Beekeeper Tips -

Californian Native Bees Identification – Know Your Super Bees

As more of us learn how important native bees are, you may be wondering about Californian native bees identification tips. Native bees are excellent pollinators, and if you can identify them, you can also work out what accommodation to place around your garden to keep them happy and keep your garden healthy. Native bees are very unlikely to sting and are excellent beautiful pollinators. Read on to find out how to identify and encourage your local bee biodiversity.

What Are Native Bees?

We all probably know that there are honeybees, and maybe bumblebees. However the honeybee is not native to North America – it is an exotic invasive species introduced from Europe and Africa. Many species of bumblebees have also been moved around the world; in some cases, these become invasive too.

Native bees are the original bees that were found in your area before the introduction of honeybees and exotic or extralimital bumble bees. Extralimital bumble bees would be for instance if we moved a bee from the East Coast to the West Coast. Although the bee is indigenous to the East Coast, and by definition, therefore indigenous to the USA, moving it to the west coast is exactly the same as moving a bee from one country to another. The bees can become invasives in an ecosystem to which they are not adapted.

In this regard, when we are looking at Native Bees, my favorites are the Mason bees that build mud nests, the leaf cutters that make nests out of leaves, carpenter bees that burrow into trees and nest in holes, and of course bumble bees that make their little honeypots in hidden places and have a semi-social nature.

Let’s have a look at a few examples of easy cases for Californian native bees identification.

Types Of Bees In California Specifically California Native Bees

Common Carpenter Bees of California

I love carpenter bees. They are actually my favorite pollinators, despite me being a beekeeper and naturally having a loyalty to my honeybees. Carpenter bees range in size from large to huge! The huge carpenter bees just land on a flower and it is like a big helicopter just landing on a field. It blows pollen all over the place.

After mating in spring, female carpenter bees, as part of their lifecycle burrow into wood and porous materials. They lay their eggs in balls of pollen and nectar, then make a wall, lay another pollen ball with an egg, and so on. The following year in spring, the larvae have matured into adults, and emerge and the process continues.

If you provide a nesting site such as this one you provide a range of options and will get carpenter bees nesting, along with other native bees. If you use a nesting site such as this one you will find you may nest mainly carpenter bees. If you look at the blurb for the product it says you will attract all sorts of bees, including honeybees!! There is no way a honeybee will ever go there, so discount the marketing material and trust my experience that that will really work for carpenter bees mainly. Let’s have a peek at who you may expect to get nesting in your carpenter bee habitats.

Xylocopa Californica

I thought I would start with Xylocopids, just because these are my favorite bee type. Xylocopa californica is a pitch-black bee with a slight greeny blue color to the body. I first saw these in the Palo Duro Canyon in Texas once, and have loved this bee ever since. It has a curious habit of starting the day very early, and as the temperature gets higher it will go and hide somewhere. This is an excellent pollinator in hot dry areas, and I am sure as the world gets warmer in the next few decades, centuries, and millennia it will become a more and more important pollinator in the increasingly dry and arid climate of much of North America.

This bee is by far the biggest native bee in California. Basically, if you see a pitch-black bee that is an inch or more long, and has a slight green tint to it when in bright light, you have seen this beautiful giant pollinator!

Common Native Bumble Bees Of California

The Yellow-Faced Bumble Bee – Bombus vosnesenskii

This bumble bee is probably the most commonly sighted bee in California after the honeybee. The honeybee is not native to California, but the Yellow Faced Bumble Bee is. The Yellow Faced Bumble bee has filled a niche in the West Coast ecosystem left by the decimation of the Western Bumble bee by nosema disease. This resilient bumble bee performs ecosystem services in the form of pollination of both indigenous plants and exotic cultivated plants that have been introduced to the west coast for agriculture. The bumble bee forms ground nests of up to 300 or more bees and starts its season very early.

The Yellow-Faced Bumble bee is quite a large bee and starts its season early. Queens emerge from their hiding places in spring and start a nest foraging and feeding the first eggs that are laid – these become the first workers. As the colony increases, the workers feed the queen and larvae more and more, and then towards the end of the season, the queen begins to forage and feed the remaining brood. As the colony collapses in autumn young queens go out to find places to hide during the winter, and will then emerge in spring and start the process over.

The Western Bumblebee – Bombus Occidentalis

This honeybee, until a decade and a bit ago, was more commonly spotted in California than the Yellow Faced bumble bee. Sadly, diseases from honeybees managed to cross into this bumble bee species and they began to succumb to nosema disease – a common fungal pathogen of honeybees. This causes a rapid decline, and currently, the chances of you seeing this bee are really low! This is really sad, but luckily, recent data suggests that the population is recovering slowly due to the evolution of resistance to nosema. Within another decade, we can hope that this beautiful bee will be a common sight again.

The Black-Tailed Bumblebee – Bombus Melanopygus Edwardsii

This small bumble bee is largely black in California. In other western states, it can have slightly different colors. This is one of the few bumble bees you will see in San Francisco. It seems to have some resilience to surviving in certain disturbed urban landscapes, where the natural vegetation has been heavily altered. This bee nests in the ground or structures and has a relatively typical bumble bee life strategy – queens over winter, start colonies, colonies grow, produce workers, expand, produce drones and queens, at the end of the season the young queens go and hide in secluded spaces, overwinter and emerge in spring and start the process again.

Other Smaller Funny Little Bees

I say this in the gentlest fashion. When I go and look at flowers, I find that a lot of little bees lurk around – if you look closely at a perennial basil plant, for instance, you will find, at peak sunlight, that there are many different types of bees working the flowers. Some of these are small little things the size of a little fly, others are big carpenter bees, bumble bees, and honeybees. The small funny little bees are too many and too complex to list here in detail. But just look at the flowers and when you see a smaller little insect, look and see if it is collecting pollen, and if it does this it is most likely a bee! Just enjoy it, and make sure to provide it with security – no poisons – and love. These little pollinators will keep our world going when we finally manage to destroy honeybees through our collective stupidity in pursuing a world where chemical treatments reduce biodiversity.

If you want to identify these little pollen-eating critters, I would suggest getting a guide such as this one. There are a lot of little bees. A lot.

Honey Bees In California – A Non-Native Bee Species Californians Often Think Is Native

When it comes to California native bees identification methods, it is important to understand that the honeybee is not indigenous to the Americas. There have been two major introductions of honeybee races to the Americas. European honeybees were introduced during the early Colonial periods, and various improvement processes have seen additional European honeybee genetics introduced. The Buckfast bee was introduced into California in the mid 1900s and was very successful. This bee was of mixed European and African lineage, and rumors suggest that the Californian climate caused this bee to breed back to nearly pure African Genetics.

At the same time that this occurred, African bees that had been introduced in South America found their way north and entered parts of California. Fear and hype around these bees dubbed the “African Killer Bees” stopped people from seeing the benefits of these hard-working, disease-resistant bees. In Africa, African bee races produce huge honey crops in desolate environments where European bees will struggle to survive. With time, African bees will probably become a reliable source of commercial pollination, much like they provide in South America and Southern Africa.

In Conclusion – California Native Bees Identification

I hope this article has given you a nudge towards knowing the big, bad, and ugly (Apis mellifera in this case is not native) basic bee types of California. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of identifying bee species that are less obvious than the big carpenter and bumble bee species, I suggest the book listed here.

