What’s the buzz with honeybees?

It won’t be much longer and winter will be exiting for the warmer breezes of spring, the birds will be singing and the bees will be buzzing. As a local beekeeper each year I get asked some of the same questions about what happens to the bees during the winter.

No, they don’t hibernate or leave and head south for the winter. All the male bees (drones) die off prior to winter, leaving about 40,000 female (workers) and one queen to last through the winter surviving off the food they worked so hard to make (honey). They gather into a tight cluster and rotate from the outside of the cluster to the inside, taking turns feeding the queen and creating heat by detaching their wing and vibrating their bodies. Even when the outside temperatures are below zero, they can keep their cluster at about 93 degrees.

Many beekeepers like for the weather to get cold and stay cold until spring, this keeps them in a more dormant state and results in them eating less, which helps keep from starving to death, until the first sign of free food, the beautiful dandelions, open up.

About the middle of April, the greatest season in beekeeping begins – swarm season. Our phones will start ringing, again to our delight, as people see a large dark cloud of bees landing on their tree branch. There is nothing to be alarmed about with this event.

It happens when a queen makes it through the winter and starts laying 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a day, her colony recognizes that soon they will be overpopulated. The busy nurse bees will produce several new queens in cells to take over the colony. The original queen will then take flight with about 40 percent of the colony to find a new home.

So, the swarm that can strike terror in most people can be looked at as helpless and homeless, just hanging out for a break until the scout bees in the group can find and decide on a new location to fly off to.

When it comes to things we enjoy in beekeeping, catching swarms is on the top of the list by far. Don’t panic, just call a beekeeper and they will come to remove it and give them a great home.

Heck, you might get a free bottle of honey out of it for calling them.

There are thousands of different types of pollinators that we all rely on to keep trees, plants and crops growing. But the honeybee is one of the best at this task. Over the past 25 years I have researched and learned so many things about these fascinating insects, and the new things I still learn to this day makes this so much more interesting than many of the other hobbies that I have.

If you have an interest in either learning about the honeybee or becoming a beekeeper, we have a local club, the Putnam County Beekeepers Association, that meets the second Tuesday of every month at the DePauw Ullem Campus Farm building. You can contact Steve Hill at 720-1802 or Greg Sanders at 701-238-3074.

A few years ago, one of our members wanted to learn more about honeybees, and found that our local library had very few books on this subject. She brought this to the association’s attention and an idea to solve this problem. Within the next couple of months, the Putnam County Beekeepers Association members will be hosting a “Bee Day” at the Putnam County Library. Our members will be donating several books for all ages to the library. At this event we will have sessions of reading bee stories to the youngsters along with other sessions going on in the more informational areas about honeybees, their products, life cycle and many more amazing facts about the honeybee and the beekeeping hobby.

If the weather is warm enough, we might have an observation hive at the event so you can look inside of their world and watch them work within their hive, who knows you might even find the queen. And if you are not interested in becoming a beekeeper but you would like to learn about the value these insects are or what we can all do to protect them, this is the event you would want to be at.

We will be posting the date and times very soon. See you there and have a BEE-utiful Day.