October 2023 - Sunday at the Museum, Buzz on the Bees
This story features the buzz on the bees.
Or at least as much as Hancock County’s Mary Lacksen, a Georgia Master Beekeeper, could pack into an hour in the Old School History Museum’s most recent installment of its Sunday-at-the-Museum lecture series.
Today, Lacksen and daughter Katherine run BeeCo Apiaries (www.beecoapiaries.com) on the family farm near Sparta. Lacksen’s journey into beekeeping began about 15 years ago. The “master beekeeper” designation took four years of study during that time.
From the beginning of her talk, Lacksen emphasized that her point was not to turn people into beekeepers, but to introduce people to the wonders – and impact – of the otherwise innocuous little honey bee.
Here are some of the nuggets from her observations:
Bees and their cousins (wasps, hornets, dirt daubers, etc.) account for 20,000 species around the world. Some 4,000 are found in the United States. The dominant bee strain here is the Italian honey bee, which are generally known to be smaller and gentler that some of the other strains. Also, bees (bumble, carpenter, mason, honey) in general have barbed stingers, which means they can sting once and once only before leave part of their bodies behind and die.
One-third of our food supply has been pollinated by bees minding their own business out looking for nectar in blossoming plants. In the process, they collect pollen in their very visible “pollen baskets” for their own use – all the while pollinating nearby blossoms on their rounds.
Somewhat surprisingly, the honey bees’ most dominant influence comes with the one million acres of almond trees in California’s Central Valley, which produces 80 percent of the world’s almond supply.
Bees form colonies ranging in size between 6,000 to 100,000 individuals. There are an estimated three million colonies in the U.S.
Bees do not over-winter on the east and west coasts, preferring the Southeast. The nation’s commercial beekeepers put their hives on trucks and move them around the country to take advantage of different blossoming seasons. A commercial beekeeper may have 10,000 hives.
Each hive has one queen, which lays up to 2,000 eggs a day. Another 30-100 are (male) drones, who “eat a lot, breed, and then die,” Lacksen said. “It’s just part of life.” Tending to all the maintenance duties of the hive are 60-100 (female) worker bees. (Ed. Note: In the 19th century there was some debate over whether there such a thing as a queen bee – the fellow drawn to that study must have been a confirmed bachelor with too much time on his hands.)
Scout bees will fly up to five miles from the hive in search of blossoms.
How do they know their way back to the hive? By smell, from the pheromones put out by their queen.
Then, how do they communicate to the other worker bees where the blossoms are? Through a vibrating “waggle dance”” (which earned its discoverer a Nobel prize). The length of the “dance” will signal the distance and the angle from the sun. “The best part of beekeeping is just watching the bees,” Lacksen said.
Honey has different flavors and different colors, depending on the blossoms they visit. With over 3,000 varieties, colors range from white to a dark amber and flavors range from clover and tupelo to lavender and sourwood. (Lacksen said she prefers privet. Huh?)
Sourwood tends to be the gold standard in honeys, if for no other reason than its relative rarity. Sourwood trees grow in a broad band across the Southeast, but best above 3,000 feet in the North Carolina Smokies where Lacksen puts her hives for about six weeks in the spring.
One flavor Lacksen adamantly avoids is golden rod. She will quickly move her hives to avoid it. The honey from such fields “smells like rotten socks,” she said, adding after a pause, “Tastes like it, too.”
Testing for flavor is like a wine-tasting. “You stir, smell, savor, swish, and swallow,” she said. Is the honey sweet? Buttery? Citrus? Bitter?
You can visit the BeeCo Apiaries website for more information about our guest speaker and her honey bees.
By Rufus Adair
Board Member and Docent of Old School History Museum
Retired Newspaper Reporter and Teacher
