Picking up the packages
On a sunny Saturday afternoon, three weeks ago, I was driving very slowly along a meandering mountain road, the windows of my compact, hatchback car open to let out the last confused honey bees. Minutes earlier I had picked up ten packages: plastic, ventilated boxes, each containing about ten thousand worker honey bees and one queen in a little screened cage with a can of syrup for food. I could hear their collective buzzing over the low hum of the engine. All of our experiments on bee foraging behavior this summer will feature these new colonies.
10 empty package boxes after feeder cans were removed and all bees had moved into their hives [1]
A few hundred workers had been sitting on the outside of the boxes, but these soon flew toward the light. After every flying bee had left the car and returned to the apiary that they came from, I rolled up the windows and turned on the AC, aiming the vents up so that the cold air would reach the bees in the back of the car and prevent them from overheating during the drive. I had thought about renting a pickup truck, but it seemed best, when driving on unfamiliar mountain roads, to have a car that I was familiar with, and my car (who I named “Speedwell. Veronica Speedwell” after the genus of light blue wildflowers) has an excellent turning radius.
After a few more loops of the road, I noticed a new set of workers trying to fly out of the back window. On the next turn I pulled off at one of the many gravel spaces on the side of the road where people park in order to walk around and take in the view. I got out and opened the back door to let out these straggler bees, and I noticed a group of a few hundred workers on the outside of one of the boxes. What was worse, the group was growing. Clearly bees were walking out through some leak in the box. On closer inspection, I realized that I’d made the ratchet strap I’d used to secure the boxes too tight, causing one box to bend a bit. The bending opened up a small hole, only about the width of two bees, but that was enough. Unhappily, it refused to bend back. Darn it! I thought. Why in the world did I leave my duct tape at the apiary?
Clearly, it was time to improvise. Along with the bees, I had received a bag of marshmallows and nails. These were meant to be used later, the nails to pull the cork plug out of each cage with a queen in it and then replace the cork with marshmallows, which the worker bees would slowly eat, eventually releasing the queen into the hive. In that way, the worker bees would have time to become accustomed to the odor of the queen, and the queen would be less likely to fly off and perhaps take the workers with her. However, I decided that, in the absence of duct tape, these marshmallows would have to do. I crammed two marshmallows into the hole in the box and then stuck a piece of paper I had on the outside for an added barrier. Fortunately, that solution worked remarkably well to keep the rest of the bees inside.
Marshmallow/paper plugging gap in a package box [2]. Photo taken after we had started hiving packages of bees. You can see worker bees gathering around the plug.
Now to deal with the bees who had already escaped. Unlike the previous workers clinging to the outside of the box, these workers didn’t want to fly right away. Thankfully, I had remembered to bring a small insect vacuum, a battery-powered device that looks remarkably like a ray gun from a ‘50s SciFi movie. You insert a little canister with the screened end toward the vacuum and a rubber valve towards the bees. Then, you turn it on and point the nozzle at each bee in turn. The suction pulls the valve open and she goes flying in and hits the screened end of the canister (but not hard enough to cause her any harm). Then, after collecting the bees, you turn off the vacuum, take out the canister, open it, and you can pretty easily tap the bees out. Confused, these bees finally flew off.
Small insect vacuum [1]
After driving another 20 minutes, I stopped in a small town to check for cell service. I had agreed to call my research mentor, Matina Donaldson-Matasci, when I had picked up the bees and let her know what time google maps predicted that I would arrive at our apiary site. Unfortunately, I was running late, and there was no cell service in the mountains. I called her to tell her how late I’d be (she was very understanding, as usual), and then set off on the highway. Even on a Saturday, driving around Los Angeles was frustratingly slow, including multiple segments of stop-and-go traffic (but perhaps that was a good thing, with so many bees in the car).
Our apiary site
Apiary site after all bees had moved into their new hives [1]
Our apiary site is on land maintained by the Pomona Valley Protective Association, called the San Antonio Spreading Grounds, which has a fence around it and a locked gate. After locking it behind us, we drove down a gravel road, made a few turns, and then arrived at another fence and gate. This fence secures our bees/equipment and prevents people from accidentally walking into the inner, electric fence. Bears are apparently common in this area, and they love to eat honey and bee larvae (sugar and protein!). A friend recently told me that the Russian word for bear, медведь, roughly translates as “one who knows where honey is,” which seems fitting. So the electric fence serves to deter any bears that might come nosing around (giving them a fairly painful shock on their nose if they try).