Do Hummingbird Feeders Attract Bees? How To Separate The Birds From The Bees

Do hummingbird feeders attract bees? They can if you make these common mistakes. Find out how to separate the birds from the bees so that your feeders work and everybody is happy.

Why Do Hummingbirds And Bees Like Sugar?

Both are pollinators. In essence, a flower provides a little sugar bribe to attract a pollinator. This pollinator arrives, sucks up the sugar and in so doing also gets exposed to pollen, which then allows the pollen to be moved from flower to flower. So plants pay pollinators to help them with their sex life.

Hummingbirds tend to be paid in a different way from the ways bees are paid. Typically, flowers pollinated by hummingbirds are not that attractive to bees, and vice versa. If we understand how this works we can bypass the problems with bees being attracted to our hummingbird feeders, and we can also ensure we do not damage our hummingbirds.

What Is A Hummingbird Feeder?

These are typically a reservoir that we can fill with sugar, and below this, there is some sort of system where the birds can stick their beaks in and drink sugar water. You get really ornate ones like this and really simple ones that you can just plug into a glass bottle such as this one. All of them are simply a way of giving hummingbirds a sugar solution that they can drink.

Do Hummingbird Feeders Attract Bees?

Yes, they can. Generally, if there is an abundance of nectar available in the flowers around the hive, bees will collect this nectar. During a period of nectar dearth (shortage) bees can become desperate and will sometimes try to take sugar from sugar feeders and cooldrink cans. When this happens, the same tends to happen with yellow jacket wasps, which look similar to bees. Yellow jackets are more of a pest this way than bees.

Why Are Bees Swarming My Hummingbird Feeder?

The bees are attracted to the sugar solution, and, much like hummingbirds, need sugar to provide them with energy. It is probably due to dry weather and a lack of flowers. If you have your sugar concentration wrong in the feeder, the bees will get more attracted. Read on to find out how to stop this problem.

How To Keep Bees Away From Hummingbird Feeders

So we have ascertained that hummingbirds and bees are both pollinators. They are both attracted to sources of sugar. Bees tend to be attracted to more concentrated sources of sugar, whereas hummingbirds are attracted to more dilute sources of sugar. But why do hummingbird feeders attract bees?

This is quite simple – bees need to make honey – so the flowers that pay bees for pollination, pay them in concentrated nectar that is attractive to them because they need to take this back and concentrate it further to make honey. In this regard, bees are optimally attracted to sugar solutions that are in the 2:1 to 4:1 (2 parts water, 1 part sugar, 4 parts water, 1 part sugar) range, as they can take these and quickly dry these into sugar stores that are similar to honey. Honey is in the 1:4 range (1 part water, 4 parts sugar).

For hummingbirds, they will just be drinking the sugar water and using it as an energy source – they do not want to have to go and find water to drink after drinking the sugar, hence if you mix hummingbird sugar to the 5:1 or even 6:1 ratio, the bees will have less interest in this, and the hummingbirds will love it.

So in short – do hummingbird feeders attract bees? Yes, they do, if you mix your sugar water and make it too rich in sugar! If you get the sugar ratio right, your hummingbirds will be healthy, and bees will have little interest as the sugar is hardly worth their while to collect.

However, if the bees are really starving they will stoop to the levels of collecting low-sugar concentration nectar. In this case, we also need to use a mechanical method to keep the bees away.

What Is The Best Bee-Proof Hummingbird Feeder?

A bee-proof hummingbird feeder is some form of contraption that keeps the bees away from the sugar water in the feeder. In this regard, a grid that is slightly away from the sugar can keep the bees away from the nectar. A hummingbird can stick its beak through the grid, but bees can’t get through. Do hummingbird feeders attract bees? Well if they are bee-proof – no!!

If we look at a simple feeder design such as this it is clear how easy it is to design a grid into the feeder. This grid excludes bees from getting close enough to the feeder, and in this way is largely bee-proof.

How To Make Hummingbird Nectar For Your Feeder

There are a few mistakes people often make when mixing nectar for hummingbird feeders. If you are asking “Do hummingbird feeders attract bees” the answer, as we have said, is yes if you get the sugar concentration too high in your mix. Typically a low sugar concentration mix will be ideal, and will not attract bees – it will however ferment sometimes, and then the birds will not want to drink it. In this regard, you will have to clean the entire feeder well and wash it with some sort of bleach to kill any yeast and bacterial biofilms that have developed.

There are pre-prepared mixes that you can buy that are already in liquid form. You dilute these as per the instructions. If you scroll down to the ingredients you will see that they contain sodium benzoate – this is a preservative that inhibits yeast growth in the mixture, thus extending the shelf life of the product in the feeder. I personally feel that adding some sort of antifungal preservative to a solution that feeds a wild animal is a problem – a cursory search of the literature found some anecdotal evidence that this was sub-optimal but I have not found any direct papers. I suspect there must be.

You may think that the products that are in a powder form will not contain preservatives, but if you look at this product you will see it also contains sodium benzoate. This is problematic.

I would suggest following a recipe from a well-known source such as this.

Do not ever feed your hummingbirds any sugars that contain artificial sweeteners. These will kill the birds. Make sure only to buy pure white cane sugar, or beet sugar that states as its ingredient “sucrose” or sugar. All these other new-age products that are mixes of sucrose and sucralose and so on are just toxic to you, and to animals in general.

In Conclusion – Do Hummingbird Feeders Attract Bees?

Yes, they do if you make the sugar mix too strong and if you do not use bee guards. In dry periods, and towards fall, bees and wasps will be drawn to feeders, and it will be necessary to make sure that your sugar mix is low (low sugar concentration) and that your feeders have a bee guard on them. This is a mesh that keeps the bees away from the sugar. Never make sugar solutions using artificial sweeteners as these will kill your birds! I hope this has helped you understand how to keep your birds and bees apart!

Do Bees Sense Fear?

Do bees sense fear? I often get asked this, and the short answer is “yes”. There are many things that bees sense, but a scared shivering beekeeper will get stung. If you want to work bees, you have to be confident and calm. Overcoming fear is an important part of becoming a competent beekeeper.

What Is Fear?

Fear is a feeling we feel when we lose control of a situation and the outcomes appear to be most likely to be bad. Typically when humans are in a fearful state they lose the ability to think rationally, and tend to do silly things.

How Do Bees See Fear?

To understand more about how bees see, read here. A quick summary of that article I wrote – bees see the world very differently to us, and most of what they see is movement. In other words, the way they can distinguish between a tree and an animal is by movement – if they buzz a tree, and it does not move, then it is probably a tree. If they buzz something and it starts waving limbs around, it is an animal, so sting it.

How Do Bees Sense Fear?

When we are in a state of fear, we produce adrenaline. This increases our heart rate, and we start to become warm and produce sweat and more carbon dioxide in our breath. As we do this, we create a trail of carbon dioxide that goes up to our mouths.

Bees can detect carbon dioxide, so they will fly toward the source of carbon dioxide, and this is your face. They will then buzz your face, and try and hit your face, and your reflex response is to then try and swat the bee away – at this point, the bee knows that you are definitely not a tree and will sting your face, or arm.

Can Bees Smell Fear?

