“I’m a Bangalow boy. A friend of mine was into bee hives and I became interested. They have a new system now which was invented by local fellows Cedar and his father Stuart. Anyway, my friend has this system and I thought I can do that. You don’t need all the extractors and equipment needed in the past. It’s a clever system and it’s so much kinder to the bees.
We started with a swarm of about 5,000 bees and we now have around 40,000 in the hive. The queen lays about 1400 eggs a day. They can all come out within a week of each other. When they start out they all have their jobs. The first thing they do is clean the cell they came out of. There’s a nursery bee and they feed the younger larvae. As they progress they go to guard bee then a forager bee. They go through each stage of what is required to make the hive work. All they want is for the hive to be the best it can possibly be.
A bees life is only 5 weeks whereas the Queen bee lives for 5 – 6 years. She will probably only be really productive for about 3 of those then she slows down. All the larvae start out the same. The drones, the workers and the queen are all fed the same for about 5 days. After that they cut back on everyone else’s food except for the one they pick as their Queen. They feed her royal jelly so she develops the apparatus to produce young. The drones only job is to mate with the queen and once they do they lose their penis and fall to their death. The workers are all female and they do everything. Pretty similar to humans. The women do everything while the men sit around in the home.(laughs). In a hive of say 40,000 bees there may be only 100 drones. The queen flies really high and the drones which have bigger eyes than the other bees have to fly really high to mate with her. She may mate with 20 drones on a flight then she returns and stays until she gets bigger and bigger and wont leave the nest again until they swarm. Before she flys again she goes on a diet so she can actually fly.
When they first start foraging they fly circles around the hive so they get the coordinates of where the hive lives. Sometimes you can see where they’ve been foraging as they come back with the pollen in sacs on their back legs. They can carry the same weight in pollen as they weigh. Sometimes the sacs are orange, white or canary yellow depending on the flowers. The first lot of honey we got was very citrusy flavour because there were a lot of Lemon Myrtle trees about.
We have to look after our bees. Pesticides and herbicides from Monsanto and the boys are killing the bees at an alarming rate. It affects their homing senses so they die as they can’t get back to the hive. In America they are losing 70% of the hives. It’s devastating and very sad.
Bees work only for the sake of their community without any thought for themselves. It’s very impressive. It’s a shame humans can’t take some notes. The more I learn about them the more I love them.