Excellent photo!
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@sweetleafbees
Excellent photo!
Hives, hives and hives!
Everyone is familiar with the most famous of eusoical species of bee; the European honeybee (Apis Mellifera), and for good reason. Humans have been harvesting honey from honeybees for approximately 10,000 years and it’s believed we’ve been keeping bees for as long as 7000 years ago. There are so many interesting ways in which past humans kept hives but the most recognisable and popular is the traditional hive box.
Besides the hive box, there are a many other ways in which humans today keep honeybees and in Australia our native species of stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria. From modern takes on the tradition hive box, to more historical top-bar hives, to native hive boxes and even to bee hotels which are used to attract solitary native bees, humans love bees and love providing them with homes.
Traditional Hive Boxes
There are a few traditional hive box designs widely used globally and are similar in that they use moveable frames, have honey supers, brood boxes, a crown board and a queen excluder. They typically look and function very similar with some differences in number of frames, dimensions and where they’re used.
1. The Langstroth Hive
The most widely used hive box and common hive box (especially in Australia and the US).
2. Commercial Hive
Designed to encourage a large volume of honey in the supers and is used by commercial honey producers.
3. Dadant Hive
Very similar to the Langstroth hive but is used in France and parts of Spain.
4.The National Hive
Also similar to the Langstroth hive and is most commonly used in Britain, Europe and in the US.
5. WBC Hive
Not a very popular hive due to it being hard and inconvenient to dismantle, they have a more unique shape then just the tradition box and are used in Britain.
Alternative Honeybee Hives
1. Top-bar hive -
The top-bar hives are a modern take on the traditional honeybee hives and promote the natural shape of the honeycomb cells, allowing for larger cells that produce a larger economic yield of honey and bees wax. This is especially useful for beekeepers that have only a few hives.
The top-bar hives therefore resemble what the hive of wild or feral honeybee colony look like.They are also designed with the main body of the hive to be long and trapezoid-like in shape: like below.
A viewing window or door is sometimes added onto the side of the hive too. This hive was designed with being easy to construct and inexpensive for the modern bee keeper. As well as producing a more natural sized-cell as opposed to framed hives.
Single bars of wooden frames are simply placed along the top of the base of the hive. The bees will then begin to fill the frame downwards like so, creating these beautiful circular frames that mound to the shape of the hive. A queen excluder is also added about half way in these hives, to separate the honey super part of the hive to the brood part of the hive.
2. Warré Hive-
Designed by Abbé Warré in 1948 Warré took the idea of the top-bar hive and designed it into a more traditional hive box. Warré published the designs in his book “Beekeeping For All” in which he advocates for far less interference with hives and bees when it comes to beekeeping.
Instead of the use of frames this hive simply uses single bars of wood like the above top-bar hives installed in the hive-body boxes that can be stacked into towers if the colony requires more space. The top of the hive is fitted with a roof and a box with cloth and wood shavings to keep the hive insulated.
3. Log hive -
Some beekeepers believe that hive boxes are too restrictive for the bees and impacts on their health. They’ve therefore turned to a more natural form of keeping bees, in hollowed out logs!
The honey is typically stored to the back of the log hive away from the entrance. Keepers harvest this by installing a back opening or door and allows them to cut out the raw honeycomb without disturbing the bees or the brood.
4. FLOW hive
The FLOW hive is an Australia invention with the goal of harvesting the honey without having to open the hive and manually remove the frames of honeycomb.
FLOW works by having frames of built-in combs, the bees are able to fill these with honey. Once full the beekeeper can turn a level to turn the honeycomb frames into the below shape. This allows the honey to flow down to the honey super, before it can be collected from the tap, all without having to open the hive and harvest the honey manually.
This hive is an efficient method of collecting honey and makes beekeeping more accessible to hobbyists and amateurs.
However it raises a few issues and risks. Mainly the use of plastics. Bees tend not to like plastic, hence why most hives are made from other materials. Plastic reduces the wax they can use to build their hive; that changes temperature and vibrates at a resonant frequency (230-270Hz) that match the bees’ sensors, allowing bees to communicate across the hive. Wax also holds the history and memory of the chemical signals used by bees.
In colder climates the honey within the hive may also crystallise blocking the FLOW hive and requiring the frames to be removed and cleaned. It was also found that the FLOW hives produced low estrogenic activities in royal jelly.
Reducing the contact humans have with their bees can also be of negative consequences. Any disease, illness or parasites in the hives may go unnoticed if the beekeeper is not opening the hive to monitor their colony.
Native Bee Hives
1. OATH - Original Australian Tetragonula Hive
2. Solitary Bee Hotels
Solitary bees make up the largest percentage of bee species. With 90% of all the 20,000 species of bees being solitary. As such solitary bee “hives” aren’t really hives at all but nests, sometimes called bee hotels. These “hives” contain separate holes that allow for females from solitary species to barrow and lay eggs in.
There are a few different genus’ of solitary bee that will use these hotels including and not limited to; carpenter bees, green carpenter bee, reed bees, resin bees, masked bees.
The hotels are simple in design; made from holes drilled into wood or separate holes using bamboo or other hollowed out wood.
