RUMFORD — Beekeepers Louise and Robert Stickney, who have owned an apiary in Rumford for 14 years, talked about beekeeping and honey during an hourlong presentation for children May 13 at the Rumford Public Library.

Besides a business around bottling honey, Louise said they feel they are also farmers.

Honey bees are vital for crops like almonds (100% dependent), blueberries and cherries (90% dependent). Their pollination improves yield, size and flavor, she said, and they are responsible for pollinating more than 400 different crops, including essential fruits, nuts and vegetables.

A honeybee colony is a highly structured society consisting of one reproductive queen, thousands of female worker bees and a few hundred to thousands of male drones. The queen lays all eggs, workers manage all hive operations (foraging, defense, nursing) and drones exist solely to mate with new queens to ensure genetic diversity.

Louise said that at the peak of summer, each of their hives will have 40,000 bees. Each of those hives has one queen. Honeybee queens fight to the death to determine who will lead the hive. When a new queen emerges while another is still present, they sting each other until only one survives to take control. Worker bees may even support different queens, leading to intense conflict.

A queen lives for three to four years. The sexually mature female queens are responsible for laying up to 1,500–2,000 eggs per day. The queen produces pheromones that maintain hive harmony and prevent workers from developing their own ovaries.

Louise said the hive’s worker bees do the foraging, nursing, cleaning, defending and building the honeycomb. They have a life span that varies from a few weeks in summer to several months in winter. They also possess a barbed stinger used for defense, which causes them to die after stinging.

The hive also has drone bees, males with the sole purpose of mating with virgin queens from other hives. They are larger than workers with huge compound eyes and no stinger. Drones die immediately after mating or are expelled from the hive in late autumn to conserve resources for winter.

Like other beekeepers, Louise said they can lose up to half of their colony to a swarm, usually during spring or early summer. When that happens, they are witnessing the colony’s natural reproduction method, where the old queen leaves home with roughly half the worker bees.

While this reduces immediate population and honey production, the parent hive often survives, creating a second colony while the swarm establishes a new home. While losing a swarm is often undesirable, it is not a sign of poor colony health, but rather a sign that the colony was strong enough to reproduce.

OH, HONEY

Louise displayed the wooden frames placed within a hive, often fitted with a wax or plastic foundation sheet, which acts as a blueprint for bees to build or draw out honeycomb cells.

Bees work in a warm environment, usually during a nectar flow, where they create a bee chain to build, using about 8 ounces of honey to produce 1 ounce of wax. The comb provides a residential structure for storing honey, pollen and raising young larvae.

The honey is collected from a beehive by removing capped honeycomb frames from the top box, removing the wax seals and extracting the honey using centrifugal force or crushing. The process involves calming the bees with a smoker, brushing them off frames, uncapping with a hot knife and filtering the honey before bottling.

Honey bees do not hibernate, Louise said. Instead, they remain active, with rotating bees from the cold outer shell to the warm inner to keep the hive alive through freezing temperatures. They survive the winter by forming a tight, insulating cluster around their queen, vibrating their flight muscles to generate heat of around 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

The bees consume honey stored during the summer as a high-calorie food source for energy.

Bees born in late summer and fall are physiologically different, with more fat stores and a longer life span, allowing them to live for months instead of weeks. The colony also kicks out male drones to conserve food for the worker bees.

A strong, healthy and well-managed beehive typically produces 60–100 pounds of harvestable surplus honey per year, though exceptional hives can produce over 200 pounds. During peak, a productive hive can produce and store up to 2 pounds of honey per day.

As children lined up to taste a spoonful of honey, Louise explained that the drought last summer hindered the production of their hives, with a lower-than-normal production of 235 pounds of honey. In a good summer, the bees produce more than 800 pounds, she said.