Pawtuckaway Lake Association

“If the world were without honeybees for two years, the entire population of the earth would starve to death.” (Taken from a documentary on honeybees)

The following interview is of PLIA Member Peter Lyle of Meindl Road. Peter has lived on Pawtuckaway Lake for 25 years and raised honeybees for the past 15 years. If you have beautiful flowering plants or vegetables in your garden, chances are Peter’s bees have contributed a lot to your success. Peter was interviewed by Jeff Gurrier on May 27, 2006.

Peter, when did you first start keeping bees?

Fifteen years ago. I had a neighbor come down who wanted me to baby-sit her kids so she could go to a beekeeping school. I said, why don’t we find somebody else to baby-sit so we can both go! The Beekeeping School is in Candia; it’s actually called Pawtuckaway Beekeeping Association. There are about 50-60 members of the association. The members have a wide variety of occupations. All kinds of people are into beekeeping. There are a lot of farmers who keep bees, especially around here with all of the apple orchards. Without bees to pollinate the trees you would get very few apples.

Why do you keep bees?

It’s a hobby, and bees are important. We wouldn’t have as lush gardens without the bees. There wouldn’t be all of the vegetables in California or the oranges in Florida; those industries couldn’t survive without the bees. There are companies that travel year round with the bees in tractor-trailers. They rent the hives out to farmers and then collect and sell the honey. They make a good living out of it. They’ll setup in California then they’ll head down to Florida, then Georgia, and then come up to New England in the summer. They keep the honey and charge the farmers a fee for pollinating their crops.

Some people are really into it. There are guys who go out into the woods. If they see a bee they’ll try to capture it. They try to figure out if the bee is a wild bee or not. They’ll put a little marker on it, let it go, watch the direction it goes in, time it until it gets back, calculate the speed a bee can travel, and then trace back to find the hive.

When I visit neighbors I always look in their gardens and usually find my honeybees.

How hard is it to get started keeping bees?

It’s pretty easy. It’s about a six-week course. They provide a lot of help and then they provide you a mentor afterwards. You can call up and they will give you advice. Plus, there are hundreds of publications available. There have been more books written about beekeeping than any other single topic in any language. Beekeeping goes back to at least the Egyptian days and is believed to go back to primitive civilizations. They found honey in some of the pyramids that was still edible.

That’s the interesting thing about honey it’s sterile.  That’s why they used it up until the Second World War as a treatment on burns. They would cover the burns with honey, its sterile, hydroscopic, absorbs moisture from the wound, and it breathes. They still use it today for treating wounds in African countries.

Hives are constructed of lower breeding boxes and upper honey storage boxes 

Where do the honeybees come from?

You have to buy honeybees. Honeybees aren’t indigenous in this country they come from Europe. There are various hybrid bees available now that are more resistant to disease. There were wild bees here in the States but the honeybees were brought in with the settlers. The wild bees and the domestic bees don’t mingle, so introducing the honeybees didn’t change the domestic bees in any way. Wild bees are smaller and they don’t pollinate as well.

The bees were brought over from Europe once the settlers started to cultivate the land in this country and set up farms. It was part of the European farming tradition. A hive of bees will pollinate plants in a radius of 5 miles from their hive. There are about 50,000 bees in a single hive and 30,000 of them are worker bees that are out of the hive foraging for pollen and nectar. So, a single hive can cover a lot of territory.

How often do you have to buy new bees?

You need to buy a new package of bees because they die off in the winter, they freeze, they starve and mites are a big problem. You have to medicate the bees for mites.  Mites have become a big problem in the last 15 to 20 years. The mites came over from Europe. At one time you could have a beehive for 20-30 years but since mites have been around they often don’t live for more than a year or two. You have to medicate them to protect them.

Africanized bees won’t survive the winter because they don’t store excess honey. They never had to because they come from a warm climate where they could collect pollen and nectar all year. They have to be replaced every year.

