DECATUR -- The northwest corner of Decatur is abuzz with a low-pitch hum, and it is not the sound of a low flying aircraft. Instead, the humming noise is the sound of thousands of bee wings beating 200 times per second. This action helps to keep one Decatur resident's venture into the world of apiculture (the maintenance of bee hives) alive.
Harold Holt always dreamed of having a working bee colony. A little over a year ago that dream came true when a friend gave him a wild hive of around 20,000 bees. He cultivated the hive into a successful colony that produced about 1.5 gallons of honey in 2014.
Holt was so pleased with his results that he ordered another 20,000 European bees to start a new hive. In a few weeks the United States Postal Service delivered his new colony right to his door. This began colony number two.
Holt, along with his wife, Gina, owns Holt Taxidermy which he operates in a barn near his home off of Chicken Hollow Road in Decatur. This allows him to work and watch his bees at the same time.
Beekeeping has been around for thousands of years. Several cultures, including the ancient Greeks, Romans and other cultures in Asia, have cultivated bees for their amber nectar for use as a sweetener. The early Egyptians depicted some of the early methods of beekeeping and the harvest process in their early art work around 4,500 years ago. Sometime around 1620, the first hive of European bees came to America.
Early primitive hives used hollow logs, holes built in mud walls or cones of mud to maintain a colony. In the mid 19th century, Lorenzo Langstroth (considered the father of modern bee hive design in America) built a bee hive using a rectangle wood frame box with between eight to 12 wood frames set between 1/4 and 3/8 of an inch apart. While studying the bees in his hive design, he noticed that they always maintained this distance between frames to facilitate movement within the hive. Langstroth call his new discovery "the bee space."
Bees are the only insects in the world that produce food fit for human consumption.
The bees live in a colony of between 20,000 to 60,000 inhabitants. The colony is split into three classes, queen, workers, and drones. Each colony has one queen whose sole purpose is to mate. She can lay up to 2,500 eggs per day. During the reproduction process, the queen uses stored sperm to produce the worker. Worker bees are females that maintain the hives and produce the various components needed to feed the larvae. They are the ones that go out and collect nectar and return it to the hive, where it is transformed into honey.
The third class of bees are called the drones. These are unfertilized larvae that are male. Unlike the workers, the drones are hatched without a stinger. Their sole purpose is to mate with the queen to maintain the population of the colony.
Some worker bees are posted at the entrance to the hive as guardians, protecting the hive from invading insects and other queen colonies.
Over the past few decades, honey bees have gotten a bad reputation, thanks to a few beekeepers from Brazil whose importation of African bees led to a new more aggressive strain of bees. The original idea was to cross breed the African bees with the European variety to increase honey production. Instead, the new breed was more aggressive and, in some cases, deadly. The Killer bee invades the more docile European colony and breeds a bigger, more dangerous variety of bee. The irony in this new breed is that it actually produces less honey than their docile cousins.
One of Holt's colonies is set in an observation hive, similar to an ant farm. It is a wood frame supporting two large panes of glass. This allows an observation port into the inner workings of a bee colony. Two shutters cover either pane of glass when Holt transports the colony to shows.
When the hive is stationary at home, a glass tube connects the hive to an exit point on the outside of the barn. This acts as a bee freeway, allowing the workers and queen to enter and exit the hive to collect nectar and stretch their wings. Bees can fly between 4 and 6 miles from the hive at an average speed of 15 miles per hour. This portal to another world allows we humans the chance to see the everyday workings of a live bee colony -- the queen, the workers and the drones all doing what nature designed them to do.
"I started out with six frames when I first built this observation hive," Holt said. "It got so congested in there that I added six more and, when that got too congested here recently, I added another six for a total of 18 frames."
Donning a bee suit and carrying a bee smoker, a device used to calm bees, Holt headed for his outdoor colony. When he opened the top, bees exited the box and headed toward whatever was disturbing the hive. After a quick puff of smoke, the bees calmed down.
Holt carefully pulled out each frame and examined it for honey production. One of the frames showed a new comb in the construction phase. Other frames were bare, which is normal when starting a new colony. Looking down into the bee space and into the dark void, the familiar buzzing sounds of thousands of bees flapping their wings filled the air. In this case, the bees use their wings to regulate the temperature in the hive. If the queen gets too hot, she stops the reproduction process and puts her life in danger.
At 3 p.m. when Holt opened the hive, there were fewer then two or three thousand bees in the hive. At that time, most worker bees are still out gathering nectar and distributing pollen. The majority of the colony returns to the hive late in the afternoon, just before sunset.
For Harold Holt, working with 20,000 bees is both relaxing and fun. He is currently planning to add more boxes to his outdoor hive to boost honey production. Someday soon, there may be jars of Holt honey on the shelf in the local supermarket.
General News on 10/28/2015