Webinar: Honey Bees (Great Southeast Pollinator Course, Week Five)
Webinar Date: July 14, 2026
Speakers: Dr. Jamie Ellis (Professor of Entomology, University of Georgia); Bethany O’Rear (Alabama Cooperative Extension System)
Moderator: Becky Griffin (UGA Extension, course host)
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-14_HoneyBees.srt (282 blocks); Archive Package (Stage 2) for structural reference
Purpose: Thirteen prompts, each pointing at a specific stretch of video with one task. Taken in order they also give a course developer a ready split of the full 1:16:58 recording into Moodle sections, with no gaps at either end. The set breaks at the presenter handoff: prompts 1–6 cover the welcome and Ellis on colony biology (0:00–30:33), prompt 7 covers the Q&A with Ellis (30:33–36:45), prompts 8–12 cover O’Rear on the home garden (36:45–1:06:21), and prompt 13 covers the joint Q&A and the close (1:06:21–1:16:58).
Audience note: Written for home gardeners, Master Gardener volunteers, and Great Southeast Pollinator Census counters. Prompts 8 and 11 are the ones that pay off directly on census day.
Part One: Dr. Jamie Ellis, A Year in the Life of the Colony
Review Task 1
Watch: 0:00 – 5:20
Task: Note who is speaking and which bee this session is actually about.
Key Points to Identify:
- Becky Griffin’s introduction: Ellis is a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia, with a bachelor’s in biology from UGA and a PhD in entomology from Rhodes University in South Africa. He has extension and research responsibilities, supervises graduate students, and his team has over 30 active research projects in honey bee husbandry, conservation, and ecology.
- Ellis had been at the University of Georgia about a month and a half, after two decades at the University of Florida. He started keeping bees at 12 years old, 36 years before this talk, and did 4-H and science fair projects with honey bees as a Georgia student.
- The correct common name is the western honey bee, Apis mellifera. Ellis pushes back on “European honey bee” because the species occurs naturally from northern Europe through the Middle East to the southern tip of Africa, and the label short-changes the rest of that range.
- The subspecies most people in the United States will meet is the Italian honey bee, Apis mellifera ligustica, which he called probably the most popular honey bee on the planet.
Review Task 2
Watch: 5:20 – 8:37
Task: Write down the idea the rest of the talk is built on, and the two drives Ellis attaches to it.
Key Points to Identify:
- Organisms want to do two things: stay alive and reproduce. Ellis makes the case with humans first, then applies it to bees.
- A colony is easy to picture as a city of individual bees. Entomologists instead call it a superorganism, one word, where the prefix “super” means a level above. The bee is the organism; the colony is the superorganism.
- The test of the idea: colonies have colony-level versions of what organisms do, including immune responses, respiration, and communication.
Review Task 3
Watch: 8:37 – 13:18
Task: Follow a swarm from the moment it leaves to the moment it moves in.
Key Points to Identify:
- Swarming is not an attack. It is colony-level reproduction, one colony working to become two.
- The sequence: workers cut back feeding the old queen until she slims to flying weight, then she leaves with about half the bees. The half left behind rear their own queen. The departing cluster, a queen plus a few thousand workers, lands on a structure. Ellis: when you watch a colony swarm, you have watched a colony give birth.
- Scout bees on the surface of the cluster canvass for cavities in trees, wall voids, and chimneys, checking height off the ground, direction of the entrance, and volume. They dance on the cluster to report, more vigorously for a better cavity, and the swarm then flies in unison to the site it settled on. Ellis compares it to a hermit crab picking a new shell.
- Why the timing is not accidental, which is the hinge of the whole talk: colonies swarm in the weeks leading up to, or the first few weeks of, the primary nectar flow, when the environment holds the most resources for a colony that arrives carrying nothing. Ellis hedges that biology is messy, so spring is the optimum birthing season rather than a rule. The colony is birthed in spring, grows through the year, and tries to survive winter so it can do the same thing again next year.
Review Task 4
Watch: 13:18 – 19:23
Task: Explain where wax comes from, then draw the nest as Ellis describes it.
Key Points to Identify:
- Nectar is a plant’s sugar water, roughly 80% water and 20% sugar, carrying secondary plant metabolites. It supplies the colony’s carbohydrate. Ellis called the ratio an overgeneralization as he gave it, which is worth carrying into the next prompt, since two conclusions get built on the number.
