Speakers: Dr. Jamie Ellis, Professor of Entomology, University of Georgia; Bethany O’Rear, Alabama Cooperative Extension System
Moderator / Host: Becky Griffin, UGA Extension (co-host: Rich Braman)
Duration: 1:16:58
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Webinar Date: July 14, 2026
Opening and Introductions
Becky Griffin: Today we’re talking all things honeybee. And as I mentioned earlier, today as you have your sweet tea, getting ready to sit back and enjoy some good content, make sure you have some honey in that sweet tea today. That’s what I did. I’ve also got my honey shirt on and my Great Southeast Pollinator hat on because we’re just a little over a month out.
So today’s topic is honeybees and we have two amazing speakers and I want to introduce our first one, Dr. Jamie Ellis. I am thrilled that he’s able to join us today. He’s a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia. He got his bachelor’s degree in biology from UGA and a PhD in entomology from Rhodes University in South Africa. So he definitely has a global perspective on beekeeping.
At UGA, Jamie has responsibilities in extension and research. He works with assorted clientele through diverse programming and as an instructor, he supervises grad students. We all know how that is. Currently, Jamie and his team have over 30 active research projects in the field of honeybee husbandry, conservation and ecology. So today we are in for a treat. I’m going to stop sharing and close the poll. And Jamie, the floor is yours.
Jamie Ellis: Well, thank you so very, very much. Let me, it really is my pleasure to be able to speak to you guys today. I’m very freshly new at the University of Georgia. I’ve been here about a month and a half. I did spend the last two decades of my life at the University of Georgia… University of Florida, but my wife and I are both Georgia natives. We both went to the University of Georgia, and it’s really good to be able to speak to you on behalf of the University of Georgia. Just briefly before I get started too far into this thing, I actually started keeping bees when I was 12 years old.
That was 36 years ago. So some of you have just figured out how old I am. I’ve been working with honeybees for a very long time. When I was a student in Georgia as a middle schooler and a high schooler, I did 4-H projects with honeybees and science fair projects with honeybees. I worked at the University of Georgia, all four. So now that you know a little bit about me, I’m going to try to be very punctual and share with you a little bit about honeybees. They are near and dear to me.
As I’ve interacted with honeybees for 36 years. All of that time as a beekeeper. And a lot of that time as a professor who studies honeybees as well as teaches about honeybees. And fortunately, I get to travel all over the world and talk about honeybees.
What This Talk Will Cover
Jamie Ellis: And so as I get into this presentation, it’s always very important to me to tell you in advance of my presentation what I’m going to teach. I’m going to remind you at the end of this presentation that I taught you these things. And so these are the things that I really want you to know by the time this presentation is over. First things first, I am going to walk you through the honeybee colonies year. I am going to teach you about what colonies do, essentially from birth all the way to sexual maturation.
In doing that, I’m going to talk to you primarily about the two main goals that honeybee colonies have. I’m going to talk a lot about the biology of swarming, and you’ll see why momentarily. And hopefully by the time I’m done, you’ll be able to match what colonies do throughout the year to the season that they do these things.
Meet the Western Honey Bee
Jamie Ellis: So as I go through this idea of a honeybee colony, hopefully I’m going to enlighten you on what it is colonies are essentially trying to do. So let’s just start from the beginning. This is the bee that I’m discussing with you today. It is my favorite insect on the planet. It’s not hard for me to say that because I just absolutely love this bee. Its correct common name is the western honeybee. Its scientific name is Apis mellifera.
The reason I emphasize its correct common name is because it is very commonly called the European honey bee. However, it is not the European honey bee. This honey bee, this one species, has a natural distribution in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. So when you call this species the European honeybee is a bit of a disservice to all the other members of this species that occur naturally in the Middle East and Africa. A fantastic bee distributed again from northern Europe all the way to the southern tip of Africa. Lots of subspecies of this bee.
The most common subspecies that you’ll encounter in the United States will be the Italian honeybee. So that would be Apis mellifera, genus and species, ligustica. It’s probably the most popular honeybee on the planet. But the Western honeybee, to distinguish it from its Asian counterparts, is the bee that is here present in the United States and will be the bee that I’m discussing today, and that we’ll be discussing in general for the rest of this series of presentations that we’re fortunate to have you listening to us talk about.
The Colony as a Superorganism
The Two Drives: Stay Alive and Reproduce
Jamie Ellis: So let’s go back to that idea of what is it that I’m teaching you here in this presentation. Well, honeybees are living organisms and they want to do what living organisms want to do. If I were to ask you what are the fundamental things that organisms want to do, organisms including you, you might be able to tell me, well, we just want to survive and we want to reproduce, right? Those are the strongest two drives in humans. Think about it. Think about how much money we spend trying to stay alive.
We eat. Some of us exercise. Most of us go to the doctor. And we know diet sodas are popular because all of us are trying to stay alive and not drink sugar sodas. And I hate to be very… But we also do what it takes to reproduce. Because reproduction is a very, very, very strong drive in organisms that can. And since all organisms can reproduce, all organisms try really hard to do that.
Now, some of you may say, well, I don’t have kids. My spouse and I don’t have kids. But my guess is, is you do what it takes to have kids. And without going down that road too far, I’m just making the point that in humans, our strong biological drives are to stay alive and to make babies.
A Level Above the Organism
Jamie Ellis: Well, the same is true in honeybees. Now, before I go far down this road, I need to tell you that it is very tempting to look at a colony as a collection of organisms, almost as a city where lots of bees live. But in reality, in the insect world, we often refer to honeybee colonies by their social organization. And we call that the superorganism. So it’s all one word, superorganism. And in this case, the prefix super means a level above, right? Above. So a superorganism is a level of organization above the organism. The organism is the bee, right?
The superorganism is the colony. And in order for this concept to hold true, colonies must do what organisms want to do. And what do colonies, what do organisms do? Well, we reproduce, we try to stay alive, we mount immune responses, we communicate, we respire, we do all of these things. Colonies, honeybee colonies, have colony-level equivalents of all of these things. They’re colony-level immune responses, colony-level respiration, colony-level communication.
Well, when you boil down fundamentally to what colonies want to do, colonies just want to stay alive and they want to reproduce. Everything that honeybees do, they do to accomplish those two goals. So when I talk about honeybee, colonies, I’m going to talk about them as if the colony is the organism. And I’m going to walk you through that organism’s life throughout the year so that you’ll have a good understanding of what it is colonies are trying to accomplish. And I’m just going to start at birth when the honeybee colony comes into existence.
Swarming: Colony-Level Reproduction
Jamie Ellis: So colony level reproduction is something that beekeepers and bee scientists call swarming. A lot of the general public will say that swarming is when they’re being attacked by bees. That is not swarming. Swarming is an entomological term that describes reproduction of the social insect colony. So essentially you have one colony whose goal in life is to be two colonies. And the process by which they do that is called the swarm. So essentially the parental colony, like what you see in this image, each of those stacks of boxes is its own hive, its own colony living in it.
Each of those stacks has a colony in it that wants to take that one colony and make it two. And so what they’ll do is that they’ll go to their old queen in the nest and they’ll reduce the feeding of that queen and she’ll lose weight. And when she gets down to flying weight, about half of the bees in that nest, along with the queen, will leave the nest. So they’ll come out of that nest, they’ll fly around in the air, and they’ll land in this cluster on a structure. And so the other half of the bees remain in the nest, and then they make their own queen, and they stay put, etc.
