Where do Bees and Babies Come From?

Today I spent my morning giving a presentation on bees and beekeeping to the second-grade classes at Chestnut Elementary School in Dunwoody, Georgia. The kids were adorable and listened with open mouths when I told them all about the bees and the beehive. I took an observation hive with me and after hard looking, at the very end, one of the students found the queen on the frame for all to see.

I'm explaining to them the jobs of the bees in the hive. I tell them that the queen bee is an egg-laying machine and that she lays eggs all day long. I also tell them that in the dark, she knows when it's the longest day of the year on June 21, and at that point begins to slow her egg-laying down until the shortest day on December 21. Sometimes by the winter solstice, she may have ceased laying eggs altogether. But that date is also the marker for when she begins to increase her egg laying to build up the population for spring.

I explain that the bees in the hive take care of the queen - they feed her, they groom her, and, ...wait for it..., they carry out her poop! Their eyes get big for a second and then they start laughing.

Then I turn to the drone. I ask them if they know what a couch potato is? They all laugh and say yes.

I tell them that the drone is the couch potato of the beehive. They've all seen The Bee Movie and I tell them that it's all wrong. The boy bees don't do any of the work - they just get fed by the girl bees.

"Just like in my house," a little girl says.

Then I say that the drone has one job to do and that is to fly up into the air every day to hang out with other drones in the drone congregation area. The drones all wait, I say, for a queen to fly through the drone congregation area and they try to give the queen a "special hug."*

"A special hug?" they question.

At this point, as the speaker, I am in a bit of a bind. These are seven and eight-year-olds. Have their parents told them about sex yet? Maybe some have, but surely some haven't, and it's not my job.

"Yes," I say, " A special hug.....and then the drone dies."

He dies?

They gasp! They don't get this. He dies?

One little girl says, "Probably the queen hugged him too hard."



*(thanks to Dean Stiglitz for the special hug explanation!)

More Than Honey: A Beautifully Shot Video

As I drove home in the Atlanta snow this afternoon, I talked to Joe Lamp'l of Growing a Greener World.  Joe took the MABA Short Course on the 18th of January and is preparing to be a beekeeper both in his own backyard and for his television show.

You may remember when he came to my house to film my bees.  At that time we talked about my helping mentor him as he gets started in beekeeping.  So today he called so that he and I could plan what he needed to order to get his bee endeavor started.  In the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he had just watched the movie, "More Than Honey," on Netflix.

As anyone who is watching the news knows,  Atlanta is shut down with the onset of the snow this afternoon.  Just about all businesses let their employees go home at about 2:00 so instead of rush hour happening over about a 2 hour period, everyone left at the same time.  Sadly, there are people still trying to get home (it's 11:25 at night now) and the Interstates are clogged and stopped.  Some school children have never gotten home today and are either spending the night at school or terribly enough, are stuck on the highway in their school buses.

Luckily I live about a mile from my office.  I also left at 2:10 and I didn't get home (a typical five minute drive) until 2:55!  Incredible.

So I am in my warm house and tonight decided to watch a gorgeously filmed movie: "More Than Honey."

I watched it on Netflix, but it's also available on Amazon Instant Video and in other places.  I have never seen bees filmed so beautifully.  The movie opens with a video shot of a queen emerging from her queen cell, being assisted by the worker bees in the hive.  Every shot of bees is intimate and close up.  There is even a filmed drone congregation area and detailed film of the queen mating with the drones in midair.

If you have a chance, watch this movie.  There are lots of movies out there right now about how the bees are in trouble.  They all interview a commercial beekeeper, a scientist, a backyard beekeeper, etc.  This one is no different in how it covers this issue, but it is SO different in how intimately it is filmed.

Here's the movie's Facebook page and here is a page about the movie.  For a lovely bee experience, see this film.  The filmakers say that they went around the world four times to film this movie and the quality of it attests to that.

