December 2015 - The Incredible Honey Bee
Members of the Horndean & District U3A met for their regular monthly meeting on Friday 5th December 2015 when they were entertained by David Nield whose talk about the incredible honeybee included many fascinating facts about our humble bees.
We learned that there is a national British Beekeepers Association; Hampshire has 13 Associates and the local Portsmouth District Beekeepers’ Association have 130 members.
There are about 50 – 60,000 bees in each colony. The bees have to flap their wings very fast because really they shouldn’t be able to fly because their wings are so small. They collect pollen on their legs and the nectar which they store in their honey stomachs is sicked up into honeycombs. The sting of the honey bee is serrated and they die after stinging.
In days gone by they used to live in skeks made of straw rope which was wound round to create a cone. Nowadays they are kept in wooden hives. These hives are made up of the floor/brood chamber/queen excluder/and supers which are smaller/crown board & roof. The bees provide the wax for the honeycomb. Bees are fed with honey so they don’t eat their own. They can fly as far as 3 miles out and back from the hive.
The bees build the honeycomb where the queen lays her eggs in the middle and the honey is stored on the outside. When there are two queens in the colony one will leave with a swarm of about 20,000 bees. Hollow trees make a good home for the swam.
The solitary queen is the largest, drones are middle sized and the workers are the smallest. In the colony there could be 60k workers and 200 drones who are lazy – they service the queen and then die! She is an egg laying machine laying 1500 eggs per day. Workers are all female and do all the work. They nurse, undertake, attend the queen, guard, clean, comb build, forage, scout and honey pack and do it all brilliantly. There is a 6 week lifespan in summer.
The honeybee is under threat outside the hive by the use of insecticides and it is fatal to them. Inside the hive they have been invaded by the Varroa Jacobsoni flea, a species of mite that parasites bees which causes the bees to have deformed wings. It was effectively treated but now the fleas have become resistant.
One in every three bites of food we eat depends on the honey bee and pollen is important in the forensic world. David supplied us with many more facts and figures and had his audience laughing loudly at his light hearted antics and portrayal of the bees.
Diane Stoner, Speaker Co-ordinator.