By Michele Martz

I'm not quite sure where my fascination with bees started. My grandfather kept bees on his farm in Kentucky to help pollinate his cucumbers, my mother tells me. But I would have been a tiny tot around that time, and the memory eludes me.

I'm not quite sure where my fascination with bees started. My grandfather kept bees on his farm in Kentucky to help pollinate his cucumbers, my mother tells me. But I would have been a tiny tot around that time, and the memory eludes me.

My first memory of bees actually happens to be rather recent. It was the summer of 1998 and I had just graduated from college and got my first "real job" as an Archeological Technician in Idaho. Everything was new to me - the mountains, the clear running streams, the freedom. I was curious about everything.

I happened to investigate some brightly colored boxes next to the side of the road one day near Idaho City. The boxes were painted in shades of pinks, greens, blues, and yellows and were quite eye-catching. I jumped out of my truck and walked over to the boxes, and as I got closer a weird feeling of excitement and caution took over me. Bee boxes, wow.

Then in February of this year, I went to the New Mexico Organic Farming and Gardening Expo, and it was there that my initial fascination from years ago grew tremendously. I attended an organic beekeeping seminar given by Les Crowder of Sparrow Hawk Farms in Bosque, New Mexico. Les and his wife Beth have been keeping bees for over 20 years and are very knowledgeable. The most exciting part of the seminar was hearing Les talk about the different times of the season that desert plants bloom and how the honey flows correspond to this.

In March, as I was leaving Colorado to come to Maryland and work at the Ecosystem Farm, I first went to Sparrow Hawk Farm for a day-long bee seminar in New Mexico.

The Crowders' bee farm is unique in that they use top-bar hives and no antibiotics on their bees. Top-bar hives are deep V-cut boxes with a flat bottom, and thick wooden slats across the top from which the bees build their comb. Other bee growers give antibiotics to bees to help control for disease and mite outbreaks. The Crowders felt compelled to find an alternative to using antibiotics, given the negative impact on the bees, and resistance and mutations of the mites. Through talking with Mexican beekeepers, Les has learned to use different plant smokes, along with an intricate system of caging the queen bee as a mite treatment.

During the workshop at Sparrow Hawk Farm, we constructed a top-bar hive in the morning, and then after lunch investigated the Crowders' bee yard. With veils on, smokers ready, and using slow movements, we opened a few hives and discussed what we saw.

A honeybee colony consists of a queen, who is mother to the rest, and worker honeybees numbering about 10,000 in the winter and rising to approximately 50,000 or more in the summer. In the summer, this will include some 200-1,000 drones, or males, which die off at the end of summer. In addition to the adult bees, there is the brood, or "nursery," with all stages of immature bee life - the eggs, larvae and pupae.

A queen bee normally lives for several years and has two functions to perform during her life: mating and laying eggs. Queens are distinctly different from worker bees in that, as larvae, they are fed a tremendous amount of royal jelly, also called white bee milk. Therefore, they develop different glands, such as the spermatheca, which holds drone sperm, and they are larger in size than the worker bees. When a queen first emerges from her cell, she is not detected by the workers as being a queen, for it takes several days before she begins to produce pheromones which the colony recognizes to be associated with her. A virgin queen, upon emergence from her cell, engorges on pollen and nectar and then seeks out other virgin queens and fights to the death. If there are no other virgin queens that have emerged, she will direct her attention to other queen cells and destroy them. After the queen is 3 days old, she will go on a mating flight for a couple of days, where she will mate with 5-15 drones a day.

Drones have primarily only one function: mating. Proportional to its body size, the genitalia of a drone are among the very largest of any animal on earth. Drones are produced from unfertilized eggs laid by the queen in the spring. Drones become sexually mature at about 10-12 days of age and will then begin taking orientation flights outside the hive. They fly in what is called a "drone zone," a space 30-60 feet above the ground. When a virgin queen reaches the zone, the drones are attracted to her by a scent produced in her mandibular glands. At the time of mating the genitalia of the drone explodes, separating from him, and he dies.

Worker bees are female bees, produced by fertilized eggs laid by the queen. In the active season a worker bee may undertake a series of duties, and these usually follow a set pattern. When first evolving, the worker bee, also called a house bee, may engage in comb building and cell capping during the first three weeks of life. Other tasks include taking nectar from the field bees and manipulating it further before it goes into the cells to become honey, and also guarding the hive. After 3 weeks, the worker bee will exchange tasks of housekeeping for those of foraging, and she is then called a field bee. A field bee engages in the collection of nectar, pollen, water, and propolis.

"So, what's the buzz?" you may be asking now. Why all this information about bees?

Well, hidden at the far end of the Ecosystem Farm, near the river and between the cypress trees is a stack of boxes. These boxes are unlike the top-bar hives I described, but are the traditional Langstroth hive bodies that most people use. In the early summer, we were contacted by a woman in the area who was moving to New Mexico (see, this story comes full circle in some way), and wanted to sell her hive.

The Langstroth hive bodies consist of several boxes filled with foundation comb and set on top of one another. There are two larger boxes known as the brood chamber, where the queen and nursery lie, and some honey and pollen are stored on top of these two boxes is a series of wires on a frame called the queen excluder, and then a smaller shaped box known as the super. The super is for honey production only, and therefore the queen excluder lies below it to prevent the queen from migrating up into the super and laying eggs.

Keeping bees at the Ecosystem Farm is one more way to diversify and keep beneficial insects at the farm. It has been a joy to be working in the fields and hear our honeybees buzzing among the flowers, or to see them in the winter squash blossoms, legs covered with pollen sacks.