But that cluster, that colony that came out of the nest, that is essentially a baby bee colony. When you watch a colony swarm, you have watched a colony give birth. And this happens typically, again, it’s biology and biology is messy, but it happens typically in spring. And that’s no coincidence.
Most animals on planet Earth have a birthing season. And the honeybee colony’s birthing season, or at least its optimum birthing season, is in spring. And the reason that’s the case is actually really simple. Colonies want to swarm the weeks leading up to, or the first few weeks of, the primary nectar flow. And that’s because the most resources are available in the environment for that baby bee colony that’s carrying nothing to move into a cavity, take advantage of those resources, and grow their colony in time so that they can do their second thing, which is survive winter. That’s it. They are birthed in spring. They grow throughout the year. They try to survive winter so that they themselves can have a baby bee colony next year.
Scout Bees and the Choice of a Cavity
Jamie Ellis: So let’s start with the swarm. And this is typically in early spring. So you see here in this picture on the upper left, that is a swarm. That’s a baby bee colony that has just been birthed from the loins of a honey bee colony. And that baby bee colony has in it a queen and a few thousand worker bees. There are bees on the surface of that cluster whose job it is to canvas the countryside looking for cavities in which they can move.
And so they’re commonly finding cavities in trees, they’re finding holes in the walls of houses that lead to cavities in the walls, they’re going into chimneys, anywhere that there is a hole that leads to a cavity. These scout bees will find it, they’ll go into those cavities, they’ll determine some very basic characteristics about that nest, its height off of the ground, the direction of the entrance, the volume of the cavity, etc. And they will come back to the surface of this cluster and dance on the surface of the… to communicate to their sisters the quality of the cavity that they have found.
Better quality cavities get more vigorous dancing. Lower quality cavities get less vigorous dancing. And when that cluster has made the decision about the best available cavity in the environment, they will release from this tree branch and they will fly in unison to that cavity. They’ll land on the outside. They’ll go in through the entrance. And that has now become their new home.
It’s almost like a hermit crab choosing its new shell. You know, hermit crabs don’t make their own shells. As they grow, they get rid of the shell that they’re in and go look for a new shell in which to live. And these honeybee colonies are almost like hermit crabs that are going to find that new shell that essentially becomes their nest.
Nectar, Wax, and the Building of Comb
Jamie Ellis: They do this again in the weeks leading up to the major nectar flow because there’s the greatest availability of incoming nectar. Nectar is a plant’s production of sugar water. It’s essentially sugar water that is mixed with secondary plant metabolites. So to you and me, nectar tastes like sugar water. I’m going to overgeneralize here, but in general, nectar is about 80% water and 20% sugar. Bees go to these flowers that are in bloom in spring. They gather as much nectar as they can, and they bring it back to the nest for one main reason. Nectar is fundamentally providing the carbohydrate reserves of the colony. So essentially, bees use the sugars in nectar to do everything they need to do.
And so that swarm that has moved into the cavity has taken with it some honey in its belly, but there’s nothing else there. There’s no baby bees. There’s no pollen. There’s no honey. There’s no comb. There’s nothing. So when they move into that cavity, they don’t have that waxy comb that’s their infrastructure that they use in the nest. So bees take that nectar and consume it for the purpose of producing wax.
And I’ll be human health relevant here. How do we produce fat? We produce fat when we take in more sugar than we use. And so our body converts the sugar to fat and it stores the fat on our bodies, right? So when we’re consuming more sugar than we’re burning, then we start layering fat on our bodies. Bees do exactly the same thing. They take sugar into their mouth and with their bodies, they convert that sugar to fat. But unlike me and you, they can actually secrete that fat in the form of wax, and they can build that waxy infrastructure, that waxy background, that waxy backbone that we call comb. You can see that in the upper.
So they form those hexagonal cells out of wax that they squeeze out of their bellies. What if you and I could eat all the sugar that we wanted to and just squeeze it out of our bellies? I think that would be pretty cool. I think a lot of us would eat more. But in the case of bees, they can and they build their homes out of it. And when they do that, that wax becomes the brood rearing area. It becomes the area where they store pollen. It becomes the area where they store honey.
So in mid-spring, with all of this sugar water coming in from plants, bees are in real time converting that to this beeswax infrastructure. They’re essentially building out their nest. And once they have that nest sufficiently built, then they can start investing in the production of queens.
The Three-Dimensional Nest
Jamie Ellis: So we, you and I, often think of honey bee nests as two-dimensional structures. After all, when we go into a hive and we pull out a comb, illustrated by my cell phone here, we tend to look at it as two sides of this flat surface. But in reality, bees build spherical nests and then go up the column in this kind of cube-like structure. And what do I mean by that? Bees will build the first few combs.
The queens will go to those combs and start laying eggs in the middle of those combs and they will spiral out just like what you see here in this image. So what you’ll notice is that brood area is roughly the shape of a squashed basketball. See how it’s rounded at the tips here? It’s got this oval structure. And the combs in the middle of the nest tend to have bigger brood areas. And as you migrate to those outer combs, the brood areas tend to get smaller, like what you can see here in this three-dimensional rendering of the nest.
So essentially, the brood area of the nest, I’m going to use a golf ball as an example. The golf ball represents the brood area of the nest. Bees collect pollen from flowers because pollen is their protein, vitamin, and mineral and nutrient source. So they collect pollen from flowers so that they can make more bees. If that brood area is the golf ball, bees will layer about two centimeters, about one inch of pollen on the upper half of that golf ball. On a two-dimensional frame, it’s going to look like a rainbow of pollen above the brood. But in the three-dimensional nest, it’s like a jacket of pollen on the upper half of that brood.
And then everything above that will be honey. So take that golf ball, paint the upper half of it yellow. The ball represents the brood. The yellow represents the pollen layer. And stick that golf ball into the bottom of a cardboard toilet paper roll. The rest of that roll represents the honeybee nest, the honeybee nest, that bees are trying to create in mid-spring as that colony is growing to fill this new cavity in which it finds itself living. So that’s all illustrated on this.
Why Bees Convert Nectar Into Honey
Jamie Ellis: Now, as they pivot into mid to late spring, they no longer need that incoming nectar for the construction of the comb. They need that nectar in the coming fall and winter when there is no more nectar available. So in those cases, the bees will start converting the nectar into honey for two reasons.
Remember back towards the beginning of this presentation, I told you that nectar is 80% water and 20% sugar. Well guys, what does wet sugar do? Wet sugar ferments. So bees cannot store nectar because it would ferment in the combs. So number one, they have to take water off of that nectar to increase the shelf life of that sugar. So honey is exactly the opposite of nectar. If nectar is 80% water and 20% sugar, then honey is 80% sugar and 20% water. So essentially the bees will dehydrate that nectar. Get that water concentration low and correspondingly the sugar concentration high and that stabilizes, that increases the shelf life of the sugar.
