Bees make honey so they’ll have something to eat in the winter, when no flowers are in bloom. How do beekeepers steal it without starving the hive?
The bees make way more than they need. Plus the keeper can supplement their food supply if it’s actually needed.
Exactly right. Enough honey can be left in the hive, or if all of it it taken, food is provided. Often, this is in the form of an open-top 55 gal drum of corn syrup with some hay sprinkled over the top giving the bees a place to land and eat without getting stuck.
A small time beekeeper, like myself, can just dissolve sugar in water in the right proportions to feed them. Bees are so efficient at making hony they can make plenty for themselves and us.
By creating more and more space for honey storage (those extra boxes on top the basic hive box) the bees will energetically fill up any empty space with combs and then honey. the slides in the uppers are formed with wax in the correct hex pattern as bases for honeycomb, so generally the bees follow the “hints” and build the comb in the correct way. this makes the hive neater and tidier to open. The comb slides out like vertical drawers. The beekeeper can slice off the covers for the comb, use a cetrifuge to extract the honey, then return the empty wax honeycomb for a refill. Since wax takes a lot of honey to make, this is an added efficiency.
There is a filter between the main hive and upper boxes with slots narrow enough so that the workers can get there to deposit honey, but the queen can’t get in to lay eggs. This we don’t have to filter any pesky larvae out of our honey.
In a normal hive, IIRC, the bee would build out the hive until they ran out of room, then decide to build some queen cells to raise a bunch of queens, most of whom would lead swarms out of the hive. By preventing the construction of queen cells and by providing empty cells for the bees to keep filling, they are less inclined to go walkabout and devote themselves to making honey in the belief they ahve not fully prepared for winter yet.
Then, as others mentioned, you can feed them cheaper sugar water if necessary.
Is there a noticeable difference in honey made by bees fed on corn syrup or sugar water compared with nectar? My ignorant assumption is that nectar contains trace amounts of impurities that would flavor and color the honey more than if it came from a big bottle of Karo’s.
Bees in temperate climates semi-hibernate in the winter. They seldom venture out of the hive, huddle together for heat conservation, and actually live longer, since they aren’t working themselves to death like in the summer. So they don’t need much food to survive. It’s warm, late winter days that are the most devastating, as they may exit the hive and find nothing to eat.
I always fed my bees with sugar water in the very early spring for that reason.
You can taste the difference, and if you buy honey outside of the typical megamart (something like a farmer’s market, for example) you’ll probably find that they list the type of plant that made the honey. Clover honey is particularly popular. When my father still kept bees, he had two or three locations for the hives. You could definitely tell which honey came from which hive just by tasting it.
But the corn syrup feeding is not for bees to make honey with. It’s to make sure the hive has enough food to get through the winter season. The bees won’t go back into honey production mode until the spring/summer when it’s warm and plenty of things are in bloom.
Gotcha.
Yes, they don’t make honey wholesale (usually) from sugar-water. It’s used by beekeepers as a food for the bees during the winter, so they don’t need a lot of the much more valuable honey.
honey is made from nectar from flowers, concentrated. As one wag described it, it’s bee barf - regurgitated concentrated nectar. Pollen is used by bees as additional food.
Remember the boa constrictors who eat a decent meal once a month? The food requirements for cold-blooded animals, and insects too, is quite low compared to mammals or birds. The major use of energy in winter months - the bees form a churning ball, so each one emerges from the warm center and waggles their wings etc. for a while to generate heat, then goes back into the crowd to get warm and keep insulating the queen in the middle.
Can someone illustrate how much honey bees make? Like, a hive of ‘x’ bees makes ‘y’ ounces per ‘z’ time?
Actually, though, I think they have one stomach for honey-making and another for the food they actually digest and live on.
I’ve heard something like one worker bee produces about a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. Could be wrong.
I have heard that figure too, not sure if it bears out. Beekeeping is like farming, very weather dependent. A good year they can produce copious amounts of honey. A bad year or poor management by the beekeeper (ahem) and you can get little to none.
Very roughly. When a hive is in full production in the spring, during a nectar flow when everything is blooming, a strong hive can fill up a super in something like a week. That’s maybe 60 pounds of honey. Like I said, very roughly.
It really depends on what is available. They don’t happily bring in the food at a constant rate all summer. The limiting factor isn’t a bee’s ability to pick up the nectar and carry it home, it is that various nectars come and go throughout the season. In July they have to work to find any food in my area.
The other stat I recall from long ago, a typical modern hive has about 40,000(?) worker bees.
keep in mind, not all their life is spent in hneymaking; the first few weeks IIRC they spend doing inside duties, like caring for and feeding the larvae, cleaning the hive, etc. So maybe around 20,000+ worker bees are doing that nectar collecting and honeymaking.
60lbs/20,000 bees = 0.003 lbs = 0.05 Oz. honey in a week
1/20 ounce is about 1.5ml
Sorry for the dumb question, but one hive would be one of those boxes that measure about 2 feet on each side and maybe 3 feet tall, right? I had no idea that 40,000 bees lived in there. That’s crazy.
Many years ago in childhood one of my obsessions was reading about beekeeping.
IIRC if you ordered a set of bees (Queen and starter workers kit) It arrived in the mail as a box with 2 sides screen (and a separate tiny box inside for the queen) that box was about 4 inches by 6 inches by 10 inches (? I think) and had about 7,000 bees packed in.
Keep in mind, except at night, the hive will have half its workers out flying in the fields.
Modern hives are modular, and inside are individually replaceable frames. Square in cross-section, each box (called a super) can be of any height. Usually there is a large one on the bottom, which is the main hive body, and it is topped by smaller ones. As the season progresses and the honey comes in, the beekeeper puts more supers on to allow for expansion and get a larger crop. As the season winds down, he takes the full supers off, and replaces them with empty ones, or reduces their number.
There is often a queen excluder, a grid between the main body and the production supers. This prevents the larger bees (queen and drones) from entering the honey-only area. It also makes it harder for the workers to get through, so some beekeepers don’t use them.
Besides production, another reason for adding empty supers is to allow the bees sufficient expansion room. There is a tendency for colonies to split up when overcrowded and half of the hive takes off to find another home. Obviously, the beekeeper doesn’t want to lose half of his productivity.
Before the modular concept was developed, hives and colonies were often destroyed to get at the honey. Much less efficient in the long run.
The boxes are a bit smaller than that, maybe 2x2 feet and a foot or so high. Different height boxes have different uses. A hive would be 2 or 3 of those boxes at the start, the brood boxes, then more boxes on top of that (the “supers”) where the bees put the honey, hopefully. The beekeeper can then just take a full super off the top and put on one with empty frames, in theory.
A full medium super weighs about 60 pounds and I think mine are 9 or 10 inches tall. A full sized hive might be 6 medium supers or maybe 2 large on the bottom and 3 mediums on top so the hive might be 5-6 feet tall. Lifting a 60 pound box at chest height can be a pain. Honey is heavy stuff.
I’ve heard 50 - 70,000 bees in a strong hive. They pack in there pretty tight.