During a talk, last week, to a group of children from Eardisley CofE Primary School - I told them that in a hive of say 50,000 honeybees, 49,499 of them are female, they are the workers and bar laying laying eggs, which is the job of the queen, they do all the work in and outside a hive. The drones, (male bees), make up the other 10% - bar 1 - which is the queen. I do confess to the children that these figures aren’t accurate, I don’t actually count the bees, so no shouting at the screen if you’re a beekeeper reading this, I’m just rounding numbers up for ease of understanding! I explained why a hive of bees didn’t need as many drones as workers, i.e., the drone’s sole purpose is to mate with the queen and that’s it. Those that mate with the queen, die, (keeping it simple here, they are children after all), and those that don’t mate with the queen return to the hive and apart from occasionally helping with fanning the hive, if it’s very hot in the summer, they do nothing else except poddle around and eat the honey the workers have been busy gathering and storing.

I held up a frame from my virtual hive which shows the difference between worker brood and drone brood, i.e., worker brood is smaller and flatter than drone brood because workers are smaller than drones. And so the talk went on.

At the end of my talk, which in total is about 45 minutes, one young lad, aged about 9, asked:

“how do the bees know that they have to build less drone comb than worker comb?

Wow, he was listening!

My answer to that was - “what a great question and I’m sorry to say I’m not 100% sure I know the answer. But, I will go home and google it and if you check out my blog on Tuesday the answer will be there!“

Google it have and the answer isn’t so different from what I might have said. However, if I’m unsure I prefer to confess and thank them for the question as I will learn something when I get home and look it up!

So here’s what I have learned.

The bees use the comb for storing the nectar and pollen and for the queen to lay her eggs. *It’s also used for communication purposes. But, when it comes to building comb, they build less drone comb than worker comb and this really comes down to fact that they only build drone comb when they know it is needed, i.e., when the drones are of most value to the colony. So, they start building drone comb before the swarming season. (Here I need to give a quick explanation as to why honeybees swarm.) It is their natural way of reproducing. Most swarms take place on warm sunny days fromMay through to the end of July. The drones need to be ready to mate before the swarming season begins. The workers know when a hive is over crowded and so they start to prepare for the old queen to leave, by building queen cells. The queen knows her time is up, the workers stop feeding her in order to reduce her weight so she can fly and when she’s ready she will take off with up to half the colony. The new queen is born. She kills all the other queens in their cells and after five or six days she will leave the hive to mate with severall drones, hence they begin building drone comb prior to the swarming. Once they have a new laying queen in the hive , the workers lay less drone comb. You can still see drone comb through to September, but not that much. It’s really there as ‘just in case’ and by that I mean, the queen could die, or maybe she could be getting old and not laying as much as they would like etc., so they would need a new queen and that queen would, obviously need to mate. But, by mid september, they should have sorted themselves out and the drone comb will have disappeared and the workers will be throwing the drones out of the hive. They are no longer of any use, (value), to the hive.

So the answer is… The honeybees are attuned to the environment, the the time of year and they know when they need to invest in drones and that not as many drones are needed as workers!

While I’m talking about comb here are a few other facts about bees and honeycomb:

A house bee produces wax through 8 pairs of wax glands that she has underneath her abdomen; this incidentally takes her 12 hours. The flakes of wax are approximately 3mm x 0.5mm and it takes about 1100 scales to produce 1 gram of wax. Once produced she will move it from her abdomen, using special combes they have on their back legs to pass it on to her front legs. She then mixes it with saliva by chewing with her mandibles, Strong jaws, which makes the wax more malleable for building the comb. In order to build the comb this process is repeated tens of thousands of times.

They build their comb in the shape of a hexagon. A hexagon is a very efficient use of space, and, because all the cells are identical, the straight edges fit perfectly together. There are no gaps. No gaps mean no space is wasted. Each cell shares it’s wall with the one next to it and around it. So the bees can produce the maximum number of cells with the amount of wax used. Also hexagons can take more weight than say a triangle, circle or rectangle. Again, the hexagon honey comb holds the most amount of honey while using the least amount of wax, proving Charles Darwin right when he said… “The honeycomb is absolutely perfect in economising labour and wax.”

Once built the comb is used to store pollen and nectar which they turn in to honey and also for the queen to lay her eggs.

I hope you’ve learned a little more about our wonderful honeybees this week. Meanwhile I, like everyone else in the UK, am waiting for the rain to stop and the temperature to increase. As soon as this happens, beekeepers all over the UK will be diving into their hives to see what’s been going on since we last saw them in October! Then I promise our year in the apiary will truly begin.

Meanwhile, I leave you with a quote!

“Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.” Proverbs 16:24