 March Christie, I'm with the program committee. Glad to have you here. Before I introduce Kurt, I'm going to tell you about next week, as we always do. So next week we'll be Phil Morris, cartographer speaking about the meaning of maps, and that will be here at the Senior Center. And then just as a reminder on March 20th, which is not on your program, how much you've got on the corrective versions, there will be a talk. It's the talk that was scheduled for February 13th, like I've canceled because of the weather. So refugee counselor Ann L. Lajling will speak about refugee settlement on March 20th here also. Weather? There was weather this week? And just a quick question. We asked it last week too, but maybe there's a different people here this week. You probably noticed if you've been coming regularly, that this year, for the first time, we're having all of our programs here at the Senior Center in Montpelier. We used to have pretty much half and half, half here and half at Gehry. So I just wanted to show off hands, how many people would like us to continue? The first question will be, would you like us to continue having the programs here in Montpelier? And then the second question, would you rather we switch back and go half and half? So how many would like us to continue here in Montpelier all the time? Okay, and how many would like us to do half and half, half there and half here? Okay, thank you. All right, Kurt Ganta, you're here with us. Kurt was born overseas, he speaks four languages, which I can attest to because we talked a little bit French and he showed me his expertise in three others. He has a background in mechanical engineering. He was an elementary French teacher for a while. He worked in recycling for a while and then found his way back to nature. He worked at VINs, or volunteer, I guess, at VINs as a classroom volunteer for outdoor education and is now the founder of Exordium, an outdoor education organization which offers inter-based science, hands-on learning to the young and young at heart. So welcome, Kurt, and let's hear about honey bees. Thank you. So I just want to let you know that I'm a very shy guy, so please if you have questions, go ahead and shoot them. But I had a mentor that always said, before you had a crowd and if you were really scared about talking, tell them a joke. That's why I haven't chosen them. Very appropriate for older people like myself. So the joke is that when you're married for 50, 60, 70 years and you get in a car, usually within five minutes, you don't talk very much anymore and you bite over each other, right? And so this was exactly what happened with this couple and after 15 minutes they were just grunting at each other and she's looking out the window and he's driving and clutching the wheel and they come by this field with jackasses in it. She gets this little smile and she looks at him and says, you're relatives? Yes, my in-laws. And with those further ado, I'd like to invite you to talk about the honey bee. Thank you for having me, Tom. I started, I was the original chairman in the St. Albans all the way back when they first started this program. So I know how interesting it can be and how valuable for our community. And I've written several nature-based programs to allow you to come out into nature and understand some of the things that are behind the topics that I have. So we're going to talk about our smallest domesticated immigrant, the honey bee, because that actually, the honey bee actually came from Europe. And the honey bee creates harmonious colonies that all work toward a common goal and they can be anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 bees in a hive, depending on how vigorous, how good the food, and how you keep them. So we're going to be talking about a whole bunch of different things and I'm also going to be touching on the wasp and other bees, the native bees. So in the world, there are over 20,000 different species of bees. And the major honey bee families are between seven and nine depending on how you count them. And we also have, I'm sure you've heard about the Africanized bee, killer bee, and that they're coming out from South America. So the only reason it isn't actually more venomous than another bee, than the honey bee, nor is it, you have a bigger bite, the reason it's called a killer bee is because it will follow you for a quarter of a mile if you disturb it. Whereas the Italian honey bee that's 33 feet and gives up. So that's why they're called killer bees. The bees are found on every continent except for Antarctica because there are no flowers or pollinating plants there. So in every habitat that does contain pollinated flowering plants, the bee would be found. And that word is far too big for me to pronounce, but that's the study of bees. And these are some of the native bees that we have. And you can see from the names that some of the names actually tell you the action that they do. For example, up here, this is a solitary bee, a leaf cutter, and it's cutting the leaves. That's its food. Bees are herbivores whereas wasps are carnivores. So we'll touch on that a little further on down. The mason bee actually creates pots where it puts its eggs in out of mud. And so you can see there's a whole variety of bees. I've just shown a couple that you might run into here in Vermont. And then the cuckoo bee, aren't they beautiful in color? So the cuckoo bee is actually a parasite and will lay eggs in another bee's nest. Not honey bee bees' nest, but other solitary bees. Where do they live? They live here in, sorry, they don't live here. They live in the tropics. But beautiful. And actually, I might have to, certain types of parasitic bees, and I'm not sure if they're cuckoo bees, but might be here as well. Because everybody makes use of something that's free. So the bee that we're going to be talking about is a honey bee. They're organized, they're industrious, they're intelligent. And they're used social because they have a single female, a fertile female that creates all of the other inhabitants of the hive. Which are workers and drones. And she organizes them also with her pheromones technology. So these are the topics that we're going to touch on as we go through the talk. And I hope to dispel or add to your knowledge of the honey bee. So the honey bee is perennial, which means that it will live from year to year through the winter. It does not hibernate, it is actually alive. And it doesn't come out of the hive, obviously. But within the hive it is always awake and keeping the queen warm. It's a vegetarian as opposed to the wasp that is a carnivore. So the carnivore, and everybody says, well, what's the use of a wasp? All it does is sting to you. It's around where I mull the grass. The importance of a wasp is that it eats all of the bad pests that are around. Such as caterpillars and harmful garden pests. And the other thing, who's seen those purple boxes that are hanging around trees during the summer? So those are for catching EAB pests that are invasive. Emerald ash borer. And what they've done is that's a passive track. And they're hoping to find that the wasp comes to a lure. But what they've been doing lately is they've actually been using wasps to go out and hunt the larva and bring it in. So it's a more proactive way of doing it. And scientists here in Vermont, I've seen them around on sandy fields, trap the wasp and then see what they bring in. And it should be a more proactive way. So wasps, although people hate them for singing, are very good. And the bee creates new colonies through swarming. We'll touch on that too. I actually had this, this is a tree that was actually in front of my house. So it's a pine tree, has a hollow in it. If there's a rock that they have a hollow, they go and they create this natural abode. Okay, modern technology. So the colony that's within that hollow is one queen. There's always only one queen per colony. The drones are male, stingless, slightly larger. And then the worker bee, which is a unfertil female. The queen is the only one that is fertile. And we'll get into the various characteristics a little further down. So within that hollow, they create