So in mid to late spring they start storing nectar, they convert it to honey, which increases the shelf life. Making it honey solves a second purpose and that second purpose is really simple. If nectar is 80% water and 20% sugar, I’m illustrating it like this. That’s the total volume of nectar. The amount of sugar in that nectar is only 20%. Honey, when you evaporate off all of that water, the sugar content becomes 80% of the volume. So essentially, the bees get the same amount of sugar from this much nectar that they get from this much honey.
So if you think about it, that means honey not only stabilizes the sugar, it reduces the cavity size that they need to store that amount of sugar. So, converting nectar to honey does two things. It increases the shelf life of the sugar and it reduces the storage area needed to store the same amount of energy.
Summer: Heat and Rising Stressors
Jamie Ellis: All right, so all of that’s happening in spring. The colony’s growing, they’re making their hive, they’re storing lots of honey. Now let’s pivot into summer. In summer, colonies are essentially all cruise control. There’s some, but little, nectar coming in. There’s some, but less, pollen coming in. So the colony’s not really growing in summer. They’re as large as they’re going to be coming out of spring and going into summer. So in summer, colonies have two big issues. Issue number one is heat.
The bees will fly to water, they’ll collect water and bring it back to their nest, they’ll sprinkle droplets of water around the inside of the nest, they’ll stand at the nest entrance and fan their wings, and through that air circulating through the nest, through evapotranspiration, bees will cool the nest. A honeybee is a cold-blooded organism, but a colony is warm-blooded. This again is this idea of the superorganism. It doesn’t matter what the temperature is outside. The temperature in the core part of the cluster is about 94.5 degrees.
So the bee is cold-blooded, the colony is warm-blooded, and in summer they spend a lot of time trying to thermoregulate the nest to cool off that nest. The second big thing that they try to do during summer is they combat a lot of the stressors whose populations are starting to go up. Varroa, which is a mite that feeds on bees, viruses, small hive beetles, etc. As you have the bee population reaching that peak and starting to go down, you’ve got the pest population that goes up, they intersect one another, and that’s when beekeepers start seeing their greatest problems from summer to fall, because the bee population is going down, the pest and disease population is going up, and you get this reflection point that’s really kind of bad for bees.
So as they’re going through summer, they’re just trying to remain stable and combat these two stressors. The greatest number of things happens in the bee colony in spring. So I will spend a lot of time on spring, but summer, fall, and winter are correspondingly a little bit more boring in the bee colony. But I want to walk you through that colony.
Fall: Packing On the Pounds
Jamie Ellis: In fall, think about the bear. The B-E-A-R. What would bears do in late summer/fall? They are trying to eat everything they can to pack the fat on their bodies so that they can reduce their metabolism in winter to hibernate. That is exactly what the honeybee colony is trying to do. In late summer and in fall, they’re putting on that last bit of fat, represented by honey in this case, they’re storing that last bit of fat in their bodies so that they can reduce their population, reduce their colony level metabolism, so that they can hibernate and use the lowest amount of reserves necessary to generate the heat that they need to overwinter at that low metabolism rate.
That’s the bee colony. Put on the pounds. Beekeepers are often feeding this time of year to get the pounds on the bees and fall. They’re putting on that fat metaphorically so that that colony can reduce its activity and essentially hibernate through winter. You tend to get pest populations at their greatest in late summer and in early fall. Beekeepers work heavily this time of year to reduce those pest populations and ensure the bees have enough stored food reserves.
One of the cool biological things that happen in the bee colonies is that male honeybees, the drones, like what you see in this image, do nothing except mate with queens. And since fall is not a queen mating time of the year, the worker bees actually kick the drones out of the nest so that they will die from exposure, so that the drones don’t just and tax the resources for no purpose. So every fall, if you listen very carefully, you’ll hear the great lament of the drones as the drones the U.S. over are being evicted from their nest.
I love this in… I’ve shown this image many, many times. There are 13 drones in this image, I believe, all being kept out of the nest by one female worker bee. Fantastic.
Winter: The Pregnant Colony
Jamie Ellis: So colonies are readying themselves to go through winter with the food reserves that they need. So let’s talk about that. An early winter colony activity is the lowest that it will be. The cluster is tight. They’re generating the heat that they need to generate for purposes of keeping their colony alive. They’re doing that by consuming the stored honey. Remember that honey they stored back at the end of last spring? They’re now tapping into those reserves and burning that fuel so that they can generate the heat necessary for the colony to survive. That’s what they do in early winter.
The secret is most people don’t know that in winter, the colony is pregnant. And in late winter, just enough brood is being reared in the center of that nest. You can’t see it. You don’t know it’s happening. But in late winter and early spring, when the red maples start to bloom across the southeast, there’s enough incoming nectar and enough incoming pollen that the colony is pregnant. You can’t see it. It’s all in the womb of the nest. But that colony is pregnant. You see it’s sexually mature now. It is successfully overwintered. The days are warming. The resources are starting to come in. And that colony is trying to grow a new colony in its own womb.
And if it’s done all of that well, once that spring rolls back around and the resources start pouring in, that adult colony, the adult colony that just survived winter, is capable of having its own child, through swarming, now it was one colony, but it has just become two.
Threats to the Colony, and Take-Homes
Jamie Ellis: So I’ve tried very hard to stick to exactly my 30 minutes. I’ll just make the point that we have a large, robust beekeeping industry in the United States, from honey production to pollination, to producing equipment, to producing more bees, to producing queens. We know the beekeeping industry is under threat from a lot of stressors that colonies face.
Part of my job at the University of Georgia is to augment the efforts already happening here at the University of Georgia with my colleagues in the southeast to address the primary enemies of honeybees. The ones that you see here Varroa which is a mite, Varroa and the pathogens that they transmit to bees, bee nutrition, climate related impacts, new pesticide impacts, poor quality queens. So these are the things that impact that colony and limit that colony’s ability to overwinter and reproduce.
If I’ve done my job in my 30 minutes, I talk to you about the two main things that honeybees want to do. They want to survive winter and they want to reproduce. I talk a lot about what colonies swarming actually means. And hopefully now you can match those developmental steps that colonies undergo with the time of year that they happen. It’s been absolutely my pleasure to speak to you about Honeybees. I can’t wait to partner with you guys in any way I can. There’s my email address at the bottom. Should you have any questions, you can find me that way. So I’m going to turn it back over to our hosts so I can try to field questions before our next wonderful talk.
Questions for Dr. Ellis
How a Queen Mates, and Winter Brood
Becky Griffin: Thank you so much, Jamie. We’ve gotten a lot of comments. Everybody loves your passion and enthusiasm for honeybees. For those who really want to hear more of Jamie, he does have a podcast. It’s called Two Bees in a Podcast, and we will make sure that you all have a link to that. I’ve listened to it, full of great information and given in a great way, similar to the way that Jamie talks now, talking to us. So Jamie, let’s dive into some questions. Okay. Kathy Schultz wants to know how does the queen lay eggs in the winter when the drones are all gone?
Jamie Ellis: Great question. The short answer is in spring when new queens are produced, the queen will emerge from her cell and she’ll actually leave the nest to mate. They mate when they’re roughly 10 to 14 days old. On that mating flight, and the reason they leave the nest is because only their brothers are available to them in the nest. And if honeybees queens mate with their brothers, the worker bees can detect the inbred eggs and they’ll abort them. So the queen leaves the nest and mates with drones from other colonies.