Inside the electric fence is a tall frame with shade cloth over it to keep the bees and beekeepers cool and a solar panel to provide power for lights or whatever other equipment we may need for research. Under the shade cloth are two tables and three rebar hive stands, enough to support ten hives and keep them away from ants (who would also be happy to steal honey and larvae). Each table/stand leg sits in a container with some oil.
Hiving the packages of bees
Disclaimer: If you’re hiving your own bees for the first time, please follow instructions from your bee supplier and get advice from any beekeeping mentors that you have. Different beekeepers have different opinions about the best way to install packages of bees in hives, and it depends on whether you ordered nucleus colonies/packages.
Matina Donaldson-Matasci hiving a package of bees [1].
Next came the main event of the day. We got ready, putting on our bee jackets, each with a mesh veil so we could see the bees but they couldn’t fly at our faces. We needed to transfer the worker bees and queen from each box into their new home, a wooden hive with moveable frames inside for them to build beeswax comb on. First, we spray the bees with very dilute sugar syrup to limit their ability to fly (they will clean each other off). Then, we tap the box on the ground to shake workers off the feeder can blocking the circular hole at the top of the box, pull out the feeder can, and pull out the queen cage, covering the hole up with a piece of cardboard to keep the workers from flying. We brush any workers off the cage to get a good look at the queen. Is she alive? Does she look healthy? Was her thorax marked with paint so that we can easily find and identify her later? All the queens looked great. We replace the cork plug in the cage with marshmallows for slow-release of the queen (as described above).
Paint-marked queen honey bee in a screened cage, see blue arrow [2]. You can also see many worker bees on the plastic frames, two workers on the outside of the queen cage, and two workers on my index finger, antennating- tapping each other with their antennae- to get information ("Are you a member of my colony?”).
Then we needed to shake the workers out the box and into the hive. You might expect that this shaking would make them aggressive, but these bees had no wax comb, honey, or young larvae/pupae to defend. They were in a state similar to swarming, when a honey bee colony reproduces, the most peaceful state for bees. So we take out a few frames from the center of the hive box, pop open one end of the plastic box full of bees, and hit one corner of that box on a frame so that the workers come tumbling out, into the wooden hive box, forming several layers of bees on the bottom. These bees promptly walk onto the adjacent frames. Many of them raise their abdomens up in the air, expose a gland between two plates of their exoskeletons, and rapidly fan their wings, wafting a pheromone (a chemical signal) through the air that tells bees near them to gather here. This chemical blend is called Nasonov pheromone, and has a pleasant, lemon-grass-like scent.
Honey bees releasing Nasonov pheromone [1]. Blue arrows show bees’ Nasonov glands. Note: this photo was taken in Minnesota in May 2020, and these bees were disoriented because I had left the frame that they were on out of their hive for too long.
Finally, we put all the frames back in the hive, and hang the queen cage between two frames. To feed our bees, we add a patty of pollen substitute over the tops of the frames (protein/fat source) and put a syrup feeder on top, filling it with sucrose syrup (carbohydrate source). The feeder is topped with a cover, and a heavy rock prevents the cover from blowing off in the wind. This whole process is often called “hiving.”
Despite my running late, by working together we finished hiving all ten packages of bees around 6pm, well before sunset. The last step was to clean up and to give our bees a nearby water source (a bucket filled with water and rocks for the bees to land on). We hoped that the workers would quickly eat the syrup and convert it into beeswax, making plenty of hexagonal cells for food storage and rearing young bees. Most importantly, we crossed our fingers that all of the queens would be released in a day or two and accepted by their new workers so that they could start the all-important job of laying eggs. Those eggs represent the future of our young colonies, the would-be workers who will cooperate to accomplish all the tasks ahead, including performing all the waggle dances that we plan to video-record and analyze this summer.
Further Reading
Fauvel, A.M. (2021, March 22) The great bee marathon. Bee Informed Partnership Blog https://beeinformed.org/2021/03/22/after-almonds-the-beekeepers-enduring-race-begins/ (Short description of how commercial beekeepers manage honey bee colony life cycles)
Seeley, T., Passino, K., Visscher, K. (2006). Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms. American Scientist, 94(3), 220. https://doi.org/10.1511/2006.59.220
UMN Bee Lab, "Hiving bees in rain and sleet," YouTube video, 3:47, December 20, 2013, https://youtu.be/Jm9j7ARfa3k.
Media credits
[1]: Photos by Morgan Carr-Markell
[2]: Photos by Matina Donaldson-Matasci