Busy Bees

Beekeeping was a very important part of farming in the Adirondacks many years ago. At a time when farmers relied solely on subsistence farming to live, keeping bees gave farmers access to honey for something sweet to eat, beeswax for high quality candles and medicine, and pollination for their crops. Listen in to learn about traditional beekeeping, and to hear from a local Adirondack beekeeper about hobby beekeeping today!

Transcript

Introductory Segment 

Have you ever heard of a bee hunt?? It might sound made up, but it's a real thing, some people hunt bees as a hobby, and others, especially Adirondack farmers a hundred years ago, hunt bees so they can become beekeepers, and use the resources bees provide. 

TRANSITION - ADKX Podcast Intro

Ready to earn some extra credit? You are listening to ADKX-tra Credit, a podcast for students about the history of the Adirondack Mountains and the people that have lived, worked, and played here. The Adirondack Experience, the Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, is located in the heart of the Adirondack Park of New York State. 

CONTENT

NY state has a lot of farms, especially dairy farms, but only a few of those farms are inside the Adirondack park. And most of the farms that are inside the Adirondack park are on the very edges of the park, near Lake Champlain, Keeseville, Plattsburgh, and Malone. This is because deeper in the park, like where the ADKX museum is, in Blue Mountain Lake, it is too mountainous, rocky, and forested for successful modern farming.

However, early settlers moved to the Adirondacks from other parts of the state, or VT to start farms because the land was cheaper here. Now, this does not mean that farming used to be easy in the Adirondacks. Far from it! In the 1800s, many farmers, especially farmers in the Adirondacks, were what is called “subsistence” farmers. This meant they grew just enough food and raised just enough livestock to live, or “subsist” on. Not enough to sell and make a profit. And ultimately, most Adirondack farmers many years ago eventually realized that trying to farm in the mountains wasn’t worth it, and moved away to places with better farming conditions.

But in the 1800s when people still farmed here in the adirondacks, they needed all the help they could get. So some of them kept bees!

TRANSITION 

People have been keeping bees for hundreds of years. Bees are an interesting kind of animal (can you call an insect an animal?) because even though we keep bees as farm animals, we have not really domesticated them the way we domesticated other animals, livestock such as cows and horses, or pets like dogs and cats. But, they are safe to keep on farms and in gardens, while most wild animals like coyotes and deer are not!

Now, honey bees are not native to the Adirondacks. They were brought here by people specifically to help pollinate crops and make honey. However, we do have native bees here! Bumble bees are native, as are mason bees, certain wasps, and many others. However, the native bees we have here are usually solitary, and produce no, or very little honey. So beekeepers do not keep native bees. But some gardeners and wildlife enthusiasts do build habitats for native bees to help them flourish!

Keeping honey bees was a win-win for ADK farmers, and for the bees. Keeping bees meant that farmers knew their crops would get pollinated, which is important because if a plant does not get pollinated, it cannot make seeds. Farmers would also harvest beeswax, which could be used to make high quality candles, which would otherwise be very expensive and hard to get. Candles were a very important tool for people who did not have electric lighting. And of course, bees also make honey, a free source of what was normally another very expensive commodity; sugar! In return, the bees got a safe place to live, and as much nectar and pollen as they could possibly need!

TRANSITION 

So how did these Adirondack farmers get bees anyway? Sometimes, in more populated areas, beekeepers would keep many swarms of bees, and would sell some, but here in the Adirondacks, farmers had to get more creative. If they hadn’t brought their bees with them when they moved, they would go on bee hunts to try to catch swarms of wild honey bees!

How did they find these wild bees? That's the really cool part. There are a few ways to track bees to their hive. One of the ways is to just get lucky and notice when a lot of bees are flying in the exact same direction, and follow them home.

Other times, beekeepers catch several bees in a small container like a jar, or a special little box. There's a picture of a bee box on the web page for this podcast if you want to see what one might look like!

Then they let one bee out, and follow it for as long as they can, when they lose sight of it, they let out another bee, and follow that one until they lose sight of it, and repeat that over and over until they find the hive!

This was called following a Beeline, and it’s where the term, “making a beeline” comes from!

Once the beekeeper finds the beehive with a thriving colony of bees in it, they can decide what to do next. Sometimes they will just take a portion of the honeycomb, and leave the bees the rest. Other times though, they want the bees as much as they want the honey. In that case, the beekeeper must find and capture the queen bee.

If the beekeeper successfully captures the queen bee, they can put the whole hive into a human-made wooden beehive, put the captured queen in with it, and when they transport the hive and queen home, the rest of the colony will follow her scent. This is a very delicate operation, and only people who are skilled beekeepers should try it. If you or I tried to catch a swarm of wild bees, we might hurt the bees, or ourselves, or both! 

Transition

I'm here today with my friend Ron who works here at the ADKX and keeps bees in his spare time!

Q: how many hives do you have? Could you describe how they work?

