Solo [The Sanctuary] All Things Wise And Wonderful (Pt 3)

[Kavala]

Continued from [The Sanctuary] All Creatures Great And Small (Pt 2)
Timestamp: 74th of Fall, 512 AV

Kavala knew that the next lesson she really needed to learn was how the bees lifecycle went. Any good healer had to have a broader picture on a creature when it was attempting to raise or nurture or even heal them. Honeybees should be no different. In order to identify problems or know that something was off, a baseline normal had to be established. So in order to form a baseline normal in Kavala’s knowledge banks, she’d have to know about what was standard for the bees.

Thankfully her book was filled with information. The majority of bees she would be looking at were workers, so Kavala started there. How exactly did their lives go? Obviously, the queen created them. Kavala remembered from her earlier lessons that only the Queen laid eggs and in the event of her loss, perhaps rarely a worker would start laying eggs, but only Drones just before the hive itself died. Okay, so starting with the life of the workers made sense.

The queen came along and lays eggs daily in the bottom of cells in the brood chamber in what Kavala had come to know as the super or deep super. The actual brood chamber itself was a deep core hexagonal cavity that workers made from beeswax. The egg itself looked small, like a tiny piece of rice, barely large enough for the Konti to see with her naked eye. The incubation time for the egg was extremely fast. No more than three days pass before the egg hatches after standing straight up at the bottom of the cell. At the time it hatches, it becomes a larvae and feeds upon royal jelly from between days four and nine. Right at day ten, the top of the cell is capped off by worker bees. Before this it was left open. Once the top was capped off, the cell is left alone between days ten and twenty.

Kavala raised her eyebrow. It seemed strange that the eggs were laid in chambers, left and only tended too by worker bees, and then capped. Why did they cap them? She read on.

The larvae, it seemed, would spin themselves into a cocoon like inchworms and caterpillars did and then would transform from the larvae to a bee. They emerged on the 21st day. Kavala thought it was rather remarkable that a tiny thing far smaller than rice could go through such a process and become something so huge and complicated in such a short time. Twenty one days was a blink of an eye.

Workers Formation

• Day 1 – Egg Laid
• Day 3 - Hatches
• Day 4-9 – Fed Royal Jelly
• Day 10 – Cell Sealed
• Day 10-20 – Larvae spins cocoon
• Day 21 – Worker emerges as a Bee

Workers Life From Cell Emergence

• Day 1-2 - Cleans Her Own Birth Cell & Warms Brood
• Day 3-5 - Feeds Royal Jelly to Older Larvae
• Day 6-11 - Feeds Younger Larvae
• Day 12-17 - Begins Producing Wax, Comb Building, and Food Transport In Hive
• Day 18-21 - Guards Hive Entrance
  Day 22-35 - Gains Wings and Gathers Pollen, Nectar, Propolis, and Water

Kavala had always assumed bees where simply created by eggs being laid and bees hatching from the eggs. She didn’t think they went through processes, like say the frogs did going from eggs to tadpoles to actual frogs. But it seemed that the tiny life forms were complex in their existence, even if the larger creatures that occupied Mizahar didn’t realize it. Kavala always thought that once a bee hatched, much like a butterfly, its wings dried and it was ready to fly off and begin gathering nectar and making honey. Reading further, she realized she couldn’t have been more wrong.

The first task a worker bee had to deal with when hatching out of her chamber was cleaning it. Kavala chuckled slightly, impressed, because she could never see an offspring of one of her usual patients getting up after their birth and cleaning the birthing chamber. From there she was trusted with feeding older larvae which weren't so fragile and then slowly younger larvae. Then, she began making wax, building, transporting, and basically fussing with the other bees in the hive. As she got older, she moved outward, from the brood chamber to eventually guard the entrance of the hive. Then, when her wings were functional, she was able to fly out and do the traditional bee jobs - gathering food and water.

Their lives were so short. Kavala almost mourned how hard they worked and how very little they got individual gratitude for it. In some ways, she could almost related.

So... that was a worker. Evidently it was the most complex lifecycle in the hive, though it only lasted about thirty days. Death came early to workers, though they lived longer in the winter when not as much foraging was going on. It still must be a miserable life; sipping honey and huddling to keep warm only to look forward to warmer weather where you were certain you'd work yourself to death.

