Honeybee_ Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - C. Marina Marchese [13]
Mom’s Bee-Pollinated Apple Pie with Honey
INGREDIENTS:
2 9-inch pie crusts
5 cups peeled, cored, and sliced Granny Smith
and Macintosh apples
1 cup Red Bee® wildflower honey
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Position rach in lower third of the oven and preheat oven to 400°F. Fill a pastry-lined 9-inch pie plate with sliced apples. Pour honey over the apples and sprinkle with cinnamon and vanilla. Dot with small pieces of the butter. Cover filling with second crust and slice vent holes in top crust. Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350°F. Continue to bake until top crust is lightly browned and filling is bubbling, 40-45 minutes. Serve warm and drizzled with more honey.
Using some quick-lighting wads of paper, called smoker fuel, Billy lit his bee smoker. As he did, he explained that if your smoker goes out, you do not want to waste time relighting it while your hive is wide open and exposed to the external elements. Smoker fuel keeps things continually smoldering without wasting a lot of prep time. The wads of paper were made up of compressed cotton fiber and could be purchased at bee supply shops.
A SMOKER
Grateful for this handy tip, we the followed Billy over to the first hive, where we all listened intently as Billy talked about the hierarchy inside the beehive. To me, hive life, with its royal queen and her attendants, worker bees that do all the chores, and the lazy drones, sounded just like a fairy tale.
LIFE IN THE HIVE
A typical honeybee hive in the height of the summer will have a colony of approximately 80,000 bees, most of which are the female worker bees. Each hive has one queen, who is the mother of all the bees in her hive and the only sexually developed female. All the activities of the hive revolve around the queen and her egg-laying schedule. The queen is the largest bee inside the hive and can be identified by her long, streamlined abdomen. It is longer than the abdomens of the female worker bees and thinner than those of the male drones. Often the beekeeper marks the queen, using a special waterproof marker, with a colored dot on her thorax. This dot serves two purposes. First, it makes locating the queen in a hive of 80,000 bees much easier, and second, the color of the dot designates the year in which the queen was born. The color system, used by beekeepers all over the world, is as follows:
Blue: for years ending in 0 or 5
White: for years ending in 1 or 6
Yellow: for years ending in 2 or 7
Red: for years ending in 3 or 8
Green: for years ending in 4 or 9
In order to mark a queen, beekeepers use a special tool called a queen catcher, a small, spring-action clip (that looks like a hair clip), to gently pick her up. She is then coaxed into a small, clear plastic queen-marking tube. The other side of the tube is closed off with a screen. A sponge-covered plunger is pushed through the open side of the tube and moves the queen toward the screen. When her back is against the screen, the beekeeper takes the special queen-marking pen and, through the screen, marks the back of her abdomen. The ink takes a few seconds to dry and then the queen is placed back into the hive.
THE QUEEN AND HONEYBEE REPRODUCTION
All female honeybees begin their lives the same way: as fertilized eggs. The eggs are laid in the brood nest. The brood nest is usually found on the inner-most frames of the hive and is made up of a collection of cells, each containing an egg, that form an oval-shaped laying pattern. A small, arc-shaped area of cells above the brood nest is filled with pollen. Above the pollen, another arc reaches into the top two corners of the frame and is filled with honey. Only one egg laid by an existing queen inside a queen cup will develop into a queen bee. Queen