combs. And I have on the desk, I actually have a natural comb. Most of you probably recognize the square comb that they create within a frame that we as beekeepers have. But if they're left to their own devices, they form a sort of a hanging, double-sided comb. And in nature, if the temperatures are good enough and you don't have weather like we have here in Vermont, then they'll actually hang the combs out in the open air and without any protection. So the honey bee, there are several races. As I said, the Italian. And then all of these come from different areas in Europe. And the Russian is actually a hybrid of the Italian, Carnotian, and Caucasian. So the Italian, just like its name, is a very gentle bee that has large hives, is not very aggressive, loves to dance, needs pasta, and the Russian on the other hand, and this is not political at all, but the Russian is far more aggressive. But it can overwinter better. And so these have been bred for certain areas, for certain heights, for certain attributes that they have. So if you look at a honey bee, it is an insect. An insect has three body parts, the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. It has six legs. Then it has a stinger. The spherical that you see mentioned here are actually the breeding tubes that are in its abdomen. The thorax in the middle has the wings, and it has four wings. It has a hind wing and a forewing. And then it has five eyes. Oh, by the way, I was supposed to mention it was a test, so I hope you're taking it. So the compound eye, they have two compound eyes, and then they have three ossily on the top of the head, and we'll see more of it later on. They also have two antennae, a jaw, and a tongue, or proviscus. So these are the heads of the various bees. And you can see, so the worker has to collect nectar and pollen. And so it has a very long tongue to be able to reach into the flowers. The drone does nothing except for chasing the queen. So he's got big eyes. And the queen gets treated royally. It doesn't have to do a lot of work other than lay eggs. And so she's basically in the hive. Once she's made it, she never leaves the hive. And the head contains glands for the royal jelly, which we'll see a little later on is the food that the worker bee feeds to larva to create queens. And then also the queen, or I'm sorry, glands in the head also create the pheromones with which they communicate. And the bees communicate through their antennae. So they touch each other, and they have a chemical signal that goes between them. So here's the wing. So this is the thorax, the middle part. And you can see that the wing has a little zipper on it right here that when it's flying, it closes up. Now look at the wingbeats. 173 per second. So that's why it buzzes. And the spiracles are little holes that allow it to breathe. So it has tunes that go into its body through which it breathes. And you'll see, we'll talk about this a little later on, but part of the challenge that the bees have are the mites that actually go into those spiracles. And then the legs, six legs, they're specialized to. The front are used to clean the body, the middle ones to walk and pack the pollen. And on the back, the back legs, they have pollen baskets. And we'll talk about those in a little bit too and see some pictures. That's the arsenal. So the stinger is contained in the abdomen. It has a venom sac, which is this purple. And here it's got a little pump in that venom sac. And what happens is it takes the muscle, thrusts that barb into whoever is attacking, and notice that they have barbs on it. And so it goes in, but it doesn't come out. And as it doesn't come out, this whole thing is torn from the bee. So a honeybee, when it stings, actually dies. So if you think about it, unless the danger is quite large, the honeybee doesn't want to sting because it'll die. And the venom is quite, well, I'll show you what it's made of. So here's the stinger. And if you do get stung, the first thing you want to do is get the stinger out because the muscle will continue to pump, push on the venom sac and it'll continue to pop, even though the bee's died. And so the way to get the stinger out is to take a credit card and see if they're good for something. A credit card and just wipe across it, and it'll pull it out. Or if you're good enough, it's very small to pull it out with your fingertips, but that's what you usually break it. There's one credit card better than another. A golden animal actually works very well. What is it, the black one these days? So the bee venom is actually a complex mixture of several components. And the way to describe it is it's actually an acid and a base that are contained in separate bags. And then when it's ready to sting, they combine it. And an acid and a base are reactive. And that's exactly what it does. It breaks down the cells and the skin where it's stung. I personally, and I should be knocking on wood, have gotten to the point where I don't react to any more. Keeping bees, that's an awfully good thing. And of course I was very proud of it and worked with the bees and it stung me right here. And when I got in, my wife said, so, if you don't react, huh? And I got to talk the next day. So a single sting contains 50 micrograms of venom and can be quite painful. So if you do get stung, cry like a baby. Remove the stingers quickly as possible. That's the most important part. Then you can do the cooling with ice. You can put vegetables and fruits on it, toothpaste and all of these things are sort of bases or whatever that give a chemical counter reaction to what you've got in there. So the pollen basket is like our shopping cart. So as the bee goes to the various flowers, it collects the pollen and it packs it on the rear leg. And you can see here, this bee is pretty back. And I'll have a close-up of it, but it's an area on the back leg that is slightly convex. Sorry, concave and has hairs on it. And so it takes the middle leg, puts the pollen in the middle leg and then packs it in just like you would into a brush if you were trying to pack hair or card wool. So here it is up close. And you can see all the little pollen grains and the comb that it's put against and that's what it then flies back to the hive with. And if you've ever had the opportunity to stand at a hive and watch, you can actually see them come in loaded and see that rear leg. It goes rear legs filled with pollen at the right time in the season. Of course, it doesn't just collect pollen, it also collects nectar. And the nectar is collected with its tongue or proboscis. So this is what a honey bee's head looks like. Pretty complicated. These are the oscillus, or one oscillus, several acilli and the compound I. And you can see the tongue has hair on it so that it can slurp up the syrup. I think the bee queen always said, don't slurp your nectar. So a bee's tongue is like our own. It's soft and pointy so that it can reach into, and most bees are sort of, the flowers of the bees have a symbiotic relationship. There are three types of bee, the short tongue, so the tongue is 0.5 to 3 millimeters, medium tongue and long tongue. The honey bee is at the low end of the long tongue. And these, this is a great picture because this shows all of the pollen all over the bee. So not only does it slurp, but it gets messy. So there's a long tongue bee and you can see the pollen basket. And as I said, bees and flowers have created this symbiotic relationship so the orchid is a very long, deep flower and you can see that the orchid bee, tropical bee, has a long business. And of course, like with every society, if you can't do it the right way, do it the illegal way. So this carpenter bee's tongue is too short to be able to get the nectar from that flower and so when it does, it's like a vent going in the front and just drills a hole in the side and takes the nectar. The flower loses out because the nectar's gone and it didn't get pollinated and the bee's happy. So bees peepers, as I said, compound and simple. And the thing that it cannot see red, a bee cannot see red, but it sees in a fairly broad range of color other than red and it also sees in ultraviolet. There's a laminated sheet