My Amazing Honey Bee Friends

I grow 5 bushes of lavender flowers all around Sand Village Farm. I love their scent and color. I know my honey bee friends love them as well,  so I want them to visit often. The sound of buzzing bees are music to my ears in the hot summer sun. They are amazing little creatures. Let me tell you just how amazing they are:

Honey bees have 6 legs, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.

Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odor recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell was so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from meters away.

The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour. The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.

A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen. Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work. The queen bee can live up to 5 years and is the only bee that lays eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, and lays up to 2500 eggs per day. Click here to learn more about the Honey Bee Life Cycle. During winter, honey bees feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.

Check out the short youtube video I create for more photos of my honey bee friends.

Helping Honeybees Survive

I wanted to put together a short Youtube video with video clips and photographs I took during the last 3 years while working with honeybees. My goal was to bring awareness to people that honeybees are not scary and bee swarms are not Hollywood horror events. I wanted to show people that bees don't sting people unless they are provoked in most cases. I wanted to show people how beautiful the bees are and how important they are to human civilization and survival.

For the last 5 months I worked on sorting through the video clips and over 300 photographs. I did online research on history of honeybees and read a couple books on honeybees. Lastly, I spend hundreds of hours putting together the selected video clips, photographs, and sound clips in After Effects 5.5 and showed it several times to my After Effects and Beneficial Beasts in the Garden classes for feedback. The final version of the video is now on Youtube.com. I hope you like it.

Vanishing Bees

The bees had disappeared in a week

Back on May 2, 2010, I participated in bee swarm capture for the first time. The bee colony we captured had lived on Merritt College campus for just under 2 years. Last month we opened the bee box and the entire colony had disappeared. Master Ken told us that the bees were still in the box a week ago when he checked on it. He said there could be many reasons why the bees decided to abandon their hive. There was still a lot of honey left in the hive, which we would harvest as a class and share among us. In addition to honey, we would also harvest the wax, which was regarded even more valuable than honey in the past.

The disappearance of the bees troubles me greatly. I have been reading about collapse colony disorder (CCD) since it was first discovered in 2006. I have read that it mostly affects commercial beehives and not beehives that people keep in their backyards. I hope that is still the case. In order to better educate myself in honeybees, I checked out a few books from San Francisco Public Library when I happened to be in neighborhood. One of the book is called A short History of the Honey Bee, which I think is an excellent book for someone who enjoys leisure reading. The author, "E. Readicker-Henderson is a beekeeper turned regular writer and contributor to National Geographic Traveler, Sierra, and others,..." He describes the taste of raw local honey beautifully, which brings tears to my eyes.

I also looked for documentaries on honeybee and found full episode of Silence of the Bees on PBS.org. From the documentary, I learned that in Maoxian county of Sichuan, China, people have to pollinate their fruit trees because they have lost their bees due to heavy use of pesticide. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that you can't have an apple unless you pollinate apple blossoms one by one? That is frightening to imagine.

I now have a new goal for 2012.

Watch Silence of the Bees on PBS. See more from Nature.