Many moons ago, when I was a wee tot, I would help my dad at his apiary. Being the angsty child I was, I really didn’t enjoy it all that much. Hot, humid summer days spent in a full-body suit and elbow-length gloves didn’t particularily make for a fun time. But, dad was old-fashioned, and I enjoyed home-cooked food, so, well, there I was, helping.
As much as I didn’t enjoy it at the time, there were a lot of important lessons learned through those arduous summers, but none other than the one day, when we were gathering honey-laden frames. The honey bees were getting increasingly aggressive, which, in turn, increased my frustration. Lifting frame after frame from the hive, I had killed a not-so-small number of worker bees. At first dad had glared at me, but as I continued to squish those poor insects in my frustration-fuelled haze, he came over, and put his hand on my shoulder and said, simply, “take care of your bees, and your bees will take care of you.”
It wasn’t until many, MANY years later that I realized the importance of that statement. It took on so many meanings, as I matured (well, my wife would argue my level of maturity…), and grew older. The flowers the bees gathered from were nothing special, but there was something about the flavour and delicacy of the honey that left many people gushing over it. My dad would smile, and nod his head, everytime someone complimented the honey. We had repeat customers who would buy only from him, and he smiled. He loved those bees, and the honey showed that love.
Take care of your bees, and they’ll take care of you.
Since September is National Honey Month, we celebrate the critter who brings us liquid gold, the honey bee. While buzzing around the National Archives Catalog, Archives Technician Aaron came across this photograph of some honey bees in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger. The caption of the photograph reads, “STS-41C mission specialists Terry Hart (left) and George Nelson (background) examine an aluminum box containing honey bees, a student submitted shuttle experiment, on the Challenger’s middeck.” I just hope those bees stay in the box, because if they get out, it’s going to be one wild space ride with nowhere to run.
people who think its unethical to eat chicken eggs are like people who think bees should keep all their honey. they literally produce more than they need and your unwillingness to even buy local means you are doing nothing to help them, support your small farmers you heathens
This is not true.
1) honeybees do not produce “extra honey.” And beekeepers don’t take some of the honey, they take all of it.
2) chickens have been artificially selected from naturally producing eggs once a month to producing eggs every couple of days. Their bodies are not sustainable and the health complications of this rapid egg production kills chickens.
Hey idk who like. Lied to you about the way honey farms work, but could you stop spreading misinformation? Are you a beekeeper?
Because I am!
Beekeepers make sure hives are fed before there is pollen in the air, protected from predators and the elements, and have enough honey to sustain themselves. We don’t take all of it.
But overproduction of honey leads to stagnation in the hive. It puts stress on the queen to lay eggs, and when they inevitably fill up all their space with honey (instead of filling up the multiple empty, clean boxes of frames beekeepers might put on top of the main hive box), the queen can get so stressed she dies. If there’s a spike in the weather and the hive hasn’t prepared new queen brood, that’s it! The colony is dead. Because there wasn’t enough space for eggs and honey in the hive.
Beekeepers take excess honey. We are constantly monitoring the state of the hive, checking for parasites, analyzing the eggs for diseases, and making sure they are fed and healthy (usually with sugar water and pollen substitutes until they have made enough honey to sustain themselves in the early spring months). If a queen dies prematurely, we make every attempt to replace her to save the colony.
I know there’s an urge to patronize everyone who works in the farming industry, but try to understand the differences between small scale agriculture and industrial farming. There IS a difference. And stop spreading misinformation.
If you’re this passionate about ethical consumption, look into some of the ecofeministresearch on non-hierarchal interspecies relationships (working on building animal-human relationships in a non exploitative way).
But yeah! Stop spreading misinformation! Please
Also if I can harp on the chicken part?
Yea Chickens are some of the most abused animals on big factory farms and I’ll be the first to admit it’s criminal and more needs to be done to regulate this.
Yes selective breeding over time has caused an increase in the ammount of eggs produced by chickens and factory farms have some messed up practices to get more eggs from them including forced moutling.