She does this with about 15 to 20 drones, and she stores the sperm that she collects from those drones and a special organ in her body. And she only does that on one, maybe two mating days. So for the rest of her life, she is fertilizing eggs from a pool of semen that she is keeping alive in her body. And just FYI, drones themselves, male honeybees result from unfertilized. So queens fertilize the eggs to produce females, they leave the eggs unfertilized to produce males, which means from a trivia perspective, drones have no fathers. They only have mothers.
Why Other Bees Don’t Make Honey
Becky Griffin: That is a good trivia question. Okay, great answer. Maria would like to know, why don’t any other bees make honey?
Jamie Ellis: It’s a great question. Honey bees are one of the few types of bees that can survive winter. So there’s 20,000 species of bees on planet Earth. The vast majority of them are solitary bees. So the adults only live within the season and then die. So the reason you’ll have new adults next year is the immatures are overwintering somewhere, usually in a tube or in holes in the ground. There are some other social bees like bumblebees that make little bits of honey. But even the social bumblebees don’t overwinter as colonies, they only overwinter as mated queens that next year come out and start a new colony. So honeybees produce and store honey because they’re one of the few bees that actually overwinter as colonies, as thousands of bees.
Purple Honey
Becky Griffin: Great. We have a question from North Carolina. Deborah has some purple honey produced by hives in the sandhills of North Carolina. Why would it be purple?
Jamie Ellis: Oh, I know why it would be purple. I don’t know what the source is. So let me answer that first question first. Essentially, all plants that produce enough nectar for bees to collect and convert into honey have that basic sugar water combination. But every species of plant contributes unique secondary plant metabolites. And that’s why the nectars, and correspondingly the honey that comes from them, has their own color, smell, and flavor profile. Because every species of plant is putting in secondary chemicals to make that color, taste, and flavor unique.
So the reason it’s purple is because it’s coming from a plant that produces nectar that has those purple characteristics. One of the most common plants responsible for purple honey in the southeast is the invasive kudzu. So if you have a lot of kudzu around you, it’s possible that you are getting purple honey from that. I’m freshly back at Georgia so it’s been a while but my colleague told me another plant that is also responsible for producing honey that’s got a purple tinge but I forgot it so unfortunately I can’t answer it right off the bat but it could be kudzu or it could be this other plant that for some reason I don’t know. I’ve forgotten what it was. But that’s why. It’s coming from a species of plant that produces nectar that has that purplish tint.
Becky Griffin: I don’t think I’ve ever seen or tasted purple honey. So I’ll be on the lookout for that.
Jamie Ellis: So the first time I ever saw kudzu honey was when I was an undergrad at University of Georgia when Keith Delaplane kept the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute. There were beekeepers who were coming from Alabama who would bring over purple honey and they did a pollen analysis and found that it was kudzu. So it appears that kudzu was responsible for purple honey, but it’s not the only one. So it could be kudzu, but it could be other flower sources.
How Much Honey to Harvest, How Much to Leave
Becky Griffin: All right, we’ll answer another one and then we’ll give you a break, Jamie. How does harvesting honey and honeycomb affect the hive? How much honey to take and how much to leave?
Jamie Ellis: So beekeeping is the art of managing colonies to where they would be stronger than they would be on their own, right? Because colonies want to swarm all the time to produce more colonies, but beekeeping, we manage that so colonies are stronger than they ordinarily would want to be. Correspondingly, we manage them in a way that they produce more honey than they need to survive. So the astute beekeeper will leave roughly 70 pounds of honey on the hive, 50 to 70 pounds of honey on the hive year-round. That’s roughly the size of one of our medium boxes. We call those medium supers.
And then we harvest everything else. So my job as a beekeeper is to make sure that they produce a super of honey for themselves and then multiple surplus honey supers that I can extract. So essentially I’m managing them to produce more honey than they need so I can harvest the difference.
Bethany O’Rear: Honey Bees in the Home Garden
Becky Griffin: All right. Well, thank you so much, Jamie. We’re going to give you a break. Let you grab some sweet tea and take a break. And we’re going to head on to our next speaker. Our next speaker is Bethany O’Rear. She is a friend and colleague with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. Since 2011, Bethany has worked with home gardeners, master gardener volunteers, community gardens, and landscape professionals across Alabama. She coordinates Alabama’s participation in the Great Southeast Pollinator Census, and she tells me she’s expecting big things out of her neighbors and all of her fellow Alabamians.
She’s on the ground connecting communities across Alabama with pollinator science. She has a great perspective on what honeybees mean to our ecosystem and the community that they serve. Okay, Beth, the floor is yours.
Bethany O’Rear: All right. Well, thank you, Becky. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. And wow, that was just fascinating. Thank you, Dr. Ellis. I appreciate that. That was very interesting. And so I’m going to kind of talk about the kind of the home gardener, pollinator, enthusiast perspective. We’re going to kind of look at some ID characteristics, some food sources. There may be a little bit of overlap with what Dr. Ellis talked about and what I’ll talk about as well. And then looking at some of the ways that we can provide those food sources, what those plants are, and protecting our honeybees in our gardens and landscapes.
Identifying a Honey Bee for the Census
Bethany O’Rear: So first we want to look at the kind of some basic identification characteristics. This will come into play for all those participating in the census in August. Becky mentioned it’s just a little over a month away. And so when we’re looking at honeybees, they’re going to be our smaller bees. And I know that’s all relative, right? We’re looking at honeybees. You know what the term smaller means. But when you compare those to, you know, the bumblebees, carpenter bees, our honeybees are smaller. They’re going to have a narrow head. You’re going to see that brown or black alternating stripes. You also notice their fuzzy abdomen. They’ve got golden brown hairs. And a lot of times you may see pollen collecting on those, those hairs.
And then, as I mentioned, they are smaller in size than some of our other native bees. Looking at the different, the breakdown of the colony, you’ve got your worker bees, which we know are our females. Those are going to be about a half inch in length. Then we move up to the drones, which are the males, and it’s two-thirds. They’re two-thirds of an inch in length. And then we move up to the queen, which is a larger female at three-quarters of an inch. So that’s one of the distinguishing characteristics that we can look at when we’re trying to identify those as we watch them during our census days.
What a Colony Requires
Bethany O’Rear: And then when we move on to requirements, so what do honeybees require? Dr. Ellis has mentioned several things and went into detail, but basically, we’re looking at they kind of need the same things we do. So they need shelter, whether it’s a hive that’s being managed by a beekeeper like Dr. Ellis mentioned. It’s a cavity that they have found on their own after they’ve swarmed. But then we also need food sources and we’ll get more into detail on that. And as has been mentioned, it’s really important that those food sources are consistent or as consistent as we can make them throughout the seasons.
And then water sources. If we’ll look at, Dr. Ellis mentioned how they use water to help cool the hive. So making sure that we provide those adequate water sources if they aren’t occurring naturally. And then we want to be cautious and be very conservative when we’re using pesticides. And we’ll talk about IPM and what that looks like. But we want to do our best to protect those honeybees.