up there that actually shows how different animals see. So when we're finished with the top, please stop and just take a look at it. And the bee also sees moving flowers better than it sees stationary flowers. If you've ever gone to like Walmart or a shopping center or a furniture place where it has a wall full of TVs and they're all tuned to the same picture, that's how it bee sees. Each individual lens or facet has an image and those images are then combined in the brain. So this is what it sees like. And the top flower is what we would see but because it sees in ultraviolet, it sees the flower like that. And if you've ever taken the time to look at a flower in a garden, you see where how all the colors sort of center into the middle part where the pollen is and the nectar is, that's because it's like a landing strip guideline for the bee to come in and get right to where it needs to go. How many of you have heard about a hairy eye bee? Well, here it is. The bee actually has hair on its eye to keep it clean and be able to wipe off any pollen as it goes in. The other thing it uses, the hair as well, is when it flies so that it can tell how fast it's going. And so here are the oscilli. The oscilli are actually photo receptors. They only see in black and white or dark and light and are not, they don't detect any images. So the main reason for the oscilli is simply it's on the top of the head and if you go to swat it, it sees that shadow coming and then reacts to it. So you can see here, you can see the oscilli here and here it's much closer. This bee is coming out of a cell and you can see the three of them there. So that's why flies, most insects that have compound eyes have oscilli. So if you've wondered why you've never been able to catch a fly, there you go. This lecture is about a lot more than just bees. So the eyes do not rotate. They're fixed. You can see them right up there. This is not a honey bee. This is a potter, a mason bee. And so the other thing that they assume is that these eyes, these oscilli, orient towards the sun and so it tells it what angle it flies up. And that's important. We'll touch on why it's important. So the bee has two stomachs. One is a storage tank for the nectar that it collects. And when it puts the nectar in there, it combines with enzymes. It's usually in there for half an hour to an hour and those enzymes are already working with that nectar. So here it is. You've got the honey stomach where the nectar goes and then you've got the normal stomach where for its food. Complicated for such a little thing, huh? So the bee also makes wax and it makes wax through wax glands. The reason it makes wax is because it wants to, it creates its cells and also to cap the honey once it's been, or the nectar once the moisture's been taken out and it becomes honey. So on the bottom left you can see the white caps and those are where the egg and the larva are and the pupa is then transforming. And this, you can see, this is a type of hive, it's not like my hive, this is a more natural hanging hive than the shape that I was saying. It looks like a big U. Up at the top you can see the arrangement of the cells, the hexagonal, because, and I have a chart here that compares it, if you're doing circles or squares, the hexagonal is actually the best way for it for space utilization. And both the wasp and the honey bee use the hex shape. So the bee actually constructs or creates the wax in its body and you have each one of these. You can see our flakes of wax. There are six and below it is a flat area called a mirror that the liquid wax comes pushing out on and then it solidifies and becomes a flake. And then the bee can actually take the flake away or another bee can take it and then they construct or repair or whatever they need the wax for. In this case here, these are thicker flakes where they didn't get to put it anywhere and so a second flake came out and doubled up its size. And the wax was also used to retain so that it doesn't lose moisture in the body. And the interesting thing is one and one quarter ounce of wax to build the comb will hold four pounds of honey. So you can see, I've got some comb there in a Petri dish. If you hold it up against the light you can see how clear it is. And later on I'll touch on it again but the thickness of one of those cell walls is two thousandths of an inch. Your hair thickness in average is three thousandths so it's thinner than your hair. So the high social structure? Yes. The queen. Yes. So this is, I do this lecture for kids too and then I bring a whole box of like a crown and you can go see it. But everybody wants to be the queen of course. But you don't really want to be the queen. She's the most important individual in the hive. She's the only sexually mature female and she gives direction through pheromones and chemical communication. So and these are some of the characteristics that she has, she has a five year lifespan but only two to three years of that is productive. She doesn't need wings to fly because she doesn't fly out unless the hive burns or something so the wings are short but she lays a lot of eggs. She lays in her lifespan she usually lays a million and a half eggs. So she has a large abdomen. She has no pollen basket because she'll never have to collect any pollen. She does have a stinger that's curved and doesn't have any of the barbs that you saw on the picture because she, there's only one queen per hive guess what happens to the others? She uses the stinger and she'll go so let's say for example we'll touch on this a little later on as well but if there are multiple queen cells and they're all maturing at the same time first one out kills all the rest. It's a vicious hive. So here you see all the all the attendants around the queen you can see the short wings, the large abdomen there she is right there and it's kind of hard to see so when you open up a hive it's usually it looks like a chaotic place but there but it isn't everybody's got duties everybody's doing things and what the queen is doing here is this is a very healthy hive because if you look at the eggs or the covered cells they're all very tight there are very few empty ones in between and you want to have that because around here they're going to be putting the pollen and the bean bread and stuff to feed so that the workers can feed those cells and then the other thing too is if you've got an egg here and an egg here and here those bees that have the wax to cover the cells have to walk around too much so it's nice when it's nice and tight in a lot of the modern hives the queen is marked so that you can see it more easily but that is intrusive again so it all depends on how you want to keep your bees and genetics matter because the bee actually uses bee perfume to give the hive identity to give everybody a sense of well-being and let everybody know that the queen is all right and also so that if they fly off any stranger wanting to come in and doesn't have that perfume they're gone they have a little paint dot like a nail polish it's not nail polish but it's that type of drone congregation areas so in making the queen so let's say a hive and again we'll touch on that but a hive creates a queen the queen is a virgin queen and needs to be mated she'll fly out usually in the afternoon about 20 feet off the ground and she'll be flying along and she'll fly through one of these DCAs which are drone congregation areas and as she flies through 15 drones we'll go oh it's a queen look at those little hands so they'll go after the queen they form comets we're called comets and these drones are pretty stupid because they'll fly at anything that goes through there but once a bee a drone has mated with the queen it breaks off the private parts and dots so it's welcome to stay in the DCA right but I came across a really neat thing it said at the DCA they spend hours each day playing poker shooting pools and they're talking about how their women are always bagging them to take out the garbage or the equivalent as they wait for a queen to fly by yes they have it tough those drones so drones are stainless and of course when I bring my basket in and I ask them if they want