National Honey Month has arrived as local keepers are buzzing about the critical role of bees
Most conversations about bees start like this: “Yikes! A bee!!”
That is, unless you’re talking to one of Florida's estimated 5,000 registered beekeepers. And those bees they keep? They don't live on some distant property: More than 24,000 hives are registered in Palm Beach County and about 85% are managed by backyard farmers. (The hives must be registered by law so they can be inspected every year for pests and disease.)
But even if bees make your skin crawl, you gotta give 'em credit for their work ethic — their industriousness, ingenuity and their social commitment are epic. (The cliches about busy bees didn't just sprout from a good social media campaign.)
Brendan Horne fell in love with the bees that visited his ex-wife’s herb garden many years ago.
When a neighbor asked for his help removing bees from his boat without killing them, Horne did his homework. He studied what to do and got to work.
“I looked like the Michelin man in my first bee suit!” he said.
Overdressed, and underprepared, Horne managed to successfully, albeit not flawlessly, move the hive to his herb garden. “It was bad,” he said, “but I was thrilled with it.”
Most conversations about bees start like this: “Yikes! A bee!!”
That is, unless you’re talking to one of Florida's estimated 5,000 registered beekeepers. And those bees they keep? They don't live on some distant property: More than 24,000 hives are registered in Palm Beach County and about 85% are managed by backyard farmers. (The hives must be registered by law so they can be inspected every year for pests and disease.)
But even if bees make your skin crawl, you gotta give 'em credit for their work ethic — their industriousness, ingenuity and their social commitment are epic. (The cliches about busy bees didn't just sprout from a good social media campaign.)
Brendan Horne fell in love with the bees that visited his ex-wife’s herb garden many years ago.
When a neighbor asked for his help removing bees from his boat without killing them, Horne did his homework. He studied what to do and got to work.
“I looked like the Michelin man in my first bee suit!” he said.
Overdressed, and underprepared, Horne managed to successfully, albeit not flawlessly, move the hive to his herb garden. “It was bad,” he said, “but I was thrilled with it.”
Horne’s curiosity only grew, and he began helping people move invasive beehives from their porches and storage sheds for free as a side gig. He met up with members of the Palm Beach County Beekeepers Association at the South Florida Fairgrounds and found a mentor in Leonard Kahn.
“I’d been a full-time electrician for more than 15 years at that point,” Horne recalled. The job that kept him busy, but not fulfilled. “But I was always talking about bees.”
Beekeeping scratched Horne’s itch and when the opportunity came to work with the South Florida Water Management District to remove bees from water meters (who knew bees love water meters?!), Horne left his electrician’s tools behind and donned a bee suit full-time.
This was truly a good deal for everyone.
The bees were removed with as little stress as possible, water meter readers could feel confident they wouldn’t be stung, and local beekeepers got to expand their hives with the rescued bees.
In the years that have followed, Horne has not only collected rogue bee colonies, but also stories that go with the unusual job.
He's found himself escorting fast-food restaurant diners to safety when some kids threw rocks at a nearby tree and raised an angry swarm. ("I escorted all the people to their cars and came back that night and got the hive.")
He's suffered numerous stings — one right under his nose was the worst for the faucet of snot it unleashed. ("I usually get stung once or twice a day. It's just like a chef burning himself or cutting himself — it goes with the job.")
His wife has been stung too. ("I sent her flowers with a note that said, 'From the Bees. We're Sorry.' ")
Horne isn't alone in his passion or his quest to save these creatures that are so crucial to life on planet Earth. September is National Honey Month, and hundreds of apiarists will be attending the Florida State Beekeepers Association's Annual Meeting and Conference in Ocala on Oct. 3-5. For more information, go to palmbeachbeekeepers.org.
Bees have a complex ecosystem
A beehive is a mysterious place filled with an average of 20,000 bees. Of these, the queen has the longest lifespan. She can live for several years. Her subjects, so to speak, they have much shorter lives. Drones live about eight weeks, workers closer to six.
“About a third of the working hive goes out gathering nectar, and two-thirds stay behind working on the hive,” Horne said. The younger bees make royal jelly to feed the queen and larvae and the older bees take on the foraging.
Seriously, though, you won’t find harder workers, more devoted mothers, a more dedicated army or more compassionate co-workers. Bees will actually come to the aid of another bee in distress. In a video posted to Horne's Facebook page, you can watch as a bee that returned to the hive covered with spider webs, is rescued by hive members that work to remove the sticky strands from the bee and free her.
Bees are fastidious housekeepers, constantly cleaning and sealing, building and repairing the hive. Only the queen can poop in the house, but a special faction of bees cleans up after her. Bees also clean each other.
“Bee grooming,” Horne says, “is a big deal.”
