My brother was at a farmer’s market in North Carolina this weekend. A vendor was selling a thimble-full of honey for $10. Maybe slightly more than a thimble. The seller told my brother that you wouldn’t smother a pancake with this special honey. It was medicinal. It was made by Central American bumblebees. I forgot to ask why it was ‘medicinal’ – was there some particular illness it was intended to cure? But that’s off-topic for today’s blog post.
I’ve never eaten bumblebee honey. Nor has my brother – he didn’t buy it. The man selling the honey claimed that he himself kept bumblebees in Latin America. He harvests a few pots from each nest. Perhaps, but even a few pots seems excessive and, I think, would deplete the bumblebees’ pantry. I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps bumblebees fill their little honey pots with wild abandon. Meanwhile, the beekeeper protects them and gives them a safe nesting spot. That would be OK by me, if it’s true.
Bumblebees don’t make much honey. They gather nectar and pollen like honey bees do, but there are far fewer bumblebees in a nest and they save much less honey/nectar for rainy days. You can see the problem in this picture of a bumblebee nest:
Florida bumblebee nest. Photographed by the author in the Ocala Forest.
You can see the pots. Each is smaller than a bumblebee. Most of these hold developing larvae, but in time there may also be a few containers of nectar. Bumblebees never store kilograms of honey as honey bees. Bumblebees store mere grams. This is because they have quite different life cycles and don’t need big reserves.
To get through bad times (winters, droughts, nectar scarcities), honey bees eat some of the huge surplus of honey they’ve stored. Even in the winter, there are thousands of honey bee mouths to fill. Bumblebees, however, have a different survival strategy. The have fewer members per colony so they need less stored honey. During really bad times, only a single mated female, a queen, survives in hibernation. When the season improves and flowers bloom, that solitary bumblebee makes a new nest, completely on her own. She fashions a few pots, lays a few eggs, collects a bit of food for her offspring. When her brood becomes adults, they help expand the nest, adding a few more pots. This allows yet more workers to emerge.
By late season, a bumblebee nest may have grown from the solitary queen who established the colony to a group of two or three hundred bees. Meanwhile, the honey bees have built a huge population (50,000 or so). Honey bee workers expand the nest, not the queen. The workers gather the food and feed the larvae, the queen’s main function is egg-laying. She does little else. Honey bees specialize, using divisions of labour, splitting tasks between queens and workers. Bumblebees don’t, at least not on the same scale. Honey bee workers collect a big surplus of food; bumblebees produce a mere pittance.
Bumblebees are threatened. Their numbers are dwindling. If there really are bumblebeekeepers, maybe they can keep those bees alive. But I’d still be uncomfortable partaking more than a few drops of bumblebee honey on the tip of my tongue (just to know what it’s like). For that, I’d gladly pay ten dollars – if I knew a bumblebee colony somewhere in Central America was getting part of the money, at least in the form of a protected nesting site.
We are having weird, weird weather here in Alberta. It’s dry as a desert and almost as hot as one. Since January, our temperature has stayed well-above normal. Ten degrees above normal, in fact. And that’s embarrassing.
Queen Elizabeth commands tens of thousands and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day? That might be an editing error. Dan Graur, a biologist in Houston, discovered that Reuters News Service once required that all stories about “the queen” should henceforth refer to her majesty as Queen Elizabeth. Thus, instead of “the queen and her horse boarded the queen’s yacht,” reporters must write “Queen Elizabeth and her horse boarded Queen Elizabeth’s yacht.” Well, that’s good, respectful policy. In theory. In practice, it threw a spanner in the works.
We started the program inside a classroom. I made a 30-slide Powerpoint which featured bees, flowers, and children working with bees. (For a kids’ Powerpoint, use just one picture per slide and just two or three large, simple words. Don’t clutter the slide with wordy details and excess photos. This advice goes double on presentations for adults – they have even shorter attention spans.)
Benny is a big, stuffed, adorable bee. He’s a boy, just like the bees causing concern in the picture on the white-board behind me. “Boy bees, like Benny and the drones on the screen, don’t have stingers.” I used this as a starting point for bee safety. (“Girl bees can sting if they feel threatened.”) I began a quick overview of bee anatomy. Even the smallest of the kids knew that bees have three main body parts. I described the head as the brain, eyes, and mouth of the bee while the thorax is like a huge muscle that powers the wings and six legs. The abdomen (for the kids’ presentation) is mostly a stomach and a stinger. The kids were fascinated that bees have three sets of eyes. I didn’t go into the way polarized light can be sensed by a bee’s third eye, but I did touch on ultraviolet, comparing the bee’s extra colour vision with the high-pitch sound perception of their pets – something these kids understood.
The presentation continued like this. After a few more slides, the teacher dressed a child in the little bee suit which I’d brought. Meanwhile I passed around a new Pierco frame and a new small copper smoker. We talked about these, but mostly I wanted the kids to physically connect with what we were doing.
Back inside the classroom (where the children were counted), I distributed handouts with bee cartoons to be coloured and trivia questions to be answered. The kids liked these but were even more interested in the small rectangular strips of new wireless foundation I gave them. This is always a big hit because they notice the waxy odour and hexagonal pattern right away. I caution them not to eat it, but I know that some will and I know that wax is harmlessly ingested. Giving wax is better than giving honey (which beekeepers sometimes distribute) because it’s not sticky and parents are not going to call with complaints about their youngster’s blood sugar and dietary restrictions.
Brag time. We just got home from the big Calgary science fair competition. My 13-year-old won three awards. Here’s the kicker: his project was called Saving Honey with Sound. His experiment was based on sending ultrasonic energy waves into combs of granulated honey, attempting to liquefy the honey without using heat and without melting the wax comb.
Here is what I learned from him. The idea of using ultrasound to reverse granulation works, at least as part of a small-scale experiment. It may even have commercial application, but my son is not totally convinced. He used speakers which emitted 18,000 hertz sound waves at just over 100 decibels. (By the way, at such a high frequency, the sound is inaudible to humans. There is no risk of hearing damage – we asked an auditory physician before we allowed the boy to start.) After seven days, there was some liquefying. He told me that if he had bigger speakers and if he had an amplifier that could generate a higher frequency, the results would have been more spectacular. That’s what he thinks would be required in a honey operation if a beekeeper wants to extract any combs which are crystallized.
Although the Ohio River’s 
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