As we have mentioned, bees use their eyes to see the world – and they see it differently from us. They can see movement, but struggle to differentiate between a tree and a human if you are standing still. If you wave your arms around, they know you are not a tree and will sting you.

Bees also have an incredible sense of smell. There are certain smells that are associated with animals – and some of those smells are in sweat. This is why it is rather important not to be a stinky person when you work bees. If you smell of sweat, and rancid skin fat, and greasy hair, bees can sense you are probably not a tree – trees don’t smell that bad. If you sweat out of fear, the sweat smells like animal hormones, and the bees will find you and then buzz you and if you panic and wave your arms around, you will get stung. A lot.

Are Bees Scared Of Humans?

I don’t think bees have fear. They just have responses to things that are a threat. In this regard, they do not like humans. We are one of their biggest predators, and we have been for a very long time. As a result, they have learned how to fight us when we want to rob their hives.

Bees do not like many of our smells, the smell of ear wax, the smell of human sweat, the smell of human hair fats. This is why bees kill horses – horses have many of the same fats and waxes in their hair as us. The result is that bees think horses are humans and sting them to death. Horses pose no threat to bees at all in reality.

What Are Bees Scared Of?

I personally do not think bees are scared of anything living! They are the most fearless animals I know. They are however scared of fire! This is why they are calmed by smoke. Smoke makes them think that their hive is about to be burned in a fire and the result is that they load their stomachs with honey.

Once a bee has a stomach full of honey, it is less likely to sting, because then the honey will be wasted, so it now fears death and becomes less of a fighter. This is much like humans – if we look at the US war in Vietnam, American soldiers were richer than the Vietnamese soldiers. The Vietnamese soldiers had nothing to lose, other than their country, and the American soldiers had a lot to lose because their life back home was great. Hence the soldiers with no wealth are braver than those that have something nice to lose. Bees with a full honey stomach make worse fighters than ones with empty stomachs. There is a lesson in there.

Do Wasps Smell Fear?

There are many different types of wasps, and some are more unpleasant than others. I know that some wasps get irritated by types of hair sprays, deodorant, and definitely fear. Wasps do not die when they sting, so they can be a bit more horrible in terms of testing to see if something is a tree or a person. In this regard they will tend to sting a lot more easily, just to test out the theory that you may be a threat.

In Conclusion – Do Bees Sense Fear

Do bees sense fear? Yes. Do they know how to make you feel fear? Yes. They are good at scaring people and other animals to make them move and act fearfully.

As a beekeeper, you have to overcome your instincts and not display fear, and in this way, you will be invisible to the bees. Do bees sense fear in a beekeeper? Just remember, if you act like a tree, the bees cannot see you – calm graceful movements like a branch gently moving in the wind. As soon as you make sharp jerky movements with your arms you know that you are telling the bees you are a human and they will get you!

How To Clean Propolis – Purifying Black Gold In Our Hives!!

In this article, I will show you how to clean propolis using a few methods I have developed over the years. We will first look at what propolis is, and then at how to clean propolis and produce tinctures and medicines for ourselves.

What’s Propolis?

The ancient Greek words Pro for in front and Polis for the city are relatively apt for the resin wall bees build in front of their “city” hive to allow them to protect the hive from invaders.

Propolis is a mixture of plant resins, fibers, other objects, and wax. Bees will forage in the wild looking for sticky things that they then harvest and bring back to the hive. This is mixed with old wax, plant fibers, sticks, small stones, and various other materials to create a firm, but flexible sealing material that can be used to fill holes in the hive, reduce the size of the hive entrance, and close small cracks where hive beetles and ants can reside – in other words, places that are less than bee space – the smallest space into which bees can crawl.

Why Is Propolis Medicinal?

When we consider plant resins this refers to the resins plants produce to protect themselves against disease. If you imagine a plant that has just been bitten by a herbivore, the bite creates a wound – the plant must now ensure that bacteria, fungi, viruses, insects, and so on do not enter the wound. Much like us, it produces a scab. We have an immune system inside us – plants do not. Hence plants produce antibacterial, antifungal, and insecticidal compounds at the point of the wound to keep pathogens out.

Bees go out and find plants that have wounds and they collect the scabs that the plants form. What this means is that bees are able to collect the combined phytomedicinal (phyto=plant medicinal needs no explanation) toolkit of all the plants within the 3-4 mile propolis foraging range of the hive. This can comprise hundreds, or in areas such as mine, thousands of species of plants, and the biochemical complexity of the propolis is incredible.

The result is that propolis is a goldmine of medicinal compounds that include antimicrobials (kill microbes) antivirals (kill viruses) healing compounds (encourage the growth of cells) and various other medicinal compounds.

How To Clean Propolis So We Can Use It As A Medicine

Depending on how you harvest propolis, it can be filled with all sorts of strange things. I have performed thousands of hours of research analyzing propolis over the years, and have found it to contain pebbles, bones of rats and birds (if bees kill a rat or mouse that enters the hive, they entomb it in propolis), sticks, nails (from beehives), pieces of plastic, fibers of plants, wood chips, and countless other unexpected things. To produce medicinal-grade propolis we need to remove this stuff and extract the plant resins. This article shows you how to clean propolis to produce purer gunk-free products.

How To Clean Propolis Using Alcohol Extraction

My favorite method of extracting propolis is a 50-70% ethanol alcohol extraction. Ethanol in water is an interesting solvent as it has the ability to extract both products that are polar and non-polar. Basically, this means that it can extract pretty much all of the things you want in the propolis, and leaves behind the sticks, beeswax, gunk, and stones.

How To Clean Propolis Using A Gem Tumbler

If you are able to buy a small gem tumbler such as this one from National geographic you would be able to easily clean propolis. First, you will need to take your propolis and cut it into small cubes. Freeze the propolis in your fridge freezer. This makes it brittle and hard. You can now place the propolis in a cloth bag and gently wack it with a plank or wooden mallet. This will break it into smaller pieces.

Take the small broken propolis pieces and place them in a cup. Place half a cup or so in the gem tumbler. Place half a cup of the highest percentage alcohol vodka you can find into the tumbler. There are Vodka products on the market that can be as high as 70% alcohol, but these are hard to come by. Anything above 40% alcohol will work well.

Do not use non-potable alcohol – these alcohols tend to have poisons added to them to ensure that they do not get consumed by humans. This means that if you make a tincture with such alcohol it will be poisonous.

Run the gem tumbler for a week. This gives the propolis plenty of time to dissolve into the alcohol-water mix (vodka) that you have put in the tumbler.

How To Process Propolis After Tumbling

After you have run the tumbler for a week, remove the tumbler and pour the propolis alcohol mix through a cheesecloth filter. This removes all the course gunk and sticks from the tincture and you now have a pretty clean filtered product. If you wish to be fancy you could filter it through a coffee filter as well. This may take a while and may clog a bit.

What To Do With Propolis Tincture

Now you have figured out how to clean propolis! You have now created a clean propolis tincture. There are many things you can do with this. You can use it straight – a few drops on a cut will help heal it. However here are a few fun products to make:

Propolis Acne Cream

I must say that this is just a tip. It is not medical advice, so use it at your own risk. A friend of mine had bad acne and prepared a mixture of 1 part propolis tincture, two parts Jojoba oil and two parts cleaned beeswax (As a beekeeper you may have your own beeswax).

