Spring in the Honeybee World

Honeybees and beekeepers are both at their busiest this time of year.

Some honeybees are returning from almond pollination in California. Their keepers bring them to East Texas, because we have abundant pollen, the honeybee’s protein, available to support new bee growth and development. Keep an eye out along the roads for 50 to 100 colonies placed in temporary apiaries. Soon the keepers will split the strong colonies into two or three new colonies of bees. The keeper does this to reduce the swarming instinct in honeybees and to make an additional product, new honeybee colonies, to sell. Successful professional beekeepers have more than one income stream.

For the small-scale beekeepers, those with less than 25 colonies of bees, the chores are similar but are on a smaller scale. Take a close look at the photo of our honeybee hives. If you are eagle-eyed, you will notice a brown stripe approximately in the middle of the hive. This is a device called a queen excluder. It is a welded-wire screen, as in the photo, which the smaller worker bees can pass through, but the larger queen cannot. Beekeepers use queen excluders to contain the queen to a certain area, usually as a part of manipulating the queen and the colony to produce new queens. The new queens will replace the oneyear old queens from last year and will be used in the production of new colonies. We are in the middle of that process now. The blue painter’s tape labels indicate the colonies we are using to produce the queen cells from which our new queens will emerge.

Honeybees collect water from the environment to dilute stored honey in the winter and to cool the hive in the summer. They prefer “dirty” (mineral and micronutrient-rich) water from ponds and roadside ditches; however, a septic sprayer discharging into a bird waterer will also do! (Unfortunately, honeybees are not swimmers, so the bee in the upper left corner of the photo is probably not going to survive.) Honeybees will collect water from the same source until it dries up. We would prefer them to drink from our septic sprayers rather than our cats’ bowls or neighbors’ swimming pools!

God, in His infinite wisdom gives honeybees and their keepers the wisdom they need to do what He has designed them to do. King Solomon said it this way in Proverbs 27:23, “Know well the condition of your flocks, and pay attention to your herds.”