This episode ofNature Calls, Conversations from the Hudson Valley is a retrospective look at one of the early radio interviews from our precursor show, “Digging in With Master Gardeners”, aired on WGXC, 90.7 FM. Teresa and Jean interviewed Master Beekeeper and Emeritus Master Gardener Volunteer Linda Aydlett. The original was aired as episode 14.

Linda Aydlett has been a beekeeper for over a decade, tending from two to thirty hives in various years. She got started at a workshop by the Catskill Mountain Beekeeping Club, studied via books, internet and Youtube videos, and then became a Master Beekeeper through Cornell University. Linda tells us there is a special relationship between bees and their keeper, quoting author Mark Winston : “The world slows down to focus on bees and their world.”

There are 20,000 bee species worldwide. Honeybees are the only insect providing food eaten by people. They are most commonly managed by people. There are twenty sub-species and they are now found in all habitable parts of the world, but are not native to North America. Some key details about honey bees include:

they forage over an area of several miles
they rarely sting because they will die if they do
they use their knees to carry the pollen from flower to flower
their role in the ecosystem is enormous.

One third of our food supply relies on the presence of pollinators. Honeybees can be directly connected to 75% of fruit crops and 53% of seed production. Direct production from honey bees includes honey. It is nectar brought back to the hive and stored at an 18% moisture content. It takes millions of miles of flight and visits to two million flowers to produce 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey. Propolis is a glue produced from the sap of evergreens for maintenance of the hive. It is also valuable to humans for certain antimicrobial properties, and is also used as a wood varnish. Beeswax is excess nectar, and is the infrastructure of a hive. Humans have multiple uses for the wax, including the popular beeswax candles. Even the venom has a use. Although its removal kills the bee, the venom is used to inject “heat” into arthritic joints.

Bees are often considered livestock and overseen by departments of agriculture in many states. Nectar is the reward to the bee for transporting pollen from flower to flower. Linda goes on to describe the fascinating details of a forager bee's life. They find the flowers (and are flower “constant” while a particular flower is in season), and collect the nectar. They return to the hive and transfer it to another bee. They also perform a “waggle dance” to transmit information about direction of the nectar source. Linda describes both the dance and how researchers decoded it in 1927.

There are three castes of bees, and Linda describes the duties of each in detail, from the queen to the drone to the worker. There is considerable drama to the choice and emergence of new queens. Learn about a substance called royal jelly which is exuded from the foreheads of nurse bees to feed the queen larvae. The larva of worker bees emerge to assume one or more of the duties of a worker bee. There are, in addition to nurse bees, mortuary bees, ventilator bees, guard bees and others. Eventually each of these can be promoted to a forager bee, usually for the last half of their life (eight weeks on average). There are even some bees known as winter bees. They are born in September or October and can survive the winter. They are of necessity less active and their main duty is to keep the hive warm... around 90 degrees F. They can unhinge their wings and then shiver to produce heat, all the while rotating from the inside to the outside of the bee cluster. New egg laying starts in February and March when activities revert to traditional good weather behavior. Ideally, there was enough honey stored in the hive for the population to survive the winter.

Bees are fascinating species. Learn more about them in the upcoming Part 2 of this conversation.

Hosts: Teresa Golden and Jean Thomas
Guest: Linda Aydlett
Photo: Linda Aydlett
Production Assistance: Linda Aydlett, Deven Connelly, Teresa Golden, Xandra Powers, Annie Scibienski and Jean Thomas