Pollen and Nectar
Pollen: Protein, Brood, and the Corbicula
Bethany O’Rear: So when we’re looking at food sources, and we’ve already talked a little bit about pollen and what it does, it is their source of protein with their amino acids, fats, and vitamins. A strong colony will collect 33 to 100 pounds of pollen annually, depending on the size of that colony. Also, as a… Brood rearing will decrease. So the number of brood that is produced is dependent on the availability of pollen. So whenever those levels go down, the number of brood that are produced will go down as well. And so that’s important to mention when it comes to being able to increase in the size of that colony. So as Dr. Ellis mentioned, as the the amount of pollen and nectar ebb and flow, so also does the number of brood that’s produced.
And I don’t know that he mentioned this. This is actually, and I kept bees for just a couple of years. It’s on my list, Dr. Ellis, so don’t write me off yet. I have that on my retirement list because it just took way more time than I really anticipated. But this is actually a bee that I was watching going into one of my hives a couple of years ago. And I just love the pollen baskets are just the cutest things ever. And so those are what you see those two yellow dots on either side of this particular bee. The technical term is corbicula, but this is how they transport that pollen back into the colony or back into the hive.
Nectar: The Carbohydrate
Bethany O’Rear: All right, so we move on from pollen, we move to nectar. And like Dr. Ellis mentioned, it is their carbohydrate source. This is what they’re going to convert to honey, and this is what provides their energy. So it’s providing the energy for flying, for maintaining the colony, for their daily activities. They’re really dependent on this source, as was mentioned, because so it’s really important that they have sufficient honey stores in the winter. They’ve got to make sure they’ve got enough to carry them through. So that’s another reason that having food sources in the late summer, early fall are really important to help continue that pollen and nectar provision.
So, one thing to mention too, when we’re talking about pollen and nectar, not all sources are created equal. So, the nutritional value will vary between plants. The abundance is going to vary between plants. Some may have a lot of pollen and or nectar, but it may not necessarily be high quality. So it’s important to kind of research those things. Some plants provide both pollen and nectar. Some provide only one or the other. So it’s really important to plant. Make sure there’s a variety of plants in your landscape or on your property, in your gardens, and just research those plants. Find the ones that are going to be best. If you’re dedicating an area that you’re wanting to plant to support pollinators, maybe you’re looking at increasing an area that you already have, just do the research that’s needed to make sure that those plants that you install are going to give the best of both of those things that are needed.
What Bees Want in a Flower
Bethany O’Rear: All right, so also when we’re looking at what bees want, as far as we’ve talked about what they’re collecting, now we’re talking about the food sources and what they want. As mentioned, they want high quality, they want a lot of it, so then we also need to, in… Because these are social insects, when they find those sources that are high quality and that are large quantities, they’re going to communicate those locations to their nest mates so that they can go out and help harvest that food source as well.
But then they’re also looking for large compound flowers, which means the actual, it’s a grouping of flowers on the individual plant. So it’s not just one single flower, it’s a grouping of flowers that form there. They also look for single flowers, no double petals. It’s hard for them to land. They don’t really necessarily produce as much pollen and nectar. And then they’re also looking for plants or flowers that have short floral tubes. So, you know, when we’re looking at varieties, and we’ll talk more about this as we move forward, but flower structure is really important as far as attractiveness and support of honeybees as pollinators.
Where to Add Bee Forage
Bethany O’Rear: All right, so if we’re looking at adding those food sources, well, where am I going to add bee forage? One option is there in our vegetable gardens. Now, granted, a lot of our vegetable crops bloom, and some may provide that source of food and or nectar to our honeybees. But we can also install flowering cover crops depending on the season. We’ll go more into detail about this a little bit later.
But then in our home landscape, so maybe you don’t have a vegetable garden or you’re wanting to increase pollinators’ support in your home landscape, so we can add perennials, we can add trees, we can and add shrubs. If you have larger land areas, look at incorporating some of these plants and field edges, providing those additional plants. Maybe if the field is cultivated or, you know, kind of along those edges, you’re going to have to be able to find those plants. Borders of your garden, you know, that kind of thing. And then maybe you want to install a pollinator meadow or a bee pasture. And that can be anywhere from a half to two acres, depending on your particular land situation. This is something that’s not a quick project, but it is something you might look to going forward.
How Bees Forage, and How to Plant for Them
Bethany O’Rear: So when we’re looking at adding those bee plants, we want to use large swathes of the same plant. So let’s talk a little bit about foraging kind of in general. So bees are going to forage for food when the temperature is above 55 degrees. They’re going to visit between 50 to 1000 flowers a day. And they’re most active between 8am and 5pm. And they really are kind of will vacate large fields or leave the fields, they’re going to vacate those by 8pm at the latest.
So that’s some important things to know when we’re looking at IPM that we’ll get into in a little bit. But so when we’re, we want to add, as I mentioned, we want to add large swathes of the same plant. Variety is important, but depending on the type and the size of the plant, you know, a single plant or even a few here and there may not be effective because insects aren’t, they don’t see very well. And so they’re not going to really see those small patches.
You want to focus on adding forage for all seasons if possible, but especially mid to late summer. That’s when we hit our dearth. That’s whenever the least amount of pollen and nectar sources are available. So anything that we can add that will be blooming that time. And as Becky has mentioned, anytime we talk about the census, that’s one of the reasons that it, one of the reasons that it occurs in August is if plants, if we can get folks paying attention to what plants are blooming and installing plants that are blooming in August, that’s going to help alleviate some of that dirt situation [VERIFY: "dirt" — reads as "dearth," per the same speaker at 47:28] that we go through in late summer. And then it’s great if you can have three food sources available each season. So plant something of three different somethings for each of the seasons mentioned earlier.
Native, Nativar, and Non-Native
Bethany O’Rear: Now let’s talk a little bit about native versus nativar versus non-native. So native plants have been proven to be four times more attractive to pollinators than non-natives. And which is important to note. And while our preference is native, granted, that’s always a benefit, non-invasive non-natives, they can offer benefit as well, especially in areas where in a commercial setting or a more formal setting where natives are still working to fit in.
Now as gardeners, we all love natives, but in some kind of HOA situations, commercial landscape situations, which thankfully, that preference for very manicured settings seems to be ebbing a little bit. We’re seeing more municipal plantings of Natives, which is super exciting for all of us. And so I think they’re kind of coming into their own slowly but surely. But I also think a balance between non-Native and Native does work in various settings.
But what about nativars? And that term gets thrown around. I’m hearing it more often. And basically a nativar is a cultivar or a cultivated variety of a native plant. So we’ve all seen the purple coneflowers that aren’t purple, right? So those are nativars. They are selected for some aesthetic reason, a different flower color, a different flower, maybe a different plant size. And so, are they good or bad for pollinators? Well, according to Dr. Doug Tallamy, it just depends. So they can be problematic in that in some cases, for whatever reason, they were aesthetically selected. Whatever that more pleasing situation was, whether it was a flower structure or lack of pollen or nectar produced, that’s going to inhibit their benefit, obviously.
But then there are, in other cases, a nativar may be just as beneficial, or in some cases, more beneficial than its native counterparts. So it really requires some research. Now, would I say, you know, adding if it’s completely non-native, once again, I think balance is the key in all of these things. So native versus nativar versus non-native, it just requires some research. And then, you know, making sure that we kind of consider all of those things before we install those plants.
