Painted Hive Bricks

This old nuc cover serves as a legend for my painted brick system

Like most beekeepers, I keep a journal to document my hive inspections. I also have a white board where I outline follow-up actions for each of my hives. Those methods of documentation are great, but neither allows me to look out over my bee yard and quickly know each hive’s status. To fill this gap, I bought a couple dozen construction bricks and six different colors of spray paint. I painted each brick’s six sides with a different color, and came up with a simple system to show the basic status of my hives.

There are two overall categories to my system—queenless and queenright. Different colors distinguish between a queenless hive that is actively raising a new queen (yellow), and one that shows no signs of building queen cells (red). For queenright hives, I’ve got colors to indicate whether they’re doing well and need minimal attention (green), threatening to swarm and need to be split (orange), or need to be treated based on the time of year or recent mite tests (blue). The last color is black, and would sadly be displayed on a deadout.

This hive needs to be split soon

This system is very cheap—the bricks were around 60 cents each and you can often find inexpensive paint on the return rack at home improvement stores. I’m not advocating to replace beekeeping journals with painted bricks, because it’s still a good idea to detail your actions and observations in writing. But for a reasonable price and little effort, you can use painted bricks to quickly scan your hives and get a pretty good idea of how your bees are fairing.

If Honey Were Firewood

How many cords of firewood would bees need to survive the winter? This sounds like a dumb question because it is a dumb question. I’m going to ask it anyway because I’m curious.

Kevin Inglin recently discussed the British thermal units (BTUs) available in honey on his podcast, and it got me thinking about the a colony’s winter honey burn in comparison to my own winter firewood usage. Kevin mentioned 4,400 BTUs per pound of honey—I couldn’t find a source for that number, so I had to use a different one. According to the USDA, honey has 304 calories per 100 grams. There are 454 grams in a pound, so this equates to 1,380 calories per pound of honey. Converting calories to BTUs reveals there are 5476 BTUs of stored energy in each pound of honey.

Meanwhile, the white oak I predominantly burn in my woodstove has an available heat value of about 6,930 BTUs per pound, according the figures on this University of Illinois Extension table.

My heating is far less efficient than a honey bee colony’s

Honey bees might go through about 40-50 pounds of honey in a winter; the honey provides nutrition to individual bees, for sure, but it’s also the fuel for generating heat to keep the cluster from freezing in cold weather. The exact amount of honey needed to overwinter is arguable and highly variable, but most beekeepers in northern climates try to have at least 40-50 pounds of honey on each hive going into the winter. So let’s use 45 pounds as a colony’s winter honey consumption. There are 246,420 BTUs in those 45 pounds of honey—about the same stored energy as 36 pounds of my firewood. (For context, the picture above shows 36 pounds of firewood.) At 4,200 pounds of seasoned white oak per cord, the bees are surviving on 0.8% of a cord each winter. So it would take 117 colonies to burn through the equivalent of a single cord of firewood. Sounds pretty efficient considering I go through a few cords each winter myself.

But which of us is really making the best use of our heating energy? Well, if an overwintering honey bee colony weights 10 pounds and burns the equivalent of 36 pounds of white oak, it’s using 3.6 pounds of cordwood per pound of colony. Meanwhile, my combined household weight is around 280 pounds, and we’re burning through 12,600 pounds of white oak, thereby using 45 pounds of cordwood per pound of family members. So the bees are 1250% more efficient with their heating than I am, and that’s not even taking into account that my body is generating its heat from food, independent of the firewood I use to warm my home.

So why does this matter? It doesn’t really. But it’s still fun knowing.

Stacked close to the entrance for convenience

Migrants: Honey Bees in the Almond Trees

As I drove north through California last week, I witnessed the most symbiotic relationship in modern agriculture—white bee hives peppering the green-and-brown almond groves that have taken over the Central Valley. Thousands of hives had already been moved into the almonds, perhaps some of them overwintering there, and thousands more will follow. This migration is in anticipation of California’s massive almond bloom in late February. I’m not sure how well this is known outside of almond an beekeeping circles, but each almond you pop into your mouth has likely been midwifed by a honey bee.

Almond growers need about two colonies of bees for each of their one million acres, so beekeepers need to have two million hives in the Central Valley for the February through March bloom period. That’s about 3/4 of the total honey bee population in the United States. Let that sink in—right now a vast majority of America’s honey bees are in the almond groves. It seems the easy thing would be to set up massive apiaries in almond country and keep bees there year-round. But driving through the area it’s clear why this won’t work—there are, ironically, too many almonds. During the 11 months of the year when there are no blossoms on the almond trees, the bees would go hungry. It’s the same reason the almonds can’t be pollinated by native species—their populations are nowhere close to adequate to touch each flower. It’s a sad side effect of monoculture at this huge scale, and I suspect it leads to a dearth of forage and habitat for all types of animals, not just honey bees. But it’s the reality we’ve created, so commercial beekeepers truck in their hives year after year to satisfy humanity’s swollen demand for almonds.

White bee hives sitting between newly planted and mature almond trees

The going rate for a hive is probably north of $190 this year, or about $380 million for the entire pollination. Believe it or not, this is more than the $320 million US beekeepers make selling honey (mostly due to depressed prices caused by China flooding the world with cheap “honey”). That’s a big incentive to pack up your hives and send them west. How do almond growers afford this? Well, at current market rates of $3 per pound, their combined annual revenue is over $5 billion. So the cost of pollination—while it’s been climbing—isn’t sending growers to the poor house.

This co-dependence comes with great risk. The difficulty we’ve had keeping bees alive over the last decade has no doubt struck fear into the hearts of almond growers. It’s no surprise, given the stakes, that a lot of money has been thrown at helping “save the bees” from pests like varroa mites. A multi-billion dollar industry needs bees to support its production. But it works both ways. Big beekeepers are so dependent on payments from almond pollination that a disruption would remove much of their incentive to keep so many colonies—or even their ability to stay in business at all. The near-term outlook is pretty good for both US almond growers and beekeepers, but with our almonds concentrated in a single area, the industry seems vulnerable to things like disease, climate change, and natural disasters. It’s also easy to imagine another country might have its own plans to reduce the world’s reliance on California almonds (looking at you again, China).

For now, commercial beekeepers can count on big checks from pollination, and almond growers can count on even bigger checks from food processors and exporters. But there could be a shake-up coming in our lifetimes (did I mention many of the almond trees now being planted are self-pollinating?). This could ultimately lead to a drastic decline in our honey bee population, similar to what happened after World War II when the government stopped subsidizing beekeepers. I haven’t decided yet if this would be a good or bad thing…while I’m not a huge fan of large-scale commercial beekeeping, the demise of those operations would greatly reduce money for things like honey bee advocacy, habitat preservation, scientific research, and development of bee-related products. Arguably, it could also improve the health of what would remain of the bee population by putting an end to the mass migration into a concentrated area each year, where pests and diseases are shared between colonies that would otherwise never be in contact. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep my homegrown line of bees healthy and happy, my tiny little bit of land pollinator-friendly, and my honey flowing.