to be a queen or a drone or a worker only one queen so they don't want to be a queen they can't be a queen but they don't need drones because they don't have to do any work drones do not add to the hive they do no work they're the males they do no work do they need dishes? no they need comic books to drink beer they don't need dishes and so all the kids and all the boys say oh yeah I want to be a drone and right after that I tell them well come September the women kick you out because you don't do anything and they don't have enough food to hold you over the winter so you die so it all evens up yes sir do the drones have a different genetic profile? they're all coming from the queen will seven drones have seven profiles? I don't know the exact answer to that but the queen and I'm glad you asked that because the queen will actually fly off some distance so that there isn't an inbreeding so any of the drones that congregate are congregating in the hive and she sneaks out to go down to the corner so yeah so that's how they minimize the the inbreeding and the drones that all hang out at the same DCA are most probably the same profile because that's one hive that would be one hive so before the drones leave what's the percentage of drones to workers in the hive? oh that's a good question next I don't know the exact percentage but it all depends on how active how warm and how much food and how healthy the hive is if and I was going to get to this if for example the queen the queen has to mate within 20 days if it doesn't mate within 20 days then it lays eggs that become drones and those drones are unfertilized females fertilized males and basically then you end up with a hive that's all drones and you don't get anything it's a very small percentage but obviously if you have 80,000 it's probably I don't know I've never stood and counted but 3, 4, 5,000 maybe yeah so a small percentage a small percentage yes sir well they only mate with one drone or do they have multiple console drones 15 to 20 I've never witnessed it but apparently you can witness it and it's usually 15 to 20 drones that will mate with the queen for a million eggs you better have a lot of weapons yes sir where did the drones hang out in the climate weather they don't leave well that's a good question because in the climate weather everybody stays home and so even the queen doesn't fly and that's why if they don't mate within that 20 let's say we have 20 days of rainy, lousy weather the queen doesn't mate and they even do the drones so the drones are in the hive and they're not in the climate so they truly live together in the hive with the females with the worker bees when they go play pool with them and then they come back at night and they eat far more than they're supposed to and they really are a bad example but as I said they don't live through the winter and the only reason for a drone is to mate with the queen any other question so here's the queen and if you follow the little arrows up at the top you can see the little eggs at the bottom of the cell these cells are plastic you can actually get foundation cells that are plastic these days I personally don't like using them because I just don't like using plastic but you can see they're all nicely shaped it's exactly the same thing in a natural hive and this is what the egg down here on the bottom right hand that's what a bees egg looks like the queen is up right there laying an egg into one of the cells and the attendant bees are all there to care for it so there's the larva and then it pupates and when it comes to that it'll be I have a chart right here under the a lost nest that shows what the various time frames are and usually a bee worker bee will live for one season and by the end of the season will die with ragged wings because it's just been worked on but we'll see we'll go through that so the egg pupates you can see the egg down below and then it goes into pupa and adult and then when it's ready to choose through the cap and emerges the one thing that is a lot of people don't know is that bees actually create silk and that silk is much stronger than spider silk and they put it on the inside of the cells to strengthen them and that silk is actually gathered and is used to make bulletproof vests so you now know the fact that nobody else knows if you can use it so a hive has 60% silk in the larval chambers and that's also another reason why the wax from the larval chambers isn't used in spinning it up so here are the life stages 33 days and more and we'll go into this in a little more detail as the bee goes through its life so the one thing to remember so we have the queen bee we've got the worker bees and the drones and the worker bees are 100% female and they undertake all kinds of jobs as they are born and we'll go through some of these now so there's the drone and you can see how big it is big and fat no stinger so I'm sure everybody's at least seen one picture of somebody covered with bees that's usually a drone that's usually somebody's collected drones, put some queen pheromone on their nose and all the drones go whooo fool you and they don't have any stingers so they're harmless so the workers comprise bees and as I said anywhere from 20,000 you start a hive with about a thousand in the nuke and you can build it up to 80,000 bees I've got six hives with an average of probably about 40 to 70,000 bees in each hive so a lot of bees excuse me, would you say you have a hive with 40,000 bees how big is that? it's probably two and a half by two and a half by and last year six six foot hive gave me well in total I got 450,000 alright so the first one is cleaners a bee that is one to two days old becomes a cleaner and what they've got to do is clean out the larval cell they also they've got to clean out any long old residue as well as any food scraps or whatever was left out and the queen will actually go and inspect it and if it doesn't pass mustard, they've got to go back and clean it again she's got a royal paragraph so then after the cleaners a couple of days after that they become undertakers they do not have horses and what they do is they're responsible for removing dead bees and also any disease or dead broods that might threaten the colonies well be we have a bunch of nurses so this is after the undertaker role the nurses take care of the developed larval and it's said that they will check a single larval over a thousand times a day they're pretty fastidious in what they're doing they will feed pure royal jelly which is a milky concentrate you'll see a picture of it in a minute secreted from food glands in their head to the larval that's going to be destined to be a queen and for those that are destined to be workers, they don't get the royal jelly they get the bee bread and the bee bread is simply a mixture of pollen and honey and royal jelly no bit of it but there are important reasons why they feed them and I'll give you that in a minute in terms of size so and if the hive is infected then the bee, the nurse bees they select specific honeys that they can feed to the workers or the infected bees that have certain antibiotic properties so they can actually choose how they do that and that was a study that was done at the Martin Luther University and how they were written back in Germany and was brought on BBC Earth in October of 2014 and they have the builders and those are the bees that have the wax glands and they're approximately 12 days old when they become builders and they secrete the wax flakes to construct and repair a comb they will also cap the comb of ripe and honey and develop a big pupae the amazing thing is for one pound of wax a bee has to eat 7 pounds of honey so if you create a new hive and you've got new frames that have no combs you're not going to get a lot of honey that first year because the bees are consuming it to build wax so that's why you regenerate the wax comb once you've spun it out then we have air conditioning and heating so when they they have to take the water out of the and bring it down to 10% and they do that by fanning it so the temperature controllers stand over the nectar that's brought in and take the moisture out of it they