Planting Options
Trees, Shrubs, and Perennials
Bethany O’Rear: All right, so then let’s look at some planting options. So long term, we’re talking about trees and shrubs. And granted, maybe when we think about pollinator plants or honeybee plants supporting our pollinators, I think, or at least in my mind, initially, folks may think perennials. All of those flowering things. But trees and shrubs are great pollinator supporters. Long-term, you plant them once, they continue to do their thing year after year.
So if we are going to plant those things, if we are going to install trees and shrubs, if we are going to install some perennials, those really are best planted in the fall just for survivability, ease of maintenance. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t plant them in the summer or in the spring or, you know, any of those other times. But I, before coming to Extension, I was in the landscape industry and we worked year round. So we didn’t just work in the fall. But as home gardeners, it’s going to be a lot easier on the plant itself to become established when we plant in the fall. And it’s going to be easier on us as the gardener taking care of those plants.
Wildflower Meadows and Annuals in Pots
Bethany O’Rear: If you’re considering establishing a wildflower meadow or a pollinator meadow, that’s something that’s going to require some planning. It’s not impossible. It’s actually growing in popularity, it seems, but it’s not an instant gratification situation. So it’s, you know, you select that area. You make sure and remove all competing vegetation, whether that’s using an herbicide to spray out the undesirable plant material, or if you’re using, maybe you solarize that area and killing out all the weed seed that may be in that soil that you’re wanting to sow the wildflower seed.
And then we’re going to sow those. Typically, it’s best to sow wildflower seed in the fall. And then it’ll kind of do its thing and germinate whenever conditions are right going into the spring. But just remember to choose a specific blend for your area. There’s a lot of online wildflower seed sources that have, that say, pollinator mixes or southeastern mix. So just make sure it’s going to support pollinators in your specific region.
And then, you know, something that’s short-term that you can really try to support those pollinators this year is adding some annual plants. I know that whenever we do talks, especially getting folks a lot of times we’ll talk when we’re talking with school groups who want to participate in the census and maybe they’re new and they really want to get involved this year but they really haven’t had time to to install a garden and there’s not one on campus then we’ll just recommend planting some annuals in some pots and you know even in small spaces you can still plant something to bring in those pollinators so.
A Note on Hardiness Zones
Bethany O’Rear: Now, as we kind of move into specific plants, I want to just mention the plant recommendations that you’re going to see, a lot of them are specific to the southeast. Now, granted, there are some that the hardiness zones go way, cover a large area of the U.S., but I know I’m talking to folks that are not just in the southeast. So, just going forward, double check the hardiness zones of the plants that I mentioned, compare it to where you are, to figure out if that’s the right selection for you.
A Season-by-Season Plant List
Cover Crops
Bethany O’Rear: All right, so I mentioned earlier incorporating cover crops. That’s a great way to kind of support pollinators, support honeybees in your vegetable garden. So depending on the season, you know, a lot of folks, they’re going to grow vegetables in the warm season or during the spring and then the summer. But they’re not necessarily going to do a fall garden. So that might be an option where they’re going to plant a cool season cover crop.
In this picture, and granted this is a large scale and this is a commercial farmer, he is growing, this is canola. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful flowers. This was taken, I was on my way to a master gardener class in the Shoals area of Alabama, and this was taken, I think, in February one year. Nothing’s blaming [VERIFY: "blaming" — reads as "blooming"] that time of year, and then you just have this fluorescent yellow that just looks like this, I mean, it’s just absolutely gorgeous.
But that is canola. And that is something, granted, not on this scale, but canola doesn’t get very tall. So that might be something. It would be suitable for a home vegetable gardener to plant canola, as would crimson clover, as would hairy vetch. And then maybe you decide, you know what, I’m not going to plant a vegetable garden this summer. I’m going to let my ground rest. I’m not going to put it in production. I’m not growing tomato, whatever, which I can’t imagine not growing tomatoes in the summer. But that might be you. And if it is, that’s fine, then you can actually turn that area and plant sunflowers or buckwheat, which would be support those honeybees in the warm season.
All-Year Bloomers
Bethany O’Rear: All right, so these are some things that are all-year bloomers. So dandelion, and I’ve listed kind of when they’re in bloom. So we’ve got dandelion, white clover, that’s another one, bitterweed, verbena, or the vervain, which is actually Verbena stricta, and then smartweed.
Now, this can be a challenge as is some of the other things that I will mention a little bit later. Especially we, I won’t say we, some of us may have an affinity for a very manicured lawn. And so, honestly, we’re trying to get rid of dandelions or maybe we know some people who are. Maybe it’s a situation with your HOA and that kind of thing. So we’ve kind of got to work around some of those things. But dandelion is a great one to support honeybees and if you can get away with letting it do what it does.
Winter
Bethany O’Rear: All right. So some plants that are specific to winter, Dr. Ellis mentioned red maple, also elm and alder. But then one, once again, that folks are really trying to maybe get rid of, they’re pre-emerging. They put out a pre-emerging in the fall season to take care of this weed, but this is henbit. And so if you think about it, whenever you’re looking around your lawn, you see this one popping up when the grass is dormant. It’s really kind of the only thing that’s blooming. And so if you live in an area where you can let this happen, then it’s a good way to help support our local pollinators.
Spring
Bethany O’Rear: All right. And then as we move forward, obviously in spring, we’re going to have a lot more availability. Willows, redbuds. Redbuds is one of my favorite trees. It kind of just says, hey, spring’s coming. It’s one of the first things to bloom. I always get excited when I see it blooming. You know on the edge of the understory black locust is another. And then tulip poplar, which we don’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to the blooms. But this is an absolutely gorgeous bloom that you see pictured here. And it’s a tulip poplar bloom.
A bloomin’, and you can, it’s almost, if you’ve got a holly that’s blooming and you get near it during the spring of the year, you just hear a hum. There is just a hum from all those honeybees that will visit the flowers. And they’re very inconspicuous, right? Those little bitty white ones, but they provide great support to our honeybee population. Cherry laurel, not as huge of a fan of that plant, but it does serve, has the benefit of supporting our honeybees. And then all of our tree fruits. So we’re looking at apples and peaches and pears and plums, our blackberries, any other brambles, and then our blueberries as well.
Summer
Bethany O’Rear: All right, and then we move over to summer, and so we’ve got a lot of different things. This is obviously is not an exhaustive list. Before we actually logged on today, Becky and Dr. Ellis were talking about sourwood honey and that kind of thing, so it’s blooming in the summer.
Also, this is a picture of milkweed. I wanted to mention too, make sure when you’re planting milkweed, we have several species of native milkweeds. This is just one. There are some other ones, larger leaves, different flower colors, a lot larger in size, the actual plant. But just be sure you’re not planting tropical milkweed. And unfortunately, in some of our retail situations, it has even been labeled as a native, but it is a tropical. The tropical milkweed, it has a tri-color bloom. So if you see that and it’s got three different colors, in that bloom, you’re going to know that’s the tropical milkweed. And this is a topic for another talk, but it is, there’s a lot of issues with that particular variety and can actually do harm to our monarch population. So if you’re going to plant milkweed, just make sure it’s one of the native ones.
