Catnip Honeybees

One of my holiday traditions is making handmade catnip toys for family and friends' cats.

Catnip grows easily in my garden, pollinated by wild bumblebees that apparently love this perennial herb. After picking and drying the catnip, it's time to decide what to make.

This year it was easy. Catnip honeybees!

I used left over black cotton fabric and added yellow fabric stripes. After sewing the fabric into tubes, one end was sewn to make a point, suggesting the stinger, and the other was sewn closed after adding catnip.

Wings were made out of white fleece. Embroidery floss suggested the antenna.

Sweet!

The corduroy grey catnip toys? A computer mouse, what else!

Charlotte

Winter Bee Bars

When honeybees aren't rummaging for pollen in bird feeder cracked corn, they like a drink of sugar water from one of my bird baths.

If honeybees didn't have access to sugar water, they would be eating stored honey so I keep their "bee bars" stocked. That way they can save eating honey for colder winter days when they can't leave their hives.

Fun to see them out and about, I miss being with my bees in winter.

Charlotte

Bees Corn Diving

When winter days turn warm enough for honeybees to leave their hives, I find my girls in unusual places around my garden.

Bees make honey for winter food but if the temperatures are warm enough, they forage for pollen. My girls look for pollen wherever they can find it, especially in bird feeders.

I make my own bird seed combination including cracked corn for doves and other ground feeding birds. Apparently honeybees can find pollen in cracked corn, or at least they try hard looking for some!

 Charlotte

Looking for Live Bees

One of HomeSweetBees.com readers contacted me about getting 30-40 bees a week for therapy for a bad back.

Bee Stings For Arthritis

Although it has not been scientifically proven, some people say applying bees to a certain area of the body helps with arthritis and other medical conditions. Most beehives in Missouri are at their lowest numbers through winter. Beekeepers are not going to open a hive, and expose it to moisture and cold weather, to remove just 30-40 bees a week. Bees form a ball in the center of the hive and make it through winter literally shivering themselves warm. Although a worker bee may only live for 4-6 weeks during summer, worker bees over winter may live as long as 6 months to get the colony from one season to the next.

Personal Observation Hive

Experienced beekeepers tell me people who need bee stings for on-going therapy usually set up an "observation hive," or a hive that's inside with a vent access to the outside so beekeepers can more easily get to, and remove, the needed quantity of honeybees.

Sorry, all of my honeybees are adopted!

Charlotte

To Brush or Not to Brush

It's easy to spot the new beekeepers at a meeting because within minutes they have that "lost" look on their faces. Beekeepers, like any other specialty, have their own language and shorthand when discussing issues.

To better familiarize myself with the "beekeepers'" language, I read as many books as I could, focusing on the terms. I will go over some of the more common terms and tools here because they are as much a reflection of the profession as - well, reading a book!

Bee Brushes

One of the beekeeper's more controversial tools is the "bee brush." Looking like a giant yellow toothbrush, the bee brush has very soft bristles and a long handle for easy gripping. Bee brushes are handy to have if you don't want to hurt or kill bees as you move hive pieces around. Honeybees in a garden are so intent on their work, they often will continue working without realizing their hive frame has been moved, or the top is on the side of the hive. Bees will follow the queen so even though you may be moving bees around, they will all try to climb back into the hive after the queen.

How to Use Bee Brush

To make sure you don't kill or harm bees, slowly move the bee brush across the area where you want bees to leave. And I mean S-L-O-W-L-Y, you are using the bee brush bristles to nudge the bees along, not sweep them off their feet. I like having my bee brush with me when I open hives, even just to inspect. I can more easily guide bees away from areas that may otherwise hurt them as I move frames around or put the top back on.

Don't want to use a bee brush? It also makes a nice tool to brush furniture treated with beeswax!

Charlotte

To the Little Busy Bee

"How doth the little busy bee, improve each shining hour, and gather honey all the day from every opening flower!" — Isaac Watts 1674-1748

Scientists now know various pollinators have a preference for different-colored flowers. Honeybees, for example, are attracted to yellow and blue flowers; hummingbirds and butterflies to pink and purple ones.

Although honeybees have a preference, I have also found honeybees on pink, red, and purple flowers, especially mid-summer when little else was in bloom. Flowers will stop producing pollen when temperatures go above 90°F, leaving honeybees with limited pollen sources to take back to the hive.

Would You Like a Bite?

Thanks to the tons of money being invested in finding out more about the little insect responsible for every third bite of food we eat,  there are now regular scientific discoveries made about honeybees. One recent discovery was news even to many beekeepers, who used to describe this behavior as "grooming."

Honeybees Don't Just Sting
Turns out honeybees aren't being fashionable or fastidious; they not only sting but they can also bite. I wondered what some of my bees were doing earlier this summer when I opened a hive to find them "rolling" a wax moth larvae away from the hive entrance. I had read that healthy hives can protect themselves from these invaders and assumed bees were stinging the larvae. After several bees converged on the wax moth larvae, I noticed none of the bees were dying.
 
A bee can only sting once, then dies.
Although the bees were still moving, the wax moth larvae had stopped. The bees were then able to roll it off the edge of the hive. Now I know  the bees were biting the wax moth larvae. Researchers have discovered that honeybees use their tiny mandibles to paralyze victims with a snake-like venom. The secretion left by the bite was found to be similar to Lidocaine, the dominant local anesthetic used in humans and other mammals. Like a snake bite, the secretion contains a natural anesthetic that paralyzes the victim for 6-10 minutes so the pest can be dragged out of the hive. The finding could help scientists develop ways to help bees fight off viruses that are affecting the wider bee population.

