Lady Beekeeper, Pres. Beekeeper's Assoc. answers Questions re: bees

Q&A with Beekeeper Randy Sue Collins

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 |

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Kenwood resident Randy Sue Collins is busy as a…well, a bee!

A beekeeper and President of the Sonoma County Beekeeper’s Association, Collins is also a professional artist, an art instructor, an inventor with a patent pending, and much more. In a couple of weeks Randy, her husband Tony, and their two children will be moving to a farm on Stony Point Road, where they’ll be raising chickens, growing crops, and tending to the hives.
A day ago Randy filled us in on honey bees and related issues:

Q: Where do bees go in the winter? Do they die?
Honey bees live in colonies, which might be located in hives, or in the cavity of a tree, or inside the walls of someone’s home. In wintertime their numbers get reduced, but there are still female worker bees living with the queen in the colony.

Q: Do they hibernate during winter?
No, they’re just resting, although they will come out on nice days and forage. But when it’s cold and rainy they cluster around each other and keep each other warm. They eat a bit of honey. A typical colony needs 35-50 pounds of honey to survive a winter.
The female bees are called “winter bees.” They live 120-140 days. The spring and summer females live only 30-45 days—they literally work themselves to death. The Queen lives 2-5 years.

Q: What about the male bees?
Male bees hatch out in spring; they’re called drones. Drones don’t do any work and they don’t forage. They don’t have a stinger, so they can’t defend the hive. They live through the whole of spring and summer, unless they mate with a Virgin Queen—they die if that happens, fall dead to the ground. But if they don’t mate, female worker bees kick them out in the fall to fend for themselves. They don’t last through winter.

Q: What makes bees know it’s time to get busy in spring?
The weather warms up, and flowers start blooming. They immediately start to forage. As soon as the amount of foraging increases, honey bees increase their numbers as well. A colony’s population can shoot from 10,000 to 60,000 at the height of its season.

Q: What are they doing right now?
Most hives are now increasing their numbers. The Queen is laying more eggs, drones hatching out, and they’re preparing for the swarm season. That’s when colonies become too crowded and divide. They look for a new home to form a new colony.

Q: And that’s where you come in?
That’s right, along with other beekeepers. If anybody reading this sees a swarm—a big ball of bees hanging from a tree or a fence post—they can contact us and we’ll come out and relocate the hive.

Q: Is there a charge?
That’s usually up to the beekeeper. Typically, I don’t charge for a swarm hanging from a tree, but if it’s within the wall of a house that’s a different story. That’s very complicated.

Q: Can you tell us about your invention?
It’s a Hex Hive—a functional bee hive shaped like the cell in a honeycomb. The patent on it is pending.

Q: Can anybody learn to keep bees?
Anybody can be a beekeeper. There’s a great benefit to having a hive in your yard. Your garden will flourish—and those in the whole neighborhood as well. Bees pollinate about one-third of the food we eat (and the food cows eat, too!). And honey, right out of the hive…what a miraculous product. I’ve created a DVD, Organic Beekeeping 101, that takes beginning beekeepers through the basic steps. It’s packed with info.

Q: For readers who don’t want to go the hive route, what’s the best way to attract honey bees to their back yards?

Plant, plant, plant! Flowers and more flowers…bees need forage. Lavender, rosemary, sunflowers, all the fruits and veggies. But please don’t use pesticides! It hurts the bees.

Visit Randy Sue Collins’ website
If you see a bee swarm, contact Collins by email ([email protected]) or phone (365-4330).
–Suzie Rodriguez