Bees are hard to get a hold of. The shortage of bees is caused by the problem with the mites. Most people need new bees every two years; it used to be every 5 to 7 years. So they are finding it hard to keep the supply going. That is a major problem for this country; the agricultural community depends on bees for pollinating their crops.

I try to get hybrid bees that are easy to work with. But, with the shortage, I have to take what I can get my hands on. Last year I had to get a package of Italian bees and they were very bad tempered. They tended to attack me when I worked on the hive. They were nasty bees.

How do you buy bees?

You buy bees by the pound, typically 1 to 4 pounds. There are probably 20,000 bees in a 3 lbs package. And, you need a queen. There are companies that produce only queens. They have lots of nucs, which are small breeding hives for breeding queens. You can buy flightless queens that have had their wings clipped so they can’t fly off on you. You can get a marked queen. They paint a dot on the back of the queen so you can spot it easily when inspecting your frames.

When you get a package of bees, the worker bees will stay wherever the queen bee is. The queen comes in a small cage with 3-4 helper bees. There is a sugar pellet that blocks the opening in the cage. You put the cage into your hive between the frames and pour the rest of the bees into the hive. Then you seal up the hive. The worker bees will chew through the sugar pellet and release the queen. The queen usually stays put and the worker bees will stay with her. The bees will only leave the hive when the queen is getting sick or if the hive is getting too crowded.

How many different kinds of bees are in a hive?

There is one queen bee, some drones and the rest are female worker bees. The drones are big, fat, hairy male bees that don’t really do anything but mate once with a queen. The worker bees spend a lot of time cleaning up after them.

In the winter bees don’t mate, so they don’t really need that many drones around. You’ll see the worker bees carrying the drones out of the hive and toss them on the ground. They try to get back in but the workers push them right back out. They don’t want to feed them for the winter because they’re useless to them.

Peter smokes his feisty Italian bees to calm them down after bear attack 

Do the bees have different roles in the hive?

Bees have different jobs that are given to them at birth and they have that job throughout life. Some clean the cells out, some feed the brood, some feed the queen, some act as sentries at the hive opening, and most are foragers. The foragers go out into the fields to collect pollen and nectar. They all have a specific job, it is very well organized. Eventually their wings wear out and they can’t get back to the hive. You can actually see their wings get shorter over time.

On a hot day they will assign a certain number of worker bees to be fans. You will see them at the opening of the hive fanning their wings creating circulation in the hive. If it gets too hot I will lift the top of the hive a bit to help circulation. If it gets too hot the wax can actually melt.

What is the honey made from?

The nectar the bees gather is what turns into honey. Bees have two stomachs, a honey stomach and regular stomach. They eat some of the nectar they gather to live.  Then they regurgitate the nectar from their honey stomach into cells that have been built in the hive for storage.  Worker bees flap their wings over these cells until the nectar is reduced to 14% moisture and then they cap the cell for long-term storage. This reduced nectar is honey.

The foraging bees also gather pollen and carry it back to the hive on their legs. When they return they pass it to the worker bees that store the pollen and then feed it to the young bees.

Is honey different depending on the types of plants that are available?
 

The honey is primarily nectar. The nectar comes from flowers and trees. The nectar gets lighter as the summer progresses and the bees start gathering flower nectar. As I look at my frames at the end of the season I can tell which cells were filled at the beginning of the season as opposed to the end of the season by the color of the honey that is in them.

If you have bees that have wintered over they start the honey production season by feeding off of the pine trees and that makes black honey. Then they hit the maple trees and that’s dark. Later in the summer, June and July, they start hitting the flowers and produce a lighter honey. Typically that is blended all together. But, if you get a new package of bees in May or the beginning of June, then they start collecting only the wildflowers and you get a lighter honey.

How do the bees know where the pollen and nectar are?

