The Honey Factory

Inside the Ingenious World of Bees

Jürgen Tautz, Diedrich Steen

• Publisher: Black Inc.
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781760640408
• eBook ISBN: 9781743820575
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Natural History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Bee hives might look like seething anarchy at first glance, but bees know exactly what they are doing. The universe of the beehive is an intricately organised, delicately balanced ecosystem. From the mighty queen to the lowliest worker bees, each bee plays its part in the whole.
The Honey Factory plunges the reader into the invisible life of a bee colony and reveals the secrets of this fascinating world. How do worker bees come to a collective decision? What does the honeybees' waggling dance communicate? What provokes the sexual excesses of the young queen bee? And why is the precious relationship between humans and bees a matter of species survival?
Combining the most fascinating scientific discoveries and greatest secrets in bee research, The Honey Factory answers these questions and more.

1

The Factory and Equipment of a Bee Colony

The evolution of beekeeping

Plundered caves

In their natural state, bees – at least the European ones – live in caves or tree hollows. During our evolution, humans also emerged from caves – as so-called intelligent anthropoids, to develop into more or less functioning social beings. But bees developed into social beings in crevices in cliff faces, under stones or in hollow trees long before humans achieved their upright stance. A bee that flew from flower to flower 45 million years ago has been found in fossil beds from the Eocene epoch. From this, one can assume that the ancestors of bees we know today may well have stung the dinosaurs that trampled their homes.

About 1.7 million years ago, the first members of the Homo sapiens race appearing on the scene in Europe would have quickly realised that bees hoarded a precious treasure in their nests. Nowhere else in the human world at that time was such a calorie-rich and delicious food to be found.

Perhaps humans learnt how to get to the honey by watching bears – rip open the hive, grab the combs and run away before being stung – for bees of that time were already equipped with stings and surely used them to defend their homes. But those who sought honey also needed to possess endurance and be prepared to take risks. Stone Age drawings in the so-called ‘Spider Caves’ near the village of Bicorp in Spain show a honey collector climbing down a sort of rope ladder to a bee colony. Today, a similar practice is still carried out in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India. Asian bee colonies, in contrast to European bees, each build a single freely suspended comb beneath a projecting rock shelf. Honey collectors of the Kattunayakan, a south Indian indigenous people, harvest honey by climbing down a bamboo rope and breaking off the combs with a hooked stick.¹ The practice is hazardous for the collectors and destroys the colony’s comb and probably the colony itself – at least in those parts of the world where the vegetation is deciduous. In such climates, bees need honey as their food reserves for winter. It is honey that enables bees to generate warmth and keep themselves alive during the cold months of the year. When our Stone Age ancestors robbed bees of their honeycombs, in most cases it would have been the end of the colony. A plundered colony with extensively damaged combs cannot survive.

First beekeeping practices

It did not take humans long to learn that a regular supply of honey cannot come just from stealing it. One has to offer something in return. So people started developing ‘caves’ which bees could live in that were made by hand from pottery, tree bark or baskets smeared with clay. Although not apiary in the modern sense, this was nevertheless a beekeeping strategy. People no longer simply sought out the homes of the bees and stole their honey. Instead, they enticed the bees to a specific place where a number of clay pipes were suspended vertically, close together, in trees. Swarming bees looking for places to settle entered the clay pipes and occupied them. The ‘beekeeper’ thus gained a new colony. With enough colonies in pipes, the keeper could refrain from harvesting honey from some of them, allowing those colonies to survive the winter. In the following year, these colonies would swarm early and so contribute to a rapid increase in the number of the beekeeper’s colonies. The keeper could again harvest all the honey from some colonies in late summer and allow others to survive. The cycle would then begin again.