THIS IS WHY YOU SUPPORT LOCAL FARMERS AND THEIR EGGS
Many people take to raising their own hens because of America’s immoral treatment of hens in factory farms like you’re not helping the poor chicks by starving these farmers financially you’re just hurting the one people trying to change things and making the OPTION of cage free organic cruelty free eggs even harder to find
Yeah, as someone who like… lives on a chicken and duck farm… Coops help keep wild animals out but birds are kinda dumb. And chickens literally do not need to keep the unfertilized eggs!
Most chickens will sit on unfertilized eggs until they can tell if they are or not… By the smell of rotting egg. Yeah, ew. Farmers can hold that bitch to the flashlight and tell if there’s a baby in there! They know! The eggs are not being abused!
Also - once a month? Like thousands of years ago maybe? Because Grandpa had chickens he literally let just roam around his farm and built coops and scattered corn for them and I helped collect the eggs, and believe me, those chickens each laid more than once a month.
As a beekeeper…what the fuck? No we don’t take all the honey. That would be downright ridiculous.
Reblogging for the bee facts. Love me some bees.
And chicken facts!
Additionally, cows need milked or their offers will get heavy and painful. And sheep need sheared or they’ll overheat and maggots can home in the wool n eat em alive! Shearing does NOT hurt sheep. It’s literally just like getting a haircut or shaving your legs.
That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.
Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.
excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[
the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.
and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.
so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.
If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.
Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.
✌️✌️✌️
Plus, buying honey supports bee owners, which helps them maintain the hives, and if they get more money they can buy more hives, which means more bees!
I tell people this. About the honey and what to do to save bees. I also have two large bottles of honey in my cabinet currently. Trying to get some flowers for them to thrive on. Support your bees guys
… uh guys… the whole “Save the Bees!” thing is not about honeybees. It’s about the decline of native bees almost to the point of extinction. Native bees do not make honey. Honeybees are domesticated. Taking measures to protect honeybees is as irrelevant to helping the environment as protecting Farmer John’s chickens.
To help save native bees, yes, plant NATIVE flowers (what naturally grows where you live? That’s what your bees eat!), set up “bee hotels,” which can be something as simple as a partially buried jar or flower pot for carpenter bees, and don’t use pesticides. Having a source of water (like a bird bath or “puddles” you frequently refresh) is also good for a variety of wildlife.
Want to know more about bees that are not honeybees?
Every place has different types of bees. Every place has different types of plants/flowers. Those hyped-up “save the bees” seed packets that are distributed across North America are garbage becausenone of those flowers are native in every habitat. Don’t look up “how to make a bee hotel” and make something that only bees from the great plains areas would use if you live on the west coast.
This is every bee that has been observed and uploaded to the citizen science network of iNaturalist. You can filter by location (anywhere in the world! This is not restricted to the US!), and you can view photos of every species people have added. Here’s the page for all bees, sorted by taxonomy, not filtered to any specific location [link]. Have you seen a bee and want to know more about it, but you don’t know what kind of bee it is? Take a picture, upload it to iNat, and people like me will help you identify it–and it will also become part of the database other people will use to learn about nature!
Some native Texan bees I’ve met!
A sweat bee! [link to iNat]. These flowers are tiny, no larger than a dime.
A longhorn bee! [link to iNat] I don’t know where they nest, but I often find them sleeping on the tips of flowers at night (so cute!)
Meet your local bees! Befriend them! Feed them! Make them homes! Love them!
This is one of the native bees I met in Arizona! This handsome man is a male Melissodes sp., AKA a type of long-horned bee. I saved him when he was drowning in a puddle.
I love him
This is a great post all in all but I’d just like to note that colony collapse syndrome is definitely a thing, so domestic honeybees are absolutely in danger as well
Europen Honey Bees are an invasive species in the US and compete with native bees.
Native bee populations are specifically evolved to pollinate certain native plants. Most are unlikely to have a significant effect on the pollination of the non-native crops that people need to grow to survive. It’s true that honeybees will compete with native bees as well, and can be classified as an invasive species, but so long as native bees are supported and native flora is maintained, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to coexist. And while there’s a whole different argument to be had about the negative effects of growing nonnative crops at all, if they fail, as they likely would without the honeybees that a large percentage of farmers keep to pollinate their and other local crops, the effects on humanity will be catastrophic
Lest people think I am anti-honeybee (no? I love honeybees?? They are precious??), the above is correct. Like it or not, the way we grow our food (much of which is not native to where it’s farmed) absolutely requires pollinators like honeybees. We would have a hugely massive food crisis on our hands without honeybees.
