What do you do when you see a bee?

Do you run and hide?

Do you flail around or do you look at it with curiosity?

I'm Dr.

Hollee Freeman.

I am a stat certified apprentice beekeeper, and I'm here to tell you all about honey bees.

Because without bees, there's no food.

And without food, there's no us.

[music] There are over 20,000 species of bees and mor are being discovered each day.

I manage nine colonies, which is about 540,000 bees.

Do you ever wonder what happens inside the hive?

I'm going to show you.

But there are some things we need to do first.

First, I need to put on my bee suit.

Ever wonder why bee suits are light colored?

It's thought that bees know that they're natural predators are dark.

Bears, for example.

And so the light colored bee suit is thought to keep the bees a little bit calmer so they don't feel like there's a predator coming into their environment.

Beekeeping suit are made up of thick material, which greatly decreases the chances you'll get stung.

Zippers and Velcro help make sure the bee stingers won't reach your skin.

The hat or veil is covered with a thin layer of mesh to help protect your fac and head and allows visibility.

[chicken squawking] Now that we have our smoker going, our suit on.

We're ready to inspect the hive.

The thing I'm going to do first is look at the hive The number of levels or boxes, and this type of hive is dependent on the number of bees that live there.

The boxes on the bottom are typically the bee nurseries where they raise their young.

The upper boxes are called hone supers, where, you guessed it, they store some of their food.

In the front you'll see a small opening on the bottom box.

This is where the bees enter the hive.

Be careful not to stand in front of the opening sinc this is the runway for the bees.

They need about six feet of space to exit the hive and take flight.

I'm going to smoke a little bit.

Just a touch.

Now I'm going to remove the inner cover using my hive tool.

And you can look down in here and see their bees in the seams.

I'm going to start with the bottom box.

Just when I did that, I could hear the sound of the bees increasing.

Bees typically are in middle C. They're just kind of chilling when they're on flowers, when they're in their colony.

But when they start to get aroused, you can feel the vibration and you can hear the sounds.

All right, Just give it a little smoke.

Calm them down a little bit.

Then I use my hive tool To pull up the frame.

There are three types of honey bees in a hive.

Workers bees are small and they do just what their name says.

They work around the clock to clean the honeycomb, feed the baby bees, bring in pollen and nectar and anything else that needs to be done.

Worker bees are females.

Drones are male bees.

They are larger and rotund.

They can be spotted because o their body shape and large eyes.

Drones mate with queen bees, but not the queen from their own colony.

And then there's the queen bee.

She's the larges and longest bee in the colony.

She's important because without her laying eggs the colony can't survive at all.

Each hive typically has only one queen bee.

Bees bring in nectar from flowers plants, and they combine it with enzymes in their bodies and they convert those sugar molecules into what we know as honey.

When that nectar gets about 18% or less moisture content the bees will use a wax capping.

This means the honey is ready.

It's not going to ferment.

Bees can consume it, humans can consume it.

So this is what bees will use during the winter.

to survive.

They need to have about 60 pounds of honey to survive the winter.

Pollen is what bees get from flowers.

It's their protein source.

I can see it on the legs of the bees and in the wax cells.

If I see a shiny substance in the combs, that's nectar.

Nectar is like snack food for the bees.

They chew it and add enzymes to break it down.

Then they fan i with their wings to dry it out.

And that's what becomes honey.

Polle and honey are usually found on the outer parts of the frame while the eggs, larva and pupa, the Brood, are usually foun toward the center of the frames.

Finding brood mean the bees are healthy and working hard to raise their young.

While saying brood does not guarantee the queen is still part of the colony, it does indicate that she was recently there.

Bees are fascinating creatures.

So much happens inside the hive that we don't see.

It's a world of cooperation and communication.

The most important thing for a beekeeper is just to make sure that the bees are healthy.

They're vital to our ecosystem as they pollinate 85% of our crops, flowers and fruit trees.

I hope you enjoyed the tour Inside the Hive.

Thank you for joining me.

[music]