Page 66 - Wallingford Magazine Issue 54 Late Spring 2025

BEES
BEES

by Roger Dietz
in New England

For beekeepers in New England, this is a wonderful time
of year. By now the ‘overwintered’ hives and even any new
colonies should be in full swing.
In early spring, the queen begins laying around 2,000 eggs
every day. After 21 days the first 2,000 eggs begin to hatch.
On day 22 the second 2,000 eggs hatch; and so on through
the month. In a 30-day month, a beekeeper can expect to
see the colony boom up to 50,000 or 60,000 bees. Tak-
ing into consideration a six-week lifespan, where bees are
dying off, you still have a positive number that is growing
daily.

Here’s some simple math, the more bees you have, the
more honey you get. If you consider that an individual for-
ager will transport about 50 milligrams of nectar back to
the hive on a given flight, a beehive needs a lot of forager
bees transporting nectar. To put it in perspective, it would
take 500 bees to bring in one ounce of nectar.
Bees perform many tasks in the hive and not all bees are
foragers. However, the most time-consuming task for any
colony is nectar collection. For each type of plant nectar
is slightly different in sweetness and water content. Since
nectar is about 75 percent water, and finished honey is
around 17 percent water, you can see that a good part of
the foragers load is water. That said, an ounce of nectar
does not equal an ounce of honey. In the hive, this water
is evaporated from the nectar by hundreds of bees sitting
on the honey frame fanning their wings at 230 beats every
second, thus converting watery nectar into ripe honey. Sci-
ence has determined that a single honeybee makes about
1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime. Knowing
this, it is amazing to think that a healthy beehive in New
England can yield 80 to 100 pounds of honey. Sometimes
even more. So, you can see why a beekeeper is interested
in keeping the population of the beehive as high as possi-
ble.

Of course, on a grander scale, the world needs honeybee
populations to grow. Honeybee populations have been in

66 WALLINGFORD MAGAZINE - LATE SPRING 2025