The bees talk to each other using a “waggle dance”. All the bees have different jobs, one is to forage for pollen, resin, and nectar. When one bee finds a new source of pollen, say a clover field, when it comes back to the hive they will have a meeting in front of the hive. The bee that found the clover will do a little dance. For example, it will rotate five times one way, five times the other, look up, make all kinds of movements and this will show all the other bees where the clover field is.  After the dance, they will all take off and go to that new location.

How much honey do the bees produce in a year?

Out of my two hives I probably get about 50-60 lbs of honey per year. That is not counting the 30-40 lbs of honey that are left in the hive for the bees to feed on over the winter.

The bees will produce as much honey as they possibly can. They will keep producing as long as there is pollen and nectar to gather. That is why there is surplus honey that you can take and they will still have enough to survive the winter.

Peter removes honey laden frame from top "super" for inspection

How do you get the honey out of the frames?

Reg Henshaw in Candia, an old Englishman, has a centrifuge. I take my honey there. First you take a hot knife and cut the cappings off the cells.  He puts my frames in a slot in his centrifuge and spins it. He charges a fee for each frame or I’ll trade him for English Tea. There is usually some honey left in the frames after spinning, I bring that back and give it to my bees. They’ll clean all of the honey out of the frames for you. I bring the raw honey back home and strain it and then bottle it. I don’t heat it or filter it too many times as that takes all the goodness out of it.

Is your honey the same as supermarket honey?

Store bought honey is junk. Its cooked, heated up, all the pollen and propolus is filtered out of it. Propulis has beneficial health effects. Pollen is good for you too. If you have pollen allergies, eating honey with pollen is a homeopathic treatment. It builds up your immunity to the pollen. That’s why it’s good to buy locally produced honey; it has pollen in it that is native to where you live.

My honey has a variety of different pollens in it including maple, oak, pine, and birch. You don’t get a lot of pollen in the honey it isn’t really that noticeable.

Why do beekeepers spray smoke on the hives?

When you spread smoke on the bees it calms them down. They think that they are getting attacked so they will go into the honey stores and start eating as much honey as they can. If they think their hive is going to be destroyed they store up on honey to take with them. This keeps them occupied while you are inspecting the frames. It makes it easy to work the bees. You don’t want to work the hives on a windy or cold day when all the bees are still in the hive. You want to pick a day when most of them are off foraging for nectar.

When you inspect the frames you want to see sufficient pollen and a good egg-laying pattern. You don’t want to see cells all over the place that are capped with holes in between. You want to see a nice centered composition. The pollen is stored on the outside of the frame and the honey in a different section of the frame. They keep it very well organized.  If you have two supers they will store their honey in the upper super.

When a queen lays a drone egg, the cap is raised. When she lays a worker the cap is flat. When you inspect the frames you are looking to see if you have a queen that is laying too many drones, if so, you kill her and get another queen. If she is laying too many drones something is wrong with her. If you can’t find the queen, you just put the new queen in the hive and she will find the old queen and kill her. An abnormal queen is weaker so the new queen will always win.

Do the bees sting you while your inspecting the hive?

Yes, sometimes you get a nasty batch of bees. If you get a bee sting the bee puts its stinger in you and there is a little sac of venom left on the stinger, which pulsates. You don’t want to pick it up and pull it, which forces the venom into your skin. You want to take a fingernail, credit card, or something thin and flat like that and scrape the stinger off. That way you don’t squeeze the venom sac.

There is actually bee sting therapy for some diseases. The venom can produce a chemical in your body that promotes healing of certain ailments.  There is a woman that tours the country speaking about how bee venom can relieve many of the symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis.

Next fall's honey is looking good!

What does it mean when bees “Swarm”?

When bees start to swarm it sounds like a little cyclone. You can see all of the bees gathered on the outside of the hive so you know they are about to swarm. All of a sudden you will hear the buzzing begin and the bees go up into the air like a cyclone. They’ll go up and attach themselves to a pine tree. If they land in a low tree you can capture them, otherwise they’re pretty much gone. Usually they’ll end up too high up in the trees to capture.

