What Do Bees Actually Do All Day?

What Do Bees Actually Do All Day? 

We used to think bees spent their days making honey.

It turns out, they have much more to do.

They forage for food. They care for the young. They build and repair the hive. They communicate with one another. They keep the colony at the right temperature.

Honey is only one part of their work.

The more we learnt about bees, the more we realised how little we had been paying attention.

A hive is a busy place

A healthy colony is always moving.

Some bees leave the hive to forage for nectar and pollen. Others stay behind to care for the brood, clean the hive or receive what the foragers bring back.

There are bees that help regulate the temperature inside the hive, keeping it warm when it is cold and helping to cool it when temperatures rise.

And then there is the constant work of building, repairing and maintaining the comb.

It is a remarkably organised system.

No one bee does everything.

Not every bee has the same job

One of the things that surprised us was how much the work changes as a bee gets older.

Young worker bees tend to spend more time inside the hive, looking after the brood and keeping things clean.

As they grow older, many eventually become foragers, leaving the hive to look for nectar and pollen.

The jobs aren't assigned in the way we might assign them in a workplace.

The colony responds to what it needs.

There is always something that needs doing.

Honey is only part of the story

When bees collect nectar, they aren't simply collecting ingredients for honey.

Nectar is food for the colony.

Bees bring it back to the hive, pass it between workers and gradually transform it into honey. The honey is then stored as a source of energy for times when flowers are not readily available.

Pollen plays another important role, providing nutrients the colony needs, particularly for raising young bees.

The more we learnt, the more we realised that honey isn't really the end goal for the bees.

It is part of how a colony survives.

And then there is the landscape

A bee doesn't choose a flower because it looks beautiful to us.

It responds to what is available.

Which plants are flowering. How much nectar they are producing. What the weather is doing. How far the flowers are from the hive.

This is one of the reasons we became so interested in where honey comes from.

The bees are constantly reading the landscape around them.

And what they find eventually becomes part of the honey we taste.

The landscape feeds the bees, and the bees leave something of that landscape in the honey.

What the beekeeper does

This is where we began to appreciate the beekeeper's role differently.

A beekeeper isn't simply someone who opens a hive and collects honey.

They are watching.

Is the colony healthy?

Is there enough food?

Is the queen laying well?

Is the hive strong enough for the season?

Is it time to harvest, or is it better to wait?

The good beekeepers we met seemed to spend as much time observing as they did doing.

They learn to notice small changes.

And sometimes, the best thing they can do is not interfere.

We started looking at bees differently

Before Hives Keeper, we mostly thought of bees in relation to honey.

Now, when we see a bee moving from flower to flower, we think about everything happening around it.

The colony it will return to.

The flowers it has visited.

The food it is bringing home.

The beekeeper who is watching over the hive.

And the landscape that makes all of it possible.

Honey is what eventually reaches our jar.

But the story begins much earlier.

With thousands of bees, each doing their part to contribute to the entire hive.