Melt the beeswax in a double boiler. When melting beeswax you always use a pot of boiling water and place another pot in this to melt the wax. This avoids fires and disasters. Hot beeswax is an evil thing.

Place the other ingredients in the melted wax just after it has finished melting and stir rapidly. Remove the double boiler from the warm water and place it in a cold water pot. This rapidly cools the mixture and as you stir it, it will form an ointment.

The ointment, applied in the evening works well at reducing inflammation. If you have a dark complexion, it helps to prevent dark spots from forming.

Propolis toothpaste

Propolis has a lasting antimicrobial effect in the mouth. This is why companies have made Propolis toothpaste. I just take simple Colgate Original toothpaste and put it on the toothbrush. Then I put a squirt of tincture in my mouth and brush my teeth. I reckon this probably has more propolis than any commercial product. Every now and then if something makes your gums bleed this helps to stop it from happening.

How To Use Raw Propolis

When we look at how to clean propolis, every now and then the bees make a big blob of relatively clean propolis. There is a thing I love to do with this. First taste the propolis – to do this, bite a small piece and chew it for about an hour like chewing gum. If it tastes nice, you can use it to make natural chewing gum!

Take the double boiler we mentioned before and slowly melt your propolis in boiling water. The water transfers heat through the wall of the double boiler pot and within a few minutes, your propolis will become soft and pliable. Add a bit of honey to this, and mix with a fork until it forms an emulsion. Pour the emulsion into something like this mini ice cube tray. The little cubes of propolis honey make a great chewy snack, and you can chew them for hours. The great thing is you can swallow the gum at the end!!

In Conclusion – How To Clean Propolis

I hope this has shown you how to clean propolis and what to do with the products that you produce. Propolis is, in my opinion, probably one of the most valuable natural compounds we have, and definitely the highest-value product (bar bee venom) in the hive.

This is literally the black gold in your beehive, and learning how to use it to enhance your health is an important part of becoming a beekeeper!

How Long Does It Take Bees To Make A Hive? How To Get Your Bees In The Fast Lane

How long does it take bees to make a hive? This is a very difficult question to answer, so I will try to do so in this article. Bees are complex animals hence the answer is naturally complex as well.

As an experienced beekeeper, I often have people ask me this question. Let us use a human example to answer this question. How long does it take humans to build a city? Well if we look at London, it is nearly 2000 years old, so we could say it takes humans 2000 years to build a city. However, if we look at Dubai, it is about 190 years old, with most of the development that happened there occurring after 1980. There are huge cities in China that have been built in 10 years or less.

The success and growth of a human city depend really on the quality of the humans (education, skills, motivation, political/organization capacity, access to capital) and the quality of the resources available to fuel that city (natural resources, intellectual resources, markets, tourism, etc). Hence when we ask “how long does it take to build a city” we cannot answer that with a single answer. This is much the same for “How long does it take bees to make a hive?”

How Long Does It Take Bees To Make A Hive?

There are a number of factors that we must consider to answer this question.

Number of Bees and Queen Quality

If a swarm starts building a hive and it has a large workforce it has more ability to build a hive rapidly. If there are resources available (nectar, pollen, sugar) and a hive has a large workforce, it can very rapidly build comb and become established. A good queen tends to be part of a good swarm. If she can lay a lot of healthy eggs every day, she will be able to produce a big brood nest. A small, mangy queen will produce a weak hive.

Honey Flow or Sugar Source

In a strong honey flow, a hive has abundant energy to build the combs and infrastructure. Hence a hive that is able to access nectar and energy grows fast. If it is a big swarm, that has access to resources, the growth rate is very rapid. If we provide the bees with sugar this helps them grow as well.

Pollen

Bees require pollen, or pollen substitute feed, to have the nutrients needed to build wax and to rear the brood. Hence if you have a strong nectar flow, combined with a strong pollen flow, your bees can build a large brood nest and this in turn produces many more baby bees.

Hive Position and Temperature

A beehive that is in a cold area will take longer to field its workforce. A beehive positioned in an area where conditions are warm in the morning, relatively cool at midday, and warm in the evening will work for longer periods of time and do a bit better.

Beehive Quality

A well-constructed beehive will allow the hive to grow faster. This is much the same as a well-planned human city will allow it to grow faster. A well-made wood hive box such as this will give the bees a head start. Hives that are poorly constructed have gaps in them that will let drafts of air, wasps, ants, and hive beetles into the hive.

Drawing All Of The Above Together – How Long Does It Take Bees To Make A Hive Under Optimal Conditions?

Under optimal conditions, comprising a large swarm, abundant resources (nectar, pollen), a good queen, a good hive, and a good location, the bees can build a hive in a very short amount of time. It can take a strong swarm a few weeks to draw the frames in two brood boxes, and for the queen to build a brood nest of about 15 frames or so. Depending on the race of bees, there are different numbers of bees per brood frame, but the workforce that emerges per frame of bees that hatches is about 3500 for European bees and 4500 or more for African bees (they are smaller).

As the new workforce emerges the hive will become increasingly strong and it is time to add more space for the bees.

I have seen hives under optimal conditions move into an empty hive box, and draw all of the combs, and the combs in a second brood box in 6 weeks. This is during a very strong honey flow with a very strong nutritious pollen flow. So this would probably be the best-case scenario. But under moderately good conditions I would work on 8-9 weeks with feeding to get the bees into two deep boxes if we started with a 3-4 pound swarm. This is assuming a very good-quality queen.

How Long Does It Take For Bees To Make Honeycomb?

After a hive has built up its workforce and produced a brood nest, the bees will begin, if nectar is available, to make honeycomb. This is their backup energy store and they will start to pack honey away as the hive population increases during a nectar flow.

Bees in optimal conditions can make a few pounds per day of honeycomb – this is a large double brood box hive, in a perfect nectar flow. Under less optimal conditions, bees can take weeks or months to produce 10-20 pounds of honey. Under sub-optimal conditions, they will produce a few pounds of honey in a year or none at all.

How Big Can A Beehive Get?

There are a number of factors affecting the size of a hive. The hive has an upper limit on size determined by a queen – European queen bees can lay 2000 to maybe 3000 eggs a day. African queens can lay up to 4000 eggs a day. Bees wear out the further they fly, so if you have an African beehive that is close to a nectar source, the beehive can get up to about 60 000 to 70 000 bees in a hive, with European bees topping out at about 60 000 bees. If however, you have two queens in a hive, you can easily double that number for either group. Hives that have very large numbers of bees tend to be a bit of a nuisance to work, however, and trying to produce the “world’s biggest” beehive is more of an ego exercise that an exercise in practicality.

I once removed a wild hive in a garden shed and it spanned nearly 6 feet down the wall and covered an area four to five feet deep and about 7 feet long. This hive had multiple queens – I think three hives grew together into one hive, and then somehow kept that dynamic going. The hive had three brood nests, and there was honey between each brood nest. I removed around 200 lb of honey and about half that mass in the brood comb. The hive was a monster.

In Summary How Long Does It Take Bees To Make A Hive?