What about the Drones?

Kavala read on until she found the list of the Drone lifecycle. She read it over and decided it made sense. The Drones were far bigger than the workers, even though they did very little but mate. That meant that they needed more time to grow and develop into the large furry bodied bees they would become. So, they needed extra time in their cells. Fantastic... this was all starting to make sense to the Konti now. She remembered that they lived about ninety days, so basically they just flitted from hive to hive after they emerged and maybe mated, maybe not, and then died. Their whole life was lived in one season. Kavala shook her head.

Drone Lifecycle

• Day 1 – Egg Laid
• Day 3 - Hatches
• Day 4-9 – Fed Royal Jelly
• Day 10 – Cell Sealed
• Day 10-20 – Larvae spins cocoon
• Day 24 – Drone emerges as a Bee

One more variety to understand. Kavala saved the Queen until last, curious about her but also dreading where it was leading. Surprisingly the Queen had the same cycle as the Drone and Worker, except unlike their long larvae stages, she emerged on Day 16. Kavala wasn't sure why it was important, but she knew there needed to be a reason. It seemed each hive had only one queen. She knew that. But without a queen an entire hive could perish in thirty days easily enough. So the workers could take a larvae in a queen cell, start feeding it copious amounts of royal jelly and have it hatched out in only sixteen days giving her time to mate, and begin laying more eggs in the event the hive lost its queen.

Ah. Survival. Now that made sense. She grew faster was fed a great deal more, and was ready to go a lot sooner so that the hive could survive.

Queen Lifecycle

• Day 1 – Egg Laid
• Day 3 - Hatches
• Day 4-9 – Fed Royal Jelly
• Day 10 – Cell Sealed
• Day 10-20 – Larvae spins cocoon
• Day 16 – Drone emerges as a Queen

But what happened when a Queen emerged and another Queen was already there? Kavala read on and chuckled, not surprised at what she found. The newly hatched queens would often pursue, fight, and kill any older queen found in the hive. Then, she immediately took control, had a mating flight, and begin laying eggs. Her life span could easily be two to four years, depending on how hearty she was.

So that was it. She knew the processes now. But what about the hive itself? How did it seasonally function?

[Kavala]

Kavala really wanted to understand the hives functionality seasonally. Because now that she had a clearer picture of how the bees behaved, what they looked like, their form and function within the group… she really wanted a big picture view that showed her what needed to happen season by season for the hives to be successful. Her book really didn’t break it down like that, but the Konti had no trouble finding the collective information and assembling it for herself.

From what she read, it seemed life for the bees exploded in the spring. But it was Fall now and she didn’t want to skip ahead. The healer knew that much of what happened in the spring with other animals was really determined by what happened in the fall and winter – say with breeding or having enough food or cover to last – and that predetermined the success of the animals in the spring. Lean falls and bad winters didn’t mean an explosion of life in the spring. It usually meant death. So what exactly were honeybees looking for in the fall?

She read on, flipping through one page, then another, looking throughout the whole book wanting a section outlining it all clearly. There was none, but when she got a clue in the Queen section. Young queens were the best. Healthy, freshly mated, all this happened in the fall. So if a beekeeper wanted to start a colony, they’d need to do it now and with a population of bees that had a happy healthy young queen. Some beekeepers, she read, made it a point to capture and kill their hive’s queen every year and either requeen the hive themselves or let the hive raise a queen to replace the missing one.

Kavala made it a note to read and learn how to requeen a hive. Where did one get a new queen anyhow? She made herself a list of things to learn, and that was at the top.

In the worker bee section, she found another clue. In the fall there was usually a mass die off of workers and drones. This wasn’t something she was not expecting because her book had already talked about the workers dragging the drones out and killing them off to not deplete the hives resources. So, once that was done and food was stored, all the old exhausted workers died. New ones were born of course, but at a far slower rate as the light period grew less each day. The remaining bees should be in a cluster about the size of her head. If there were too many they’d starve. If there were not enough, they’d freeze.

