Weber State College Comment, October 1987, Page8 Keeping Bees R obert Nielsen directs a real hive of activity, and it has nothing to do with his position as WSC director of purchasing. Nielsen is a bee keeper, “extraordinair.” At one time he had over 500 colonies of bees stretching from Ogden to the Idaho border, and, with some colonies as large as 70,000 bees, that’s a lot of honey. “There’s a lot of technology to know in being a good beekeeper,” Nielsen said. “You have to really understand bees. You can’t train bees like you doa horse. You have to take advantage of what they do out of instinct. You don’t manage them in any other sense.” Neilsen’s initial introduction into the world of bees came when he worked in Smithfield. | During his lunch break Nielsen and another man ate lunch near an abandoned home. They discovered that there was a hive in the old structure and the other man dared Nielsen to get the honey. Nielsen took the challenge, checked out -every book on bees in Logan and “got hooked.” “T borrowed a veil and a smoker, went into the home and cut out the comb. That was my first colony and I’ve never been without bees since.” Once, years later, he got tired of maintaining so many hives and, in one day, sold them all. By that evening, however, he had two new hives. “T have 90 colonies now, but I’d like to keep only about 50 at a time,” he said. He has a honey house to extract the bee’s wax and honey, and this year he expects to harvest between 2,400 and 3,600 pounds of honey. But it’s not strictly the honey or wax that intrigues Nielsen. The bees themselves hold a fascination for him. “They're extremely interesting creatures.” The bee builds a perfect six-sided comb based on the magnetic fields of the earth. Each spring the colonies are weak, but soon grow as the queen lays eggs that three days later hatch into adult worker bees. The newer bees are assigned housekeep- ing responsibilities—cleaning the hive, feeding the queen, larvae and the drones and cultivating the honey to the final stage. They cultivate the honey by beating their wings in akind of sequence throughout the hive that sets up wind currents to evaporate the honey to a 16 percent moisture content, which is the perfect state for honey. They then cap the stored honey in the cells to feed on during the winter. The extra honey becomes the property of the bee keeper. As the insects age they become guard bees at the hive’s entrance and then eventually forage for honey. After six to eight weeks of foraging they wear themselves out from gathering honey and die. “Bees have two stomachs, a honey stomach and a digestive stomach. They collect the honey from the flowers in their honey stomachs and enzymes change the complex sugars into simple sugars,” he said. Bees also collect nectar, pollen and propolis. Propolis is a sticky substance that smells like water. When a wasp or some other creature attempts to enter the hive it is stung to death and encapsulated in the sticky propolis. To build the comb bees catch each other by their leg parts and hang, somewhat like a curtain, in the total darkness of the hive. Their abdomens secrete wax that comes out in a thin sheet. The bees grab that sheet of wax with their mouth parts and mold the comb. The queen is the dominant force in the hive. She gives off pheremones, a kind of perfume, that are passed from bee to bee throughout the hive. “As long as the pheremone is passed the bees are cohesive. As soon as those pheremones stop the bees immediately start a new qucen cell,” he said. Worker bees are all female, and the only thing that separates them from the queen is the type of food they are fed. All bees, for the first three days of their larva Stage, are fed a kind of bees’ milk that is extremely high in protein. If the infant bees are fed this milk longer than three days they develop sexually, and become queens, Nielsen said. “The first queen that hatches will sting the others and become the lone survivor,” he said. “In three to five days their wings are ready for flight and the queen will leave the hive for a few test flights to build up Strength. Then, a few days later, the queen will leave the hive again and fly high into the atmosphere with the drone bees chasing her until a drone catches the queen and they copulate in the air. When the male pulls away he leaves his sex parts in the female and dies. Those sex parts continue to pump until all the semen is pumped out,” Nielsen said. The queen can repeat that act anywhere from five to 15 times in one or two days before she returns to the hive. The semen is kept in a storage area of the queen's body called the spermatheca, and after the queen lays an egg in an egg cell she fertilizes it with semen from that storage sack. If the queen should run out of semen she, for some reason still not known, cannot mate again and dies or is should look at on certain days of the year,” he said. Bee stings are an inevitable part of the process, but Nielsen said that many bee keepers become immune to the sting and work with bare hands. Bees like warm, sunny days, but are irritable on overcast days. If Nielsen should happen to handle the bees when they’re not in a good mood they can literally drive him off. “There’s a certain odor that goes rip along with stinging, and when those ‘t odors get out among the ey, bees things go from bad to worse,” he said. “But working out in the bee yard is very enjoyable. There is nothingmore pleasant than to go out and look at the bees. People who don’t work with bees miss half of life," Nielsen said. killed. The fertilized eggs become worker bees. Eggs thatare not fertilized become drones, who perform no function other than reproduction. “They cannot even feed themselves.” Every fall the drones are kicked out of the hive and left to starve. “As a bee keeper one of the prime responsibilities is to have a good queen. The colony will not do well without a good queen,” he said. If Nielsen notices a poor egg laying pattern or a confusion of the hive he knows the queen is going bad and “‘pinches her head off.” “As a bee worker you begin to see various patterns and you know what the bees should be doing and what they Robert Nielsen "sits" with some of bees. "You'd have to be stupid to this withouta mask before finding what kind of mood the bees are in," said. his do out he