also ventilate the hive when it's hot so when I have my hives and we have that hot weather last summer I do crack the top but then you'll see a whole bunch of bees out front fanning the air and bringing it through to try and cool it down in wintertime they'll all cluster around and move their muscles and in moving their muscles they expand the heat and that heat is what keeps that cluster hot and the queen is in the middle of that cluster so there you can see on the left hand side honey bees on the entrance to a hive and this is a solidarity I'm sure everybody's seen one of these it's big it's round and that's a solitary bee so there's a little hole that it digs in the sand for its egg and there's no colony with that then it becomes then they become guards so guards are the last the last task that bees in the hive are before they become field bees and these guards stand at if you've ever had an opportunity to stand at a hive you'll see the guard bees standing there if anybody lands they'll come out to check and they ask for they smell them to see if they're of the right odor and also if it's an intruder like an earwig or a grasshopper or a wasp or anything they'll actually fight it off and the only hive members enter but likely with any society sometimes they can be brined with nectar then the other thing maybe you too is they go and check if the hive has any cracks or anything so that they call the construction guys over to seal it off so that robber bees can't come in and they also emit an alarm pheromone that if they sting it notes it lets everybody else know there's an attack underway and so then they all come out and help out so it's not just the guard bees but the worker bees will also come and rise to security so here's the guard bees there's the guard bees standing at the entrance very alert and down here they're saying you want the better end of me buddy come again so they're ready with the stingers and so when after the guard bee they become foraging bees and that happens at approximately 14 days old bees leave the nest at sunrise and visit flowers in a 4 to 5 kilometer radius up to 3 miles from the from the hive in search of nectar pollen propolis and water they drink, we also use the water for cooling just like an evaporative cooler they make approximately anywhere from 10 to 20 trips depending on how far they have to fly per day with each trip lasting anywhere from half an hour to an hour and that's why they had baskets where they put in the stomach where as they gather stuff up they put it together and then at night they go back to the hive and stay with them in the hive for 6 to 8 weeks they will usually die in the field because they've just been totally spent a bee is just always looking for stuff for the hive for the better of the society and in winter bees don't fly but they do, they are alive and they do eat and the cluster moves around on where the honey is and eats the honey and eats the honey as a cluster so my hives right now, although they are totally covered in snow if I put my ear tube I can hear them buzz it's a question about timing I think I have the wrong picture in my head this is after 2 days this is after 4 days this is after 14 days is that like a whole bunch of bees all at once go through that together or is every day a new so it's a continuous flow all season and depending on the weather and depending on the food sources the queen bee might increase or decrease so if you have a very hot summer and you have the hives in the proper location in other words facing east in a sheltered spot you have much more opportunity to have more bees than if they were north facing and in a windswept field with very little food but you can keep bees anywhere people have kept bees in the city in a loft in their apartment or on the top of their building apartment the guidance system when the hive moves the bees seem to know where the hive moved to can you speak to that guidance system every hive comes with a little pen and paper so you see what's going on no that is true but what happens is you if you move the hive in the middle of the day you're going to lose your bees what you have to do is you have to move the hive at a very late at night back in it or very early in the morning before they leave and what a bee does is it will come out it will fly around, orient itself and then fly up and it will come back to the same spot so even if you move the hive two feet away it will be lost because it goes back to that spot and so and we'll talk about it but when you get a queen cell I can actually create new hives without having a queen if you buy a queen it's 125 bucks so it becomes expensive but if you rear your own queens then you can take them and take them outside of that 5 mile or 3 mile radius and the queen will be brand new with new bees coming to it then you bring it back and then it will be oriented to that hive but you have to do it at night when they're in the hive and I've done this if I move the hive during the day I thought oh like 8 o'clock they're all in there I lost half the hive because of it so when the queen initiates a swarm does she do it early in the day or does she follow those same rules so it keeps everybody together so I'm good question but I'm not quite sure what I think happens there is so depending so a swarm occurs when a bee is overgrown the space is overgrown or overpopulated and so I'm sure that what happens is there's a lot of communication going on okay we're ready right are we all okay and I've had swarms that I've collected in the morning I've had swarms that I've collected in the afternoon so did they fly along the way I'm not quite sure but I think they communicate with each other any other questions can you say a swarm is because another queen has hatched there's a enormous amount of bees it splits no it's the old queen you're not doing your job anymore kid and she gathers up the old workers and off they go the old folks on yeah the old folks on I didn't say that so and the other thing that's really interesting is in the springtime or now actually throughout the winter they're in this dark hive you really don't know is it cold is it warm is it is the weather right so they all sit around and they hold straw and the bead with the short straw has to head up to check and of course a bee is a cold blooded insect and if it's cold very cold within three feet of a hive the muscles freeze out so if the scalp bead doesn't come back everybody else stays in but if the bee comes back and has directions to the red maple buds being ready then they all fly up it lays approximately 1500 eggs a day a million plus in a lifetime oh god I'm tired so in answer to the question there are three reasons for a new queen if for some reason the queen dies they create an emergency situation they will take a cell and select a larval worker put it in there and start feeding royal jelly to it which then creates the queen super seizure means that a queen is not doing its job it's like lousy laying eggs and it just isn't getting the hive population up so they all say winter's coming we need to have people gathering stuff so you're up and so they will actually create a cell on the outside of comb that hangs down and you can see it's bigger than these cells and they will start feeding in royal jelly and of these they actually make more than one so that's where the first born queen goes and kills all the others and this here is a swarming cell a swarming where the queen because the queen is old or I'm sorry not because it's old because the place is over crowded it's done too good of a job they create another hive basically and then they divide it in half off they go balling the reigning queen means that this queen that obviously wasn't working what they did was they all get around her and get really hot and then basically cook her I'm sorry to share this nasty stuff nature's cruel and so the bee doesn't have a cell phone but what it does is it communicates through dance and I have two charts here behind me that tell you the round circle the food is within 35 yards of the hive if it does two loops like this with a central axis the central axis actually in relation to the sun tells them in