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How it works – Honeybees: One beekeeper’s view: ‘Truly fascinating creatures’

JANELLE PATTERSON The Marietta Times Teresa Wagoner begins to inspect a nuc honeybee hive at her home in Boaz Thursday.

By Janelle Patterson

The Marietta Times

jpatterson@mariettatimes.com

Their houses are busily buzzing, awash with workers, nurses, eggs and honey.

And as each hive member completes her job with diligence and under the guidance of alpha females, some are cleaning, others are feeding and those in their final two weeks of their life are off foraging for pollen and nectar.

JANELLE PATTERSON The Marietta Times A honeybee lands on a clover flower to collect nectar for her hive at Sam Hammett’s apiary in Fleming Friday.

“They’re truly fascinating creatures, and you’re always learning something new about them,” explained Teresa Wagoner, 59, of Boaz, as she checked on the health of her nucs, fresh hives still building up the population and their homes for winter.

Wagoner is one of more than 100 local amateur beekeepers part of the Mid-Ohio Valley Beekeepers Association. The group, which meets monthly, works together to learn

from each other as they cultivate their apiaries across the valley.

“You either get into it for the health benefits of consuming natural, local honey and all the enzymes and local pollen, or you get into for the cause of saving the bees or to help your garden,” mentioned David Huffer who not only has his own apiaries dotting Warren Township, but also is an independent distributor and assembler of materials needed to keep bees.

“We’ve been keeping bees since 2012 but got into the business of the equipment two years ago,” said Huffer, who with his wife Teresa owns The Bee Barn, on Coffman Road in Tunnel. “We’ll buy the wooden wares and I’ll assemble them. And we can get you started with a whole kit, too, with the smoker and other supplies you’d need to be successful.”

Huffer is a retired sheriff’s deputy, and said he’s drawn to the intricacies of beekeeping because he’s constantly learning something new, solving a new challenge or problem facing a hive, or perfecting the family’s technique of honey extraction.

“Our granddaughter has been around bees since she was three,” said Teresa Huffer. “She’s the official first taster and she even knows what bees eat.”

What bees eat, how they survive and make both wax and honey is all part of a life cycle that Kenny Bach, president of the association, can’t help being excited about.

Life cycle of honeybees

From egg to forager, Kenny Bach explained, a honeybee takes on different jobs at different stages of life.

JANELLE PATTERSON The Marietta Times Sam Hammett unfolds refrigerated beeswax candles he made at his home Friday in Fleming.

“It’s only in the last two weeks of their life that they’re out foraging for nectar or pollen,” he said. “Before that they’re nursing the young, cleaning the hive, feeding the queen, gathering water and working.”

Bach said the duties are “age-dependent” meaning in the summer six-week life cycle, so many days are spent on each job.

“Everybody thinks it’s the queen bee that controls and directs what’s going on too, but that’s not the case,” explained David Huffer. “There are a few alpha females making those decisions of how many nurses are needed or if they need to feed up a new queen. And if the food supply is too low and the queen isn’t a good queen they direct the hive to ball her and install a new queen.”

To ball a queen means to dethrone her, he explained.

“They basically surround her, sting her and suffocate her,” Huffer added.

JANELLE PATTERSON The Marietta Times David and Teresa Huffer explain how honey is extracted through a slinging process at their business, The Bee Barn, in Tunnel Thursday.

But queens do have their role and provide the constant flow of life for the hive’s survival after only one or two mating flights. After that, they are fed, cleaned and are an egg machine.

“They start out with a queen laying fertilized eggs,” Bach explained. “Then depending on what they feed it that egg will either come out a virgin queen or a worker bee.”

The queen will also lay a few unfertilized eggs, which become the male drones.

“But the drones are really useless besides if they get lucky enough to mate with a queen,” said Huffer. “Though it’s not much luck because the mating kills them. And if they didn’t mate with a queen they’re still not going to live through the winter because the hive will kick out the drones to conserve food and focus on keeping the queen alive.”

Bach explained that a queen may mate 15 to 20 times with different drones and then for the rest of her life until she’s removed from office will stay in the hive laying eggs.

She’s able to store that sperm and keep it alive to decide which type of egg to lay throughout her life.

“She lays between 1,500 and 2,000 eggs a day,” explained Fleming Beekeeper Sam Hammett.

Those eggs, like other insects, go through the larval and pupae stages as nurse bees feed them in their honeycombs.

“Then when the time is right the larvae will cap themselves in, kind of like a cocoon, and depending on the type of bee it will emerge as a pupa at different times as the newest brood,” explained Bach.

New, virgin, queens emerge after 16 days from the time their egg was laid. Worker bees emerge as adults after 21 days. Drones (males) emerge after 24 days.

Jobs of a worker bee

For the first three days as a new adult, a worker bee is then providing housekeeping.

“Bees are exceptionally clean in their spaces,” explained Wagoner.

Then the bee will begin learning how to nurse older larvae and will take orientation flights outside of the hive, though not very far.

“We keep water close by because moisture and keeping the queen and hive at the right temperature is so important,” added Wagoner. “Though bees can drown, and too much moisture can cause the fermentation so they’re very careful with it and we have rocks in the birdbath so they have somewhere to land.”

