19
COROMANDEL LIFE
SPRING 2013
There’s hardly a noise more evocative of
a sunny day than the gentle buzz of bees
working the flowers in your garden. These
brilliant little buzzers are really a miracle of
Mother Nature, each of them industrious
in the extreme, whatever their role in the
complex system that is their home – the hive
or colony.
But there’s more to the little bee than just
this – these busy insects are contributing to
our economy, our health, and the very food
we depend on. We are pleased to report on
the growing health of the bee industry in NZ.
And, there are ways you can help!
COLONIAL ‘BEE’GINNINGS
Honey bees have been ‘buzzin’ in New Zealand
for over 150 years. In that time, beekeeping has
progressed from a home craft to a progressive
industry. We are now recognised as one of the
world’s most advanced beekeeping countries.
The first honey bees were brought to NZ by
English missionaries. The earliest record of a
successful shipment was of two basket hives
which arrived along with Mary Bumby and her
brother John in 1839. These hives travelled
aboard the
James
from Sydney with English-
born Mary and her brother John in March 1839.
John had been appointed as Superintendent
of Missions for the Methodist Church. It was
part of a missionary’s duties to introduce
agricultural practices, and as the two Kiwi bee
species were unsuitable for honey production,
introduced bees were the only option.
Many other importations soon followed and
beekeeping became a popular pastime with
settlers. The first NZ beekeeping book was
published in 1848.
The original stocks were the Northern European
black strain. They were kept in traditional straw
skeps or wooden boxes with frames. Around
1880, the first stocks of the yellow Italian strain
were imported. They, along with movable frame
“Langstroth” hives, provided the foundation for
modern commercial beekeeping.
There were two rather short-lived attempts
at forming an association of beekeepers in
the late 1880s, but it wasn’t until December
1913 that the current NZ Honey Producers
Association (HPA) came into being, part of its
purpose to unite the provincial groups that had
already set up.
Highly valued internationally, our export honey
industry was launched in 1911 when the first
batches of honey were sent overseas. By the
end of 1913 exports for the nine-month period
were 1,690 hundredweight valued at £3,293,
becoming a significant contributor to our
country’s export earnings.
From Mary Bumby’s seemingly small gesture a
huge industry grew.
BEES ARE NEEDED FOR
MORE THAN THEIR HONEY
As even Albert Einstein advocated, we should
never underestimate the value of the bee
– pollination is crucial to life as we know it.
Estimates are that a third of everything we eat
is bee-pollinated.
Honeybees have thrived for 50 million
years, each colony 40 to 50,000 individuals
coordinated in amazing harmony. The
bees of a colony have a fascinating set of
relationships with clearly defined roles. Marla
Spivak, University of Minnesota professor of
entomology, researches bees’ behaviour and
biology to help preserve this now-threatened
insect. She even tries to think like bees .
“We look up to honeybees as being very
efficient and well-organised, and maybe we
think our own society should be more like that.”
Bees are attracted to flowers of particular
colours with the aim of getting to the nectar.
Sterile female bees (also called foragers or
workers) retrieve nectar from down inside
flowers by using their specially adapted
proboscis, a long tongue. Somewhat
inadvertently, the bee gets sticky pollen on
itself while gathering nectar. The pollen then
transfers from the bee to other parts of the
flower (self-pollination) and it also transfers
pollen to another flower (cross-pollination). The
result? Fertilisation and the formation of fruit
and then its seeds.
Pollination by bees helps perpetuate the circle
of life for our plants and trees, and thus the
food that supports human and other animal life.
THE BUZZ AT BEE BASE
The bees of a colony have a fascinating set of
relationships and clearly defined roles. A colony
will comprise one queen bee, a few thousand
drones (males) and a variable number of sterile
females, the foragers (aka workers).
The bee’s life cycle
Over the course of their life bees undergo
a miraculous metamorphosis through four
distinct stages – egg, larva, pupa and adult –
which takes 21-24 days. (Loosely translated
metamorphosis means their form changes
markedly as they develop.)
Queens lay a single egg in each cell of the
comb which will hatch on day four as a
legless grub or larva resembling a white
maggot. Larvae are fed ‘beebread’ which is
a combination of nectar and pollen. On day
nine the cell is capped and transformation
occurs into a pupa, a transition stage between
larva and adult. The pupa is not fed. The hairy
winged adult worker bee emerges on day 21, or
day 24 if it is a queen or a drone.
By spring all the larvae have matured and the
hive again comes alive with a new generation of
bees, completing the circle of bee life.
“If the bee disappears
from the surface of the
earth, man would have
no more than four years
to live. No more bees,
no more pollination… no
more men!”
Albert Einstein
THE HONEY BEE:
The Coromandel’s Sweet Treasure
She who must be attended
to: The Queen Bee
While her every need is attended to by others
in the hive, the queen – only one per colony -
doesn’t enjoy a life of leisure. She is constantly
surrounded by groups of attendants, because
she is unable to clean or feed herself. The
workers feed her and she only leaves the
colony to mate. Everything done in the hive
revolves around her needs and functions. A
colony cannot survive without a queen.
The largest bee in the colony, with a graceful,
longer body or abdomen, queens live for a
number of years and must constantly move
from cell to cell producing and laying the eggs
for the hive, up to 2,000 a day, one every 30
seconds! The health of the colony is entirely
dependent on the productivity and strength of
their queen.
When a queen begins to weaken or dies several
larvae that are in specially constructed, larger
cells are selected to become a new queen.
All larvae are fed royal jelly whether they later
develop to be queens, drones or foragers, but
after three days only the queen larvae continue
to be fed the precious royal jelly in copious
quantities, secreted from glands in the foragers’
or workers’ heads. This method of feeding
triggers development of the ovaries required by
fertile queens so they can lay eggs.
Queens are very gentle and rarely sting
beekeepers. However, if more than one queen
develops the virgin queens fight to decide
which will remain in the colony, defeating their
rivals by use of their stinger.
And those evicted queens? They do not go
alone. Scout drones search for suitable new
sites for colonies, and immediately set about
creating wax comb for the new brood. Then
the swarms, consisting of a mated queen and a
large number of workers arrive to establish the
new colony, setting about creation of cells to
house the newly laid eggs.