You can see from the above that there is no real correct answer. However, if you understand the factors that make a hive grow fast, as a beekeeper you can control these and make your hives grow fast. Much like the Federal Reserve introducing liquidity into the economy (printing money and giving it to people to invest) a beekeeper can stimulate a hive by “printing honey” (giving the bees sugar and pollen) and this stimulates the bees to increase their workforce, build infrastructure and grow stronger. Hence a beekeeper acts a bit like a reserve bank governor, planning the economic growth of a hive to coincide with honey flows. If you know that a grove of nectar-producing trees will bloom in three weeks’ time, you can improve the size of the workforce in the hive so that they can take advantage of this – more bees =. more honey from a honey flow.

I hope this has helped you see the answer to the question “how long does it take bees to make a hive?” is that if you are a good beekeeper, you can increase the speed with which bees do this, and increase the size of the honey crop you will harvest. So the answer to the question is really you, dear beekeeper, you are the answer to the question! I challenge you to go out there and find out how fast you can get your precious bees out into the environment working their magic for all of us.

How Many Hives Can One Person Manage? Tips From A Pro

How many hives can one person manage? This is not a question with an easy answer, so let us explore the factors that will directly impact how many hives you can manage in your area, with your capability.

A Precautionary Note To Beekeepers Who Want To Scale Up

There is a funny thing that happens when we have two beehives in our backyards and decide we want to scale up to being commercial beekeepers. Let me explain how scale up works and how this helps you decide “how many hives can one person manage?” where one person equals you.

What is Scaling Up?

Scaling up refers to the process of making any activity or operation or machine bigger. I have been involved in many technology scale-ups, and it is quite amazing how small miscalculations at the laboratory scale become monumental mistakes at a large scale. When we scale up a beekeeping operation the rules of any scale-up apply, and the biggest limiting factors are yourself, your strength, your health, your wealth (capital available), and your available time.

To ascertain if you can scale up your beekeeping to something that can support you, let us look at a few important scaling factors.

How Many Beehives In One Location Are Practical In Your Area?

This is an important factor. If you live in an area where you can keep 200 hives in an apiary and you are blessed with lots of strong nectar flows a year, this means that you can minimize your time and cost spent traveling between apiaries.

In my area, we have intermittent rain and long periods of drought that are completely random. In a good year, an apiary can support 100 hives, and in a bad year, an apiary can support 10 hives. So this means that in a good year, I can cluster apiaries and achieve greater efficiency, and in bad years, I have to space the apiaries out. Hence in good years, I make more honey, spend less time and money on moving around, and achieve greater profitability.

So when you start a business plan on how many hives you can place in an apiary, start on a worst-case scenario, as this is the realistic scenario. For me, if I did my business plan again, I would start on 10 hives an apiary, and then anything more than that would be a bonus and ensure greater profitability.

How Many Hives Can One Person Manage?

This is an important factor to consider in your scaling calculations. There are a few important things to consider here if you are going to do everything yourself:

Age

If you are 18-25 you have a natural resilience that will get lost as you get older. Common sense increases with time, but physical fitness decreases. This is a sad fact. So as you get older and wiser, your efficiency improves to a point as you make fewer mistakes (stupid mistakes are educational, and youth and stupid mistakes are intrinsically linked). This however reaches a peak sometime in your late thirties, after which, no matter how much you know, your back will probably let you down due to lifting a lot of heavy boxes of honey.

You can mitigate the effects of age (at any age) by choosing smaller bee boxes. Shallow supers are much lighter than deep supers. The human back is an irreplaceable and essential part of any beekeeping operation, and making your back last as long as possible ensures you can profit from beekeeping for longer. Lifting heavy weights is not a show of strength – it is a show of stupidity. Remember that, and you will lift moderate weights for longer.

From an age perspective answering the question “how many hives can one person manage?” it is better to aim to have fewer hives when you are young, and make the hives as lightweight as possible to minimize wear and tear on your spine. This means that you can optimize the number of years you can keep bees and the long-term honey yield will be greater than being a 30-year-old superhero lifting 500 80-pound boxes of honey a day for 5 years, and then being a cripple for the rest of your life with osteoarthritis in your spine (I speak from experience on this sadly).

Distance between Apiaries

If you are able to locate apiaries so they are 5 miles apart, you will spend very little of your time driving around and a lot more time keeping bees. Put another way, if you have to drive for twenty minutes between apiaries, you will spend most of your day working bees and hence have more time to work bees, and can have more hives. If you have to drive for three hours between apiaries, you will spend most of your day driving, and very few hours working bees. However, if you can have two hundred hives in two spots that are three hours apart, versus 10 hives dotted 5 miles apart, you will find the results are about the same.

In terms of calculating “how many hives can one person manage?” if you are able to maximize colony counts in an apiary, and minimize the distance between the apiaries, you will achieve the maximum efficiency of honey produced in the time allotted to you on this planet.

From a distance between apiaries, the perspective answering the question “how many hives can one person manage?” is all down to yield per hive. If you can get a crazy yield per hive in two apiaries with a huge number of hives, and you spend a whole day traveling between these, versus a small yield in a bunch of closely spaced low hive count, low yield apiaries, you have to make a choice and do the calculations based on experience gained over time.

Read more about Can You Eat Honey From A Dead Hive

Yield per Hive – How Many Hives Can One Person Manage?

If you are in a region where you can have 200 hives in an apiary, and you harvest 60 pounds of honey per hive per year, then you are blessed. If you are in an area such as mine, where you get 20-40 pounds of honey if you are lucky, and can keep 10 hives an apiary, you are far less blessed. However, the honey I produce is exquisite due to the exceptional biodiversity in the honey, and it makes amazing mead. By including a value addition step, we are able to increase our profit margin on a pound of honey due to the quality of the honey and my technology for making mead.

In terms of my calculations on “how many hives can one person manage?” I then factor in the actual profitability of honey sales, because if you can make more money out of less honey, you need to work fewer hives, and you will last longer before you wear yourself out.

Summary For How Many Beehives Can One Person Manage?

In order to answer this question we need to set up trial apiaries and see how much honey you get, and how good you are at carrying honey. Then you need to fully populate an apiary – this means you keep pushing the number of hives up until you notice a deterioration in the output of the hives. When you find that the hives start starving, and just not producing as much honey you have reached your carrying capacity, and you can reduce that apiary by about 20% to ensure that it will always produce at its maximum.

Now you have one fully stocked apiary – it will take a year or two to get to this level. See how you handle an apiary of say 50 to 100 hives. This becomes your production apiary benchmark and you can put this into your spreadsheet to calculate your time inputs, transport inputs, and how your health manages. From here you can calculate how many similar apiaries you could handle, and what your rough honey output would most likely be.

How Many Beehives To Make A Living?

The Sales Price Of Honey Decreases With The Volume Produced.

I have met many backyard beekeepers who sell honey to their friends and then extrapolate how much money they would make at this price to a bigger operation. When they scale their operation, however, they find that the more honey they produce, the lower the sales price of that honey. This strongly affects how many hives can one person manage – as your returns decrease with increased work.

What this means, in reality, is that you can make as much money selling the honey from 20 hives to your close friends, colleagues, and their friends, as you can make selling the honey from 100 hives to the bulk market.

You can be creative, and try and market honey on Instagram and Facebook, and so on, but there is really a ceiling to this market, after which you are selling your honey into the bulk market and you will receive less than half as much per pound as you would selling to the first market. This means that your business model has to factor in the fact that the more honey you produce, the less you will get for it.

