The life and times of worker bees Part 2 The Ottoman Empire

The next stage in a worker bee’s life is guarding the hive. They also take on the task of receiving pollen and nectar from foraging bees. The society of bees is both highly structured and well functioning. Even the occasional palace revolution is embedded into the structure of perpetual order. Few societies both in the animal and human world are like that. Most societies thrive on chaos both from within and from without. The Ottoman Empire is the only society comparable to that of the bees, to my mind. As in the hive in Ottoman society everybody knew his/her place and thrived in it. Individuality was not encouraged and justice didn’t mean in fairness and reasonability but in stability without change. No wonder the Empire lasted 450 years and only came to grief when the chaos around could no longer be kept out. The photo I took in 1966 in the Central Taurus Mountains of Turkey, home ground of the erstwhile Ottomans and famous for it’s honey. On a plateau stand about a hundred hives close together.

The life and times of worker bees Part 1 Carers

Worker bees, not surprisingly, do the work to keep the hive healthy and happy. As Timothy the beekeeper said: bees are stupid but the hive or colony is intelligent. And well organized. Worker bees don’t all do all the work all of the time. Worker bees start their working lives feeding the queen and larvae and doing cleaning duties. For the purpose they have Royal Jelly producing glands. But when they get older and the glands stop functioning they build comb cells for the eggs to be laid in. Photo Amanda Stevens

Drones and queens

The queen will fly out on a sunny day to the congregation area and mate with many drones. When she enters the mating zone a cloud of drones will follow her till one gets so close he can move over her flying body and grab on to her. The mating lasts a couple of seconds. The force of the sperm release propels the drone backward and his penis snaps off. That is the end of the drone. No happy returns for him. Considering the short time the mating takes it is amazing that somebody managed to photograph it. My drawing is from a picture I found on the Internet. The queen stores the sperm of this and all the other drones she mates in her spermatheca to be doled out at will. A young virgin queen has a limited time to mate. If she can’t fly because of bad weather she won’t get mated and will lay only unfertilized eggs. She’ll become a drone layer. That is why I’m so worried about the continuing bad weather we’re having. But maybe that delays the virgin queens being born too.

Rain and Damp

Rain and damp have plaqued these shores for the last 5 weeks. I'm worried about the bees. Are they warm enough? Can they find a honey source? Are the hives thriving? I was very glad to hear that Thimothy the beekeeper was due for another visit. He came late in the day. It was dry but overcast. The bees were still active but not like earlier in the day when they were going in and out of the hives in large numbers. Now the midges were out and for the first time this year they were stinging: much too early for my taste. Apparently when Timothy was here the last time and I was in the Burren, he had discovered that mites pestered the hives. He had put tablets of poison in the hives that he was now taking away again. But there was also good news. The hawthorn had come out in bloom like I had never seen before. Timothy took a photo of one of his bees feasting on the hawthorn blossom.

Corraun Mountain a mating site?

Once on a summer day I climbed Corraun Mountian. I started out from the northeast where the lonely little lakes hug the steep incline to the top. It’s a quietly beautiful but slightly creepy place that the sun only reaches very early on a cloudless day in high summer. When I climbed the top of the mountain was out of sight all the time so I didn’t really know where I would end up. Finally I came to a shoulder north from the top. It was so steep I crawled on all fours. On the last bit a lovely sweet smell reached my nose. It must have been the heather that was in bloom. Around me circled an enormous amount of bees. Where did they come from? There were only two beekeepers on the peninsula and one was my neighbour in Polranny and the other an old man in Owenduff Tonragee; both miles away. When I told the story to Timothy the beekeeper he was very interested. It might have been one of the elusive drone congregation areas, he reckoned. The drawing of Corraun Mountain was made from the north or Belfarset side.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

I was away staying with friends in the Burren. When I came back after a mere five days, not only did the County Council in name of the Irish Water Board install a water meter next to the gate to the Polranny Pirates hideaway, but Timothy the beekeeper had also put an extra storey on one of the starter hives. You can never lift your heels for a second without the world you left behind changing completely. I missed out on all the fun! Now I have to wait for the first water bill in a long time to be put into the mailbox and Timothy to come back to do the second hive.