what direction and then so the axis of the loops is the direction of the food source and then it will wiggle and the amount of wiggles will tell it how far so it's over 35 yards 5 miles away sorry 5 kilometers 3 miles away and you can see some of the examples of that and so they actually take the sun and the angle to it and that's where the oscillators come into play where do they do the dance? they do the dance on the inside of the combs or on the landing strip and they'll have here it just shows a single bee and what they'll have is they'll have a whole bunch of bees around it going where did you find it? was it good? yeah, McDonald's really? let's go and so they've got a whole group that's around and that's what's really quite interesting when you keep bees you see all these things happening and understanding that you've been observing it's really great so as William Blake said there is no time for sorrow with a busy bee our history almost 10,000 bee seed there were cave drawings in Valencia, Spain and show and take a look at that drawing because you'll see I have another picture later on where you can actually see modern day collection it always was thought that bees had spontaneous reproduction because of the storming and because of the large numbers within the hive but we now know that's not true and bees throughout the ages have been part of our folklore part of our drawing, our artistry and myths, all kinds of cultural stories and play very important parts in those in those cultural icons and things and here's that you remember the picture two slides back so here are some modern and indigenous people gathering honey off cliff faces and whatnot and this is actually a comb so these combs hang there and he's got a basket and he drips out the honey he's on this little tiny little hole so anyway it's still happening he has a high tolerance for pain I assume I've never asked him actually I assume so 8,000 years ago for sure because there was wax residue found in pots that were unduck and my connection to beeswax was when you read the introduction I actually ran an investment casting foundry for 30 years in St. Albans investment casting used beeswax the Chinese used beeswax to make jewelry and dentists used beeswax instead of carving teeth out of wood they used wax to make an impression and then would cast a mold for bridges and whatnot dental paraphernalia and from that in World War II because of the need of high quantities of precision metal parts it became an industry I made investment castings for farming missiles there are 8 units of components on the moon from our company on each lunar lander so it was an exciting interesting industry and I'll send back from bees and the Chinese so they've been very important to humans they pollinate 1-6 of all the flowering plants including 400 agricultural plants the agricultural crops in 2010 were 19 billion dollars of which one third of which that represents one third of everything we eat in 2013 the honey crop whether it was liquid honey or honeycomb or mixed with mead or whatever else valued at 317 million .1 million dollars that's quite substantial mead is lousy wine with good actually anybody make mead here I should ask you my suggestion and what is mead don't go and ask them what I just told them guess then I'm back to the pollination you said that honey bees are European immigrants so previous to honey bee immigration was it solitary bees that pollinated or yes so this might not be politically correct but who cares right honey bees represent 20 percent and what made bees 80 percent of the pollinating mass the reason honey bees get so much publicity we have even 17.1 million dollars and so to keep that in perspective they go we've got problems but they don't talk about all the solitary bees they're killing and so we'll get into that a little more but keep that in mind we're going to take a fifth of the whole question and these people that move bees around it's because it's a money making problem they have to move them now because there's so much colony collapse right you have to bring in the pollinators sometimes well that's what they say but in actuality if you were to support and get bees and you need the large things but then it's like anything else and I'm getting into some deep weeds here because it's the politics and everything else of it but when you have model cultures like corn or whatever else almonds it's like anything else it's a huge drain on the resources where nature never meant to be like that so when you then so to address the problem they don't address the problem of breaking it out they address the problem by bringing in truckloads of bees that have probably traveled for a heck of a long time been cooped up and how do you feel after being in a car for 24 hours and that you know so they keep creating the problems in my opinion so here are some of the foods and vegetables that we would not have if we did not have pollination and yes I've got the honey bee up there but it also the wild the indigenous bee is also very much a part of it and in Africa Kenya for example they're actually using bees as an invisible fence where they've got the crop field they're growing some sort of corn there and on the outside they've got all these hives and what those hives do is keep the elephants up isn't it innovative so so the bee is a as I said an herbivore it creates products from plants the honey the bee pollen and propolis and then it creates animal from itself it creates the royal jelly from glands the beeswax from glands and the bee venom and all of those are actually used so the honey is yeah I'm good for and if someone didn't hear I do have honey samples so before you leave you can get a lick of honey I hope I don't run out of stir sticks but raw honey not the honey that is processed raw honey is very very good for you because it has all of the minerals and all of the things that the bee has eaten and is very good also if you eat local honey I've actually had people that bought my honey and have eaten it and have gotten rid of allergies so if you get local honey and eat it and they were only doing a teaspoon a day in coffee tea or whatever were just pure they got rid of their allergies so honey won't spoil it's the only food that will last forever without refrigeration they've actually opened up tombs from the faros and had honey that was unspoiled so it's don't throw that honey in the fridge out because they've been there for five weeks or whatever it's usually raw honey will crystallize my honey is crystallized because it is raw forms crystals but it just becomes creamy if you want it to become liquid all you do is you put it back into warm water and then it becomes cool so it's enriched with enzymes and has a chemical composition that's very stable and is controlled for pH so it's placed into honeycombs and moisture controlled and then it's sealed when the moisture is 10% from the nectar and brought down to 10% the interest I'm sorry, yes if you want bees to travel a couple of kilometers away is that more how the hive is managed yes the smoke so that you don't use chemical for example we'll talk about mites later on but one of the ways to control mites is you can get a mite strip from a bee house like a bee supply house that's a terrible poison and you put that on after you've gathered the honey or you can do it organically by putting in rhubarb leaves and they'll eat the rhubarb leaves and the rhubarb leaves have the same composition as the chemical so does anybody keep bees here ah I should have told me that before so I know but for those of you that keep bees for two years now is at the beginning of the season when rhubarb leaves are fresh I put rhubarb leaves in and they'll eat them and it controls the mites and so mites are and we'll see it, mites are get into their tracheal tubes and that part of why they sort of leave and the other thing about honey is if you go for a hike or a camping trip take along some honey if you get a cut or get a bruise you can put honey on it it's antiseptic and it'll heal and never eat honey because you never eat raw honey because then you do destroy its curative properties the picture on the left top