Queen of the Sun - a Great Bee Movie

Last night Julia and I went to a screening of "Queen of the Sun" at a local food club meeting.  We took food - it was a potluck dinner - to a local bar that opened just for this meeting.  We had a great time talking to people there and watching this wonderful movie about the bees.

My favorite character who was filmed was this beekeeper, who keeps his bees without a shirt and wearing a necklace.  His funniest moment was when he used his mustache to brush the bees.

The movie was well-done, in support of natural beekeeping and there are many interesting versions of hives in the film, such as the one below.  There were also frames that were different sizes.

As you can tell from the comb attachment in the frame above, most of the beekeepers in this movie practiced foundation-less beekeeping.

The movie was filmed all over the world, which adds a lot of interest.  My only regret is that most of the beekeepers interviewed except for one, who was shown without her bees, were men.  

A Bee Movie with Gina and Linda

Every year the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association holds a short course in January. We are always trying to improve the course. This year we are adding a movie on how to harvest honey two ways - extracting (Gina) and crush and strain (me). We are so lucky that we have in our club a beekeeper named Allen Facemire who is an Emmy-nominated film-maker and director. He offered to make a movie for us about extracting.

Here is Gina getting all miked-up before the filming begins.


Allen comes with amazing equipment - microphones, cameras, and lots and lots of expertise!



The first part of the movie is to film taking honey off of the hive without using any chemicals like Bee Quik or Bee Go. As followers of this blog know, I don't advocate the use of any poisons, so I just shake the bees off and carry the frames away from the hive.



Allen is filming me putting the harvested frames into a nuc box to carry inside. The nuc is at my feet covered with a towel to keep interested bees from exploring the honey I am harvesting.



We took two frames in from Gina's hives.  I had brought three frames of my honey from home.  Here is one of the frames before a hard shake to get the bees off.

This is our last snapshot.  We then got deeply involved in the bee movie.  Gina showed how to use an extractor and then I did crush and strain.  We bottled a couple of bottles of honey.  I thought my honey was awfully thin.

I took my honey bucket home to bottle the rest.  I kept thinking the honey was really thin.  I decided to put a drop on the refractometer.  This was fully capped honey and I have not been feeding my bees sugar syrup this entire season.  To my horror, the moisture level was 20.2.  Honey is too moist above 18.6 so this was honey with way too much moisture.

I've always relied on taking fully capped honey, believing that the bees don't cap honey that is so moist that it will ferment.  Well, not so this time.  I called Cindy Bee who told me to put the bucket with a dehumidifier and maybe it could be de-moisturized enough.  I posted on Beemaster to find out what people thought was behind this.  One theory was that we are in a heavily humid area and maybe the bees just quit before they evaporated the moisture because it has been humid and rainy.  Who knows?

Maybe I should make mead.......that way the inevitable fermenting is invited!

The Secret Life of Bees

Not since Ulee's Gold in 1997 have I seen a movie portray beekeeping so accurately. There are many reviews of the movie: here, here, and here. Obviously the three beekeeping sisters are headed by Queen Latifah - her name in the movie is August, but that she was queen was also her role. And the movie is about a community mostly of women. The men are sidebars and one is clearly in the role of drone (the man who courts June).

As a woman who was in high school in 1964 when the movie takes place, I don't think Dakota Fanning's character could have moved into a household of African American women without community reaction, but that was not the point of the movie. It was a sweet as honey film with a loving portrayal of women's strength and sisterhood.

The beekeeping was extraordinary. Clearly Queen Latifah was comfortable handling the bees as was Dakota Fanning. I loved seeing them examining the frames of honey in the hives. And there is even tape of a queen bee in the center of workers on a frame! They lit the smoker authentically, wore veils, and August (Queen Latifah's character) advises Lily (Dakota Fanning's character) to approach the bees with love.

(I can't figure out how to post an audio clip to this blog, but there is an audio clip of Queen Latifah talking about her beekeeping education here - scroll down to the center left of the page and you'll see it).

I loved this movie and think it represents beekeeping so much better and authentically than the Bee Movie, released about this time last year.