Drones

The world of bees in which I submerge myself is getting more interesting but also more unsettling each time I look into a new phenomenon. This time it is drones, the male bee. They are born out of unfertilized eggs and do not work. Their sole purpose is to mate the queen. The fate of drones is that they either die after mating or are forced to leave the hive in the winter. To prevent inbreeding drones don’t mate the resident queen but go to a collective destination with all other drones from up to 200 different hives. There the drones wait for the virgin queens to arrive. A bit like the old Irish ‘dancing in the crossroads’ where the young men of the different villages gathered, some of them with a penny whistle or a violin or a uilleann pipe and wait for the girls to turn up to dancing and courting with. The drones visit more than one mating site and if they do not strike lucky they have to go all the way back to the hive for refueling. As there are many more drones than queens and even thou the queen mates more than once, there are still plenty of drones that don’t get laid. The same congregation areas are used year after year and as new inexperienced drones arrive every year the place must be clearly signposted in bee-speak but unseen and unheard of by humans.

Virgin queens

Queens are raised in specially constructed queen cells that start out as queen cups. Queen cups are larger than the cells in a normal brood comb. Once the reigning queen lays eggs in the queen cups the worker bees start building it up. As the young queen larva pupates the workers cap the cell with beeswax. The new Virgin Queen lifts the cap off when she is ready to emerge. By then the reigning queen has usually left the colony in a huff with a swarm. As soon as the old queen has left the hive a palace revolution breaks out with different virgin queens vying for supremacy. During the revolution the virgin queens are all over the colony restlessly seeking out the competition. For the beekeeper it is a nightmare trying to find and isolate them before they sting each other to death. Nature has provided the virgin queens with a stinger without the usual barbs making it possible for them to sting more than once without dying. The colony remains in swarm mode till all but one virgin queen have left or are killed leaving the hive depleted. Again it is the movies that my imagination turns to: The Virgin Suicides (1999) by Sofia Coppola, but most of all Harem Suare (1999) by Ferzan Ozpetek (Polranny Pirates collection). It is not so much that the movies spin a similar tale, but that the world of the bees is still completely unreal to me. I take to anything that even vaguely puts me on firm ground.

Larvae and the making of the queen

The creature that comes out of the egg is the larva. Before becoming proper bees larvae undergo moultings and spin a cocoon within the cell in the comb and pupate. All larvae are first fed on Royal Jelly which is produced by a gland of the worker bees. Later they get fed on honey and pollen except for the future and reigning queen, she’ll gets always fed on Royal Jelly, hence its name. The worker bees decide who is going to be queen when the old one is either weakening or dead. To do so they choose several small larvae and make special royal cells or queen cups where they feed them a lot of Royal Jelly. This type of feeding triggers the development of the queen’s long abdomen with fully developed ovaries and spermatheca. Collecting these data from the Internet I immediately get associations with costume dramas like the gloomy and fateful Elisabeth (1998) by Shekhar Kapur (part of the Polranny Pirates' film collection). I’m sure others will spring to mind as the kingdom of the bees is like a matriarchy.

The nucleus or nucs or colony of bees

Bees live in a colony. Timothy the beekeeper calls a small colony a nucleus or nucs. There are three different kinds of bees in a colony: drones, workers and the queen. Each nucleus contains one queen bee: the only egg producing female bee in the hive. Depending on the season there are up to a few thousand drone bees: fertile males and tens of thousands sterile female bees, the worker bees which produce and shape the wax honeycomb on the frame. The queen has a spermatheca, a reproductive organ to receive and store the sperm from drones. Using the sperm selectively she actually choses which of the eggs she lays is fertilized. Drones develop from unfertilized eggs while future queens and worker bees are born out of fertilized eggs. Queen, drones and workers are different from each other. The trained eye of the beekeeper can tell them apart.

The anatomy of bees

Bees as all other insects have no inner skeleton. Their’s is on the outside in the shape of a hard outer shell. You hear the shell crunch when (by mistake of course) you crush an insect under foot. The muscles are attached to the inside of the shell as are the organs. The body of the bee is divided in three parts: the head, the thorax and the abdomen. On the back of the hind leg is the device for gathering pollen. On back scales are the spiracles, the openings for breathing. The frist one is a blind but the next two are the major breathing tubes and the rest play a minor role. The bees don’t have a nose. Compound means that the eye is build up out of many small visual units. Note also the nifty antenna cleaner on the foreleg. Nature has provided the bee with many handy gadgets. The drawing is mine made after examples I found on the internet.

What are bees?

It is fun having bees in the garden and being properly impressed by them, but what are they? I went searching for knowledge. Bees or in our case apis mellifera mellifera, are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants. They are important pollinators and produce honey and beeswax. Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica and where ever there are flowering plants. Bees feed on nectar for energy and pollen for nutrients. Most pollen is used for food for larvae. With their long tongue they suck the nectar from the flowers and pollen is gathered via the hind leg. Bees have two pairs of wings and a stinging hook for defense. The best-known bee species is the European honey bee. Ours is a sub species called the native Irish honey bee. Beekeeping is also known as apiculture.