There is no need to a queen separator (as solitary species have no queens) or for brood or honey supers. As solitary bees do not produce honey. These “hives” therefore require no real keeping or maintenance and are kept primarily for encouraging native bee species and pollination (as native bees are often better at pollinating native flora species compared to honey bees!)
This is a great post. How long did it take you to make this? I just like appreciating the work behind quality content.
I wrote most of it up almost a year ago and forgot about it in my drafts until today, quickly finished it and posted it! So technically over a year.
There are no bees in space.
Well guess where I aiNT FUCKIN GOIN
Enough with the Glyphosate! Stop using it!
Common weed killer—believed harmless to animals—may be harming bees worldwide
Glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide and one long touted as harmless to animals, might be taking a toll on honey bees. The chemical appears to disrupt the microbial community in the bees’ digestive system, making them more vulnerable to infection. The discovery adds another potential reason for the alarming decline of honey bees in parts of the world, as well as that of other pollinators that live in colonies, such as bumble bees.
Found on FB
*******PLEASE DON’T LEAVE DISHES OF SUGAR WATER OUT*******
Post from a beekeeper
Oh dear - I keep hearing tips about leaving bowls of sugar water out to “help” keep bees hydrated. Please, please, please DON’T. Bees are really good at finding what they need and there are so many reasons not to do this. The MOST IMPORTANT reason is that if you within 3 miles of some hives (and most people are) if the bees find the sugar water they’re going to think its a great source of easy food, go back to the hive and recruit more bees to come and collect the “food” and before you know it you’ll have 1.000s and 1,000s of bees descending on your garden/balcony - a very scary sight. This is known as robbing and as beekeeper I’ve seen this a couple of times - once started it is impossible to stop until the source of the “food” has gone.
Other reasons not to do this are - sugar water is essentially “junk” food for bees. Its full of carbohydrates which will give them an energy burst, but has no other nutritional value unlike the food they should be having i.e. nectar.
Honey bees will store this as honey in the hive. The beekeeper unknowingly may end up extracting and selling this as honey later in the year. You don’t want to buy sugar syrup and the beekeeper doesn’t want to be prosecuted for selling a product which isn’t honey.
This is also an easy food source for social wasps.
By all means give a tired bee a drink of sugar water on a spoon, but please don’t leave it out for them.
If you want to help bees there are lots of ways you can do this from planting nectar rich plants or leaving out bowls of water with gravel/small pebbles in so they can access the water which they would be very grateful for.
PLEASE SHARE THIS AND TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS
Edited - It appears that a lot of the advice I have seen about leaving out sugar water stems from advice from DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. He was absolutely right in his advice, but his advice was if you see a struggling bee to put some sugar water where the bee could reach it - not to leave out bowls of sugar water. Unfortunately it seems like, as usual, media publications have misquoted advice and not done their research
Also please don’t feed bees honey. Surprisingly they don’t eat honey - they eat nectar. Honey bees make honey for their own use during the winter months, but bumble bees collect and use nectar as and when they need it.
Feeding honey can spread disease between bees.
Reblog for a tired bee
Wild blueberry
buzzy bee
Blue Banded Bees Sleeping
the bee hotel has been populated! there’s so many different types of bees here. hopefully in spring we will have lots of babies hatching out!
its been fascinating watching all my native pollinators 🐝
Bombus ashtoni! This is news.
This species of bumble bee is nest parasite. They take over the nests of other bumble bees and use the host’s workers to produce their progeny. This one is special because its known hosts are B. affinis (the endangered Rusty-patched Bumble Bee) and B. terricola (a species that declined greatly from its former numbers, but may be recovering now. Thus the odds were stacked against our parasite friend, who may also be vulnerable to the pathogens that took out these species.
So, how cool was it when Matt Schlesinger/Amanda Dillon passed a few “interesting” bumble bees collected in the Albany Pine Bush in New York by specimens by Tim McCabe in 2016 and there it was.
Leif Richardson (keeper of the Bumble Bee Database) writes about the last eastern records for B. ashtoni: Michael Veit got it in NH in 2010 and MA in 2008. Sheila Colla has a 2008 record from Pinery in ON (west of the Appalachians). I have three records 2007-2008 from Michel Savard and Pierre-Marc Brousseau in Quebec. Next most recent are from Cory Sheffield in Nova Scotia, 2002.
We need this kind of good news….
All original pictures completely public domain and available at our Flickr site:https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/
Photography Information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_yvIsucOY
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/usgsbiml/
sam droege, public bee servant
Salvaged some materials from the backyard and garage to make an insect hotel for our backyard designed to encourage beneficial insects (such as solitary native bees, predatory wasps and ladybugs) into the garden to increase our biodiversity and help manage pests who ruin my fruit and veg!
Dark Vs. Light
Honey bees of the North American kept variety, come in different shades. Some dark, some light. We are trying to capture a series of dark and light bees, to start off here are typical light and dark variants. There is no particular “race” of honey bees that appear to be associated with there variants.