- A swarm arrives with honey in its belly and nothing else: no brood, no pollen, no honey, no comb. The bees eat nectar, convert the sugar to fat the way a human body does, then secrete that fat as wax and build the comb out of it.
- The three-dimensional picture: the brood area is a squashed basketball, wider in the middle combs and smaller toward the outer ones. Ellis’s model is a golf ball with the top half painted yellow for the inch-thick pollen jacket, dropped into the bottom of a cardboard toilet paper roll, with the rest of the roll standing in for honey.
Review Task 5
Watch: 19:23 – 22:09
Task: Give both reasons a colony turns nectar into honey.
Key Points to Identify:
- Reason one, shelf life. Wet sugar ferments, so nectar cannot sit in the comb. Bees drive water off until the ratio flips: honey is about 80% sugar and 20% water.
- Reason two, volume. The same amount of sugar takes up far less room as honey than as nectar, so the colony needs less cavity space to bank the same energy.
- The timing behind both: by mid to late spring the comb is built, so incoming nectar is no longer needed for construction and goes into storage for fall and winter instead.
Review Task 6
Watch: 22:09 – 30:33
Task: Track the colony through summer, fall, and winter, and list what each season asks of it.
Key Points to Identify:
- Summer is cruise control, with little nectar and less pollen coming in and no real growth. Two problems: heat, handled by hauling water, sprinkling droplets inside, and fanning at the entrance, which cools the nest by evapotranspiration; and stressors climbing, Varroa mites, viruses, and small hive beetles. Bee numbers falling while pest numbers rise is why beekeepers see their worst trouble from summer into fall.
- The superorganism point Ellis attaches to the heat section, which is a separate claim from the cooling behavior: a honey bee is cold-blooded, a colony is warm-blooded, and whatever the outside temperature does, the core of the cluster stays about 94.5 degrees.
- Fall is the bear analogy: pack on the fat, which for a colony means honey, then cut population and colony metabolism to run cheap through winter. Drones only mate with queens, and fall is not a mating season, so workers evict them. Ellis counts 13 drones in his slide, with an “I believe” attached, all held out by one female worker.
- What beekeepers are doing in the same window: feeding to put pounds on the colony, working to knock pest populations down, and making sure the bees have enough stored food reserves.
- Winter is the tight cluster burning stored honey for heat. His line to hold onto: the colony is pregnant. Brood is being reared quietly in the center of the nest in late winter, as the red maples begin to bloom, so the colony that survived winter can swarm in spring.
- The threats he names for his UGA program: Varroa and the pathogens it transmits, bee nutrition, climate-related impacts, new pesticide impacts, and poor quality queens. He puts his email on the closing slide and invites questions.
Part Two: Q&A with Dr. Ellis
Review Task 7
Watch: 30:33 – 36:45
Task: Collect the four answers in this stretch. Two of them are the ones people ask beekeepers most often.
Key Points to Identify:
- Winter laying and queen mating: a queen mates once, at roughly 10 to 14 days old, on one or maybe two flights. She leaves the nest because only her brothers are inside, and workers can detect and abort inbred eggs. She mates with about 15 to 20 drones from other colonies and stores that sperm for life. Trivia Ellis offers: unfertilized eggs become drones, so a drone has a mother but no father.
- Why honey bees store honey: of roughly 20,000 bee species most are solitary, with adults dying within the season and immatures overwintering in tubes or in the ground. Some other social bees, bumblebees among them, do make little bits of honey, so sociality is not the dividing line. Even social bumblebees overwinter only as mated queens. Honey bees are among the few that overwinter as a colony of thousands, which is why they need the fuel.
- Purple honey: every plant species adds its own secondary compounds, which is what gives each honey its color, smell, and flavor. Kudzu is the common southeastern source, confirmed by pollen analysis of purple honey Alabama beekeepers brought to the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute when Keith Delaplane ran it. Ellis noted another plant does it too, and that he could not recall which.
- How much honey to leave: roughly 50 to 70 pounds year-round, about one medium super, with the surplus supers harvested.
- One resource named in this stretch and worth linking in Moodle: Becky Griffin points listeners to Ellis’s podcast, Two Bees in a Podcast, and says a link will be shared with attendees.
