We have photos from a new contributor, reader Lesli Sagan. She keeps bees and sends us photos of honeybees. Lesli’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
All of these photos were taken in Ithaca, NY this past summer and fall, 2024. I’ve been keeping bees for decades and tend to garden for them: asters, oregano, mountain mint, coneflowers, and anything else I think they would like are my garden favorites. There’s some question in my mind whether European honey bees (Apis mellifera) are truly “wild,” given that we’ve selectively bred them. However, they are free to go anytime and often do return to the wild by absconding or swarming.
Unused bee equipment is attractive to all sorts of critters, including honey bees who may either be looking for a new home or are attracted, during lean times, to the scent of honey.
These are bees emerging through an opening in the cover of their hive.
Asters bloom until the first hard frost, and so are valuable sources of nectar and pollen for honey bees and all sorts of other insects.
This closer look of a honey bee shows her body is still fuzzy and her wings are whole. Honey bees live about a month in summer and they can be nearly bald and their wings quite ragged towards the end of the lives. This bee is probably a couple of weeks old.
While this bee is likely going for the nectar, we can still see yellow pollen on her face.
In contrast to the young bee above, this old girl has lost much of her fuzziness and her wings have been literally flown to bits. Mountain mint is a favorite of all sorts of bees.
The top bee on mountain mint is Apis mellifera, and the bee below may be as well. Not all domesticated honey bees are the familiar gold and black; darker varieties exist. None of my hives have the darker variety, so if this is Apis mellifera, she’s not from my hives.
This is an unremarkable scene at a hive entrance. Bees are coming and going, and while a few are likely guards, there are no hornets or other predators trying to break in just now.
Another fuzzy young bee, this time on oregano. She is collecting pollen, as you can see from the white pollen ball on her back leg. Pollen colors don’t always match the color of the flowers, but in this case, the petals and pollen are bright white.
This hive has windows, and here you can see the worker bees preparing cells for the honey flow.
If anyone wants to watch a complete hive inspection from this past summer, here’s a link to a GoPro video.
Thank you Lesli. VERY interesting and educational photos and commentary.
Lovely and interesting
Nice hobby!
I love being educated about species that I am likely to encounter in real life, because it makes them more interesting to me. The next time I encounter a bee, I won’t just say to myself, “oh there’s a bee,” and move on. Rather, I intend to stop to 1. check to see how fuzzy (and therefore, how old) the bee is; 2. note whether it is carrying any pollen, and 3. note whether it is dark or light. So, thanks!
Super interesting! Last spring, I noticed that bumblebees (of several species) seemed to arrive (emerge?) at our flowers before honeybees arrived, leading me to worry that our honeybees had become locally rare or extinct. But they did eventually arrive, much to my relief.
Question: Do the honeybees in my suburban neighborhood live in a beekeeper’s domestic hive, or have they become naturalized, living on their own?
Hi Norman,
Honey bees start flying around 55F, so as things warm up, you’re more likely to see them. They could be managed bees, but they could also be wild. If you live in an area with a lot of old, large trees, for instance, that increases the likelihood that one of them has a large enough hollow for them. They can fly up to three miles, though, so the possible radius is large. –LS
So lovely. Thanks for this informative and beautiful selection.
I was employed by a beekeeper in the ’60s in NZ. With over a 1000 hives to service my boss was keen to ensure that his bees were kept as yellow in the abdomen as possible. The yellow variety he referred to as ‘Italian’, and would re-queen any hive that showed a tendency to black abdomens with the yellow variety. The dark bees were very aggressive and difficult to manage eg when removing honey from their hive. I note in the picture above of bees on the landing stage of a hive to be quite yellow, while in another pic two bees are working, one yellow, the other very dark. My question; do you re-queen your bees? Our experience was that the black colour would become dominant in a hive after a few years.
Hi Don–There are many types of honey bees that are darker: Carniolans, Buckfast, Caucasian–all strains humans have bread for honey production, disposition, health, and other factors. There is a black honey bee native to England, which might be the ultimate source of the black bees in NZ. They are grumpier than the Italian bees, which are mellow.
These days, breeders don’t talk about “Italian” bees much because there has been so much mixing of different strains. We worry primarily about mite resistance and health because of the appearance of the varroa mite in the mid-80s. They weaken bees in several ways, and European bees have no natural resistance. Gold versus dark doesn’t determine the temperament as much these days. I would requeen only for health or temperament reasons, regardless of color.
Thanks for asking! Mites and other pests have really changed beekeeping in recent decades.
Great photos and interesting commentary. Thanks. 🐝🐝🐝
Really fun to see these great photos, and I learned quite a bit. Thank you!
Extremely cool photos and information – thank you very much.
Fascinating! And just the right amount of detail. A few years ago, I learned that butterflies’ wings get more ragged as they get older too, from collisions with plants.
The windows you have in the hive— are they backed with plexiglass. It was so clear I couldn’t be sure.