South Carolina Mid-State Beekeepers Association

We are now hosting Zoom Meetings -October 6th- Zoom- 6:45 PM to 8:30 PM

Guest Speaker: Dr. Tom Seeley-Presenting

The Bee Colony as a Honey Factory 

We will explore how a colony of honey bees operates as a factory that produces honey efficiently despite tremendous day-to-day swings in the supply of nectar, the raw material for making honey. An important feature of the organization of the honey production process is a division of labor between the nectar foragers, elderly workers who toil outside the hive collecting the nectar, and the nectar receivers, middle-age workers who toil inside the hive converting the nectar into honey. We will see how the bees can boost their colony’s rate of nectar collecting during a honey flow, using the waggle dance and the shaking signal. And we will see how the bees can also boost their colony’s rate of nectar processing—to keep the rates of nectar collecting and nectar processing in balance—by means of the tremble dance and stop signal. In this talk, I will show videos of bees producing all the signals mentioned above: waggle dance, shaking signal, tremble dance and stop signal.  

Meeting information will be provided for members in the monthly newsletter.