Bees

In the British Isles there are over two hundred different kinds of bee, but the best-known and most useful is the honey bee. Smaller and quieter than the big, noisy bees we often see, she works steadily from early spring until late autumn — and even on mild winter days. Of the many kinds of bee, only two are truly "social," living together in organised colonies: the bumble bee and the honey bee. The difference is that honey bees stay social all year round, while bumble bee colonies break up each autumn, leaving only young queens to hibernate through the winter; bumble bees, unlike honey bees, do not store honey at all.

The natural home of the honey bee is a hollow tree, where workers cluster together, gorge themselves on honey, and build waxen combs from tiny scales of wax produced in pockets on their own bodies. In these combs they raise their young and store their food. Modern beekeepers now use wooden hives fitted with removable frames of wax, making it far easier to inspect and harvest combs than in the old straw hives, which once had to be destroyed each year just to get at the honey. A hive's population swings dramatically with the seasons: around 20,000 workers and a single queen cluster together through winter, but by summer the colony can swell to about 80,000 workers plus hundreds of drones.

Each hive has only one queen, whose sole task is laying eggs — as many as 3,000 a day in summer. She is easily told apart by her longer body and her habit of walking with her wings folded, since, unlike the workers, she has neither wax pockets nor pollen baskets. A queen may live up to five years, but beekeepers usually replace her after her second season in a process called re-queening. Drone bees, the largest in the hive, exist purely to fertilise young queens; unable to sting and contributing no other work, they are driven out of the hive to die once autumn arrives. It is the worker bees — technically undeveloped females — who do every other job in the colony, working themselves so hard in summer that they live barely six weeks, compared with around six months of easier winter life.

A worker bee's life inside the hive follows its own pattern: her first fortnight is spent cleaning cells, feeding grubs, guarding against robbers and wasps, and fanning her wings to cool the hive and ripen the honey, before she finally moves outside to gather water, nectar, and pollen. Nectar collected from flowers is carried home in a special sac inside her body; as its water content evaporates on the journey and afterwards in the cells, it slowly becomes honey — a process so demanding that a single bee would need to fly a distance equal to twice around the globe just to make one pound of it. Pollen, meanwhile, is combed from her body into baskets on her hind legs and packed into cells back at the hive — though most of what she carries is scattered from flower to flower along the way, achieving pollination, which the essay describes as the honey bee's true purpose in nature, even more important than the honey she happens to produce.

Beekeepers rely on a few key tools and structures to manage a hive without harm to themselves or the bees: a veil of black silk net to protect the face, a hive tool to prise apart combs sealed with sticky propolis, and a smoker — a small firebox and bellows — whose smoke calms angry bees by making them gorge on honey. A slotted metal sheet called a queen excluder keeps the queen confined to the brood-chamber, letting only the smaller workers pass into the honey-storing supers above, while an escape board later lets bees leave a full super without returning, so the honey can be safely removed. When a hive grows overcrowded with bees, brood, and honey, thousands may leave together to found a new colony elsewhere — a dramatic event known as swarming, which costs the beekeeper dearly in lost honey and lost bees alike.