Those who attended the presentation on backyard bee keeping by Findley Lake resident Terry Phelps recently learned a lot about honey bees and what is involved with keeping them. The program was sponsored by Community Connections at Findley Lake and took place in the Communi-Tea Room in the Community Center on North Road.

“I’m just a hobby bee farmer, I’m not an expert,” Phelps said. “It’s not a good hobby if you’re timid or if you are allergic to insects.”

People sometimes think that bee keeping is simply setting up a hive box and letting the bees do all the work, Phelps said. But the opposite is true.

“Once I got into it, I started to realize how time-consuming and expensive it was,” he said.

Mites can pose a danger to honey bees as shown in this slide presented by Findley Lake resident and beekeeper Terry Phelps

One of the biggest difficulties of backyard bee keeping is that whole hives can be wiped out, Phelps said. For instance, he said, a few years ago he lost six of his seven hives because the winter was so bad.

“To stay in business, you have to go out and buy bees or you have to capture a swarm,” he said. “I do this as a hobby. I lose money every year.”

People have been collecting honey for thousands of years, Phelps said. An 8,000-year-old cave painting in Spain depicts honey collecting. Furthermore, honey that has been properly collected and stored will last for thousands of years, he said. He noted that the honey found in King Tut’s tomb was 3,000 years old and was thought to have been the oldest in existence until a 5,000-year-old jar of honey was found in the Republic of Georgia.

Honey has many uses beyond being a sweetener, Phelps said. For centuries, it has been used during wars to treat wounds due to its anti-bacterial properties. Its anti-oxidant qualities have also made it useful in cancer prevention, he said.

Honey is also used to reduce canker sores and other forms of herpes, as well as to reduce itching, Phelps said. It can also reduce coughing in children, he said.

A hive is made up of three types of honey bees, Phelps said. There is the queen, whose sole duty is to control the hive by sending out pheremone signals which tell the other bees what job needs to be performed. A queen will lay millions of eggs in a lifetime and can live for many years, he said.

Then there are the drones whose duty is to mate with the queen. Drones have no stinger and can live 40 or 50 days, Phelps said. They are all male.

The workers, which are all female, make up the bulk of the hive, Phelps said. They perform whatever task the queen signals, e.g., protect the hive, feed the babies, or build the comb. A summer worker bee lives only a few weeks, he said. A winter worker bee will live four or five months.

The hive has many predators, from ants to bears, Phelps said. He noted that bears are not after honey, as is usually believed. They are actually after the larvae.

“They want the protein,” he said. “The honey is the dressing on the meat — the A-1 sauce.”

Another predator is the small hive beetle, Phelps said. This predator changes the honey into a foul goo. Bees also can be attacked from within by mites that lodge in the trachea of the bee. Mites also often get on the larvae, he said.

Pathogens can cause a formidable threat to the hive as well, Phelps said. The worst is called the American Foulbrood, which results from a bacteria spore that infects the larvae and then grows outward. If a hive is found to be infected, everything in the hive must be burned, he said.