Bee Field Trip

Beeing Busy
By: Matthew Heinekin

Bees are quite fascinating creatures, the way they communicate, reproduce, and even build there amazing and complex hives. This field trip was quite amazing, due to the fact that we were given the opportunity to view the Bees and their hives up close in personal, and this was the first time that I have ever done something like this. Before this field trip I knew that there were worker bees and a queen bee, but I had never once heard of drone bees or even for a lack of a better term "garbage disposal bees." Whats cool about the drone bees is that they help protect the colony and reproduce with the queen bee. The garbage bees were also quite interesting because at the very bottom of the housing unit was a small tray that housed dead bees and or debris. Also if some bees die inside the hive these garbage bees will carry the dead away from the hive and leave them there.

Figure 1 is depiction of one of the suits that we wore during the up close and personal bee experience, you definitely need to make sure everything is zipped up and that you have the right size so that no bees can enter and sting you. Figure 2 shows the housing unit for the bees, now based on what I observed, I noticed that the upper level was primarily where honey was developed, the next layer down was where the wax was produced and the third layer was where they were mainly reproducing. Gwen, our instructor in yellow in Figure 2, was using a smoker in order to move bees out of her way so that she could open up the hive without killing a ton of bees. the main ingredients for the smoker was I believe wood chips and old test papers. Lastly in Figure 3 it shows a great representation of there amazing comb structure. What I find that is really fascinating is that each individual comb is pretty much exactly the same size, shape and depth. That must take some extraordinary skill an talent. Overall this trip was a success and I learned a lot about bees.