This article is the first in a three-part series devoted to bees and the effects they have on an agrarian community.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), California is the largest producer of agricultural products in the U.S., which accounts for billions of dollars in revenue every year. Since California grows over 200 crops, each requiring pollination, diligent bees are in demand by farmers.
Although bees are in demand, one factor for the rapid increase in the almond industry is that the initial lifespan of a bee is relatively short and can lead to hardship for beekeepers.
According to the Backyard Beekeepers Association, the lifespan of a bee during the summer is six weeks, while during the winter it ranges from 4-9 months. Though the worker bees (female) and drone bees (male) only last a short period of time, queen bees can survive for years.
Long-time Madera beekeeper, Harvey Nickell, who retired after 50 years in the profession, shares his experience in the industry.
?The bees don?t last so long in the summer because they wear off their wings from working in the field,? Nickell said. ?During this time of year the queen will lay as much as two thousand eggs a day depending on if a lot of nectar and pollen is coming in.?
Even though the queen has a longer lifespan, the beekeepers may kill her sooner if she is not producing enough brood, which are eggs that then evolve into the larva and pupa stages of life.
?The queen may look good, but if she?s not producing then she is not good,? Nickell said. ?If we kill her, we will drop her in the hive that way the bees start buzzing and alert the others that something happened to queen. If we don?t do this, then the bees will not realize the queen is gone and eventually the colony will die.?
After the death of the queen, the hives will either select a new queen from some of the virgin bees or the beekeepers will add in a new queen they have purchased.
?A breeder queen can coast up to around $800 so we are always extremely careful with them,? Nickell said. ?There was this one time when a fellow beekeeper purchased one, but then slammed the lid of the colony on her; that was $800 wasted.?
When a new queen is added to a colony, there is a sugar substance that the bees will eat off before she is released, otherwise the colony will kill her due to her different scent.
Since the queen is producing many offspring, the colonies will get crowed and tend to swarm. According to Nickell, to prevent the bees from swarming and causing havoc, beekeepers will create new colonies by splitting a colony in half.
?We will take out a frame or two that contains a lot of brood and some worker bees to start a new hive,? Nickell said. ?But, during this process, we have to be careful to not accidently transfer the queen into the new hive, otherwise the one [hive] we are taking the frames from will die off. So, for the new hive, we place in a new queen that we buy.?
When a queen bee lays an egg, she will place it into a cell within the honeycomb. In about three days the egg will hatch into larva in roll jelly, a white jelly substance that comes from the head of nurse bees and tastes like buttermilk, according to Nickell. Although bees survive on honey and pollen, the queen is the only one allowed to eat the roll jelly.
From the point of being laid as an egg, a queen bee will hatch in 17 days — while a worker bee takes 21 days and a drone is 24. When bees are first born they are wet and pale, but within a few days they will develop the darker color of a bee.
Unlike the female worker bees, the drones are larger and do not have a tongue or stinger, so the hive has to feed and take care of him. The main job of a drone is to mate with a virgin bee; later he dies because the female bee stores his reproductive organ to later use for laying eggs.
?The female bee goes really fast so she gets the strongest drone,? Nickell said. ?By doing this the offspring will be the strongest breed. Then, she comes back after mating and in a few days the mother queen gets happy and they want to swarm since it?s in their nature, but we try to prevent this because bees from other hives will join in and they can swarm across the country.?
For more information about bees read the Dec. 7, 2010 article, Honeybees critical to Valley agriculture, for more information about pollination read the Feb. 23 article, Almond farmers sustain bees, fight pests.