When bees swarm they feed up on so much honey that they can’t sting you, their bellies are too full. They can’t twist around to sting you they are too fat. If you have seen a picture of a person with a bee beard all they have done is put the queen on their chin and the workers will gather up around her. 

Why do bees swarm?
 

If the hive is getting too crowded the queen will lay an egg and the worker bees will put royal jelly on the egg, which makes that egg turn into a queen. The worker bees generate royal jelly in their bodies. You can actually buy royal jelly in health stores.  The old queen will leave the hive before the new queen is born. If the old queen didn’t leave before the new one hatched, the new queen would kill her.

The old queen will leave with about 50% of the bees in the hive to establish a new colony. This is when they swarm. The new queen will come out and will mate with the drone bees that are still left in the hive. They only mate once in a lifetime. The queen and the drones’ fly up in the air and you can hear pops and cracks and the drones’ fall dead to the ground. The drones die as soon as they have mated with the queen. 

The queen will keep laying eggs until the hive reaches its maximum of around 50,000 bees. Then, depending on the time of year, they typically swarm. Before the mite problem, when the old queen left she would successfully start another colony. But now, if they aren’t medicated for mites, they can’t make it on their own. They won’t even survive a winter.

Docile bees working hard storing honey

What happens to the bees over the winter?

They stay outside. Although, the Canadians keep their bees inside during the winter; they’ll put them in their garage. Usually you leave 30-40 lbs of honey in the hive for the bees to survive the winter, sometimes more, sometimes less. The bees form a ball around the queen and shiver and move to generate heat. They can keep a constant temperature around 94-95 degrees inside of the hive. Some people insulate their hives but the bees will seal up any cracks with propulis, which is a resin from trees that they gather up during the summer. If there were a particularly cold winter I would insulate them or build a snow bank around them to keep out the wind.

If it is cold in the spring the plants won’t produce pollen. The bees are already breeding so you sometimes have to buy pollen to feed them until the trees begin producing pollen. You typically feed them in the spring with a sugar solution as well.

Aftermath of Bear Attack 

What are the greatest threats to the bees’ safety?

Probably me!  Actually, it’s got to be the mites. You can treat the hives for mites with different chemicals. There are Apistan Strips that you can place in the hives that will kill the mites. You can mix cooking oil up with dish-washing detergent and put it on wax paper strips to catch the mites. The mites get in the bees throats, they bite the bees, and they introduce bacteria all of which kill the bees. Foul Brood is a disease introduced by bacteria. It creates all kinds of abnormalities in the brood cells. If you get Foul Brood, you need to burn everything, the hives and all.

You medicate the bees before honey production season begins that way none of the medication gets in the honey. The medication is on strips the bees walk across and that is how it is applied.

Other factors are the weather and sometimes bears. A bear destroyed one of my hives the other night. There are lots of bears patrolling around these woods. Once in a while they will attack one of my hives. You can see lots of dead bees in my yard today, they were attacking the bear. After they sting they die. The bears are nocturnal.  This one came around at 2:00am in the morning.

Skunks will come around and eat the bees because they are grub lovers. You have to place a board with nails on it in front of the opening of the hive to keep them away. Otherwise, they sit in front of the hive and grab the bees as they come back from foraging.

I have had a couple of hives die off due to wax moths. They eat the wax and make a mess of the hive. Mice can get in, ants can get in and they don’t sting them, I don’t know why. Wasps go in the hive but the bees can kill them. They won’t sting them but they will cook them. A wasp can survive only up to 94 degrees Fahrenheit while a bee can survive over 100 degrees. The bees will surround them making a cluster around the wasp. They will wiggle and move generating so much heat that the wasp will literally bake to death. That’s also how the bees live through the winter. They all huddle together around the queen in a big mass and generate heat.