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Sweet Attraction – Honeybees at Maine Wildlife Park

August 25, 2009 - GRAY -- Though we may not relish the prospect, before long, our lush landscape will be snow-covered again and temperatures will hover in the single digits. But local honeybees will be nice and warm in their hives. They're plenty busy right now preparing for the cold months ahead.

Honeybees do not die off, hibernate or fly south for the winter. They stay put and feed off their honey stores, huddling together around their queen in a kind of heat-generating, vibratory status, maintaining a hive temperature of 92 degrees no matter what the weather.

Honeybees are not native to America; European colonists brought them. American Indians soon referred to honeybees as "the white man's fly."

Plain old honey is really a pretty amazing food. Because of its low moisture content, it's the only edible that will never expire. Archaeologists have found perfectly good 2,000-year-old honey in King Tut's tomb in the pyramids of Egypt.

Among its hundreds of reputed uses, honey has antibacterial properties, can speed the healing of wounds and burns and is a low-cost laxative.

Honeybees are as remarkable as the nectar they produce. Bees are the only insects that produce food for humans. Honeybees have four wings, can fly up to 15 mph and can take wing while carrying up to 80 percent of their body weight in pollen. It's said that a honeybee could fly around the world, fueled by nothing more than an ounce of honey.

The all-important queen bee mates in flight with five to as many as 45 different drones for just one session in her lifetime. However, she is able to lay some 200,000 eggs after this one mating. In summer, a typical honeybee colony can contain 30,000 to 60,000 bees.

Folks will have the chance to observe these remarkable creatures, purchase local honey, and chat with beekeepers at the Maine Wildlife Park in Gray on Saturday.

Francis Fedrizzi, a beekeeper from Freeport and a member of Cumberland County Beekeepers, is the event coordinator.

"The main attraction is the observation hive we'll have on display," said Fedrizzi, 44, a beekeeper for the past seven years. "Kids like the challenge of trying to find the queen."

Fedrizzi said he keeps bees simply for the honey.

"I've always been interested in bees," he said. "I was out of work and started reading books on it and said, 'Hey, I can do this.'"

Fedrizzi found a local beekeeping association and was off and running.

Fedrizzi now has three full-sized hives, with two more growing. His first hive consisted of a divided colony from a fellow beekeeper.

Fedrizzi encourages any would-be keeper to join a local "bee school." A number of these in Cumberland and York counties are typically run in the winter months. The University of Maine Cooperative Extension offers the courses.

Bees have been in the news in the past couple of years. "Colony collapse disorder" is the term for the mysterious disappearance of bees from their hives. Though commercial beekeepers have experienced this, Fedrizzi said it generally has not affected hobby keepers or wild bees in Maine.

"Colonies collapse and die off naturally all the time," explained Fedrizzi. "The odd thing about CCD is that the bees have simply left the hive; there's no dead bees.

"Starvation, a failed queen, mite problems or dysentery can all result in dead bees. Colony collapse, where bees simply leave the hive, is still a mystery," he said.

Fedrizzi says CCD is alarming for huge industrial-scale farm operations, such as almond growers in California, or blueberry operations here in Maine. These folks simply cannot grow hundreds of acres of a monoculture crop without the honeybee diligently pollinating it all.

In Maine, blueberry growers have some 60,000 hives trucked in annually. California requires upward of 1.5 million hives for its almond farms alone. That's about half of America's entire honeybee population.

It's ironic to think the health of a tiny winged insect could mean the difference between success and failure for a multimillion-dollar agribusiness. But since much of our food is produced via these large-scale operations, CCD has the potential to affect the availability of many common menu items.

Commercial keepers transport bees over hundreds, even thousands, of miles to feed on a single crop, which unnaturally manipulates them. With many colonies from different regions congregating, diseases can spread.

Fedrizzi said this stresses the bees. He feels that the CCD situation is far less dire for small and diverse farmers.

"The local, small farmer that's growing a variety of crops on a few acres here in Maine is going to receive pollination from the local insects," said Fedrizzi. "There are other varieties of bees out there pollinating as well."

Members of the Cumberland County Beekeepers will be at the Maine Wildlife Park on Route 26 in Gray from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information on beekeeping in Maine, visit www.mainebeekeepers.org.

DON PERKINS, Portland Press Herald, August 19, 2009


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Regions: Sebago


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