Labeling frames

I could witness the move of the nucleus of one hive to the other from close up thanks to the beekeeper suit I wore. Now I noticed that each of the frames had a sign written with a red marker pen. I asked Timothy the beekeeper what it meant. It was his system for marking the function of the different frames. F stood for Foundation, S for Store and DB for Drone Base. I wasn’t far advanced in the knowledge of the Apiculture in our Apiary to fully understand the meaning, but there is always room for improvement on my part. It was time to take off the beekeeper's suit and go surf the internet.

Moving house

Timothy the beekeeper was satisfied with the work the nucleus of bees in the Styrofoam hive had done the past weeks. They had industriously been filling the combs. Now it was time to proceed with the good works in their new abode. When you move house you take all the good stuff with you and transplant it in a new environment: the same with the bees. The frames well cleaned of excess bees wax go in one by one in the same order. And of course the position of the queen bee will be checked.

Anaesthesizing the bees

The Styrofoam starter hive was placed on top of his neighbour to make room for the brand new wooden hive that will be the bees permanent home. Timothy the beekeeper gives every year a different colour to the hives he makes himself. This one should have been a bright pink as he assured me it was this year’s colour. But it had a brown tarnish: ‘Store bought,’ he said. What a pity. I love a bit of the old pink. The lid was off the Styrofoam box but before he was able to move the swarm from the one hive to the next Timothy had to give them a dose of the anaesthesizing smoke from the bellows.

In a beekeeper’s suit

Timothy the beekeeper was going to replace the Styrofoam starter hive with a proper wooden one where more storeys could be added to. It meant an unexpected house move for the bees. It was something that would upset them. To view the procedure from close up I had to be dressed accordingly: in a beekeeper’s suit. To be inside the suit was not as sweaty and claustrophobic as I expected. Highly recommended as alternative to a niqab or burka.photo Karin Daan

Putting up the sheep fence

During the rest of the month of April it was very peaceful around the starter hives. The weather that had been beautiful and summerlike changed for the worse. On the very last day of April Timothy drove up again with Amanda and a very small blue-eyed sheepdog puppy. They had just been to Achill where Timothy had put two starter hives at Achill Secret Garden (not four as I have posted; the Styrofoam hives had not been emptied yet into the wooden hives) where Amanda had been stung on the forehead. They had also inspected a promising site at Saula. Timothy was going to put the sheep wire up and change the Styrofoam hive into a wooden one.

Bees in Achill Secret Garden

As honey source is the ultimate condition for keeping bees Achill Secret Garden is the place to be. On the last day of April on their daughter’s thirties birthday Timothy the beekeeper installed no less than 4 starter hives in the seaside garden of Pirate’s friends Doutsje and Willem. The garden with all its flowering plants and shrubs is a haven for hungry honey bees. Doutsje and Willem improved and beautified an existing hundred year old seaside garden on the east coast of Achill Island. Since 1967 they have been working non-stop to make this garden the pride of the island. During the past winter they have cleared a section where wind damaged trees darkened the ground. Timothy chose this place for his beehives. It is far from the house and the visitor’s route through the garden.

Quiet is a beguiling word

All looked wonderful with the sun shining and the bees a-buzzing. The sheep were safely put behind bars and forgotten. The next upset came from Facebook of all places. That happens when you make a blog and link the blog to FB every now and then. Lilian Voshaar a Polranny Pirates’ friend and environmental activist in the Amsterdam district called De Pijp wrote: ‘I wonder if there is enough to eat for the bees through the year. Here we try to make the best of it by advising different plants for different seasons to accommodate insects.’ To which Timothy Stevens the beekeeper answered: ‘I shall be keeping a very close eye on stores for the bees. I am not certain that there will be forage in the height of the summer in Polranny and June may prove troublesome. This is one of the main reasons that I have only installed two hives to see if the location can stand that and if it can I shall increase the number. From late this month the hives will be seen every week and inspected every two. I also intend to pay close attention to the pollen coming into these hives and others I have placed close by to see what the bees are foraging on.’ Well! Never a dull day!

A home for abandoned shrubs

Every now and than kind people give flowering shrubs to the Polranny Pirates to embellish the garden. Unfortunately they usually are put somewhere to be dealt with later and then forgotten. Sad really. But now I had an idea: I would put flowering shrubs along the screen that stands in front of the beehives. There were four abandoned shrubs in different stages of pitiful to be put to use. I put them in but they hardly made an impact. Next I went begging for sad shrubs with my friends of Achill Secret Garden. They gave me another six orphaned shrubeens that were on the verge of very sad. Now there is a start of a kind of hedge along the screen. That is if nothing dies on me.