Then by the seventh day, the worker is able to feed the queen and larvae fully.

Between days 12 and 18 of their adult life the worker is then a builder, working on the combs of the hive and also acting as a guardian from intruders like beetles, predators and helps keep the brood warm.

Then in the final days of its life, the worker takes flight, searching for both the carbohydrates and sugars needed to sustain the hive.

“They only fly in about a 2-mile radius from the hive,” said Bach. “Then one day they go out and don’t come back. Their wings could give up from exhaustion, or they’re prey.”

Making honey

Honey, though a delicious part of human diets, is not one that bears other than Winnie the Pooh favor.

“That’s a fallacy. When a bear goes after a hive it’s not out for honey,” laughed Huffer. “It’s there to get the protein of the larvae.”

But the honey is made first and foremost by bees to survive a winter season.

“Pollen is the protein, nectar is the carbohydrate, bees need both to be healthy,” said Bach. “So in the winter they’ve stored what they’ve made and eat and cluster to keep warm.”

But a single honey bee will only make one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in their lifetime.

“A good healthy hive is constantly producing new workers to replace the ones before,” said Lori Sayre, of Fleming. “They need the numbers so that the greatest number can protect the queen until she starts laying again in the spring.”

Nectar from different species of flower is brought back by foragers and deposited in the combs within the hive’s wax honeycombs housed in frames. Then younger worker bees fan the honey to bring down the moisture content, explained Bach.

“Then once it’s the right level they cap it off to keep it clean,” added Wagoner.

But different flowers produce different colors of nectar, which then become different colors of honey.

“Darker honey is usually from the fall flowers,” explained Huffer.

Once those honeycombs are full, the process of extraction, or robbing, begins.

“We’ll remove the frames with the honeycombs capped and take them into where our equipment is,” said Huffer. “Then we uncap the wax and place the frames where we can sling the honey, strain and collect it. Then it gets bottled.”

Inside a metal cylinder sits metal stands to hold the hive’s removed frames, which are then spun to release the pure honey.

“Every kid or adult that walks in here wants to turn it,” said Teresa Huffer in The Bee Barn. “It’s so easy and you can watch the honey hitting the walls before it drips down.”

They said to have truly pure, local, honey that provides the health benefits to things like digestion and allergy relief, straining is kept to a minimum.

“Otherwise you lose the enzymes, proteins and pollen that do all the good things,” said David Huffer.

Then he and his wife bottle and sell out pretty quickly.

“Our son already has a tab of people wanting him to bring it to the courthouse,” laughed Teresa Huffer.

Wax products

But what’s done with the wax removed so the honey can spin and sling?

“I make candles from it and we keep the honey for our personal use,” said Sam Hammett Friday. “I make eight candles at a time from a metal frame mold that I string the wicks through before I pour in the wax.”

First though, the capping wax is strained, melted, and strained again.

“Then I keep them in the fridge until we use them. It’s pure beeswax in there,” said Hammett.

Lori Sayre makes facial products out of her wax.

“I was already into natural products before I got into bees so it made sense to use this part of the process too, plus it’s something I can do in winter when I’m not so focused on growing produce,” said the female farmer. “I make skin salves, lip balms, beard balms, some soaps, lotions and cold creams.”

She said she loves the trial and error of keeping bees and making wax products.

“You’re always learning, and perfecting technique, my favorite to make is the super skin salve. People use it for sunburns and as a moisturizer and I give it to my parents who both have eczema,” Sayre added. “Infusing oils with herbs to add to my products is the most challenging though because you have to make sure the flowers are dry enough.”

Challenges

Moisture isn’t the only challenge to beekeeping and honeybees though.

Teresa Wagoner said she’s keeping her eye on skunks that may pounce on her hives, while Sayre said the wet weather the valley has experienced has confused her hives after a hard winter.

But the biggest threats to honeybees are three-fold: mites, lack of forage and man-made pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

“Pretty much if it has ‘cide’ at the end of it, it’s poison to pollinators,” said David Huffer.

At the association’s meeting, Tuesday others mentioned a kinder weed killer that can be made with a gallon of white vinegar, two cups of Epsom salt and a quarter cup of Dawn soap.

“But it’s also the lack of wildflowers and the wind that carries the sprays from farmers and from (Ohio Department of Transportation) spraying along state routes,” said Bach.

Other challenges include hive beetles, wind storms and rains washing out nectar and pollen from blooming plants.

Agricultural significance

“The value of (commercial) honey is in the millions, but the value of pollination is in the billions,” said Bach at the association meeting this week. “People don’t realize it’s not just the honey on the table, but it’s the pollinators that keep the alfalfa which feeds the cows. They’re a part of everything.”

Beekeeper needs

¯ 10 frame hive body.

¯ Outer cover.

¯ Inner cover.

¯ Bottom board.

¯ Entrance reducer.

¯ 10 frames with plastic foundation.

¯ Smoker.

¯ 10-inch hive tool.

¯ Goatskin vented gloves.

¯ Beekeeping guidebook.

¯ Mentor beekeeper.

¯ Learn more from The Bee Barn at www.thebeebarnohio.com.

Source David and Teresa Huffer.

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