TED Talks on Bees

Here are all I could find:

Anand Varma
Marla Spivak:

Noah Wilson-Rich

Dennis VanEnglesdorp

John Miller



Dino Martins



Bees and Hexagons

Bee Art at the Hambidge Center in Rabun County

On Betty's Creek Road in Rabun County is a gem of a place called the Hambidge Center.  Mary Hambidge was an artist/weaver who started the Hambidge Center in 1934.  She believed in art and sustainable farming.  I took a weaving class there about 30 years ago.  The Center has a gallery associated with it where art is displayed and sometimes sold.

My friends and I went to the mountains for the Memorial Day weekend.  We walked a trail on the Hambidge property (it covers 600 acres) and visited the Hambidge Center Gallery.  My dog Hannah swam in the N Georgia creek on the trail!

 To my surprise one of the items on display was this:

The sculptor had put sculpted busts into the beehive and let the bees have their way with them!

My friends put me with one of the hives for a photo:

While in Rabun county, I drove to the garden to check on my hive there.  To my shock as I drove up, I could see that the top of the hive was upturned on the ground.  The hive had the inner cover slightly askew.  I ran over to the hive.  One of the gardeners said he thought the wind had blown the top off.  

There is a surround box on top of the inner cover with a Rapid Feeder inside it on that hive.  As a result the top cover isn't propolized as it would be if it were directly on top of the inner cover.  

I checked on the hive which didn't need a new box, but I gave them a new box anyway since I may not be up there for another month and the blackberry is in voluminous bloom right now in that county.  I don't understand why the bees don't do really well in that location, but they don't seem to.

I left the hive with a brick on top of the top cover. 

How DOES the queen do it?

When the queen lays an egg, the egg is like a tiny grain of rice that stands straight up in the cell. She does this a thousand times a day in the height of bee season and her eggs manage to balance on end almost all the time. You can see many examples of her skill at work in the slide below....many eggs, all standing properly on end.



I am part of a Foxfire-Mountaineer festival in Rabun County on Saturday - it's at the Old School Community Garden behind the Civic Center in Clayton for anyone who is in the area and wants to stop by. I'm giving a talk for children at 11 and 2:30. To talk about the bees, I thought I'd make a model of what a frame looks like in the hive. I'm copying something my friend Jay made to use in demonstrations.

Well, I thought I'd make eggs and larvae out of Skulpy clay (baked in the oven) to show what they look like. Truly this project takes me back to the days of my children's science projects for school - they were always involved with foam core board, clay, dyeing fabric with walnut shells, etc.

To create the egg, first I tried using rice. I put grains of rice, with a dollop of glue on the tip end into the nut cups I'm using for cells and for the life of me, they wouldn't stick and wouldn't stand on their ends. How DOES the queen do it?

Here we see a fallen-over grain of rice.



In this blurry picture I am trying to hold the rice upright with a toothpick while the glue dries to no avail.



Finally I settled on baked clay eggs but even they, larger than the rice, wouldn't glue and stand up on end, so I had to concede that the queen has a special talent that I don't and made a round clay bed to hold the eggs upright.



Thankfully this morning all are still standing.  I am going to redo the board so that it isn't square but is rather shaped more like the rectangle that a frame of brood comb is.

For now, this is what it looks like:

As per Jay's example, I have capped brood, capped honey, pollen and larvae.  I'm going to put polyurethane over the larvae to be the liquid in which they lie and in the empty cells at the top to be nectar.

Don't you love the bee?  I found it at Michael's just sitting on a shelf waiting for me to choose it!

Bees and Wax Glands

Noah, Julia's son, has claimed their top bar hive as his own. He was looking in his hive yesterday and actually saw the bees with wax coming from their wax glands on their abdomen. You can really see the wax on the bee in the center of the first picture (thanks, Julia).



Below although the picture is fuzzy, you can again see wax flakes coming from the bees abdomen where the wax glands are located!



The bees take the wax flakes and mold them with their mandibles to make honeycomb.

The Difference in Beeswax and Honeycomb

In this, my fourth year of beekeeping, I am finding out that I have old beeswax that needs to be melted down. I've done it three times on hot days here in Atlanta and am disappointed every time. What I am melting is old brood comb. Last year I lost about three hives during the bee season - queen failure, absconding, etc.

This beeswax has been cut out of frames from those hives that didn't succeed last year to put into growing hives this year. When bee babies emerge from the brood comb, they have been encased in a cocoon that they leave behind in the cell when they emerge. Over time these casings accumulate debris in the cell, although workers do clean out the cells regularly.

Putting brood comb in the solar wax melter is a very different experience from putting honeycomb in the solar wax melter.

Here's what smashed together, blackened with cell casings and bee footprints brood comb wax looks like as it is placed in the solar wax melter:



At the end of the day, wax has filtered through the paper towel, but a large amount of slumgum stays on top of the paper towel. Little wax is the result.



I do end up with a nicely wax-impregnated paper towel to use as a smoker starter, though.



For comparison's sake, look at this slideshow from the solar wax melter with honey comb from the harvest in it.

Visiting Clairmont Elementary School

Yesterday I started my day in Clairmont Elementary School in the Pre-K class. There were 18 kids there who had learned a lot about ants and now wanted to learn about bees.

I had so much fun. The children tried on two bee veils that I passed around.



Here is my friend Tracy's daughter, Ella, looking snappy in her bee veil and gloves. Tracy, her dad, had bees in his family when he was a kid. Ella was my assistant and helped in so many ways during the presentation.



We talked about how beekeepers put the bees in boxes and about how the bees build and live in honeycomb. They liked hearing that the bees don't wipe their feet when they come inside the house so after a while the comb isn't white any longer but is dirty and brown from bee footprints.



We all did the circle dance and the waggle dance together.

Then before I left everyone got to taste honey. I had a great time and I think they did too. One of the joys of bee-ing a beekeeper is getting to share information with other people.

Visiting a Preschool

Here is my grandson Dylan in his bee veil. He showed his friends at preschool today how he is protected from the bees when Grandma works in the beeyard.


Today I was lucky enough to get to go talk about bees at my grandson's preschool. The class members were betwee 2 and 3 years old!

They got to feel honeycomb.



They tried on Dylan's bee veil.



They tasted honey on popsicle sticks.



And they did the waggle dance - I didn't get a picture of that because I was dancing with them!