/lit/ - Literature

>>18007991
Why do bees make honey? What purpose does it serve? Is it their food supply? Wouldn't they get angry if you try to harvest their honey? Where do they go in winter and fall months?

>>18008081
>Why do bees make honey? What purpose does it serve? Is it their food supply?
Honey is their food supply.
>Wouldn't they get angry if you try to harvest their honey?
I think they sedate the bees with smoke before they harvest the smoke.
>Where do they go in winter and fall months?
They just stay inside their hive and eat the honey they harvested. If they are used by humans, they are given syrup or sugar water in exchange for their honey.

>>18007991
The 4th book of Vergil's Georgics has an interesting story about a beekeeper

>>18008081
Bees make honey for the baby bees (the brood). Bees eat very little once matured, 80 percent or more of the honey is for the brood. Yes it is their food supply. We never take too much of the honey only the upper hives (upper hives are known as "supers") and usually only during the the warmer seasons (depending on colony strength we can even take honey during winter but it is unusual). They produce a huge surplus of honey during the warmer seasons and we closely monitor how much they have, taking too much and killing a hive is not cost efficient but usually they only need the honey from the brood box (bottom box) to feed the brood which we do not take. In the winter they slow down production massively and that is when we focus on hive health and keeping them alive.

Here is a pic to illustrate what I'm talking about. The bottom box is the brood box, all above boxes are known as supers which will be filled with honey, not brood, because the queen can not pass through the excluder, there is an excluder between the brood box and the supers which the queen bee and drone bees can not pass through because it is basically a flat cage of a certain size too small for her thorax, the workers however can pass through it and they will place the honey and pollen in those boxes because they know that when the queen is laying eggs in the cells they must move the honey for her. She gets priority over the honey and they instinctively know to move the honey out of her way. She can lay 2000-3000 eggs per day.

If you look closely at the picture you will notice most of these hives have 3 boxes, the bottom is the brood, the second is a super, and the 3rd which has been placed on its side is another super full of honey which we are taking. We chase different types of trees, chasing means moving the hives to the trees which are blooming flowers and yielding nectar. Different nectar produces different results, some act as painkillers, others as anti inflammatories and etc etc some will even make you trip out like psilocybin, however when you buy honey from the store it has been so processed and mixed together with other honeys that these effects are rendered inert.

>>18008147
The whole book is meant to be about beekeeping but Virgil was not very good at sticking to ag-sci

>>18007991
>>18008191
unbelievably based

>>18007991
The Death of a Beekeeper by Lars Gustafsson