#10. Feeding the bees(t)

I know everyone is sitting on the edges of their seats, waiting to hear what happens next to our mated queen.  So consider this post a slight detour - an intermission, if you will.  I think a crash course in bee nutrition will help to set up what happens next in our hypothetical hive.

There are four types of honey bee food:

1. Nectar - Field bees, the foragers, drink the dewy nectar that collects on the 'nectaries' of flowers, usually located at the base of the petals, and head back to the hive, where some of it is converted to honey.  This process starts in the field bee's 'honey stomach'.

2. Honey - Some of the partly-converted nectar is regurgitated and transferred from the field bee to the tongue of one of the house bees, and thusly transferred to another, and so on, until it is deposited into cells where its conversion to honey is completed by the process of evaporation.  The bees accelerate evaporation by beating their wings to increase air flow.  Once the honey is fully 'ripened', the bees cap the honey cells with wax, where it can store indefinitely, to be uncapped and eaten as needed.  Today's bee factoid:  according to Ray Lackey, it takes 10 pounds of nectar to make one pound of honey.

3. Pollen - In the process of visiting flowers, bees collect dusty, yellow pollen on their abundant body hairs, and pack it into the 'pollen baskets' on their thighs to carry back to the hive.  There the pollen is unloaded by the house bees, who mix it with saliva and honey.  This recipe causes the mixture to go through a fermentation process similar to yoghurt and results in a nutrient-rich and highly digestible food.  This 'bee pollen', or 'bee bread' is also stored in wax cells and is used by the nurse bees to feed developing bee brood.  Unlike unprocessed plant pollen, which is perishable, bee pollen, like honey, has an indefinite shelf life.

4. Royal Jelly - The fourth type of bee food, this 'bee milk' is secreted by nurse bees through glands located on the tops of their heads.  It is the first food of bee larvae.

Besides food, bees need access to water.  This never occurred to me.  I guess I never thought of bees drinking anything but nectar.  But apparently they need a lot of water.  They use it for a variety of things, including diluting honey to feed brood, and for cooling the hive during warm weather.  Bees drown easily and we've been counseled to provide escapes from pools, dog bowls, and the like.  Tiny little bee ladders, life rafts and preservers would be adorable, I think.  Safety first!

What many people don't know is that it is customary to feed bees if you are going to steal their honey.  Logically, if you took too much of the stuff that the bees stored to feed the colony, they'd starve.  What does a beekeeper feed bees?  A syrup made from sugar and water.  That's right, we take the good stuff and return the favor by giving them the bad stuff.  Of course, one could leave enough honey on the hives so that the bees would not need supplemental feeding, but that could mean little or no honey for the beekeeper.  (Besides feeding syrup, apparently there are times when feeding a bee pollen substitute is also called for.  It's not yet clear to me when this is recommended, but probably when some occurrence  results in a dearth of field bees, so that plant pollen is not being harvested in large enough quantities to support the colony.)

Another scenario where feeding bees is required is during times of stress, like when you're starting a new colony.  Supplemental feeding helps them by offering a reliable, immediate source of food that replaces the nectar that takes so much bee power to forage for.  This allows the bees to tend to the establishment of the colony more easily, and is one of our first management tasks as novice beekeepers.  As soon as I place my bees in the hive, I will have to feed them.

I have ordered 2 kinds of feeding devices.  One is called a frame feeder.  It is a receptacle that replaces one of the frames in the hive.  You fill it with syrup, and the bees dive in and lap it up.  The downside is that the bees can drown in the syrup.  To avoid this, interior walls of the feeder are scuffed up to give them a foothold.  The other feeder I've bought is called a hive-top feeder.  This is the same size and shape as a honey super and sits right on top of the brood box.  It holds a lot of syrup, and it's not clear to me how the bees access the syrup, but I'll find out when my equipment arrives.

Speaking of which, I was starting to get nervous.  The bees are supposed to arrive in 10 days and no sign of my hives.  So I called Betterbee just now and they were still waiting on a couple of back-ordered items, and since the missing things are totally optional, I pulled them from the order so they should now be shipping by tomorrow.  This means I should have my hives before the middle of next week.  It's cutting it close, but that should work out fine.  While I wait, I will finish leveling and clearing the bee yard and constructing my pressure-treated hive bench - a low table on which my hives will sit.