corner is a picture of pollen so there you go why do you sneeze when you have pollen it looks pretty nasty and there's a bee with a pollen basket that's full and it's covered with pollen there are some pictures there are two bees that are they have hair all over their body for exactly that reason that the pollen sticks to the pollen nurse bees feed it for nutrition or eat it for nutrition and then there's the royal jelly which is one large queen and after three days royal jelly is mixed with bee bread which is a mixture of pollen and enzymes and honey a hive gathers approximately 100 pounds of pollen per year so that's a lot of flowers it provides a wide range of nutrients from proteins, lipids carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals usually bees will forage one flower so that it can cross pollen it will also collect pollen from plants that provide no nectar such as corn and it's thought that pesticide contaminated corn is thought to be one of the problems with bee colonies propolis propolis comes from the greek word defense of the city and it is for anybody that keeps bees you've had to fight propolis and undo the tops and whatnot it is a heck of a strong group it comes from pre buds and bark and bees tend to put it anywhere where there are cracks or things to be held down like tops or frames and it's got an antiseptic quality to it it's a natural antiseptic it goes fungus and bacteria and they will line brood cells with it so that there is a natural bacterial avoidance and then also you can see here up at the top there's a mouse obviously a mouse is too big for a bee to carry out so what they do is they encapsulate it in propolis and that way it isolates and keeps it from contaminating the same thing with an earweed down here and so therefore they mummify the the carcasses propolis it's been found effective against a lot of bacteria staph and strep bed sores, diabetic oysters, surgical wounds common cold and skin disorders so if you go to your local homeopathic store you'll find propolis you'll also find royal jelly in propolis here's the royal jelly and you can see the picture over at the end where there's a larva it's actually a queen cell that they've cut open and that larva is orcuba is eating royal jelly and should have become queen the royal jelly is a powerful energetic it's the only food that's fed to queens who then grow two and a half times larger than the other bees so if you eat royal jelly you're off the diet so queen gains three thousand times her weight after five or six days on royal jelly there's a lot of jokes could be made with that but it allows the queen to lay eggs that exceed her own body weight and I mean I'll figure it out a million eggs right so it needs something and it's fed to worker bee larva for three days to get their weight gained by 1500 times which it is at the end of the third day it supposedly improves transmission of nerve impulses increases the efficiency of the brain and it's thought to help with treating infertility I'm not quite sure if that last one is how they marketed in homeopathic stores how do they collect it very carefully you actually all of this stuff is very expensive because of the small quantities but they'll open up queen cells they'll force queen cells and then the bees put royal jelly in it and then they take it away so this is interesting, guards against fluid influenza and has all of these other benefits as well so there's a TV commercial I'm sorry there's a TV commercial that seems to have that same rural picture oh probably, she's got a definite food look we all use it so then beeswax which is the other product that comes from the animal has a lot of excellent qualities its chemical makeup is very stable is virtually unaffected by time and pieces that have been removed from the tomb after thousands of years is still pliable and usable it's insoluble in water so it's highly valued for its waterproofing qualities it's recovered from shipwrecks in perfect condition and still usable so underwater it's valued as a polish so that you waterproof the wood and during World War II hundreds of thousands of pounds were used to waterproof equipments such as tents, ammunition and ignition systems it has the highest melting point of any of the natural waxes which rise between 145 and 150 degrees 150 degrees Fahrenheit it's an excellent fuel and for centuries it was the only wax that was available it's highly valued for candle making because it burns clean and has no smoke smudge and the flame is uniquely bright and white and small, so compact and it doesn't produce any unpleasant odor in burning in ancient times it was also used as a skin softener and as a remedy against this injury and the thing that was really interesting to me was many people used it as a tax so in Rome when they defeated the Corsicans they imposed a tax on them of 100,000 pounds of beeswax and in the 1300s French farmers paid an annual tax of 2 pounds of beeswax to the king Oh that's it I don't know but that's the end there's a radio show I don't know if anybody knows it but you can write it to them or call them and they'll tell you where it is if you need me you're at email address I'll give you an email so in ancient times the production of wax was much more important than honey and the wax comb is at an angle of 13 degrees so that the vector doesn't roll out or grain and as I said it's hexagonal and that's so that it's more spaceated and that's not skill that is incredibly to do that it can hold 22 times its own weight and as I said before the thickness is between 2 and 3,000 of an inch and we as humans have copied that design in many in the geodesic dome constructions and also in the 747 air liner so here are some of the things that beeswax is actually used for cosmetics, pharmaceuticals polishes, crayons the grinding and polishing of optical lenses such as the lens that went up into space with hovered was used with beeswax candies and chewing gums so if you look at this list all of you at some point had something to do with beeswax that's all that's the only reaction so I've been stunned many times and I'm not quite sure if it's helped with my joint pain or whatever but there are people in the far in the not many, in the east of european and far east countries that use these things for all kinds of cures and they have several components that are anti-inflammatory properties but I'm not sure whether it's that or the reaction to the immune system and the part if anybody hasn't recognized it that's an eyeball and that's why I was waiting for a bigger reaction but what's that? can't believe it's Rhea so the hairy eyeball there's also been claims that the sting would address multiple sclerosis shingles, burns tendinitis and infections why would there be stings to the eyeball if you weren't bothering the bee? well, a lot of times you can see it here that might have been staged but what they do is they actually take the bee and sting so for example if you had rheumatism in your knee you might get bee therapy by doing 10 bee stings around your knee and bee stings other than if you're allergic are not really deadly I can't have a reaction but out of all of the people in America there were only 54 deaths from bee stings so myths and misunderstandings all bees live in hives no only 10% of the world's 20,000 bee species are social and live in hives and only a small percentage of these construct hives in North America only the European honeybee and the bumblebee build hives and live in colonies and most bees approximately 75 to 80% are solitary and live in individual nests covered into the soil misconception too all bees make honey no, only the honeybee makes enough honey to harvest honeybee colonies are perennial and that's why they have to store up food to live through the winter bumblebees make small amounts of honey but the colonies only are annual and so therefore they don't need to store food here are some of the native bees and none of these make honey at all native to what? native to North America but they're pollinators they're pollinators, correct and what they do is they'll eat the pollen they'll eat the nectar but they don't store it and they don't make honey