A: I have 2 beehives.

The first thing to understand is the structure of a honeybee colony.  In a honeybee colony there are typically between 10,000 – 60,000 bees. Of those, there is one queen bee whose only job is to lay eggs and make new bees or “brood”.  Then there are a couple hundred drones, the only male bees, whose job is to make sure the queen has been fertilized and able to lay eggs.  Finally the bulk of the hive is made of worker bees.  Worker bees are all female and do not lay eggs. They are responsible for all the work to maintain the hive such as, feeding and raising new bees, building honeycomb, cleaning the hive, providing protection of the hive, cooling and regulating the temperature of the hive during the summer, and most importantly, collecting nectar and pollen to create honey to feed the hive during the winter.

A honeybee hive itself consists of wooden boxes stacked on top of each other like a tower, this mimics how honeybees would typically create hives in nature, usually in hollowed out tree trunks.

In each stacked box are around 8 to 10 frames that hold beeswax comb.  That comb contains thousands of hexagonal cells. In the boxes at the bottom, frames and cells at are where the queen typically lays eggs and the worker bees feed and rear new bees or “brood”.

In the boxes at the top, the frames and cells are used to collect nectar to make honey

Q: how did you get your bees?

A: Most beekeepers get their bees by purchasing bee packages or nucleus colonies.  A bee package is simply a screened box containing around 10,000 worker bees and one queen. 

A nucleus colony is a small box with 5 frames that already have a laying queen, worker bees and brood.

Q: what is your favorite thing about keeping bees, and what is your favorite bee fact?

A: I like keeping bees because when you’re inspecting the hive, you have to be very present and aware of what you’re doing. It’s almost meditative.

My favorite honeybee fact is that in the course of one worker bee’s lifetime, they will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.  To make one pound of honey, workers in a hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers.  In a single collecting trip, a worker will visit between 50 and 100 flowers.

Q: when you harvest honey, does it hurt the bees? And do you leave them any honey to eat?

A: No it doesn’t hurt the honeybees, but they certainly don’t appreciate it.  They spend a lot of time collecting nectar to make it so they feed their young and to survive the winter. 

Yes, I always leave more honey than I take.  Honeybees need their honey to survive the winter, it’s what they eat and what allows them energy to keep warm.

Q: do you harvest beeswax? If so, how does that work, and what do you do with it?

A: I harvested beeswax once, and it is a lot of work.  The first you do is harvest wax from used honeycomb and melt it down several times in a pot.  The melting process allows pollen, residual honey and other impurities in the melted comb sink to the bottom of the pot while pure beeswax rises and solidifies on top. This pure beeswax can then be used to make candles, furniture wax, or many cosmetics such as lotions or lip balm.

Q: is there anything else you’d like to share 

A: Just one additional interesting fact about bees…they communicate with each other by doing a waggle dance.  The waggle dance informs their hive mates about the location and quality of food sources. 

Transition

So, how do bees make honey anyway?? Turns out, it’s a little bit gross, but mostly really cool! Let's learn how they do it.

Step 1. Bees harvest nectar from flowers using their proboscis. 

Step 2. The bees then store the nectar in a special honey stomach, which is separate from the stomach they use when they eat.

Step 3. Once the honey stomach is full, the bees fly back to the hive. Did you know bees can carry up to half their weight? Those are some strong insects!

Step 4. After they arrive at the hive, the bees regurgitate the nectar, and pass it around mouth to mouth from bee to bee. Yes this is kind of like puking it back and forth, which seems super gross, but remember bees have a special stomach to store the nectar that we do not have, so its way less gross.

Step 5. Once the nectar’s water content drops below 18% after being passed from bee to bee, it turns into the syrupy honey we know and love, and mold and bacteria can’t grow on it. So the bees can put it away for winter. The bees stuff the honey into special compartments in the hive, and cover it with beeswax to keep it safe.

Step 6. Enjoy! Now the bees have honey to eat all winter long.

TRANSITION 

We may not be bees, but we can use honey for lots of things. It’s good for making sore throats feel better, it tastes really yummy in tea or yogurt, and some people think eating local honey can help with seasonal allergies! Plus, honey is antibacterial, which means it doesn’t go bad! It might crystallize if it sits for a long time, but warming it up makes it good as new! 

Did you like learning about ADK beekeeping? I sure did! If you want to learn more about beekeeping in the ADKs, you might want to consider inviting us to bring our Bees & Pollination program for 2nd to 4th graders to your classroom! 

TRANSITION - ADKX Podcast conclusion - Thank you for joining us for an episode of ADKX-tra Credit. Ask us a question, or tell us what you thought by clicking the link above the episode description. This podcast is brought to you by Adirondack Experience, the museum on Blue Mountain Lake. Our mission is to expand understanding of Adirondack history and the relationship between people and the Adirondack wilderness, fostering informed choices for the future. If you want to learn more fun Adirondack history visit our website theadkx.org