If one just wanted bees to pollinate fruit trees, could they get a bee hive and just leave it alone and not harvest the honey?
Yes, such a thing is done deliberately. I read in National Geographic, beekeepers drive their hives around to almond orchards, for example, for pollination purposes. Such honey is toxic to humans, so the beekeeper lets the hive gets to keep it, and grow larger. Later, on a Nova special regarding the (fairly) recent hive syndrome, that people will rent out hives to orchard owners for pollination. Orchard owner is responsible for vandalism or bear damage to hives. Which is frequent. Bear damage that is. The larvae are just too yummy for them to resist.
Thanks. Did they say why the honey would be toxic to humans?
No bears in Hawaii and I don’t think the wild boars here would go after honey although they might knock down the hives for the hell of it.
Sure, there is no real requirement to harvest the honey.
Probably not the best overall idea though, normal beekeeper hives are not really designed for long term with no interaction, or all year use.
It depends on where you are, but some areas, leaving the hives out in the winter may get the bees too cold. Generally the hive construction won’t last more than a few years out in the open year round either. The hive entrance or inside can get plugged up, making the bees leave for a better home.
Are you in an area with no/insufficient native bees, and no beekeepers around to get your trees pollinated? I guess it depends on how long a time period you are looking at. Even in the best circumstances, it is unlikely you are going to get a hive of bees to stay around in one spot for 10+ years. They’ll get parasites and die/move, clog up the hive and move, just up and move, die for unknown reasons, etc. Buying and setting up a new hive every 3-5 years might be more trouble or expense than getting a local beekeeper to come by regularly.
If you really want to go cheap and native though, you could probably construct homemade hives, abduct wild swarms, and make a go of it.
I’d suspect it’s because almonds can contain trace amounts of cyanide.
Dunno why almond flower honey would specifically be toxic. Maybe its not, but is instead too bitter to sell well. I’ve never seen, peach flower, or plum, nectarine, nor almond flower honey for sale. They’re all related, all having that bitter kernel within their stone.
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And yeah, they all contain amygdalin, which breaks down to cyanide in our acidic, meat digesting gut. The alkaline bee gut is immune.*
I read a book on hydroponics by H. M. Resh. In it he suggested ordering a bumblebee hive to pollinate greenhouse grown tomato plants. It comes with a bladder of sugar water to feed the bees, as tomato flowers don’t make much nectar.
Almond nectar contains amygdalin, which metabolizes in the human small intentine into hydrogen cyanide. (Cites here and here.) Strangely enough, according to the first article, amygdalin is almost irresistible to honeybees.
Modern beehives are those boxes - theres the main hive box at the bottom and the less deep “supers” above. Typically there’s a grill between the breeder box and the supers to stop the queen (who has a bigger fatter, uh, posterior) from going up into the supers.
So the queen wanders the bottom box honeycombs, basically filling them with eggs that produce more workers. The upper boxes contain frames with a base wax bottom with the beginning of a honeycomb pattern, so the workers build honeycomb and fill it with honey for the winter. Fortunately, the queen can’t get up there. so it’s only honey, no bee larvae.
So when the supers are full, you either harvest them or add more supers - but I don’t know how tall you can make a hive before the bees have a collective “WTF” moment and divert their efforts elsewhere.
In the winter, the bees form a huge ball of insectiveness around the queen and keep active and circulating; the ones in the inside get warm, go to the outside, maybe grab some honey stored there and let the outside ones go toward the centre and warm up. If the hive is too exposed and uninsulated, this is not enough for a core group to survive the winter. Beekeepers IIRC either wrap the hives with insulation for the winter, put them into a somewhat warmer place than outdoors, or let them die and order a new batch from Florida in the spring.
If the bees run out of places to store honey, they may think the hive is getting too big and start growing more queens and swarm off to parts unknown. Beekeepers keep providing fresh comb for the bees to fill, and watch the breeder part of the hive for queen cells…
What md2000 said; the hive will swarm if there is not enough space.
I no longer keep bees, but I do know people who have hives that they treat for disease and mites, but do not put honey supers on and just don’t worry much if they swarm. If a hive dies, just split another that’s about to swarm.
When the hive swarms, does that mean the whole things leaves? I’d have thought that any location that was ideal enough to allow that kind of population growth would be worth leaving a part of the hive at. Not that I think bees are thinking that, but it seems like it would be advantageous evolutionarily; bee hives do send out new queens to make child hives, right? Sort of the same thing, but with a guaranteed good hive spot.
When the hive swarms it splits into two. Part of the worker mass leaves with the old queen, and part of it stays in the old hive with the new queen.
And no, there is no guarantee that a swarm will find a good location to set up a new hive. they just keep moving until they find a site, they become frustrated and set up somewhere that is not optimal, or they die. The list of places where swarms will attempt to establish a hive is quite bizarre. Inside houses is common, inside cars, inside rabbit warrens, and the legend of Samson finding a hive inside an animals carcasse has been verified several times in the real world.
A swarm can’t really afford do be fussy most of the time.
If it’s so frequent, why not just enclose the hive in a metal cage driven into the ground? You know, kind of like your everyday metal fence, except with a top.
I have not looked into this, but a bear-proof fence is probably much more expensive than replacing the hive box on occasion.
You can also train the bees to harvest and bottle the honey, but the problem is, because they can’t read, they keep sticking the labels on upside-down.