Fall
Bethany O’Rear: And then moving into fall, like we mentioned, late summer, early fall, Clethra is a great native shrub that’s blooming that time of year. Several of our asters, mountain mint, a lot of different sunflower species or… And then goldenrod. And bless goldenrod’s heart. It gets a bad rap. But we, you know, we know, and I’m trying to communicate this to all my non-gardener friends, you know, it’s not goldenrod that’s going to give, that causes the allergy issues. It’s a ragweed that’s blooming at the same time. But this is a great supporter of honeybees in the fall.
Water
Bethany O’Rear: All right, so we’ve moved off of food and now we know they’ve got to have water. So first, a little, a few things to mention. These can’t swim and so they’re not going to just kind of dive into a water source. They’re going to be around the edge. They can’t sit [VERIFY: "sit" — reads as "sip"] while they’re flying, so they’re not like a hummingbird or anything like that. They’re going to have to land. While they will fly up to five miles for a water source, they’re going to extend… spend a lot of energy doing that. So if we can kind of help mitigate that, that’s what we need to do.
Now, if you have a pond or a creek on your property, then you’re good to go. There’s no real need necessarily in providing a supplemental water source. But if you don’t, and can, that’s a good thing to do. So adding a shallow dish with clean gravel so that they have a place to land and then they can drink. Maybe you have a bird bath with pieces of floating wood or something that’s just any place that they can land, they’re going to be able to drink from that perspective or from that position.
Protecting Honey Bees from Pesticides
Start With IPM
Bethany O’Rear: And then let’s move on to protection from pesticides. So we really want to start with IPM. And as we know, IPM is Integrated Pest Management, right? So we’re going to start, that’s our toolbox of strategies that kind of ends with chemical. So we’re going to start at the bottom of this triangle. We’re going to start with our prevention. And then moving up to our cultural sanitation kind of level. And then as we move up, chemicals kind of the last resort.
So if we, if pesticides are necessary, we definitely want to make sure we start with the softest chemistries first. So we’re looking at, you know, you know, insecticidal soaps, we’re looking at maybe horticultural oils, that kind of thing, if pesticides are necessary. And you know, that’s something that we work as extension educators, trying to encourage the public to increase their tolerance of things that aren’t exactly perfect, whether it’s produce that they’re eating or maybe spots on a leaf. You know, some things just aren’t worth treating. And so we’ve got to work on changing that perspective a little bit. And so that’s something that we continually work on.
When You Have to Spray
Bethany O’Rear: But if it is a situation where we’ve kind of gone through all these steps, pesticides are something that we’re having to resort or do to, then we want to make sure, try not to spray on blooming plants if possible. And then also we want to make sure we time it correctly. So we’re going to spray at dusk after those honeybees have already left. And then look for the bee advisory symbol on any products that you choose. And that’s the EPA icon that’s used on pesticide labels. It signals that the product has specific application restrictions to avoid harming or killing bees and other pollinators. So it’s really important that you look for that when you’re selecting products, if possible.
And then another thing to mention too, organic doesn’t mean safe for pollinators. Just because it’s an organic product, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to harm our beneficials. So it’s something, once again, to research.
Time correctly. Don’t use broad-spectrum pesticides. Be as specific as possible to the pest you’re trying to control. And then for sure, use contact pesticides. Anything that has a residual, like a systemic, that’s something that’s… And we see this used a lot in our ornamental settings, where it’s something that we use. We pour it as a drench on the ground. It’s taken up by the roots and translocated throughout the plant. Well, as it’s translocated, that means it’s translocated to those blooms as well. So there’s some issues there.
And then I mentioned at the beginning of this talk how the pollen will collect on those fuzzy hairs that are on the abdomen of the honeybees. Well, guess what? So, dusts. So if it’s a pesticide dust, the formulations are important. So we definitely don’t want to use any dust. If that gets on the honeybee, then they’re going to take it back to the colony, and that can cause some real harm there as well. So some things to think about whenever we’re looking at… Trying to be as good of a steward as possible of our pollinators.
Best Management Practices
Bethany O’Rear: Let’s look at some best management practices. A lot of these things will kind of help mitigate or alleviate or delay pesticide intervention. So, healthy plants are going to do much better. So, there are some things we can do. Watering correctly, not too much, not too little. Fertilizing appropriately, once again, not too much, not too little. We know we can always over-fertilize things. Pruning correctly and at the right time. Anytime we stress a plant, they’re going to be more susceptible to disease and insect pressure. So, if we keep our plants healthy, intervention on our part with pests are going to be a lot more limited.
You want to make sure as I mentioned spray chemicals in the evening after the pollinators have quote gone to bed encourage your beneficials so if you see ladybugs or lacewings or any of these other beneficials let them do their job if you know if you see a few aphids but then you see a lady beetle or a ladybug then just know that that it’s kind of taking care of business and let them kind of do their thing and then once again we always start with looking for pests and disease resistant varieties.
Wrapping Up: Every Garden Can Help
Bethany O’Rear: So kind of wrapping up, you want to make sure you know your pollinators. We’ve talked about that. Dr. Ellis did a great presentation earlier describing kind of the cycle and a year in the life. Talked a little bit about ID and what they need, their requirements. As mentioned, food sources are important to plant for continuous bloom so that they have whatever they need, especially during the late summer, early fall. Meeting the basic needs not only of food but water as well. And then protecting your pollinators, making sure that you’re responsible with pesticides. Only use them as a last resort. Kind of increase your tolerance to maybe not so perfect plants. And then just know that every garden can help.
You may not have a huge landscape. That’s fine. You may just have a patio where you can plant a few pots and put those pollinator plants in there as well. So, you know, it doesn’t matter the size. Everybody can play a role in protecting our pollinators, specifically our honeybees. And with that, I will turn it back over. I appreciate the time. And this is my email and cell phone number, and I’m open to any questions you may have.
Questions and Answers
Researching Nativars
Becky Griffin: Great. Thank you so much, Bethany. Wow, you gave a lot of good practical advice. So I think your presentation complimented Dr. Ellis just perfectly. You’re getting a lot of hearts on the screen as well. Okay, so I’m going to delve into some questions. And I don’t know if these are not directed to just you or Jamie or both, but I’ll just throw them out there. How can we research nativar plants?
Bethany O’Rear: So that’s a really good question. There’s a lot of information available out there. I actually heard Dr. Doug Tallamy speak at the Master Gardener Conference and he’s still a little on the fence. And so, but there’s a lot of good information out there as far as… And Dr. Ellis chime in anytime. As far as specific studies about how beneficial they are and all of the different nativars, there hasn’t been as much research that I could find, but it is something that I think folks are paying closer attention to.
Jamie Ellis: Yeah, I believe you’re right. We have some research going on here at the station.
How Far Honey Bees Travel for Nectar
Becky Griffin: Do we know how far honeybees will travel to find nectar?
Bethany O’Rear: I’m going to turn that one over to Dr. Ellis.
Jamie Ellis: Yeah, I could take that. One of the peculiarities about honeybees is that because their colonies live from year to year to year, they’re much pickier about their food resources than a standard bee. So they like large volumes of high quality nectar. Correspondingly, they prefer to forage within about 300 yards from their hive. However, they will routinely go up to five or eight miles from the nest. So the area of a circle with a five mile radius is about 80-ish square miles. So if you think about it, a single honeybee colony is foraging about an 80-square-mile area around its nest. Yeah, so it’s pretty impressive what they’re capable of doing from a forage perspective.