That's because it is essential to beehive health, which depends on limiting the contaminants introduced to the hive. Bees use friction — using the tiny hairs their bodies are covered with — to scrape off any foreign matter. Bees keep themselves quite clean but sometimes need help.
You may wonder, "How do they ask for that help?" They dance.
In 1945, bee biologist Mykola H. Hadak identified the “grooming invitation dance” that bees use to attract so-called allogroomers, the bees that groom other bees. The allogroomers help eradicate invasive pathogens and pests, like the super-tricky varroa destructor mite.
Bees perform a critical ecological function
In addition to making honey, which honeybees do by mixing nectar with enzymes and — we regret to inform you — vomiting it back up in the form of a precursor to honey, bees are pollinators.
From an agricultural perspective, pollination powers the planet.
An estimated one third of the world’s food depends on fertilization by the bee. They are nature’s magicians, incidentally dusting pollen from one flower to the next, making fruits, nuts and vegetables possible.
The USDA has declared that honeybees “are a critical link in U.S. agricultural production. Pollination by managed honeybee colonies adds at least $18 billion to the value of U.S. agriculture annually through increased yields and superior-quality harvests.”
Long before the government weighed in, one of the world's geniuses had. Albert Einstein said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
There’s cause to worry. The well-being of bees is under threat by the likes of parasites and pests, pathogens, poor nutrition, environmental destruction, and exposure to pesticides. All of which can combine in ways that exacerbate their dangers.
The perils facing bees — not just honey bees, but the thousands of other species that are also integral to the cycle of plant life — has been a source of alarm in recent years.
The biggest threat to Florida's bee population is a mite called varroa destructor, said Chris Oster, lab manager of the University of Florida’s respected Institute of Food & Agricultural Sciences' Honey Bee Research and Extension Laboratory. “It’s a tick that feeds on developing bees, it also carries damaging viruses. It kills the youngest bees and shortens the lifespan.”
As if being feasted on by mites isn't enough, bees — or more accurately bee advocates — must worry about the threat of colony collapse disorder.
That's when a majority of a colony's adult bees disappear from an otherwise healthy looking colony, leaving behind a queen and young bees. They leave behind food, but the bees left behind are reluctant to eat that food or anything provided by the beekeeper, according to the University or Florida's agricultural authorities at its Institute of Food and Agriculture Sciences.
It appeared that the threat of colony collapse was fading in 2015, when authorities reported the number of cases declining substantially, but the Bee Informed Partnership, a non-profit working to improve honeybee colony health in the United States, says that number is rising again.
Bee Informed judges bee health based on the number of hives that survive the winter; an acceptable winter loss rate is about 20%. From 2017 to 2021, the average winter rate of colony collapse ballooned to nearly 40%. But Oster says his bigger concerns are the pests and diseases that can destroy a hive.
The Bee Lab is constantly researching new methods of keeping hives healthy, but one of its primary purposes is educating beekeepers. There’s newsletters and research papers, podcasts, videos and even a Bee College.
The Bee Lab is often a veteran beekeeper’s first stop when there's a problem with a hive. A problem with one hive could foretell a problem with others, they say.
That's why inspections are so important. Inspectors look for pests and "unwanted" bees — at one time aggressive Africanized bees topped that list of feared interlopers, but that concern seems to have faded. (As one IFAS expert noted, since Africanized honeybees were first reported in Florida since 2005, there hasn't been a serious problems with their presence - just remember if you see a swarm of bees in your yard, "keep an eye on it, but don't bother it." )
Bees generate an assortment of health products
Though bees are perhaps most famous for their honey, it's not the only thing they produce.
Bee pollen, beeswax, royal jelly, bee venom and honeycomb are all harvested from the hive.
Joey McCoy is a third-generation apiarist at his family’s honey farm, Sunny South Apiary in Loxahatchee, source of McCoy’s Florida Honey. The brand can be found at dozens of local retailers and online.
McCoy's parents, Mark and Elaine McCoy, moved to Florida in 1980 and brought their honey-making skills with them. In 1984, they started delivering raw honey to customers.
Joey McCoy says, “Bees are getting harder to take care of. We want our bees to thrive, to be as good as they can be. Bees produce best when the time and conditions are right, so we work to make that happen.”
The McCoys produce honey, but their bees also have an important role as pollinators. They transport their beehives to farms to aid in the pollination of everything from melons to cucumbers. Another crop dependent on bees? Almonds. Each year the McCoys transport hives to California to aid in the almond tree pollination. No bees, no almonds.
In general, it takes two beehives per acre of land for a period of three to four weeks to provide sufficient activity.
“Bees are so in tune with nature, it makes them very interesting,” Joey McCoy says. But beekeeping is also hard work. A labor of love, really.