Part Three: Bethany O’Rear, The Home Garden Half
Review Task 8
Watch: 36:45 – 43:47
Task: Write the census identification cues on an index card, then note what a colony needs and what each food does.
Key Points to Identify:
- Identification for the August census: next to bumble and carpenter bees the honey bee is the smaller bee, with a narrow head, brown or black alternating stripes, and a fuzzy abdomen of golden brown hairs that often carries visible pollen. By caste, worker about ½ inch, drone about ⅔ inch, queen about ¾ inch.
- Four requirements: shelter, whether a managed hive or a cavity the swarm found; consistent food through the seasons; water; and careful, conservative pesticide use.
- Pollen is the protein, with amino acids, fats, and vitamins. A strong colony collects 33 to 100 pounds a year depending on its size, and brood rearing rises and falls with pollen availability. Nectar is the carbohydrate and the energy for flying and running the colony. O’Rear’s photo of her own hive shows the pollen baskets, technically the corbicula, as two yellow dots.
- Not all sources are equal. Nutritional value and abundance vary by plant, some plants give both pollen and nectar and some only one, so the plant list is worth researching before you buy.
Review Task 9
Watch: 43:47 – 48:00
Task: List what a bee is looking for in a flower, then where and how O’Rear says to add it.
Key Points to Identify:
- What bees want: large compound flowers, meaning a grouping of flowers on one plant; single blooms rather than doubles, which are hard to land on and do not necessarily carry as much pollen and nectar; and short floral tubes. Because they are social, bees that find a good, large source communicate its location to nest mates.
- Where to add it: vegetable gardens, flowering cover crops, perennials, trees and shrubs in the home landscape, field edges and garden borders, and a pollinator meadow or bee pasture of half an acre to two acres.
- How to plant it: large swathes of the same plant. Insects do not see well, so a single plant or a few scattered here and there may not register.
- Foraging behavior worth knowing before the IPM section: bees forage above 55 degrees, visit 50 to 1,000 flowers a day, are most active 8am to 5pm, and clear large fields by 8pm at the latest.
- Aim for three food sources per season, with mid to late summer the priority. That stretch is the dearth, and it is one reason the census falls in August.
Review Task 10
Watch: 48:00 – 53:53
Task: Define nativar in O’Rear’s terms, then write down the planting advice that follows.
Key Points to Identify:
- Natives have been proven about four times more attractive to pollinators than non-natives. Non-invasive non-natives still have a place, particularly in commercial or HOA settings where natives are still working to fit in, and O’Rear’s repeated word is balance.
- A nativar is a cultivar of a native, selected for an aesthetic reason: a different flower color, a different flower, a different plant size. Her example is the purple coneflower that is not purple. Doug Tallamy’s verdict, as she reports it, is that it just depends. Some nativars lose value through what they were bred for, others match or beat the straight native, so the specific plant needs researching.
- Trees and shrubs are the long-term play, planted once. Perennials, trees, and shrubs are best planted in fall for survivability and easier maintenance.
- A wildflower or pollinator meadow needs planning: clear the competing vegetation with herbicide or by solarizing, sow the seed in fall, which she calls the typical best timing, and pick a blend for your region. Annuals in pots are the fast option, which is what she recommends to school groups that want in on the census this year.
Review Task 11
Watch: 53:53 – 59:46
Task: Build a season-by-season planting list from what O’Rear shows. Check the hardiness zones against your own before you buy, as she asks at 53:24.
Key Points to Identify:
- Cover crops: canola, crimson clover, and hairy vetch for the cool season. Sunflowers or buckwheat if you are resting a warm-season bed.
- All-year bloomers: dandelion, white clover, bitterweed, verbena or vervain (Verbena stricta), and smartweed. She flags the tension between dandelion and a manicured lawn or an HOA.
- Winter: red maple, which she credits to Ellis, plus elm, alder, and henbit, the weed a fall pre-emergent is usually aimed at.
- Spring: willows, redbud, black locust at the edge of the understory, tulip poplar, holly, cherry laurel, and the tree fruits and brambles, apples, peaches, pears, plums, blackberries, and blueberries.
- Summer: sourwood, which Becky and Ellis had been talking about before the session started, plus native milkweed. Not tropical milkweed, which she identifies by its tri-color bloom, notes is sometimes labeled native at retail, and says can harm monarchs.
- Fall: Clethra, asters, mountain mint, sunflower species, and goldenrod, which takes the blame for allergies ragweed causes.