Skeps, or basket apiaries, were a similar beekeeping strategy and were widely used across Europe from medieval times to the end of the nineteenth century. Basket beekeepers were not only interested in honey but also in wax, which was much in demand for the production of candles for churches and cloisters. A few skep apiaries still persist today in the Lüneberg Heath in north Germany. Basket beekeepers begin in spring with a few colonies. The number of bees in these colonies increases rapidly in February, the baskets become crowded and the pressure to swarm grows. Should a swarm leave a hive, the beekeeper catches and accommodates it in an empty basket, which the bees usually accept and occupy. The beekeeper has a new colony. This process repeats itself several times from the end of April until about the middle of July. In late summer when the heather blooms, beekeepers have many more colonies than they had in spring. These are now arranged along horizontal boards, protected with a roof and set out in the heather, where the bees collect nectar for heather honey, to be harvested when the heather no longer blooms.

In the past, harvesting honey was often fatal for bees. Apiarists first dug a shallow pit and burned strips of paper in it that had been soaked in sulphur. The basket hive was then placed over the pit in the rising sulphur fumes. The bees promptly suffocated and the combs could then be broken out. But it must be said that more often the beekeeper would set the honey and bee-filled basket over a second, upside-down empty basket and then thump them both onto the ground. Most of the bees fell out into the empty basket and could be added to colonies chosen to survive the winter. Those that remained in the old hive died in the sulphur fumes.

This method of beekeeping leads to the destruction of both the combs and the colony. This was not seen to be a problem while beekeepers wished to harvest wax. But beeswax as the raw material for candles became less desirable from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul found out how to prepare fatty acids from animal fat and soon stearin, the material from which most candles are made today, was discovered. The development of paraffin wax followed and, finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, electricity and light bulbs brightened houses at night. Honey also lost its economic importance when, in 1801, Franz Carl Achard founded the first sugar factory in the world to refine sugar from beets. Until then, those wishing to sweeten their meals had to make do with expensive imported cane sugar or relatively scarce and also expensive honey. Sugar refined from beets offered a much cheaper alternative. Where sweetness had been a luxury enjoyed regularly only in the homes of the well-off and of beekeepers, it was now a widely available consumer product.

Apiarists had to adapt to this new situation. To avoid throwing the wax away, they needed to find a way to harvest honey without destroying the colony’s combs. Beekeepers seeking to compensate for the fall in the price for honey needed to increase production in order to have more to sell.

It would take too long to describe the developments that followed somewhat chaotically in the nineteenth century, when the scientific observation of natural phenomena became a serious occupation. Systematic study of the activity of bees in a colony was part of this effort. Countless clubs and societies were founded that busied themselves with bee research and the improvement of beekeeping practices. Much that was regarded to be scientifically established at the time turned out to be humbug – and inventions claiming to revolutionise beekeeping vanished quickly from the scene. Two new developments persisted, however, significantly influencing modern beekeeping and leading to establishing colonies in stacked boxes, and to installing combs in removable frames.

Hives gain space and frames

Basket beekeepers noticed that bees would accept help and guidance when building their combs. Wooden rods pushed through the walls at the top of the baskets so that the ends stuck out on either side provided the interior of the hive with a series of horizontal beams. The bees began to build their combs along the rods and continued vertically downwards, ending up with completed combs hanging down from the rods. If the beekeeper placed the rods parallel to one another, the combs would hang straight and separately down, without bridges between them. It was now possible to break single combs out of the hives without damaging the others.

Inventive beekeepers had already started to develop rectangular, stackable baskets. Beehives became multistorey, with the floors separated from one another by a board. A hole in each board allowed the bees to slip through and move between the floors. An entrance was placed at the bottom of the stack, through which the bees could enter and leave the hive.

Bees primarily need their combs for two purposes. First, the queen must have somewhere to lay the eggs that will develop into young bees, and she lays these in comb cells. Second, food reserves, pollen and honey are stored in the comb cells. We will learn more about this later. The contents of the combs are organised by the bees as follows: Cells accommodating eggs and brood are located in an area in the centre of the comb. Above this is a narrow pollen crescent, as apiarists call it, of cells containing pollen. Above this again is the honey crescent: cells filled with honey. The bees arrange the contents of the cells so that they have the food where it is needed, right next to the brood that have to be fed. As time passes and more honey is brought into the hive, the brood nest and the adjacent cells migrate downwards and the honey crescent expands above. The consequence of this for a beekeeper with a multistorey hive is that they can begin with a single storey and then add another storey to accommodate the growing brood nest. When so much honey has been collected that combs in the upper floor are full and contain only honey, these can be removed without disturbing the brood nest and throwing the colony into panic.

