Bee Hive Update

As winter begins, the short, wet, cold days are hard on bees and ours are no exception. So it is with pleasure that we see some honey in the combs, signs that our pollen substitute is being accepted, a queen who is still active and surrounded by workers, and a notable absence of dead bees inside the hive.

What do each of these observations tell us?

Honey storage has a lot to do with how well the bees can get through the cold months. With temperatures cold enough to inhibit flight, bees cannot go foraging for nectar – even if there were flowers out at this time of year. Bees that have honey stored in their hive stand a much better chance of making it till spring. Our bees do not appear to have enough honey stored to survive until April flowers. However, the bees are still getting to the jar of sugar water just outside the hive. This means they can replenish their stock - and with luck and good weather - keep enough food to start generating new workers. One new trick we have used with our sugar water this year is flavoring it with mint extract. Mint is said to be a feeding stimulant, and our experience seems to confirm this.


Bee larvae, AKA baby bees, have much higher protein needs than adult workers. This protein comes from pollen. Unfortunately, our hive was completely out of pollen by early December. While we have seen success placing a sugar feeder outside, we never had much luck getting the bees to accept substitute pollen. This year, we tried pushing the pollen directly into the hive area, through the screen on one of their ventilation holes. Pollen substitute is never as well accepted as the real thing, but the bees do seem to be taking it up. Once the colony starts raising workers in spring, this may be a critical factor in whether they are able to rear enough young to replace the current workers.


As expected, the colony is taking a break from rearing workers. The queen takes several weeks off around the solstice, before gradually building up her egg production once again. This makes sense to the hive. In winter, raising extra bees is simply creating more mouths to feed. In spring, it is creating a new work force, able to go out and gather food once the flowers start blooming. Seeing our queen look active and fit gives us every reason to expect that her egg production should kick in shortly. We will be watching closely for this to happen.

The absence of dead bees may seem like a fairly obvious sign of a healthy colony. But in fact, there are some nuances to this, because we know that there are bees in the colony that have died. The population has been slowly declining from November until now. Bees live short lives – from 21 days in the height of summer, to a few months during the less active winter months. So over time, it is natural to expect the colony to shrink if the queen is not laying new eggs.


In a badly functioning colony, a bee that died inside the hive would stay there. In a healthy hive, another worker promptly remove the dead bee, so that her body would not cause health problems for other bees. Therefore, a lack of dead bees doesn’t mean that bees aren’t dying.


As our bees are gathering food for energy and for building up a new workforce with their healthy looking queen, we have high hopes for their success this spring. Of course we temper our hopes with caution. Beekeeping is a challenging activity, and many well-tended hives fail each year. But if we do have success, we will have learned several useful techniques for keeping our small hive healthy in the future.


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The Bees in Winter

You may notice that the observation bee hive located in Pacific Science Center’s Insect Village is much less populated in the winter months. Honeybee populations fluctuate greatly throughout the year, usually peaking in early summer and decreasing with the temperature outside. How do we cope with this problem?




In the wild, honeybees survive the winter by huddling together in the warmest part of the hive. The queen resides in the center of the huddle, and the worker bees surround her. Although most members of the colony will not survive the winter, it is vital that the queen makes it. If she can outlast the winter, the colony can rebuild itself in the spring. The worker bees must shiver and flutter their wings to keep the hive and the queen warm. They constantly rotate from the outside to the inside of the huddle, so that no one bee gets too cold.



Because nectar plants are scarce in the winter, honeybees must live off of the honey they have been producing all year. It is important for a colony to store up enough honey in the warm months to survive during the winter. Bees rarely fly during the winter, not only because there is no food, but because exposure to cold temperatures for an extended time can be deadly.



Our colony has an especially difficult time in the winter. Because the hive is relatively small, it is difficult for the bees to produce enough honey to last through the winter. In order for the colony’s activities to be visible, we sacrifice some of the depth of a normal bee hive. This means that the bees are more exposed to outside temperatures than they would be in a deeper hive, but we believe that seeing the queen and her brood is a valuable experience and it helps our visitors appreciate and understand all bee colonies.



Our animal care team works to keep the colony running through the winter by offering extra sugar foods and manually heating the hive. We also insulate the hive at night, keeping the remaining members of the colony warm through the end of winter.

Will they make it? That is still an unknown. In recent years, we have had to install a new colony each spring. However there is some hope this year. There is still stored honey in the hive, and bees are using the feeder. Our queen bee is still young and robust. If she can last through the winter, and we don’t suffer too many long cold snaps, there is a great hope that her colony will return and thrive as well.

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Long Live the Queen!

Last week a member of Pacific Science Center’s Science Interpretation Department made an interesting observation at the bee hive, found in our Insect Village. She spotted a robust queen, efficiently laying eggs in the cells of the hive. Continuing to look around the rest of the hive, she made another observation that didn’t make quite so much sense. There was a second queen doing the exact same thing. (Dun-Da-Dun-Dun!)



Most people know that for a bee hive to live and thrive, it must have a queen. The queen is the largest bee in the colony and she is responsible for laying all of the eggs. Queen bees usually live between one and five years, while worker bees’ lives are measured in weeks, or at most months. Over time, the queen bee’s body will age and deteriorate, and eventually the time will come for her to be replaced. Beekeepers often replace the queen when they see signs of aging, but in the wild, replacement can happen in one of two ways:


Most often, an old queen dies suddenly before the rest of the colony has a chance to prepare. With no queen, what is a colony to do? Why, raise a new queen of course! Several larvae are selected at random and installed in larger cells built especially for them. These are generally found on the bottoms of the hive frames. Although genetically identical to a worker, the queens are physically different. They are fed large amounts of royal jelly, which allows their ovaries to mature. They will emerge as virgin queens. The first virgin queen to emerge will eliminate any others with a quick sting to each of the remaining queen cells. Then she takes off on a short mating flight before returning to the hive to settle down into her role of Queen Bee.

Alternatively, the colony will detect signs that the queen is starting to get old. As her pheromone output decreases and she fails to perform at the speed the workers want to see, the workers will begin to rear new queen cells. Once a new queen is available, the workers will surround the old queen so tightly that she overheats and dies. Ouch! The old queen has just been superseded.



We believe that in our hive, our old queen is being superseded. Although it is rare to catch the hive at a time when both the old queen and the new queen are alive and actively laying eggs, it is not entirely unheard of. While we have been able to locate one robust and healthy looking queen, the old, tired queen (distinguishable by a yellow dot painted on her thorax) has still been spotted hanging around the hive recently. How long will she remain? Stop by the bee hive on your next visit to Pacific Science Center and perhaps you can help us to solve this mystery. (Dun-Da-Dun-Dun-DA!)
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