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Nerdy Jobs: Beekeeping

High school learnscience.org

Name Date

Predict

Honey bees make honey from nectar, the sugary water inside flowers. Each honey bee carries nectar home inside her body. Is honey a kind of bee vomit?

Circle one. Yes / No

Why?

Watch

  1. I WAS A BEEKEEPER for a day!youtu.be/hAVklEerZFI

Meet the scientist

The beekeepers at Bee Country

Job. Beekeeper, also called an apiarist (AY-pee-uh-rist).

A workday. Bee Country is a family-owned bee farm in Darien Center, New York. Its beekeepers graft and raise their own queens and make hundreds of nucleus colonies, or nucs, each spring. A nuc is a starter colony with two frames of honey and pollen and three frames of brood, the growing young bees. The farm also harvests raw honey. Its bees stay in New York year-round and are not trucked south.

Training. Beekeepers learn on the job and in courses. Cornell University offers a beginner program for people with 0 to 2 years of beekeeping. Its Master Beekeeping Program takes 15 months, asks for at least 3 years of experience and ends with exams at Cornell’s Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies.

Word of the day

Apiary (AY-pee-er-ee). A place where bees are kept in hives.

Word partComes fromMeaning
api-Latin apisbee
-aryLatin -āriuma place for
  • A library and an apiary share the -ary ending. Library comes from Latin librārius, “of books.”
  • The western honey bee’s scientific name is Apis mellifera, “honey-bearing bee.”

Bonus word. Nucleus (NOO-klee-us) is Latin for “kernel,” from nux, “nut.” In a cell, the nucleus holds the DNA. In beekeeping, a nucleus colony, or nuc, is a small starter colony with a queen, brood and food, ready to grow.

Questions

  1. Flower nectar is about 20 to 60% sugar. Honey that bees store is about 80% sugar. Bees also add an enzyme called invertase. How do honey bees turn watery nectar into honey the colony can store for the long term?

    Hint. Track two changes, the water that leaves and the sugars that change.

  2. In the episode, a beekeeper says young worker bees start as nurse bees. Later, a worker may guard the hive or forage, depending on what the colony needs. When food runs short, workers switch to foraging sooner than usual. Raven’s co-host Annika adds that bees are “constantly communicating with each other,” even dancing to tell each other what’s going on. How does switching jobs by need, instead of keeping one job for life, help a honey bee colony survive?

    Hint. Picture a colony short on food. What happens if no worker can change jobs?

  3. Honey fraud means selling honey stretched with cheap sugar syrup. Rice syrup costs about 0.40 to 0.60 euros per kilogram. Imported honey averaged about 2.17 euros per kilogram in 2021. How does syrup sold as honey hurt beekeepers who sell pure honey?

    Hint. Compare the prices. Then think about which product a store would rather buy.

  4. Bee Country sells nucs, small starter colonies. Each nuc holds two frames of honey and pollen and three frames of brood, the growing young bees. Why does a new honey bee colony need both stored food and young bees to survive?

    Hint. Worker bees change jobs as they age. Which bees will be foraging a few weeks from now?

Claim, evidence, reasoning

Picture a beginner beekeeper in New York who buys a nuc of about 6,000 bees. The claim to test says that leaving a strip of the yard unmowed for wildflowers will help the new colony and the native bees nearby. What evidence from the episode backs the claim? List at least three pieces. Then write the reasoning that links your evidence to the claim.

Hint. Think about how much the colony has to grow and store before winter, what bees eat and how many kinds of bees live in New York.

Claim

Evidence

Reasoning

Going further: honey fraud

In 2021 and 2022, European Union inspectors tested 320 shipments of imported honey at the border. They flagged 147 shipments as suspected of having added sugar syrup.

Where the honey came fromShipments flaggedShipments testedPercent flagged
China6689
Turkey1415
United Kingdom1010
All shipments147320

  1. The table lists flagged shipments from three places and from all 320 shipments. What percent of all 320 shipments were flagged? Which place had the highest percent flagged?

    Hint. Divide flagged by tested, then multiply by 100. Fill in the last column first.

  2. The tests found chemical markers of added sugar. The tests could not measure how much syrup was in the honey. Why do the inspectors call these shipments “suspected” instead of “fake”?

    Hint. What does a marker show? What does a marker leave unknown?

Exit ticket

A Bee Country beekeeper explains that bees make beeswax from honey they eat. The beekeeper estimates that bees eat about 8 pounds of honey to make 1 pound of wax, and a University of Nebraska beekeeping guide gives the same figure. Workers shape the wax into six-sided cells that hold honey, pollen and brood. Trace beeswax back to the flowers the bees visited, step by step. Then use the 8-to-1 number to show why wax costs a colony so much.

Hint. Start with a forager drinking nectar. End with a six-sided wax cell.

Sources