a female flower so that a plant will produce fruit. This science is something you most likely learned in elementary school, but have you ever thought about how pertinent the work of the bee is to producing the food we eat? Bees play a huge roll in our food production. In fact, they play an essential roll. Without them, we would be fruitless (or vegetable-less)!

I asked Ray if he works with farmers. He said that he used to, but that it was a lot of work for very little pay. For $75 he had to move the hive at night into the farmer's field. They do it at night because it makes the bees less angry. Moving those hives is no easy feat. They are very heavy. In addition to moving the hives, the apiarist (that's the fancy name for a beekeeper) has to go and check on the hive 3-4 times during the growing season. Sounds like a lot of work for not a lot of dough. We should be thankful that someone loves bees enough to do it because like I mentioned above, those bees are a key element to harvesting crops.

The hive we are going to be checking on

On my visit to Ray's place, I was able to see a couple of hives before Ray closed them up for the season. I feel that I was pretty lucky because the day I visited, Ray was combining a hive that was not surviving with thriving hive. He had been carefully watching this hive after removing it from someone's house and had hoped that the bees would make a queen, but upon a final check the bees had no queen and yellow jackets were infiltrating and stealing honey. Without a queen the worker bees are lost souls and would not survive the winter.

Parts of the hive Ray was trying to save

Honey bees are amazing creatures. A hive is a busy community where every bee has a job to do and does that job in order to keep the hive alive. First off there is the queen bee. She is the queen because without her the hive cannot exist. Her job is to mate with a drone (male) bee to be fertilized and then to make babies. That's all. Her whole life, day in and day out the queen eats royal jelly and lays thousands upon thousands of eggs. These eggs are called brood. She has worker bees who feed her
this royal jelly so she can have the energy to create thousands of eggs. She has to lay so many eggs because it takes thousands of bees to keep a hive running and worker bees only have a lifespan of around two weeks. After two weeks of flying back and forth, thousands of miles, to collect nectar and pollen, the bees' wings actually become so tattered that they can no longer fly and they then die. So these bees work their wings off in order to make honey that they will never eat in order to sustain the future of the colony.

These self-sacrificing worker bees are all female. The only male bees in the colony are the drones and their only purpose it to fertilize the queen. There are only a few of them in a colony and when they aren't being used as a mate, they just sit around and eat. At the end of the harvesting season the drones are actually kicked out of the hive to die because they are really just a drain on the hives resources.

Honeybee brood in the hive among worker bees

I've seen plenty of bees in my lifetime, but before now, I had never taken the time to distinguish between a honeybee and any other type of bee. I have seen bees in my garden collecting pollen and nectar, but had never noticed or even wondered how these bees carry all their crop back to the hive. Honeybees store the nectar they collect in their stomachs. When they get back to the hive they pass it from bee to bee until the water content diminishes and it is the thick honey we find in the honeycomb. As for the pollen. Bees have these little buckets on their legs that they fill with pollen. Can you see it in the photo below? Notice fat yellow leg on that bee. That is the pollen!

Bee with pollen on its legs

I did a lot of research on bees before I visited Ray. I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about so that I didn't appear to be an idiot. My father-in-law and one of my brother-in-laws started keeping bees a couple of years ago. We don't see them much, so I never have really had an occasion to visit their hives during their working season. I have, however, heard the tales of lost hives. When a colony abandons their present home to find another it is called swarming. Swarming usually happens when a colony feels threatens or loses a queen, but its been happening a lot more than usual recently. Scientists don't actually know why.

There are other issues that plague bees as well. One of the most challenging issues are mites. Microscopic bugs that feed off of the bees eventually causing the colony to collapse. Ray told me that they have mitocides that help protect the hives from mites, but they are tricky to work with and have to be rotated every few years so that the mites don't adapt to the poison.

These issues matter because of the roll bees play in our agricultural system. Not only do bees pollinate our plants, but everything they produce is useful to humans.

I did some further field-tripping at the Savannah Bee Companies' website. When I lived in Charleston, SC my husband and I took a trip down to Savannah and stumbled across their store there. I didn't know much about honey or beekeeping at the time, so it was my first experience with really good honey. But at Savannah Bee Company, its not just about the honey. Bees produce wax, royal jelly, and propolis (used by bees to seal honeycomb). Savannah Bee Co. makes products from all of these things because they have effective medicinal properties.

The owner and founder of Savannah Bee Co., Ted Dennard, has taken his love for bees and not only been successful at building a business, but also has a program to educate others about bees, as well as promote the well-being of bees. Over 1000 hives have been donated so far.

Now like I promised, Ray's secret? Like I said, "It's all about the mechanics of the beehive." Worker bees love their queen. If the queen is taken away, worker bees panic. They hustle to produce another queen, but that takes awhile, so if the queen is removed for about 24 hours, and then reintroduced to the colony, the worker bees are so thrilled to have their queen back that they are docile. In the picture, the queen bee is on Ray's throat. She had been taken away from her colony and it was at that moment she was reunited with them. Those bees were so happy, they could care less about stinging someone.

So there you have it, a little bit more about bees and their importance to you as a food consumer and agriculture lover.

 Works Cited

 Markley, Ray. Personal interview. 23 Oct. 2015.

"Savannah Bee Company." Savannah Bee Company. Web. 14 Dec. 2015. 

"Bee Display." Insectropolis Museaum. Personal Visit. Cape May, NJ. July 2015. 

All photographs were taken by Beth Bernards except the photo of Ray.