But, because so much $$$ is tied into the continued production of food, governments and food production companies will do whatever they can to mitigate the effects of colony collapse and other honeybee health issues. What can you do to help honeybees? Buy and eat food. Easy, right?
What is being done to protect native bees? Well,
1) Scientists and researchers are feverishly trying to get them listed as protected species and absolutely failing (see @thelepidopteragirl’s post about colleagues of hers: [link]).
2) Scientists and researchers are trying to get pesticides known to have devastating effects on bees and other pollinators banned and absolutely failing ([link]).
3) Scientists and science communicators (like me now, apparently) are trying to spread this information about native bees and their importance so more people can do little things like plant native flowers (lookup North American species for your zip code here: [link]), change how often they mow their lawns ([link]), and vote out the assholes who are profiting by destroying our environment ([link]). Success on this one: TBD, and by people like us.
As a gift to the honeybee lovers out there, please accept this photo of one making out with a stinkhorn mushroom:
^An excellent post on the complexities of the “Save the Bees” movement
To add, honeybees are also having problems in, you know, Europe and Asia, where they are native!
I feel like that gets forgotten by many, as Tumblr is very USA centered.
#TBT to my first hive and the first photos not taken by my dad’s disposable camera. This photo by @cityathena for her @sidehustlestories project, called The Rooftop Beekeeper, is in the Crystal City Fotowalk exhibit this week.
Some #bts on this photo, @cityathena is standing inside my room, shooting through the screen. The bees were calm that day as they always seem to be for company. You can tell because my veil isn’t even sealed at the top. My neighbor’s brilliant blue house is what stands out to me. He repaints it that color every 2 years so it stays that way. Talk about dedication to a look.
This is me exploring, learning, knowing next to nothing for sure. For all my fiddling, this hive survived several winters. Thank you, bees. It would be another few seasons before Good Sense Farm was on my mind.
Thank you M for capturing this moment. #beekeeping #photography #igdc
Anyway, this is where it all started. #Rooftop #beekeeping in NWDC. #crystalcityphotowalk Where it all started. #Rooftop #beekeeping in NWDC.
#TBT to my first hive and the first photos not taken by my dad’s disposable camera. This photo by @cityathena for her @sidehustlestories project, called The Rooftop Beekeeper, is in the Crystal City Fotowalk exhibit this week.
Some #bts on this photo, @cityathena is standing inside my room, shooting through the screen. The bees were calm that day as they always seem to be for company. You can tell because my veil isn’t even sealed at the top. My neighbor’s brilliant blue house is what stands out to me. He repaints it that color every 2 years so it stays that way. Talk about dedication to a look.
This is me exploring, learning, knowing next to nothing for sure. For all my fiddling, this hive survived several winters. Thank you, bees. It would be another few seasons before Good Sense Farm was on my mind.
Thank you M for capturing this moment. Check out her work ya’ll. She’s great!
Anyway, this is where it all started. #Rooftop #beekeeping in NWDC. #crystalcityphotowalk
The die-off of America’s honeybee colonies, which are disappearing in droves because of parasites, pesticides, poor nutrition and disease, leave beekeepers scrambling to salvage the vital insects.
The task of solving the honeybee problem, experts say, isn’t isolated to beekeepers. A few changes to home patios and gardens can lend honeybees a much-needed assist.
Last year, a third of the nation’s honeybee colonies died, which is low considering the bigger decreases of the last decade. This doesn’t necessarily mean fewer bees. Beekeepers can salvage a dead colony, but it comes with labor and production costs.
I forget when we found the first swarm of bees, maybe two weeks ago? Anyway, it was a small swarm and a beekeeper came over and scooped them into a hive. Then, yesterday evening, we found another much larger swarm. They were huddled in a tree near the road. A second beekeeper (brother-in-law of the first) came over right at dusk. He placed the hive under the mass of bees and then gently shook the tree. They plopped into the box, and those who were left out filed neatly and quickly inside after their queen.