The basket beekeepers’ rod technique was soon creatively combined with the multistorey hive. Flat wooden boxes were constructed with a grid of rods supported on their upper edges. The boxes were stacked on a base board with an entrance hole. Whenever the upper box (the super) was filled with honey, it could be removed, the honey harvested and the box returned, empty.

The end result was a stacked wooden hive with multiple storeys or ‘supers’ and horizontal guides for comb building. Beekeepers could now operate more considerately than with basket hives because harvesting honey no longer disturbed the entire colony. One problem remained: the rods bearing the combs still had to be cut out of the supers to harvest the honey.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Polish priest Johann Dzierzon and Baron August von Berlepsch in Thuringia found the solution to this difficulty. Instead of laying a grid of rods on his supers, Dzierzon used individual, separated rods. Now he could cut the combs from the walls of the super and take out the combs separately. Berlepsch wanted to avoid the cutting-out procedure entirely. He made a frame by extending the rods down on each side and joining these laterally at the bottom. He could now hang these frames in the super and let bees build their combs in them, which, most of the time, they did without joining them to the sides of the super. Thus, removable combs were invented.

Modern honey factories

Multiple storeys and removable frames – these two inventions laid the foundations of beekeeping as it is practised today. The aim was then to improve on these inventions. How large should hives be to ensure optimal colony development? What is the size of an ideal frame? How should the proportions and construction of the hive and frames be determined to provide an appropriate living space for bees but at the same time be easily and economically operated by beekeepers?

A period of wild experimentation by individual beekeepers began that basically has never ended and is frequently characterised by unkind abuse of anyone who approaches things a different way. Presently there are eighty different sizes of comb frames around the world. Each fits only one size of super, and all apiarists are convinced that their system and practice is the only soul-satisfying way to keep bees. The arguments continue.

However, beekeeping with magazine hives has been adopted internationally. Magazine hives consist of a baseboard with an entry. A rectangular case with a removable lid is set on top of the baseboard. The case is a four-sided box, open top and bottom, in which the comb frames can be suspended. The cases can be constructed from wood or plastic. Two sizes of frames have been adopted in Europe: the German normal size, which measures 37 cm long by 23.3 cm wide; and the Zander, which is 42 cm long by 22 cm wide. Beekeepers using the normal-sized frames usually fit eleven frames into each case; those that work with Zander frames, nine. The normal size provides the bees with a greater area, but also more frames for the beekeeper to handle.

Magazine hives are built for the production of honey and the ingenious aspect of their construction is that they can be expanded. A colony that has lived through winter in a single case can be provided with a second case with frames, or super, as it grows in spring. This is simply placed on top of the first. When the flowers bloom and the bees bring in nectar, a second super can be added. If things go really well and the beekeeper is tall enough, a third can be added to the stack. With four supers in June, up to 40,000 bees can be active in the colony.

Such colonies are huge and the comb areas enormous, but nothing is inaccessible to the beekeeper, because each super can be taken off the stack individually and every single frame is available for inspection. Removing the lid of the hive exposes the frames in the uppermost super. Leaving the lid on but lifting up the top super exposes the frames in the super below it, and so on down through the hive. Frames can be pulled up and out separately from any of the supers and examined.

And so it was that the interest and inventiveness of humans led bee colonies from caves and hollow trees to honey factories in magazine hives with supers. Whereas the initial relationship between people and bees was characterised by destructive plundering of their hives, magazine-hive beekeeping has facilitated the ongoing care, and use, of bees. Magazine hives were the key, because they allowed access to the comb, the most important component of the honey f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Factory and Equipment of a Bee Colony
• 2 Teamwork in the Honey Factory
• 3 The Honey Factory Production Line
• 4 Founding a Daughter Company
• 5 Bees as Aggressors
• 6 The Struggle for Survival
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Endnotes
• Index
• Back Cover