There were also hints in her book about getting the numbers up to this ratio if she noticed there wasn’t enough bees for warmth in winter. Kavala needed to make sure she had two Deep Supers and two Honey Supers and harvest early fall not late fall as to not robe the bees. If there weren’t enough bees, she could add boxes, and then spray the hive down with sugar water to feed and stimulate the queen to start brooding more bees. She had to start out with more than just enough though because the winter cluster would die off slowly throughout winter and shrink. So it was really by trial and error a beekeeper learned how many bees he needed depending upon how bad the weather was and how fit the colony was.


So, the books advice was seventy pounds of honey, an that equaled about fourteen frames of storage cells. Kavala took careful notes, impressed someone had taken the time to really observe what was needed throughout the years.

However, when looking at a lifecycle of the workers, when the bees started emerging in the spring and before the real bloom of spring came about, the hive would need plenty of pollen to feed the newly emerged brooders and to give the workers to produce new honey. But, if the pollen storage was low, beekeepers could feed pollen substitute or pollen patties to a colony to keep it alive. Most beekeepers made their own pollen patties if they made them ahead of time. Enough pollen, for feeding a colony in early spring, equaled about two frames. Kavala added that to her list.

The last mention of fall situations in the book involved pests and pest control. It was imperative that bees going into the winter. The bees raised their winter brood fduring the late summer and throughout the fall. It is imperative for the winter bees to be healthy so they could make it through the winter. If they had pests, the pests could often enough drag them down and cause beekeepers to loose entire hives in the spring. Kavala made a note to research honeybee pests.

So, after that research she knew what a fall hive shoud look like and what was expected to get it through the winter.

Kavala’s Seasonal Hive Doings List.

Fall

1. Requeen or make sure there’s a young healthy queen.
2. Workers and drones die off.
3. 70 lbs of honey to overwinter with stored or 14 deep frames
4. Two full frames of stored pollen for spring emerging brooders
5. Low pest and disease count (ie. Mites) so Beekeeper must do pest control.

Kavala moved on. Next was finding out about hives in the winter.

[Kavala]

Okay, so Kavala had a great grasp of what honeybees needed to get them through the fall. However, winter seemed to be the most difficult season for them to navigate. They could not go outside the hive and forage because there was not enough nectar and the season was wrong with all the plants in a mostly reproductively inactive state. That meant the amount of food in a hive had to be enough to feed all the bees throughout the winter. That was simple enough. But what wasn’t obvious, that the book pointed out really quickly, was that not only did the bees have to have enough to feed themselves, but they had to have a great deal of surplus food in order to feed the emerging workers when the queen started producing more bees again.

There would be nectar in the spring, but when the new bees were emerging the colony would still be too small from the winter die off to forage for this nectar and pollen until the new bees were active and the hive size swelled again. That meant there had to be enough food on hand. That was a lot of food worry, and in some cases, beekeepers had to watch what they harvested in terms of honey harvest, and they sometimes had to supplementally feed bees with pollen cakes.

Kavala made a note to figure out how to make pollen cakes and what to feed honey bees when they ran out of food. There was a section in her book on it, so she would flip to it next after she got done figuring out what was needed for winter.

So, the colony had to keep warm. That was a given. Did bees need blankets over their hives? No, it seemed all they really needed was a number of other bees to group together with them and those numbers would stay warm together. So, thinking of a cluster of bees as several thousand, a good winter cluster would be roughly the size of a standard dinner plate. That was a twelve inch diameter circle that was bee thick. To Kavala that didn’t seem like a lot of bees. But, the book assured her it was a fine number to start with and would definitely drop off as the winter killed off workers that were not really replaced.

So a good number of bees was a strong cluster that took up at least six frames in the hive deep super. The cluster would get smaller, so the object was to maintain that size throughout winter, starting high and ending up not too much smaller so there would be enough bees left after winter to regenerate the goings on in the hive and gather foodstuffs for the new generation.

Beekeepers could also winter one hive on top of another to keep warm. And if they had to very week very small clustered hives, they could kill the queen in one hive and combine the two clusters into the hive with the most brood and food storage and see the bees through the winter that way. It was good information to know, and Kavala kept meticulous notes as she read, making sure she understood what was happening.


So, what was the queen doing during all this? Kavala thumbed through the pages until she found the section she was looking for and read on.

