In the wild, a swarm of bees looking for a new home will often settle into a hollow in a tree. In some Cache Valley backyards, however. some bees will be quite content to move into a white 12x8 inch box sitting a few inches off the ground.
This is how my friend Richard got started keeping bees in his backyard with a single box full of worker honeybees and a queen.
Richard's worker bees got busy building an interior wall of wax. This wall is an engineering marvel of tightly packed hexagonal cells that allow the bees to create the maximum amount of storage space with the minimum amount of wax.
While the interior walls were going up, other bees flew out of the bottom of the hive and into the flowering alfalfa fields nearby. The bees returned to the hive with bellies full of sugary nectar. The bees seemed to be thriving. Richard added another box.
Now, five years later, Richard has six hives and is harvesting gallons of honey. This year I invited myself over to watch the honey harvest.
We both suited up in bee suits. Richard lifted the top off one of the boxes. The bees were not pleased. The buzzing took on an angry edge as they flew right at us. I was very, very glad I was wearing the bee suit. I leaned in to get a better look and was surprised to see the bees had laid down a thin layer of wax capping the honey filled hexagonal cells. They had created a honey storage facility completely protected from moisture and air.
Bees are the only insect that produce wax. People that study bees tell us the honeybees secrete 8 tiny drops of wax out of their abdomen every 12 hours. The drops solidify into tiny flakes which the bees gather up. It takes 11,000 flakes to make 1 gram of wax. The bees keep the temperature inside the hive between 92-95 degrees Fahrenheit, so the wax stays flexible.
Later, when Richard got the harvested honey into his workshop, I watched him scrape off the layer of capping wax before putting the honey trays in the centrifuge. "Not to worry," he said. He'd save the wax and make candles out of it later. Beeswax candles are ideal because they produce very little soot as well a few ions that help clean the air.
In 2013 the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris put 3 hives on their rooftop so they could make clean burning candles that could be lit inside the church.
Richard and I didn't see the queen during the harvest, but Richard assured me she was there. Without a queen bee, the hive ceases to function. When Richard lost a queen awhile back, he quickly ordered one on the internet. The queen arrived in a small wood box (about the size of a matchbox) with a candy cork. It was up to the worker bees to open the box by chewing through the cork. Then, after the bees accepted the queen into their hive, they got to work feeding her an exclusive diet of Royal Jelly - something they produced out of their heads. In return the queen laid 1,500 eggs each day.
The queen becomes the mother of most if not all the bees in the hive. All the worker bees are female. Any drone lucky enough to mate with a virgin queen drops dead immediately afterwards. It's a matriarchal society all the way.
I wonder if Brigham Young and the early pioneers knew this when they put the bee on the Utah flag in 1847.
This is Mary Heers and I'm Wild About Utah
Credits:
Image Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, Photographer
Featured Audio: The Green Eyed Ghost on Freesound.org and Anderson, Howe, and Wakeman.
Voice & Text: Mary Heers, https://cca.usu.edu/files/awards/art-and-mary-heers-citation.pdf
Additional Reading: Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Additional Reading
Wild About Utah, Mary Heers’ Postings
The following references were accurate as of the date of publication or most recent update.
Cache Valley Beekeepers Association, https://www.cvbees.org/
Beekeeping, Extension, Utah State University, https://extension.usu.edu/beekeeping/https://extension.usu.edu/beekeeping/
Christensen, Jennie, Bee Inspector pleased with growing popularity of backyard hobbyists, Cache Valley Daily, Apr 16, 2015 Updated Feb 10, 2024, https://www.cachevalleydaily.com/news/local/bee-inspector-pleased-with-growing-popularity-of-backyard-hobbyists/article_da68c0c8-c8c2-5fb5-963d-b5211e822abe.html