This varies from area to area, but with increasing global energy costs, it means the realistic working range of a beekeeping operation declines, as there is a ceiling to how much you can charge for bulk honey before the honey from countries with cheaper labor, and better transport infrastructure outcompete you. Hence if you want to understand the worst-case scenario for your honey, it must be price competitive with Brazilian, Argentinian, and Chinese honey.

Chinese honey can be of very high quality or can be absolutely adulterated. This means that a skilled buyer can buy very cost-competitive high-quality honey from China, where the infrastructure and government support for beekeepers is better than in any other region of the world. For long-term planning, use the current bulk price of honey from China as a starting point to work out if your business plan is viable at a specific scale. Then work out if you have a competitive advantage over such honey – a cleaner environment, national pride in homegrown products, fewer pesticides, poisons, etc, and work out how long you can maintain this advantage.

How Much Does It Cost For Hobby Beekeeping?

Let’s define a hobby beekeeper as somebody that has a beesuit (never buy a cheap beesuit – this one is $150 and good quality – a smoker ($30) and a set of gloves ($15) – and two hives of decent quality($300). You may need to buy two packages of bees to fill these up and a good spot to get them is here. Budget about $150 a package. Look at about $800 dollars to start your hobby.

If you are frugal and look around online you will often find people selling beekeeping equipment – it is one of those hobbies that grabs some people, and not others, so often you can get a complete setup for a fraction of the above price. Many beekeepers get old and die, and often their families are delighted to pass on the equipment to a young enthusiastic beekeeper who will give them a few bottles of honey from Gramps/Gramas hives every year. When I started beekeeping most of the equipment I got was sourced this way. People love helping young people because it reminds them of what they lost as the reality of the adult world wears away the dreams they once had.

How Much Space Do You Need For A Beehive?

This will depend on the type of bees. African bees need a bit more space because they can be slightly jumpy when they see people close by. I know people who keep African bees in a space that is 6 feet by 6 feet per hive in their backyards. Generally, other races of bees work in a similar space, and just remember to keep the bees relatively far away from any dogs, cats, other animals, and people that cannot get far away from the bees should they start stinging and become upset.

For an apiary of 30 hives, work on a space that is 20 yards square minimum.

Conclusions: How Many Hives Can One Person Manage?

The decision on how many hives can one person manage basically boils down to you, your energy, and your resources. As they often say, if you want to make a million dollars keeping bees start with 10 million dollars. It is a good idea to grow incrementally and learn your skills. Work with another beekeeper to get some experience on a bigger operation, and see what you are capable of. As a rule of thumb, the answer to “how many hives can one person manage?” a healthy strong man or woman in their mid 20’s to mid-’30s can manage 300 to 600 hives in most parts of the world.

Above this number, you need to mechanize and hire seasonal help. There is an abundance of youngsters leaving high school now who actually want to learn about bees, so the time is right for working with this trend and making the world a better place.

Can You Eat Honey From A Dead Hive

Can you eat honey from a dead hive? This will really depend on how the bees died. I personally never eat honey from a dead hive. But let’s have a look at how you can work out whether eating honey from a dead hive is safe or not.

Why Would Bees Be Dead?

There are a few reasons your bees may be dead and these will help decide what to do:

Winter Cold Killed them

If you open a hive and it is still very cold, and the bees are dead, then the chances are the cluster died due to cold, or in some cases disease. Normally, in winter, we would have fed the bees up on sugar, so the chances are that any combs in the hive are sugar honey, and not honey. I would rule out disease as a reason for death, and if the bees did not die of disease, then you can take these combs indoors and store them until spring and then provide them to other hives to feed those hives for spring.

Can you eat honey from a dead hive that died from cold in winter? If you do not feed your bees and let them overwinter on honey, then this honey should most likely be safe for consumption.

The hive Consumed Poison

I have had this happen, where my bees consumed poison and died. Can you eat honey from a dead hive killed by poison? In this case, you definitely do not want to eat the honey!!! You will find a big heap of dead bees in front of the hive. If it is warm enough for bees to fly, and there are no other bees coming to rob the honey from the hive – or wasps for that matter – then you know that that honey has something really badly wrong with it! Do not under any conditions consume it. I personally would burn this honey!

The Bees Plugged The Combs During A Very Strong Honeyflow

I have had this happen once, and a few friends have had similar experiences. In an exceptionally strong honeyflow, the bees bring in so much nectar that they will make honeycomb even in the brood nest. As brood hatches, the bees fill every comb, and soon the queen cannot lay. Rather ironically, the bees will then swarm and leave behind an entire hive full of honey.

I once came to an apiary, and had 30 hives that were like this! It was most bizarre and happens once in a very long time. This honey was perfectly safe to eat. The way you can tell this has happened is that the entire box will be plugged with capped honeycomb! There will be no space left for brood. Can you eat honey from a dead hive that absconded because it was completely full of honey? Yes.

Small Hive Beetles Overwhelmed The Hive

When small hive beetles multiply up to very high numbers in a hive, they will destroy the brood nest and some of the honeycombs. The horrible stench of this will cause the bees in the hive to abscond, and other bees or wasps will not rob this honey. Can you eat honey from a dead hive killed by small hive beetles? Probably, but it really stinks and I would suggest not to.

What To Do With Honey From A Dead Hive?

Have a look at the above causes of hive death. Depending on what the suggested outcome is, you either can use the honey or should destroy it. In the case of bees killed by poison, burn the honey and combs in a safe place. I do this by making a large bonfire and throwing the combs on the bonfire at night. Beware – wax burns hot.

If the honey is safe to consume as per some of the options above, you can then consume it and enjoy it.

Can I Harvest Honey From A Dead Hive?

Read through the causes of a hive being dead, and ascertain from these what you will do with the honey. In some cases, you can harvest honey from a dead hive, and in some cases, it is safer to destroy this honey.

Can You Eat Honey With Wax Moths?

Yes. Sometimes if you leave supers standing for a while you may find a few wax moths building webs and making a mess in a corner of a super. These are relatively harmless – although they stink a bit, and you will want to run the honey through a sieve to remove webbing, larvae, and cocoons.

What Causes Mold On Capped Honey?

Sometimes, if your bees have nosema in winter and cannot get out of the hive, they can end up defecating in the hive. This will then cause mold to grow on the combs. If you find a hive with these conditions, you can actually just rinse the combs using a cloth and remove the mold and then crush the combs and make mead with them!!

In Conclusion

Can you eat honey from a dead hive? In a few cases yes, and in a few cases no. You need to ascertain, based on the causes of a hive becoming a dead out listed above, whether the honey contains poisons or not. If the answer is no, then you can work out the next steps. But it is really important to follow the logic above to decide if it is safe to eat honey from a dead hive. Personally, generally, I would probably not eat the honey from a dead hive just because there is some risk of a false diagnosis.

Does Bee Pollen Expire? Expert Tips To Healthy Pollen Eating.

Does bee pollen expire? Yes. Much like any biological substance, it degrades slowly over time. Follow more to find out what the modes of action are that cause bee pollen to expire.

What Is Bee Pollen?