How a Split Colony Gets a New Queen
Becky Griffin: Great. Michelle would like to know, when the colony splits, how does the original colony get a new queen?
Jamie Ellis: Yeah, so in advance of the split, they began investing in the production of the next round of queens. So a queen honeybee can only control the sex of her offspring. When she lays an egg, it’s either fertilized or unfertilized. If it’s unfertilized, it’s a male. Drones, we’ll put those aside for a second. When she lays a fertilized egg, it’s a female. So that female is capable of becoming a queen or a worker. The workers determine the fate of that female.
So the workers will feed that female a lot of high-quality food if they want a queen or less low-quality food if they want a worker. So in advance of the swarm, workers start taking those female offspring and start pushing them to become a queen. So the queen swarms with the hive about a week or so before the new queens start emerging from their cells.
The first queen to emerge from her cell after the colony is formed can lead its own swarm away, but if it doesn’t, it stays behind and goes to all the other developing queens that are in their cells. They bite small holes in the walls of those cells and stick their abdomen in those cells and start stinging their sisters to death. So whichever queen emerges first it determines that she wants to be the one ruling in the nest, she’ll do away with her competition. But all of that starts in advance of the swarm. The workers start investing in the production of the new queens before the old queen leaves.
Becky Griffin: And which bees are chosen to leave? And which bees know to stay?
Jamie Ellis: That’s something that’s currently being worked out.
Honey Bees at Hummingbird Feeders
Becky Griffin: Yeah, that’s a good question. We have a couple questions about hummingbird feeders. People are seeing honeybees come to their hummingbird feeders. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? And Maria says that they come to her hummingbird feeder in the spring, and then after the spring, they just disappear. So any thoughts on that?
Bethany O’Rear: Well, I would just assume it’s because of the sugar water. And so that’s a food source. I mean, when you’re putting out a hummingbird feed, there’s not as much or as many things are blooming, but I’ll let you go into further detail.
Jamie Ellis: Yeah, essentially. Honeybees prefer to forage on plants. So when there are nectiferous plants doing their things in the environment, so those are plants that are producing lots of nectar, they will forage on that. So when you mention that you’re seeing them on your hummingbirds and feeders in spring and then they disappear, they’re disappearing to flower resources. They’ll come back to your hummingbird feeders once the nectar flows are over. I don’t think it’s a problem.
Beekeepers might think it’s weird that they’re producing red honey and they’re not sure that that stuff comes from if you’re dyeing your sugar water, that is. You’re feeding the bees. You’re feeding other things, too. I mean, ants go to them, wasps go to them, other bees go to them. They can be a little territorial. They might chase away some of your hummingbirds, but it’s not a problem from the honeybee perspective.
Do Plants Produce More Nectar Every Day?
Becky Griffin: Okay, great. Dawn wants to know, do plants create more pollen and nectar every day?
Jamie Ellis: It’s highly variable. I mean, I think about a standard plant that’s going to bloom and produce a lot of nectar. It’s like a bell curve, right? As the plant starts blooming, you get little bits of nectar in their flowers. Then you get that huge flush and because of the large volume of flowers, it’s producing a lot of nectar and then it crescendos and then comes down to where you get fewer flowers and less nectar.
Flowers, individual flowers, do produce more nectar in the morning. So it’s often, so a lot of flowers are exhausted by the afternoon, which is why honey bees will often pivot away from them. Again, honey bees make almost all their decisions from a foraging perspective based on energy, whereas native bees will often go and go and go and feed on flowers throughout the day. Once the energy scale is tilted, in other words, it’s costing honeybees more energy than they get from the flower, they pivot somewhere else. And so energy dynamics are very important for them. But yes, the flowers produce more nectar typically in the morning and then more in the middle of their bloom than they do on either end of their bloom.
What “Brood” Means
Becky Griffin: Okay. Elizabeth would like some more understanding on the term brood.
Jamie Ellis: Bethany, I hate to answer all the questions. Do you want me to take it? Honeybees undergo complete metamorphosis. So they have an egg, larvae, pupa, and adult stage. Okay. The egg, the larvae, and the pupal stage all occur in one of those waxed cells. The egg, the larva, and the pupa are collectively referred to as the brood. So the adult bees are the ones meandering about the hive doing their thing. The brood would be the immature stages of honey bees, which would be the eggs, the larvae, and the pupae.
Capturing a Swarm
Becky Griffin: All right, let’s just, we’ll just do a couple more. Can the beekeeper capture the new swarming colony and add to a new bee box alongside his other boxes?
Jamie Ellis: Yes. Yes. Yeah, beekeepers collect swarms all the time and use it as a way to grow their apiary. It can be a little tricky if you hive the swarm in the same apiary as where the parent colony lives, because you could get some bees going back and forth between the new hive and the parent hive. So generally, if you hive a swarm, which is… is what the process is called. You would move that colony away for some weeks before moving them back if you want them to be in the same apiary.
The Yellow-Legged Hornet
Becky Griffin: All right, we’ll just do this question as the last one because it’s a doozy. How badly is the invasive yellow-legged hornet expected to impact the bee industry? Do we have any idea about that yet?
Jamie Ellis: That’s a very good question. If you hear me pause as I talk, it’s because we don’t know with certainty. So to broaden this for the benefit of everyone, the yellow-legged hornet is an invasive hornet species from Asia that was found in the Savannah, Georgia region in 2023, actually August 2023. It’s almost been here three years. And we have precedence for this… this hornet because it escaped its native range of Asia and moved into Europe about 20 years ago. So we’ve been able to see what bee colonies and beekeepers have encountered in Europe, and it’s not been pretty. So it’s expected to be potentially problematic in the southeastern United States.
They eat bees. They cause lots of damage. Beekeepers in Europe go to great lengths to try to control them. Feudily [VERIFY: "Feudily" — reads as "futilely"], I might add, because it’s a very difficult thing to control. And right now, the Georgia Department of Agriculture is doing everything they can, as long as the South Carolina Department of Agriculture, because they’re in South Carolina as well, to find as many of these nests as they can find and eradicate them. I think it will be a large component of my early extension efforts here here at the University of Georgia will be developing extension related information concerning this yellow legged hornet. It’s not going to be pretty I’m afraid.
Closing
Becky Griffin: Well we’ll look forward to seeing some of that information for sure. I want to thank Dr. Ellis and Bethany for joining us today and sharing such great information. The content was amazing. We got a lot of positive comments on it.
For those of you joining us, thank you for spending your afternoon with us today. I hope you learned a few things about honeybees. I know I did. Please be ready to join us next week, where we’ll be talking about some of the less glamorous pollinators. We’re going to be talking flies and bees. Flies with Dr. Scott Clem, University of Illinois. And Dr. Jason Schmidt from UGA is going to talk about wasps. And Gabrielle LaTora is going to be joining us as well.
As usual, look for Rich’s email that the recordings are up. You guys know the website by now. You can be checking. Thank you guys so much for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you next week.
[Unidentified speaker]: Have a great week, Becky. [VERIFY: second voice at the end of block 282, carried under Becky Griffin's label in the SRT — speaker not identifiable from the transcript]
Becky Griffin: Thanks, you too.
Transcript processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Great Southeast Pollinator Course · gsepc.org
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), file GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-14_HoneyBees.srt (282 blocks)