Review Task 12
Watch: 59:46 – 1:06:21
Task: Set up a water source, then write the rules for the day you have to spray.
Key Points to Identify:
- Water: bees cannot swim and cannot drink on the wing, so they need somewhere to land at the edge. A shallow dish with clean gravel or a bird bath with floating wood works. They will fly up to five miles for water, at a real energy cost, so a pond or creek on the property generally means no supplement is necessary.
- IPM as a triangle: prevention at the base, then cultural and sanitation steps, with chemicals last. Softest chemistries first, insecticidal soaps and horticultural oils. Part of the extension job, in her framing, is getting people to tolerate a spotted leaf.
- When you do spray: avoid blooming plants, time it for dusk after the bees have left, and look for the bee advisory symbol, the EPA icon on pesticide labels marking products that carry application restrictions to protect bees. Organic does not mean safe for pollinators. Skip broad-spectrum products, skip systemics, which move up into the blooms from a soil drench, and skip dusts, which stick to the same fuzzy hairs that carry pollen and ride back to the colony.
- Best management practices that push the spray day further off: correct watering, appropriate fertilizing, pruning at the right time, since a stressed plant draws more disease and insects. Encourage beneficials such as lady beetles and lacewings, and start from pest and disease resistant varieties.
- O’Rear closes on the point that scale does not matter, down to a patio with a few pots, and puts her email and cell number on screen for follow-up.
Part Four: Joint Q&A
Review Task 13
Watch: 1:06:21 – 1:16:58
Task: Note the eight questions in this stretch and the answers, then the close. The hornet question is the reason to keep watching.
Key Points to Identify:
- Researching nativars: information is out there, but O’Rear could not find much study-level research on specific nativars, and she reports Tallamy is still on the fence, though she thinks people are paying closer attention. A reply in the same block notes research going on at the station. [VERIFY: block 235 carries only O’Rear’s speaker label but appears to fold in an unlabeled reply and Becky’s next question; the “research going on here at the station” line reads as Dr. Ellis. Confirm against the recording.]
- Foraging range: because colonies live year to year they are pickier than most bees and want large volumes of high-quality nectar. They prefer to stay within about 300 yards of the hive but routinely go five to eight miles, which puts roughly 80 square miles in range of one colony.
- New queen after a split: the queen only sets the sex of the egg. Workers decide whether a fertilized egg becomes a queen or a worker by how much high-quality food the larva gets, and they start the next round of queens before the old queen leaves, about a week before those queens emerge. The first queen out either leads a swarm of her own or stays and stings her developing sisters through the cell walls. Which bees leave and which stay is still being worked out.
- Hummingbird feeders: it is the sugar water. Honey bees prefer plants, so they turn up at feeders when the nectar flow is off and vanish when it is on. Not a problem for the bees, though they can be territorial with hummingbirds, and dyed sugar water can turn up as red honey.
- Nectar production: variable, on a bell curve across a plant’s bloom, with individual flowers producing more in the morning. Honey bees pivot away once a flower costs more energy than it returns; native bees keep working through the day.
- Brood: honey bees undergo complete metamorphosis, and the egg, larva, and pupa, all of which happen inside waxed cells, are collectively the brood.
- Capturing swarms: yes, beekeepers do it to grow an apiary. Ellis says hiving a swarm in the same apiary as its parent colony can be a little tricky, because you could get bees going back and forth between the new hive and the parent hive, so move the colony away for some weeks before bringing it back.
- Yellow-legged hornet: an invasive from Asia found in the Savannah, Georgia region in August 2023 and now in South Carolina too. It escaped into Europe about 20 years ago, where control has gone badly, and it eats bees. Ellis pauses because no one knows the scale of the damage here with certainty. The Georgia and South Carolina departments of agriculture are working to find and eradicate as many nests as they can, and he expects the hornet to take up a large share of his early extension work at UGA.
- The close: Becky Griffin previews Week Six on flies and wasps, naming Dr. Scott Clem, Dr. Jason Schmidt of UGA, and Gabrielle LaTora, and points people to Rich’s email announcing that the recordings are posted. (The affiliation she gives Clem on air was corrected in Week Six processing; he is at Illinois State University.)
Produced for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Great Southeast Pollinator Course Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-14_HoneyBees.srt (282 blocks)