and bees die after they sting nope only honeybees die after they're sting native bees do not die and without a colony to defend a lot of times you can be right out there with them and they won't attack you because they have nothing to defend other than if you were to step on more try and swap misconception 4 is that bees are declining because of colony colapsed disorder and this is to the question that came 4 this is true if they live in a if they're honeybees and live in a managed hive but if they're wild bees and live in individual tunnels they are not affected by this the cause of the disease is still unknown although there are some thoughts that it's deolichinoids or other pesticides I'll show you a slide in a minute but it could also be stress and malnutrition malnutrition being single crop monoculture crops misconception 5 wasps or bees somebody asked me about the yellow jacket there it is so the difference is that a wasp has a very thin waist the bee does not and some of the problems are that they are the same order but they are not bees and we have bees are vegetarian as I said before and wasps are carnivores and a lot of times we have misleading names because we just see a flash of yellow and oh yeah that was a bee it might be a bee, it might be a wasp the yellow jacket is also notorious for raiding picnics and another name for it is a beet bee so how the heck are you supposed to know if it's a bee or a wasp it's called a beet bee and wasps are especially aggressive if you stumble upon their nests because they are definitely defending their colonies but wasps are important because they also control insects such as that are harmful to our crops such as caterpillars or other larvae so the challenges for the bees are stress factors these are some of the things that really work on the bee climate weather this year has been terrible and I've had bees suffer from dysentery because they are cooped up there's not much you can do about it other than hope that there's going to be warm weather soon right right and then of course if you have residues in the bee products from pesticides or any other contaminant that goes back through there's a lot of stuff that affects the bee boromite so you know how small the bee is there's the boromite on top and the boromite basically sits on the bee and such sits what we call blood what for us would be blood but it's their life liquid and it will also infect brood so it will suck life on brood and especially on drones so if you go in and look at your drone brood and count the lights then you know whether you have an infestation of that and then this is the tracheal knife so we had talked about the spirit bills and these are the tubes that go off the side of the bee and you can see how small those are relatively and the problem is that it's just like us having a cold and then having congested chest we can't breathe and so what the bees try to do is they then go out and walk in front of the hive trying to get air and it's thought that an overabundance of tracheal mites might actually make them fly off as well because they're not sure what's happening we can't breathe there and then they head out but that's unsubstantiated and this is the kind of thing that I treat that I treat with rhubarb leaves these would be the ones that you would have at the end of the season and then we have all kinds of things so some of these are dead bees and you actually have to burn up your hive so the American foal brood did I spell that one? A foal brood and then if infestations as a beekeeper you hate to open up and see wax moths like that they just ruin everything but if the hive is healthy then the bees will take care of it I was sick five years ago and couldn't take care of my hives and by leaving them unattended for the winter I had a whole bunch of wax moths that came in and when I opened it up I couldn't even take because of the the wedding I couldn't even take the frames out and so I said I'm not going to bother with it now I put it out behind the garage and two weeks later I had a colony in there and six weeks later it was thriving and by the end of the year it produced almost 150 pounds of honey bears anybody? so bears if you live in a bear in an area where bear might be then you need to protect your hive before the bear gets there and the way to do that is put an electric fence around it put strips of tin foil covered with honey and turn up the temperature so when the bear comes to lick it he gets a shock on his tongue and off he goes and when we come back if you try and do that after he's wrecked the hive once forget it because no electric fence is going to stop it there's a source of food there skunks and raccoons put the hive up higher so that the koon or the skunk has to show its stomach and then the bees can sting and the koon covered with hair and is protected and I have a really funny so I had beehives and I had a skunk and I don't like killing things so I live trapped it put it in my car put a blanket over it took it off way off in the distance 22 of them and my driveway turned the corner and there's this guy, he's got his trunk open and he's pulling up a blanket with a cage and I go what are you doing? I have a skunk problem really? and where do you live? do you live where I was dropping? that place, skunk here we go again anyway and for mice you cover the entrance prior to fall cold weather because they go in and they go and find a nice warm place and again, the mice would stay because the bees are trying to ball up so the mice know the way until the bees are clustered and aren't going around all over the place and insects if the hive is very healthy, they'll fight off a yellow jacket earwigs will hide in corners ants put the hive in into buckets of water so the ants can't swim across and also look where you're locating them if you locate them on a forest floor or a meadow that's full of ant hives or ant hills then you'll end up in that corner severe weather is also as I said and you can see the bees will on a warm day make a cleansing flight and if you go up to your hives you can actually see the track of where they go out and then they fly back if it's so cold right so those are the cleansing flight so if I'm in the fifth grade they go but anyway that's the cleansing poop flight that they do right here and if they can't get out this entry is the next thing and you can see down below there's lots of because they're covered up the circulation in the hive is bad and then they also can't get then they die off because the weather is cold and this here of course there is no climate change there's that political side again anyway climate the change in climate whether it's real or not presents a real big threat because bees will when it's warm come out and if it's warm before the buds and the flowers are presented they have no food and then they'll start flying around and dying because of the lack of nutrition and then also the pollination is off kilter and of course our own addition to all of this in a big way is the loss of habitat by the urbanization so if you do live in a row house perhaps you can put a little gardening or something you know pesticide use the neonicotinoids are suspected and this is this blew me away 57 different pesticides discovered in poisoned honeybees so 6 ways you can help the bees plants and flowers use of chemicals support local sustainable farmers, local honey make a bee hotel just take straws put them in a can hang it up and the native bees will form little pockets in there and here are bees that are nuisance because they create between second and third floor in the softest cabinet left on the porch they went in through the top there and were behind the barn board under the house there's a buzz in my ear dear oh yeah and that comfortable chair on the porch that's available in downtown Montpelier so 12 plus 2600 plus 850 is equal to 1 how would you make that equation work 12 bees visiting 2600 flowers and flying a total of 850 miles create one teaspoon of honey so if you eat honey do not be wasteful there's a lot of work went into it 850 miles is approximately from here to Chicago just to give a perspective thank you very much well over time