Elizabeth Fraser - Reality Rules II: A Guide to Teen Nonfiction Reading Interests: A Guide to Teen Nonfiction Reading Interests

Text copyright 2010 by Loree Griffin Burns

Photographs copyright 2010 by Ellen Harasimowicz, except for the following (numbers refer to pages in the print editon):

Scott Bauer/USDA ARS: pp. 28 (inset), 29, and 58 (right); Loree Griffin Burns: pp. 3 (right), 12 (left), 42, 44 (bottom left), 56 (left), and 57 (left); Scott Camazine: p. 56 (top right); Kathryn de Graaf: p. 58 (top left); Lila de Guzman/USDA ARS: p. 30 (top right); Maryann Frazier/American Bee Journal: p. 46; Andy Hemken/Honey Guy: p. 3 (bottom left); Cara Llewellyn: p. 13 (inset illustration); Jennifer L. G. OKeefe: pp. 19 (under), 33 (under), 44 (right); Jeff Pettis/USDA ARS: pp. 13 (right) and 21; J. Pettis, R. Ochoa, E. Erbe, and C. Pooley/USDA ARS: p. 30 (middle right); Roger J. Simonds: p. 45 (right); I. Barton Smith, Jr.: p. 14; Dennis vanEngelsdorp: p. 25 (right)

Photo of silhouetted bee throughout by Don Farrall, Getty Images

Drone definition on page 32 copyright 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Adapted and reproduced by permission from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition.

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Burns, Loree Griffin. The hive detectives: chronicle of a honey bee catastrophe /
Loree Griffin Burns; with photographs by Ellen Harasimowicz.
p.cm. (Scientists in the field)
1. Colony collapse disorder of honeybeesJuvenile literature. 2. Bee cultureJuvenile literature. I. Title. SF538.5.C65B87 2010
638'.13dc22 2009045249

ISBN 978-0-547-15231-8 hardcover
ISBN 978-0-544-00326-2 paperback

eISBN 978-0-547-48812-7
v1.0215

To my sister, Karin

Put on your veil, grab your hive tool, and light up your smoker...

... were going into a beehive.

Before we begin, remember this: Honey bees are gentle insects.

Gentle? you ask. But dont they have giant stingers on their rear ends?

Well, yes, most bees do have a stinger at the tip of the abdomen. But they only use it in emergencies. If you move slowly and deliberately (no jerks in the bee yard!) and remember not to block the hive entrance (bees hate to find a strange body between them and the entrance to their hive), you can spend an enjoyable afternoon with thousands of honey bees and walk away without a single sting. Mary Duane does it all the time.

Mary is a hobbyist beekeeper. She keeps a small number of honey bee hives in her backyard for the pleasure of working with the bees and, of course, for the honey. Every week or two, from early spring until fall, Mary opens and inspects each of her hives to be sure the family of bees inside is healthy and safe. If anything is wrong with the colonyand, unfortunately, there are many things that can go wrongMary will see signs during the inspection. Her goal as beekeeper is to recognize these signs and take the steps needed to correct them. Its not an easy hobby, but the rewards, according to Mary, are many.

When you work with bees you have to pay close attention to what you are doing, says Mary. Everything else in your life drops away. The bees are fascinating, they help the environment, and the honey is great, but mostly I love that keeping bees forces me to be mindful.

In nearly ten years of beekeeping, Mary has been stung about twenty timesnot bad when you consider shes handled millions of bees. Most of those stings happened early on, when Mary was new to working with honey bees. Now that she is used to the sights and sounds of an apiary, or bee yard, Mary is more relaxed and stings are rare. She wears a veil, of course, to protect her face, and she keeps sting remedies in her bee box, but she works her bees barehanded.

I started off wearing gloves, but I find that Im more gentle without them, Mary says. She pats the top of her bee box and adds, If I come across an ornery hive, then I put my gloves on like anybody else.

Mary also keeps a smoker handy. Any worries the bees have about Mary poking through their homeworries they communicate with each other by releasing a smelly chemical called alarm pheromonewill be masked by the smell of smoke. Unable to smell alarm pheromone, the majority of bees in the hive dont realize anything is amiss and, as a result, remain calm during the inspection.

To prepare the smoker, Mary fills it with dry pine needles, drops in a lit match, and fans the flames with air from an attached bellows. Once the needles are burning well she closes the top and a thin line of smoke issues from the metal spout.

Like most modern beehives, Marys consist of several boxes, called supers, stacked one atop the other in a towerlike structure. The supers come in different depthsand depending on the beekeeper, in different colors, toobut inside, all supers are the same: ten rectangular frames hang side by side.

Each frame provides a foundation on which the bees can build their wax honeycomb. They fashion rows and rows of hexagonal cells that will eventually be used to store food and raise young bees. Supers and frames are designed so that the honeycomb is arranged just as it would be in a wild hive. Of course, the removable frames and stackable supers make handling a man-made hive much easier than handling a wild hive in a hollow tree.