All original pictures completely public domain and available at our Flickr site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/
Photography Information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_yvIsucOY
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/usgsbiml/
Download our free field guide to the genera of bees:
http://bio2.elmira.edu/fieldbio/beesofmarylandbookversion1.pdf
Public Bee Servant, sam droege
Wetland Bee.
There are many bees in wetlands. Why?
Because so many wetland plants have flowers that are designed to lure bees. Why, for example, are water lilies so large and colorful? So they look good in our pretend suburban ponds? Nope. To attract bees out into the pond for a little pollination fun? Yup. And, here you will find Lasioglossum nelumbonis a waterlily bee. You see, the miracle of writing has once again intentionally brought a plant and animal concupiscentiae invicem together. Picture by Sydney Price.
All original pictures completely public domain and available at our Flickr site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/
Photography Information: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_yvIsucOY
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/usgsbiml/
Download our free field guide to the genera of bees:http://bio2.elmira.edu/fieldbio/beesofmarylandbookversion1.pdf
Public Bee Servant, sam droege
dark bee tumblr show me the forbidden bees
this is the masked bee! she has no friends and hates everyone. Sometimes when she has kids she raises them alone and doesn’t let the father come for day trips. she loves pollen but does not like waiting for it so she chews flowers open which is essentially stealing. we love her anyway.
these bees are homalictus bees! they are the rainbow gay bees. Females tend to live together in one nest and guard the entrance. one time we found 160 gay girls bunking together. They’re so irridescent and small that they might look like flies but they are really just tiny lesbians.
and this is the blue banded bee! she may look like she’s wacked out, but really she is pretty chill. she just wants to live independently (or with some friends) in a nest or burrow and look after tomatoes.
this is a cuckoo bee! she is really cool! she goes into other bee’s houses and lays eggs there, and then when the baby hatches it eats the host bees’ pollen and lays waste to the hive, murdering and eating all the other bee babies! BUT ONLY if it’s mother bee didn’t kill them all first.
thank u dark bee tumblr
This is the most successful thing ever!
this is dawson’s burrowing bee! they are one of the largest bees in australia and they burrow into the ground to make nests. males are so aggressive that they will literally fight and kill each other to get a female! and if a particularly aggressive male does not get a female he will murder all of the other males out of rage! (and sometimes the females will be casualties of these brawls - here is a video of a bee brawl where a female get decapitated. these bees are very large and kind of look like half bee half cockroach. but the females’s fuzzy white heads are pretty cute! [photo credit]
and dark bee tumblr comes through for us again… we are so fortunate. thank u dark bee tumblr. thank u
I’m mad that they missed the opportunity to use “les-bee-ans”
This is a tree bumblebee- they’re pretty similar to honeybees in that they have big nests with a polyandrous queen. However, these guys love to be around humans and in gardens, and are super resilient- there are now large populations in Iceland. They have a more complex social hierarchy than most bees, with multiple worker castes. If a worker gets close with the queen she can mate with a drone and lay her own eggs in with the big pile, but eat the eggs of any workers beneath her that try to do so.
This is a valley carpenter bee- the only bee that can thermoregulate and had a circulatory system complete with aortic arch. Carpenter bees are good because they are too big to get into many flowers and have to be extra hairy to get pollen. They live in raw wood in small family units of all females (mothers and daughters or sisters) and are excellent cooks and workers. Males cruise around mating with multiple females and then leave.
These are green sweat bees- they burrow in the ground and live in apartment complexes, where they all use the same entrance but then have their own separate burrows rather than one large room. Some have kids, some don’t, so someone’s always around to keep out invaders. Unlike most bees the males actually do quite a bit of pollinating and go out in groups.
dark bee tumblr has graced us once again with even more forbidden and secret bees we are truly blessed
Coming at you with another Australian native bee; tetragonula carbonaria or the sugarbag bee. They are a stingless species instead using resin to trap and entomb invaders that get into their hive as shown below (which doesn’t happen often because these bees are tiny and the entrances to their hives are also just as tiny).
Like honey bees they are eusocial. Meaning they live in hives with a queen, drones and worker bees that create these complex hives that are completely different to honey bee hives. With honey and pollen pots built on the outside of the hive and the spiral structure in the middle made up of brood cells, where in the centre the queen sits.
do you dare pass through the sticky traps and enter the B E E S P I R A L
Hoplitis mason bee nest cell. Species unknown, a rather large black bee that frequents the garden in July. One can see the lengths these bees will go to protect the next generation. Multiple layers of chewed leaves represent the outer and innermost walls with tiny rocks filling the space between-the stone masonry that gives these bees their name. The cocoon rests securely in the middle. Of course the mother bee has to collect these materials and the effort must be nothing short of laborious, especially lofting those rocks in the air. Honey bees are given a lot of credit for their architectural skills however the knack for building is present throughout the expanse of bee diversity. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~#beenest #cocoon #hoplitis #masonbee #bees #bugs #insects #macro #canonmacro #insects_of_our_world #mat_macro #kings_insects #found_on_flowers #macro_freaks #top_macro #macroclique #tgif_insects #macro_kings #photooftheday #beesofinstagram #pocket_insects #macro_brilliance #macro_perfection #top_macro #macro_highlight #macro_spotlight #electric_macro #igmw_macro