There are many different forms of pollen that we could refer to as “bee pollen”. Hence if we trap pollen using a pollen trap, the pollen will be pretty much as the bees collected it from the flowers. Bees pack some of this pollen into combs as stores – this will typically be dry pollen, and sometimes it is covered with honey.

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If the bees are preparing the pollen to make food for themselves, they make “bee bread” which is a mixture of pollen and nectar that has a rich population of probiotic yeast and bacteria in it. Bee bread is something that you can harvest and eat from a hive – if you have your own hives or perform bee removals. This is potentially very beneficial for your own health if you eat this fermented honey.

In this article, we will take “bee pollen” to mean that pollen is harvested from hives using pollen traps. In this regard, the pollen looks like little balls that are different colors depending on the source of the flower from which the bee collected the pollen. These are dry, and quite hard.

Does Bee Pollen Expire?

If we ask ourselves this question, we need to look at the chemistry of pollen. It contains proteins, carbohydrates, lipids (fats), vitamins, and various other nutrients. Lipids are prone to going rancid – this means that with time, bee pollen, as with any lipid-containing substance, will begin to develop a rancid smell. This indicates a decline in the quality of the fat or lipid component of the pollen. You can compare this to a bottle of vegetable oil – if you keep it for a few years it starts to smell rancid and gets all slimy and disgusting. Does bee pollen expire – yes! It begins to taste worse with time. It does not become poisonous, it just tastes worse.

The other components in bee pollen are far less likely to degrade over time, but they will, over a period of years or even decades degrade. The shell of pollen is very robust, and this means that palynology, the study of small organic particles such as pollen and spores, allows us to peer back into layers of soil and even fossils and learn about plant pollen from many many millions of years ago.

What Does Bee Pollen Taste Like?

On average pollen tastes a bit like a sour marshmallow together with the weird metallic taste you get if you eat a dry bean or pea. It has a floury texture and is not really nice. I actually do not know a single person who has ever said to me “I love the taste of pollen.” It is not really an acquired taste either – generally if you want to eat pollen try and hide it in something else that makes it taste better. Mix it into a smoothie or sprinkle it on your cereal (as an aside if you are trying to be healthy by eating pollen, and you are eating cereal your goals are misaligned as cereal and health are mutually opposed concepts).

Is Bee Pollen Sweet?

Bees sometimes mix a little bit of nectar into pollen to make it stick. This is not a hard and fast rule but I have noticed that some pollen has a slightly sweet taste, and others have no sweetness at all. Sometimes pollen can actually be bitter.

How To Extend The Life Of Bee Pollen?

Does bee pollen expire? Yes. Can we extend the life of bee pollen? Yes. As we mentioned above, the single biggest cause of pollen degrading with time is the oxidation of lipids/fats. If you remove oxygen, you reduce the rate at which this happens. This can be achieved in a number of different ways. You can place the pollen in gas-tight bags, suck out the air, replace the air with an inert gas such as Nitrogen and then seal the bags. This is a technology that has been perfected recently in the cannabis industry and these technologies can be used in pollen packaging as well.

Alternatively, if you place pollen in honey, and seal it in a jar, the honey protects the pollen quite well – this is a bit like what bees do when they seal pollen under a layer of wax.

Freezing pollen actually speeds up the oxidation of lipids, so, unless you have used one of the above two methods, freezing will not preserve the pollen.

Does Bee Pollen Go Bad?

Does bee pollen expire – yes. With time it will expire as we have mentioned and it then gets a rancid taste and loses much of its nutritional value. Does bee pollen go bad – this is a big difference in terminology! Generally, in food processing, we mean something becomes poisonous when it goes bad. To use an example, you may find that Himalayan rock salt has a best before date or expiry date. This is just a nominal number that people put on a product to suggest that it will taste best before this date. If you eat salt that is past its expiry date, it will kill you no faster than salt before its expiry date. However, if you buy a beef steak, and it says “consume before” and you keep it for a month longer and eat it, there is a very good chance you will get ill. This would mean the steak has gone bad!!

In the sense of the above, bee pollen does not go bad. If you store it sensibly, it will, with time, just taste even worse than it normally does.

In Conclusion

Does bee pollen expire – yes, depending on how you store it, it can last for months or years but eventually it gets a rancid taste. Does bee pollen go bad – no – if you store it sensibly, it cannot deteriorate in such a way that you can get sick and die from it (assuming you are not allergic to pollen). I hope this article has helped you understand more about pollen. If you do want to consume it, you do so for the benefit of your immune system, and most definitely not your palate! I eat pollen, and have done so for years and find it is a remarkable cure for hay fever – but after eating pollen for twenty-five years I still do not like that taste!

Do Wasps Produce Honey? A Story With A Sting In The Tail!

Do wasps produce honey? Yes, there is one species that does! This fascinating wasp still eats insects as most other wasps do, but, like honeybees, it has the ability to store nectar and ripen this into a sort of honey! Read on to find out more about this weird wasp.

What Is The Difference Between A Wasp And A Honeybee?

Wasps rely on animal protein (mostly) as their primary source of protein and will collect sugars from flowers, insects, cooldrink cans, and so on for their energy.

Somewhere in the past, some wasps learned to eat pollen, and use that as a source of protein instead of having to hunt insects. It is easier to store pollen than insects – to date no insect has figured out refrigeration yet – so by shifting to being essentially vegan wasps, honeybees have been able to develop technologies that allow them to store both nectar (honey) and pollen (bee bread).

The ability to store food allows honeybees to build colonies that can survive the long cold, or dry, periods and emerge from these periods with enough workers to be incredibly productive. Wasps on the other hand generally struggle to make it through winter as a colony, because they cannot store enough food to overwinter. This is why yellowjackets cannot sustain a colony through winter in colder climates and will often attack honeybees going into winter.

Do Wasps Produce Honey?

Generally, the answer is no. However, there is one species of wasp native to a few parts of the Southern US, Mexico, and extending into South America as far as the beginning of Argentina. Unlike honeybees, however, this wasp does not make wax – it stores the nectar it collects in a paper nest much like those that other wasps use for brood rearing.

Brachygastra mellifica is the species name of our honey-making wasp. If we look at the species name of the western honey bee, it is Apis (Latin for bee) mel (honey) fer (that brings) so Apis mellifera – the bee that brings honey. If we look at our interesting honey gathering wasp, it is Brachy (branch) gastra (stomach) mel (honey) fic (stick). So I assume, and do not trust me too much on this as I did Latin 38 years ago, that this refers to the fact that these wasps have a sort of tube that connects their thorax to the abdomen, and that they stick honey into their nest combs!! I am sure it is something like that.

Ok, so now we have answered our question – do wasps produce honey? And the answer is no, wasps do not produce honey, but there is one wasp that does! All the others do not!

Do Wasps Make Honeycomb?

Do wasps produce honey – as we have ascertained above, there is only one wasp that produces honey – but what does it store the honey in? So these wasps store their honey in a paper-like structure, not a wax structure like a honeybee honeycomb. Loosely, they do sort of make honeycombs but unlike bees, where these are aligned vertically, the honeycombs hang down, and basically, the nest is a bit of a mess compared to a honeybee hive. It works, but it is more of a work in progress.

What Is A Honey Wasp Nest?

