Bees and Beekeeping
I love bees: These images are my tribute to these wonderful creatures
Go to the Using My Photos page on this site for instructions on how to obtain high-resolution versions of these images from me. I don’t charge money for my photos, but I do require a photo credit in your end-product in exchange for the use of my images. Key words: honeybee images.
Frank Sanders’ Brief Guide to Honeybees
In the spring of 2005, a clump of thousands of bees slightly smaller than a soccer ball appeared on a tree branch in a friend’s backyard near Denver. Over the next two days, two more of these swarms appeared in the same yard. The property owners called a beekeeper who simply clipped off the branches with the bees still attached, dropped the swarms into cardboard boxes, and relocated them to new locations in a rural area near Denver.
Further searching revealed the presence of a hive of wild bees that had taken up residence in a disused birds’ roosting box. This colony had been thriving, to the extent that it had spun off the three swarms that we found. Over the following week I photographed the traffic in and out of the wild hive. A guard bee always stood watch at the entrance, making sure that only her sisters were entering (all the bees being female except for a few token drones).
Fascinating as the wild hive was, we soon vacuumed the bees out of it and re-established them in a man-made hive in the same backyard. For the rest of the summer we acquainted ourselves with the bees and the intricacies of beekeeping. I kept on photographing the bees using a 100-mm macro lens and a ring flash. (It turns out that you can work without molestation near a hive entrance (or at least I can) without getting stung if you bathe beforehand, wear light-colored clothes, and stand somewhat to the side so as not to annoy the bees who are trying to get in and out on their errands.)
Bees are closely related to wasps and ants. Their bodies are marvels--the loads of pollen and nectar that they bring to the hive can nearly double their ‘dry’ weight, and when they are coming in with a heavy load they don’t necessarily land so much as they tumble. The ancestors of the honeybees in North America were imported from Europe; only bumblebees are native to North America.
Unlike their cousins the wasps, honeybees are very docile, especially when they are foraging. They are a little more aggressive when they are guarding their honey, pollen, and young in the hive, but still pose no real threat to people as long as they are not overtly harassed. (The infamous africanized honeybees that now have infested South America, Central America and Mexico are much touchier, but they have not reached Colorado (at least not yet). With luck Colorado’s winters will be too cold for them to tolerate.)
I have fallen in love with these amazing little animals. I also am very concerned about their extremely precipitous decline in North America in recent years. In many areas the combined effects of pesticides and a vicious parasitic mite called varroa have reduced their numbers by 90%. Honeybee decline is a serious problem not only because bees are inherently wonderful creatures with societies that rival the complexity of our own, but also because flowering plants, especially many agricultural plants in North America, cannot reproduce without the assistance of bees. A few years ago, for example, the almond crop in California was practically lost because there were no bees to pollinate the plants. The bees’ decline should be taken as a warning!
Bees and flowers seem to have co-evolvedThere is evidence that bees and flowering plants began to co-evolve during the late Jurasssic and early Cretaceous eras. They have continued to co-evolve ever since. Now we are managing to screw up this eons-old relationship. Our loss of honeybees is evidence that we are seriously damaging our own environment--the environment that we need if we are to live. Honeybee decline is a very serious warning that we are doing some very bad things to our environment, and that we need to start making changes in the way we do business--now. We can start by cutting back significantly on our use of pesticides, from backyard gardening to mega-agriculture. I’ll gladly pay a higher price at the grocery store for pesticide-free agricultural products if it will help to preserve honeybee populations.
Incidentally, bees should not be confused with their bad-tempered cousins the wasps—wasps are black-and-yellow with very tapered bodies. Go to my identifying bees and wasps link to see how to tell the difference. As far as human contact with these insects goes,
Bees = bueno. Wasps = no bueno.
In short, this is a honeybee...
while this is a wasp...
and this is a wild, native Colorado bumblebee adapted to high altitude (photographed by the author at Medano Pass in the Sangre de Cristo mountains):
See the differences?
Bees are ecologically, economically, and biologically vital, and they are magnificent in their own right. So this spring, having taken a beekeeping class through the Denver Botanic Gardens and having read as much as possible about bees and their lives, I now have three two hives at my house. So far they are getting a good start this spring, bringing plenty of pollen (as shown to the right) back to the hives. I’m looking forward to working with these beautiful creatures for years to come.
Typical bee swarm--Don’t panic when this happens!
Individual bee
Bees in a colony love each other. They die if they are isolated even if they have food.
A bee behind
Bee with her tongue out
Bee tongue again
Bee grooming herself
Bee in perfect profile
Bees hanging out together
A bee in detail
Bee walking
A very old bee with ragged worn out wings--so sad
Bee robbing honeycomb
Bee working honeycomb
Bee working honeycomb 02
Bee working honeycomb 03
Bee working honeycomb 04
Bee with full pollen baskets 01
Bee pollen baskets 02
Bee pollen baskets 03
Bee pollen baskets 04
Bee pollen baskets 05
Bee pollen baskets 06
Bee at hive entrance with full pollen basket baskets
Bee water source fitted with a lifesaving grille that I made
Bee drinking water from my drowning-proofed source
Bee drinking water through my lifesaving grille
Bee on the rim of a source with my lifesaving grille
