Making honey - beekeeping and honey collection - Cover Story

Ranger Rick, August, 1996 by Tommy Irvin, Deborah Churchman

See these space aliens checking out a filing cabinet? Hey, it's really Doug and me being beekeepers. The things we'll do for honey!

Tommy is my name, and I'm on lots of teams. I'm on a soccer team in the fall, a basketball team in the winter, and a baseball team in the spring. But last summer, I became part of a bee team--helping my friend Doug Inkley take care of his honey bees.

Doug has three big stacks of white boxes in his backyard. Each stack is one bee hive (see photo above). He checks the hives every few weeks from early spring to late fall. (He sees how the bees are doing and if they need anything.) Last summer he asked me to help. If we did a good job, he said, we might get gobs of honey in the fall. "Yum!" I said. But I thought, What about bee stings?

That's when Doug gave me a special beekeepers' suit to wear. It made me look like some kind of space alien (right). Doug said it would help keep the bees from stinging me. It also made me really hot!

We were now ready to go to work. Doug told me that bees get upset if you bump the hive or move really fast. So we moved very slowly and carefully toward the hives.

OPENING THE HIVE

Before opening a hive, we needed to calm the bees. We used a can full of burning leaves called a smoker. Smoke makes bees want to pig out on honey, and that makes them too busy to attack us.

I pumped smoke into the hive's bottom entrance (see photo, page 42). Then Doug did the top (right).

I looked straight down into the hive (below). Each box has wooden frames stashed inside. (A few frames have been pulled out in this photo.) The bees fill each frame with thousands of six-sided wax cells. Then they fill the cells with eggs, honey, or pollen.

HOW'S THE HONEY?

Doug used a hive tool to pull out a frame (right). Then we checked for problems and to see how much honey the bees were making (below). (Golden cells have honey; bright yellow ones have pollen.)

The bees in a hive need at least 50 pounds (22 kg) of honey to get them through the winter. Here's the good part--if the bees make more than that, Doug and I can take the extra. So we want them to make as much honey as possible.

That's why it's important to check the frames for problems. Say the queen wasn't laying many eggs--maybe because she was old or unhealthy. Not enough eggs would soon mean not enough worker bees to make honey. So the old queen would have to go.

SPECIAL DELIVERY

One of Doug's hives did need a new queen, so he ordered one through the mail! (right) See the other bees in the box? They were there to care for her.

Doug s-l-o-w-l-y introduced the new queen to the hive. First he got rid of the old, unhealthy queen. Then he put the box in the hive. By the time the hive's bees had chewed their way into the box, they were used to the new queen's smell. See her there? (below) She's the big one in the middle.

BEEKEEPING--THE SWEETEST JOB

At the end of the summer, it was finally time to get paid for our hard work--with lots of honey! Doug took the extra honey-filled frames from the hives. Then he put them in a machine that spun them round and round. That pulled honey from the cells. Doug strained the honey to get all the wax and other bits out. Finally, he poured the honey into clean jars (below).

Doug says that the first year he took care of bees, his hives made barely any extra honey. But now Doug usually gets about 40 jars from each hive. Sometimes the bees have a really good year, and he gets much, much more. In fact, in a great year, beekeepers can get 300 pounds (135 kg) of honey from just one hive. That is one sweet deal!

Of course, beekeeping isn't always sweet. Sometimes the bees get sick and die. Sometimes a group of bees flies away in a big swarm, looking for a new place to live.

And once, Doug says, when he had bothered his bees too much, a few of them headed next door. His neighbors were outside having a picnic. Ack--it turned into a bee attack! Luckily, only a couple of people got stung. And that's happened just once in three years.

To me, most of what happens on a bee team is lots of fun--especially eating the honey. Beekeeping--it's one job I'm really stuck on.