Removing the frames from the hives, removing the beeswax sealing from the frame, extracting the honey from the frames using a giant spinner: This is the culmination of months of work. When they filter the final product through cheesecloth to remove any tiny bee parts, they’re left with pure, healthy raw honey. Commercial honey is often pasteurized to extend its shelf-life, but that also removes most of the health benefits, Joey McCoy says.
“We are local beekeepers who pack our own local healthy raw honey,” he notes.
McCoy says he and his brother and sister are raising the next generation of beekeepers now. They’re still a little young, but it won’t be long before they hear the words he heard growing up: “There’s work to be done.”
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Free lecture
The Palm Beach County Beekeeper’s Association is hosting Eric Malcolm from the University of Maryland’s Bee Lab to speak at their monthly meeting. Malcolm joined the lab in October of 2017 and his work focuses on apiary management, outreach, education, and helping beekeepers make informed decisions using their own observations, monitoring techniques, and scientifically proven best management practices.
Malcolm owns his own apiary management business and is a sideline beekeeper, which is generally considered a beekeeper who has more than 20 hives but less than 1,000 and still has a day job. He is passionate about beekeeping and helping beekeepers, but also has an interest in wild edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms. His colleagues claim he’ll eat anything considered slightly edible.
What: “Performing Colony Health Inspections & Recording the Details” by Eric Malcolm
When: 6:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 6
Where: Pine Jog Environmental Educational Center, 6301 Summit Blvd., West Palm Beach
Info: palmbeachbeekeepers.org/event
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Honeybee facts
Hives usually only contain the species, Apis mellifera, the domestic honeybee. This species is also called the European honeybee, the Italian honeybee or the western honeybee.
Hives contain three types of bees:
- The singular queen, the drones (males) and worker bees (females). The queen mates with male drones from as many as 15 other hives and returns with enough sperm stored to lay fertilized eggs in the space the workers have prepared for her for the rest of her life.
- The hive’s drones’ only purpose is to mate with other queens to ensure the genetic health and diversity of her colony. Usually, all male drones, which make up about 15 percent of the colony, are ejected at the end of the season because they’re a drain on resources.
- The female workers have many jobs: Nurse bees care for the young. The queen's attendant workers bathe and feed her. Guard bees stand watch at the entrance of the hive. Construction workers build the beeswax foundation in which the queen lays eggs and the workers store honey. Undertakers remove the dead. Foragers bring back enough pollen and nectar to feed the entire community.
It takes a lot of bees to get all the work done—from 20,000 to 60,000 in a hive. Usually when a hive reaches a maximum, it splits off into two hives.
Honeybees are not the fastest fliers in the bug world. They average about 12 miles per hour when fully loaded with pollen, with a top speed of 15-20 mph.
Honeybees are conscientious neat freaks. Bees even try to die outside the hive, so they won’t contaminate the food source or pose a threat to the young bees.
A worker bee visits between 50 to 100 flowers before heading home laden with pollen. She repeats these foraging roundtrips throughout her life. A hardworking forager lives just three weeks and covers 500 miles before she succumbs.
You would think the youngest bees would be the foragers, but it’s the opposite. The youngest bees make the beeswax in eight paired glands on the abdomen. Then workers construct the honeycomb.
A queen honeybee can lay more than 2,000 eggs in a day.
A hive is maintained at a constant 93 degrees year-round.
Source: thoughtco.com/fascinating-facts-about-honey-bees-4165293.
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National Honey Month
The U.S. Department of Agriculture set aside September as National Honey Month in 1989 to raise awareness of the importance of honeybees and honey. The goals include promoting the beekeeping industry, supporting beekeepers and bringing the benefits of honey production to the public's attention.
Here are three ways to celebrate:
- Try a new flavored honey or one from a specific flower. Who hasn't wanted to taste just a spoonful of Tupelo honey?
- Substitute honey for sugar in your tea or on your toast instead of jam.
- Plant flowers.
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Honeybees and the Nobel Prize
Karl Ritter von Frisch earned the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his groundbreaking research on the bees’ waggle dance. He was one of the first to translate the meaning of the waggle dance and prove that bees convey up-to-date directional information during their dance about where they found nectar including detailed information about the food source. Von Frisch said, “The bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.”
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Honeybee quotes
“It was the bumble bee and the butterfly who survived, not the dinosaur.” — Meridel Le Sueur
“That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.” — Marcus Aurelius
“When the flower blossoms, the bee will come.” — Srikumar Rao
“Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.” — August
“A bee is an exquisite chemist.” — Royal Beekeeper to Charles II
“The bee is domesticated but not tamed.” — William Longgood
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee.” — Emily Dickinson
“The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.” — Elizabeth Lawrence