At this point, who knows how many bees are still in the wall of the house. And there were three queens? Or maybe the workers made themselves a new queen very quickly after their first swarm got disrupted by cold weather. If we are REALLY lucky, maybe this is all of them, and the wall of the house is beeless, now.
Anyhoo, I very, very much wanted to walk over and gently put my hand in among the bees. I didn’t, but I wanted to.
My dad was giving me a hard time when we did a hive check for taking so many photographs while we looked at the brood frames. Well, the other day I was out observing the hive and I came across a few feet of yard that was completely covered in dead and dying bees. The bee graveyard. You couldn’t even see the dirt of the ground, it was completely hidden by bee bodies. I collected a large drone that was scrambling around. At first glance, he looked normal, healthy. No tattered wings even. Once I scooped him up and took some photos of him, I saw it. A little brown dot, the size of a pinhead, on his fuzzy thorax. Varroa mites. AKA the bee version of ticks. They say when you see one, there’s a lot more where that came from. Then I re-examined the photos I’d taken the week before during the hive inspection. While I hadn’t noticed it the first time looking at the photos, this time I could pick out a mite here and a mite there. Then, the disfigured wings of a bee, indicating it had Deformed Wing Virus. Not good.
So now we are working on helping the bees rid themselves of the mites before the mite population grows and overwhelms the bees and we see a colony collapse. Natural treatment includes placing a mite catcher at the bottom of the hive (with a screen only the mites can fit & fall through, and sticky paper underneath to trap them) and dusting the bees themselves with a thin coat of powdered sugar which encourages them to groom themselves and then hopefully groom off the mites, dropping them down into the trap below.
I’ll post updates, but please wish our bees some extra strength and vitality as they fight off their mites! And taking photos during your hive inspections is a great way to document the hive health and provides you with clear references of your bees without having a time-limit or needing to worry about stressing them (except for that initial inspection), and then you can always go back and look for things you may have missed upon the live-inspection.
Photo descriptions:
1. A brood frame
2. A couple mites on some of the larvae
3. In the middle right you can see a drone with a mite on his thorax
4. On the far left and also in the center there are two bees with Deformed Wing Virus.
@celebrateasimplelife no, we didn’t lose them! They made a full recovery. And we did not treat them with Oxalic Acid (poison) as many keepers will recommend for mites.. we treated every few days for about a month with sprinkling them with powdered sugar which encourages them to clean themselves off and groom one another (and pull mites off). We also added a grate and sticky sheet to the bottom board so as mites fell off they would be trapped and more easily cleaned out. And finally we made sure the hive could retain its high internal temps by switching back to the “winter” top instead of the “summer” top that lets a lot more air flow through and is more cooling because the mites don’t survive in high temps (but bees do - just not too hot - but they are good at regulating and will put workers outside the entrance to fan in air if they need to)
I keep mason bees. Every day in the early spring, I go outside and watch them work. I sing to them as they store pollen from the apple trees and lay their eggs. I tell them how beautiful they are. Their children will know me next year.
Gardening in the western world involves taking measures against certain pests – such as rabbits, deer, or beetles – nibbling on crops. But we don’t have to worry about elephants merrily trampling our carefully-tended produce. But certain villages in Africa are faced with this dilemma every day. One environmentally friendly (and “elephant friendly”) solution is to install beehive fences to deter the majestic beasts from wandering inside. It turns out the old stereotype of elephants being afraid of tiny creatures is true – and it’s a profitable trick for farmers.
Every frame of Honeyland pulses with the cycles of life and glows with the film’s subject, Hatidze’s, magical vitality and optimism. This visually sumptuous, vérité glimpse into a forgotten world is an ode to two endangered and priceless treasures: human decency and the delicate balance of nature.
With honey in tow, directors Tamara Kotevska (center) and Ljubomir Stefanov (2nd from left) and theHoneyland team premiered their documentary during the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The film took home multiple World Cinema Documentary awards including the Grand Jury Prize and two Special Jury Awards for cinematography and impact for change.
Honeyland opens in select cities on Friday, July 26.