The queen is not inactive during the winter. In fact, she’s carefully laying more brood eggs repeatedly so that in late winter the brood rearing will pick up considerably in time for a new crop of workers to be ready to go when the fair weather of spring hits. Food might not be available until late spring or early summer depending on Riverfall’s weather. So one must be careful and make sure to supplimentally feed the bees if necessary.

That wasn’t the first time Kavala had heard about supplimentally feeding bees. She marked the section in the book on what bees ate and what could help them through the winter and moved on with her Winter Hive studies.

As soon as the late winter brood rearing kicked in, pollen consumption in the hive increases, and beekeepers often have to feed pollen substitutes at this time. Starting right after midwinter, Beekeepers should feed pollen cakes to the bees by placing them on the top bars of the hives. This is the best location if the cluster is at the top of the deep super. If the cluster is down by the bottom of the deep super, place the cakes on the bottom on top of the queen excluder. The bees in winter need easy access to the food so they don’t have to leave the warmth of their cluster to feed.

Kavala’s Seasonal Hive Doings List.

Winter

1. Bees must have a cluster large enough to be covering six frames or more.
2. Colony must have the majority of their honey stores remaining.
3. Pollen stores mostly untouched.
4. Pollen substitute must be fed to augment hive food production.

Okay, that seemed easy enough. Kavala laid it all out for herself in a quick note and added her Hive in Winter notes to her Hive in Fall notes.

Now? What about Spring?

[Kavala]

Something was telling Kavala, from all that she was reading, that despite Winter being an obvious choice for the most dangerous time of year for bees, that indeed Spring was the real danger. Why? Well it seemed to her, now that she was getting a feel for the lifecycles of honeybees and how a colony in a hive operated from year to year, that during the spring there was a crowd of new bees and an overabundance of old tired bees and basically no new food sources around. That meant that the young bees, due to the queens diligence, were hatching in abundance and the old bees were scrambling to find something for them to eat while still feeding themselves.

There was all sorts of talk about beekeepers artificially feeding bees. So Kavala realized that this was the critical time. Unless the winter was mild and spring came early budding into full bloom early on, there was simply no food for honeybees anywhere other than what they had stored. And as a healer and a realist, Kavala liked to err on the side of caution.

So starvation was prominent. Get them fed. Check. She added intensive notes to her book, making sure she was clear to herself that this was one of the most critical times of the year for bees and that this period, how they’d overwintered and how they’d come into the winter, would make or break a hive of bees come summer.

So by Kavala’s guestimation, pollen was going to be a critical element in fall, winter and spring. And by spring, the colony would definitely be consuming pollen almost as fast as honey only for the simple fact they needed pollen to make more honey and to make beeswax and all sorts of food, especially royal jelly, for the young.


Now… what was the queen doing in spring? Kavala flipped her pages until she found the section she was looking for and started her investigation. It seemed in the spring, it was a good time for beekeepers to monitor the progress of the queen. If she was young, healthy, well mated, and in good production form she’d produce a brood pattern that would show a solid wall of brood cells being full. Occasionally, peppered within, were empty cells which meant the workers were rebuilding them or cleaning them or that they’d been somehow unacceptable. There was even an illustration in the book, carefully drawn in pen and ink, showing how it should look in terms of a healthy brood pattern. Too many empty cells, or no broods at all meant the queen wasn’t doing her job and needed to be replaced.

So, when a queen was doing her job property, a healthy hive would have enough bees to cover all the frames in a two deep super hive and at least eight to fourteen frames of the brood in various stages. That, indeed, was a lot of bees.

Kavala made a careful note and finished off her Hive in Spring list.

Kavala’s Seasonal Hive Doings List.

Spring

1. Bees must have a cluster that fills a deep brood box..
2. Spring is starvation time for honeybees as the colony grows trying to feed new bees and keep older bees fed on dwindling winter stores and lack of early spring nectar and pollen based on the weather.
3. Heavy supplimental feeding by Beekeepers.
4. Pest treatment by beekeepers a must.
5. Heavy presence of drones – usually about 10% of colony
6. Should have enough bees to cover all frames in a two deep super and enough to cover eight to fourteen frames of a honey super.

Once that was done, she turned to the last season for a hive. Summer. That should be, by her guestimation, the season of bounty.

