Hey friend, you need to get over here and listen up. If all the bees disappear, mankind would have four years to live. Lots of folks claim Albert Einstein said that. Fact or fiction, I cannot say — but by clicking on the image of beekeeper Mary Morgan, you can learn why the bees' pollination work matters to all of Mother Nature's children, humans included.
Now, if your neighbor calls to say drones are flying over your yard, don't panic — you're probably not getting bombed or spied on. They're just male honeybees looking for a virgin queen. And you won't get stung either, because swarming male honeybees have exactly one purpose in life, and for that they don't need a stinger.
Mary is only one of 125,000 beekeepers in the U.S., and the vast majority are hobbyists like her. Yet there are an estimated 2.6 million managed honey-producing colonies in this country. A single colony can swell to 60,000 bees at the height of summer, which puts the national bee population somewhere around a hundred billion — a number much too big to picture. That's exactly why beekeepers count colonies instead of individual bees.
Here are a couple of beekeeper butt-kickers. Bees despise cold weather! Mice, raccoons, deer, and bears all love honey. Put those two things together and many beekeepers lose up to half their colonies every winter. But not Mary — she tells us she keeps all creatures, big and small, from robbing her of honey. So here's the cliffhanger: those five-degree nights we had this past winter — how many of her bees froze?
Speaking of honey, a single worker bee produces only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life. So what must happen before Mary can harvest enough of that semi-liquid golden substance to fill a one-pound jar? Here's the formula: after two million flowers are visited by 768 bees, who together have flown a distance equal to twice the Earth's circumference, enough pollen will have been pilfered to start the wing-flapping process that produces that one-pound jar of honey. Did Albert Einstein calculate that complicated equation? That, I dare not claim — but that is the life of a worker bee.
Now you ask, what is this wing-flapping process? Mary answers that in her video.
Mary has a question for our ride-about partners: "Has anybody ever tried stinky honey?" If you have, drop us a comment. But come on now, Mary — what kind of question is that, and is stinky honey even a real thing? Let's change the subject.
I need to level with you: the thought of sixty thousand bees buzzing and swarming around gives me the heebie-jeebies. But when I think of Ray Charles and the Blues Brothers singing "Shake a Tail Feather," now that's cool. Here's the connection: some beekeepers swear those moves were inspired by watching honeybees get their waggle on. Truth or fiction? I know not.
Now take another look at that picture of Mary. She keeps five hives, each holding as many as sixty thousand bees in high summer. Don't you want to ask her: "Mary, how many times have you been stung?" Drop your guess in the comments, and you might just win a jar of honey this fall.
Like most beekeepers, Mary keeps European honeybees — but the High Country is also home to native pollinators that make no honey at all, and there's a whole world of mountain stories still to tell.
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