NEWSLETTER #18 (English) from Urs & Izzy: It is cold outside!
- Izzy the busy bee....
- Dec 10, 2022
- 5 min read
November & December 2022 (Issue #18)
Winter is upon us! We can notice the cold, and so our bees. They don’t have problems with the price of gas, though, they keep warm through the energy that they get from the honey. Whereas we keep our homes at an average of 18C – 20C, the bees keep their home at a cozy 30C – 35C ... the whole winter on 24/7. We calculate here down what would that mean, in terms of energy, if we would scale it up to human terms....keep on reading for more fun facts about bees and honey!
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News from the Beehives
The temperatures are now too low for bees to fly around. The bees have started already their ‘hibernation’ period. The Queen has already slowed down, or even stopped, on the laying of eggs – The bees born from the fall’s eggs are ‘winter bees’. They are morphemically different than the summer bees – they are thicker, and they have more body fat. They also have a much longer life span – up to 6 months, if compared with the 6 weeks of the spring & summer bees.
Winter bees do not work – or at least, they work differently—they do not go out looking for nectar; their main function is to keep the Queen-bee and the hive warm, at about 32C – 35C. How do they do that? By shivering!. Yes, as soon as the temperatures drop, they form a cluster around the Queen, and they maintain the temperature by flexing their wing muscles continuously to generate heat. Pretty exhausting! .
We are also getting exhausted :-) we profit from the fact that we do not have to care actively for the bees these months, to clean and prepare all of the material for next season. This winter we also want to change the flooring of our 100 years old bee-cottage. The current flooring must be at least 60 years old, and we will be replacing it with new, sustainable cork flooring, more insulating for the bees - and easier to clear for us!
Where is my Honey...?
We don't have more honey! We are sold out - one of the reasons, because we left half of the honey as winter reserve to the bees. So, effectively, your honey is still being eaten by the Bees as we speak 😊 From October until February, Bees feed on the reserves of honey that they have gathered during spring and summer. Let's make a couple of calculations, so you get amazed at the scales that nature uses to assure the survival of the colony....
A colony of bees, in winter, contains about 5,000 bees (in May, at its peak, it reaches up to 60,000!). The bees consume, between November to February, about 15 kilos of honey from their reserves. Considering that a bee weights about 120mgr, she eats about 0.75gr of honey/month.
You will say, that's nothing! Well, it is 6,2 times her own weight...so basically she eats every week more than her own weight on honey, in order to survive - and heat the colony with the buzz of her muscles.
In comparison, we, humans, eat on average 1 kg of food/day --that is about 0,5 times / month our own weight.
And the best part... despite all of the Kcals that the bees eat (1kg of Honey = 3000 Kcal) -- they don't put on weight!
Facts & Figures
Queen bees fly an average of 3 km (and a maximum of 8 km) to find their partners. In human terms, it would be as if you would live in Switzerland, and look for your partners 600 km away... basically, in the neighbouring countries.
In various experiments, 26 virgin queen-bees were glued a tiny RFID (Radio-Frequency chip) and tracked, in real time, to understand their mating fly pattern. What did it reveal?
Contrary to classic knowledge, Queens go on more than one ‘mating excursions’ – on average, they fly off to mate twice per day, for 2 – 7 days. That is, a Queen bee will fly off to mate on two to four different days (consecutive or almost consecutive), and roughly 2-3 times per day. Th most modest took about 6 mating flights. The most enthusiastic queens were reported to have 7 mating flights in one day! Most of these flights took place between 13h – 16h in the afternoon, and last about 20 minutes.
Does the Queenbee fly alone? yes, she does! but, upon her return, as the Queen gets close to the hive, she is expected and cheered by a cohort of bees from their hive, that welcome her dearly.
Unfortunately, not everything is wine and roses - in about 16% of cases, the Queen does not come back - there are always predators out there!
Did you know that...?
During fall & winter, the bee colony is an ‘only-female’ club. By end of August, the Queen bee does not lay any more male eggs (yes, the Queen can decide the gender of each baby bee!. The still living male bees (drones) are kicked out – literally- of the hive by the end of September, when the fall equinoctials occur.
During that week, for several days, the female bees will push out, bite the legs, and deny food to the drones. Drones cannot eat by themselves; they must be fed by the female bees, so they get weak very fast, as they are chased by the bees.
Why does this happen? First of all, because the breeding season is over – usually colonies ‘multiply’ (i.e. they swarm) between March and June, when the virgin Queens mate with the drones. Secondly, because drones are pretty useless for any other task in the hive – they don’t gather honey, they don’t clean, and they don’t help in the defence of the hive, as they are stingless. Finally, drones consume 3-times more food than what a female bee consumes. Nature is wise and minimizes resources – there is no reason to keep them alive during fall and winter.
But, don’t worry! The Queen bee will lay drone eggs again in March and resume the lifecycle of the colony.
Swiss Bees
Did you check carefully the label of our bee’s honey? Labels of food produce (including honey, of course), need to follow strict regulations, dictated by 10 different legislative directives (RS....). Very complicated! Thankfully someone (the beekeepers from la Béroche) realized beekeepers have more important things to do apart from caring for the bees (for example, melt & clean wax, clean frames, clean the hives, delivering pots with the old bicycle ...) and pulled all together.
Here down you can see all the information that honey labels from Swiss honey – or any honey sold in Switzerland- should comply with. Yes, all of it is on our labels 😊 Check it out! You can find the compendium of the legislation here in German - and here in French .
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