[Kavala]

Kavala took a break, got a cup of tea and a few scones (was she eating better these days?) and came back to her notes and studying. There was absolutely a ton to learn about honeybees and she wasn’t done yet. Stretching, she settled back down, stuffed part of a scone in her mouth and sipped at her tea. Ironically, when she was feasting, she realized summer was indeed (as she suspected) the season of feasting among bees.

Then, she settled in to read.


So, when the nectar and pollen were abundant in the summer, the bees were busy. Their hives were overflowing with honey, broodchambers filled with young, and the queen was busy mating again so she’d have enough seed to carry her through her winter egg laying. Sometimes this was the time the old queens were killed by new vibrant queens that hatched out healthy and strong. And if a queen was noted to not be making a lot of brood chambers, the beekeeper might kill her off and requeen the hive with another more vigorous queen. This was the time to make sure hives were pest free, and that all the bees were thriving.

If there were problems in the hive, it was a good time to deal with them since the colony as a whole had time to recover from just about anything in the summer before the winter set in.

Honey was harvested frantically by beekeepers, stored, and the bees would carry on making more and more of it to replace what was lost. Pollen was gathered like crazy, stored in the tiny brood chambers and sealed up to be broken into in the winter when it was needed for honey production. The pollen stored should fill up a good two to three frames, and that would be enough to feed the dinner plate sized colony that would remain to overwinter.

And lastly, there was the pest population. It should be nonexistent. Kavala noted that down and added her final season outline of what the hive should be doing.

Kavala’s Seasonal Hive Doings List.

Summer

1. Well-Mated queen present or perfect time to requeen hive.
2. High population of workers
3. Hive should have abundance of honey.
4. Two to three frames of pollen filled.
5. Very low pest population, particularly mites.

Then, before she was finished, Kavala decided to look for any other indications of a healthy hive and note them down. Honeybees, it seemed, had all sorts of odd behaviors that Beekeepers didn’t quite understand. One of the indications of a healthy hive, at least from the authors perspective, was that the bees that guard a colony did a behavior that folks called ‘Washboarding”. It was a tiny dance that the bees did. The guard bees would dance two steps forward, then two steps back, then two steps forward over and over again on the landing board near the hive entrance. It was unusual behavior, but when a Beekeeper saw it going on, they knew for a fact their hive was healthy.

Kavala nodded and noted down the behavior.

There were other behaviors bees exhibited when a hive was opened. In a healthy hive, the bees would be calm when a hive was opened. Calm bees signified that there was a heavy nectar flow and plenty of honey, so the bees would not run around in panic when their frames were lifted and examined. They just tended to remain calm. So, calm bees were a sign of healthy bees. Kavala noted that down, adding a few insights of her own from what she’d read.

Another behavior that Beekeepers could observe if they were careful enough was the flight path of incoming and outgoing bees. Was food coming in? This took the form of pollen and nectar. Was the hive entrance calm? Was it orderly? Was everything erratic and chaotic? The more organized a hive was the more healthy it was. The more chaotic and agitated the hive was, the more unhealthy it was. If a hive was missing a queen, say she died unexpectedly or was killed, then chaos reigned.

So, once a beekeeper knew her bees, the better off she was in knowing how healthy they were and what she could do to help them.

Continued in: The Gods Made Them All.

[Shadow Cast]

Thread Rewards!

Kavala:

XP- Beekeeping 5

Lore- Bees: It Takes a Total of 21 Days to Produce a Worker; Bees: 22 Days After Becoming a Bee the Worker Grows Wings; Bees: Workers Only Live 35 Days; Bees: It Take 24 Days to Produce a Drone; Bees: Drones Live 90 Days; Bees: It Take a Total of 16 Days to Produce a Queen; Bees: Young Queen Bees Kill Older Queens for Power; Harvest Honey in Early Fall; Two Frames of Pollen are Needed to Feed the Colony in Spring; Six Frames of Bees in the Deep Super are Needed for Survival in the Winter; During Winter the Queen Bee Lays Brood Eggs; Bees: Springtime is the Most Critical Time for Bees; Three Frames of Pollen Should Be Filled Enough for Winter; Hives: Calm and Dancing Bees Signal a Healthy Hive

Comments: All I have to say is, these are fun to read