Bee Anesthetic
Dr Max Watkins, a former researcher at Cardiff University, said the anesthetic may not only help honeybees fend off pests such as wax moths and the parasitic varroa mites, but it also has great potential for human use.

“Firstly, the revelation that honeybees can bite enemies that they cannot sting confounds some existing ideas and adds significantly to our biological knowledge. “Secondly, the discovery of a highly effective natural anesthetic with huge potential will be of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry eager to develop better local anesthetics.”

The natural anesthetic is 2-heptanone, a compound found in many foods.
It is also secreted by certain insects but never before understood to have anesthetic properties. Until recently, research seemed to indicate that 2-heptanone was either a honeybee alarm pheromone that triggers defensive responses, or a chemical marker signaling to other foraging bees that a flower had already been visited.  The compound is found naturally in many foods such as beer and white bread, and is so safe that USDA allows it as a food additive.

That's a bear of a discovery!

Charlotte

Pool Party

Honeybees sometimes run out of places to store honey. When that happens, they will add wax comb between hive floors.

When the hive is opened, that exposes little extra honey pools and bees dive right in!

Charlotte

Cleaning House

Honeybees are very fastidious. They like to keep the hive clean.

As the 2012 summer drought continued, baby bees died in the nursery because bees couldn't find pollen.

When temperatures are over 90F for any length of time, flowers shut down to survive and stop producing pollen.

Worker bees removed the little mummy-like bodies and left them on the hive deck. Sad to see but relatively harmless to the rest of the colony

Charlotte

Kissing Cousins

Yellow jackets and bees are not the same.

Millions of years ago, wasps and bees were the same species.

No one knows why bees became vegetarian and started to make honey. Both are important garden pollinators.

Before I had honeybees, I had a healthy population of wasps pollinating my compact pear tree.

Charlotte

Honey Wax Caps

Once comb is filled with nectar and dehydrated to 18%, the oldest bees cap cells with wax.

Bees make honey to give them food through winter. When they need to eat, they chew through wax caps to get to the stored honey.

Melted wax caps become those highly-prized for a variety of home and beauty products including clean-burning beeswax candles.

Charlotte

Getting a Drink

Can you see the little dark pink tongues lapping up water? Honeybees depend on water to make nectar that becomes honey.

They seem to prefer water with flavor.

I tend to find them hanging out in bird baths seeped with twigs and leaves. Must give the water a better bouquet...

Charlotte

Burr Comb

Bees produce several waxy comb versions.

Comb for baby bees and honey storage measures five cells per inch.

Comb built to hatch drones, or male bees, are larger measuring four cells per inch, more the size of a ladybug.

When honey comb is damaged, bees build new comb in the larger cell size. I also find burr comb on the bottom of frames.

How do you suppose they know what size to build?

Charlotte

Bumblebee on Asters

Fall purple asters are a favorite pollen source of a number of native bees.

Furry bumblebees can often be found foraging along side honeybees.

Although they are among native bees that don't make honey, they still collect pollen as a food source.

They are also very cute to boot!

Charlotte

Hi, Carpenter Bee!

Carpenter bees are large, solitary bees. They build a nest inside wood structures like my deck.

You can distinguish a carpenter bee from a fuzzy bumblebee because carpenter bees have shiny back sides.

Carpenter bees are also among native wild bees that don't produce honey but they are just as important as pollinators, nature's match-makers.

Charlotte

Meet A Honeybee!

It's amazing to think something half an inch long and maybe 1/4 inch wide is responsible for every third bite we eat. Honeybees are small but very sophisticated.

Scientists continue to study how these tiny creatures live together in colonies of 40,000, dividing labor and easily adjusting to different chores when needed.

During their lifetime, they can produce food for new bees; wax comb where honey is stored; generate a wax-like substance from tree sap that wards off hive diseases, and royal jelly, which changes a bee into a queen. They also keep my garden growing by pollinating flowers, especially blue ones.

With honeybees, size really doesn't matter.

Charlotte

Pollinating Pears

My honeybees are tiny so sometimes I see more details about how they work through close up photography.

Both honeybees and their cousins, wasps, pollinated my compact pear tree flowers spring 2010, the first time my pear tree produced fruit since it was planted in 1985. 

By brushing against favorite flowers like bluebells, honeybees pick up pollen in their leg pouches. As they move from flower to flower, honeybees move pollen that triggers fruit production. 

It's still amazing to me one third of all the food we eat is dependent on this little insect's travel schedule.

Charlotte

Say "Beeswax"

One warm fall day I was taking garden pictures while feeding my honeybees sugar water. When I got back  to wipe off excess "bee juice" where my fingers smeared the camera, bees had beat me to it.

My honeybees are a mix of Minnesota Hygienic Italians and Carniolans, bred locally to be disease-resistant, easy to handle and high honey producers. Some have solid black lower bodies; others like these two have a striped lower section and an upper thorax that appears to be fur covered.

I left bees cleaning up the camera. It took them about half an hour to remove every remaining drop of sugar water.

Charlotte