Bee Happy

by Mary Jasch

Fred Yarnell has 50,000 bees at his Branchburg, New Jersey home. His three hives are made of stacked boxes of wood with a large box called a "super" where the young are raised. The smaller ones on top are for honey, and the whole thing is surrounded by four strands of electrified barbed wire to keep the bears out.

Yarnell dons his white bee suit, veil and gloves when he handles bees. He says bees get mad when they see dark.

He's been beekeeping for 10 years and says it's too late to change. Besides, he likes the challenge ­ like when the second hive swarmed and the queen flew off, never to return. He bought a new one, delivered by the US Mail. She came in a little cage that contains a sugar cube at one end that the worker bees chew through to release her. "If she comes out too fast, they'll kill her," he says.

There are good times too, like when he collects and extracts the honey every August. He gets about 50 pounds of honey in a good year and none in a bad one. And there are other good reasons. "Bees are pollinators; they provide honey and wax. You should see some of the candles I make," he says.

Jim Puvel, 3rd VP of the New Jersey Beekeepers Association, has been keeping bees for eleven years. "It's a great hobby. I really enjoy it because they always keep me guessing."

Honeybees fly when temperatures are over 50 and sunny. They navigate by the sun and have poor eyesight. Workers gather nectar within a two-mile radius, Yarnell says, and when they return to the hive after foraging, they do a nectar dance, which depicts information on direction and mileage to the nectar. Then all the worker bees immediately fly to the nectar source.

A queen gauges the number of eggs that she lays based on the amount of nectar that comes in with the foragers. She lays up to 2,000 eggs a day in order to keep the colony going.