A honey wasp nest is a nest built by the honey wasp, Brachygastra mellifica . The nest consists of a paper nest of hexagonal structures that can be up to 20 inches wide. The nest contains both honey storage areas and brood rearing areas with larvae. Unlike bees, there is no pollen storage as these bees do not collect much pollen! However, unlike many other wasps, they have hairy bodies and are actually important pollinators of crops such as avocadoes. Avocados have an infernally complex pollination system, hence it is good that there are useful pollinators such as these wasps that can help out.

Honey wasps, much like many other wasps are a prized food source. The larvae are a delicacy throughout their range, and the honey is sought after. I was initially rather disturbed at the idea of eating wasp larvae, but my Mauritian business partners once gave me some wasp larvae fried in butter with peri-peri sauce and I can safely say that they are actually very good eating once you get over the initial shock of eating larvae.

There are certain benefits that men, and their bed partners, may notice when eating these wasps – they definitely turbocharger the hormonal system in a most interesting fashion. Well worth a try – I would suggest that this is not something to try on your own, however!!

Do Wasps Drink Nectar?

Yes. A lot of wasps do! I encourage wasps in my garden for this exact reason – they drink nectar and normally eat insect pests. We have a certain species here that eat aphids – I actually often get people phoning me and saying “There are some bees hanging from my roof” and find that they are actually paper wasps. I have worked out a way to relocate these and put them around my garden in peak summer. The colonies die in winter.

They have educated me a few times when I bumped them – a wasp can sting multiple times, and when it does, it sinks its sting deep in your leg, or arm. Once I was stung on the ear and the ear has never looked quite the same where that happened. I think wasp venom is a lot more toxic than bee venom – so try to avoid wasp stings. Bee stings are apparently quite healthy, so I always make sure to get my monthly 10-50 stings.

Wasps will also collect honeydew – they learn how to go and squeeze sap-sucking insects such as aphids – this elicits a little drop of sugar to emit from the rear of the aphid, and the wasps drink this. In this way, they harvest honeydew much the same way that bees do.

In Conclusion – Do Wasps Produce Honey?

One species of wasp does! So we can say maybe that wasps do not produce honey in general, but there is a wasp that does. So yes, wasps do produce honey – if they are Brachygastra mellifica. And these wasps are a complete anomaly, but the honey is tasty and healthy, and so are the larvae! The honey wasp is also an important pollinator, which is unusual for a wasp. These are bizarre creatures, but that is one of the things about our planet. Not everything fits in a box.

Do Azaleas Attract Bees? – The Secret Source Of Psychedelic/Poisonous Honey

Azaleas are a relatively diverse family of flowering plants in the genus Rhododendron. The nectar of these flowers generally contains toxic andromedotoxins! Do azaleas attract bees? Yes, sometimes they do! Read on to find out why, in general, keeping bees in areas where there are large numbers of Azaleas may not be a good idea!

What Are Azaleas?

Azaleas are a group of flowering plants in the Rhododendron genus. These are one of the more popular plant species in many parts of the world, and much like roses, occupy a special place in many cultures. Unlike roses, Azaleas are very very toxic plants!!

The main toxins in Azaleas are andromedotoxins. This is a diterpene poison that appears to cause problems with the sodium channels in nerves. This can, in some cases cause hallucinations, in larger doses, it will kill you, or paralyze and then kill you.

In ancient times, the honey of some of these flowers were used to create honey for use as a weapon. It would be left in houses so that invaders would find it, eat it, and fall asleep/die/be paralyzed and easy to kill.

Do Azaleas Attract Bees?

I have grown azaleas in the past and have hardly ever seen a bee on them. I have seen carpenter bees on them in the southern hemisphere, and bumble bees on them in the northern hemisphere. However, a brief search of the internet, including relatively respectable sites such as this, suggests that bees can be induced to collect toxic honey from these plants.

It would therefore appear that it is possible for bees to visit these flowers under certain conditions and produce honey! Again, I cannot vouch for this personally, as I have never seen it, but, if it is in Pubmed, it is peer reviewed and true. So do azaleas attract bees? Yes. It is confirmed in peer-reviewed publications.

Do Bees like Azaleas?

The chemical structure of the toxin in azaleas suggests that it would be toxic to bees too. However, if they are able to produce honey from this, it appears that maybe it is not toxic to bees. As I have said, I have grown certain ornamental azaleas in my life and I have never seen a single honeybee on their flowers – this despite the fact that any place I have ever stayed in has had a minimum of five hives in the garden – often closer to 30 hives.

It may be that certain varieties of azalea are more attractive to bees than others. I do not know. The shape of the flower suggests that it would be quite difficult for bees to get to the nectar. Again, with nature, these rules are not hard and fast. Some years, the nectaries in plants can overproduce nectar and fill a flower, resulting in bees being able to reach nectar that would be hard to reach in other years.

I have also seen cases where the work of bigger bees such as bumble bees and carpenter bees opens a flower up so that smaller bees such as honeybees can get to the nectar. Bumble bees and carpenter bees are however bees!

As a general rule, I would say that in answer to the question “Do azaleas attract bees?” the general answer would be “no” with a small sub-statement that under certain conditions bees may learn to work these flowers and produce honey, that is toxic if there are enough flowers. However, the question “do azaleas attract bees?” is a trick question, and the flowers are in fact very attractive to some bees – specifically bumble and carpenter bees!

Azalea Honey

In the event that bees do collect azalea honey, it is called “mad honey” due to the presence of the neurotoxic andromedotoxins. Depending on soil moisture levels, it appears that some reports suggest that the honey gathered from bees forced, through lack of other flowers, to forage on azaleas can be toxic to humans, but not the bees – whereas under other soil moisture conditions the nectar is toxic to the bees. Hence there is a fine balance between collecting a crop of poisonous honey and losing your hive due to the bees being poisoned.

Bumble Bee-friendly Plants

Azaleas are an example of a bumble bee-friendly plant. The bumble bees appear to not be affected by the toxins in the nectar of azaleas and are also able to easily work these flowers in most cases.

Generally, legumes, such as peas, beans, and fava beans are excellent bumble bee-friendly plants that will help maintain a healthy population of bumble bees in your garden. Sometimes, and sadly this company seems to not be producing currently, you can buy seed packs for bumblebees such as this pack.

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If you are adventurous, you can sprinkle a bit of clover seed on your lawn, and these will produce clumps of clover flowers that nourish bumble bees.

Plants that Repel Bees

I have never seen such a plant! There are certain plants that bees do not bother to visit, but I have never actually seen a plant that will chase bees away. A cursory scan of the internet suggests all sorts of plants, many of which I have seen bees actively forage on, will repel bees. This is clearly a case of some sort of miscommunication.

In certain cases, there are flowers that are just not attractive to bees – this can be due to the shape of the flower not allowing a bee to be able to access nectar, or the plant not producing nectar of a high enough sugar content for the bees to find it interesting. These flowers do not repel bees per see – they just do not attract the bees.

Conclusion

In conclusion to the question “do azaleas attract bees?” I personally have never seen this happen in the sense of attracting honeybees, but in the broader sense of attracting bumble bees and carpenter bees – yes they do attract bees. In terms of honeybees, if they do attract honeybees, the honey produced can be toxic to humans and bees depending on the type of azalea and the conditions under which it is growing.