Day in and day out, families of bees buzz about The Tucker Bee Farm pollinating the community crops and helping to produce honey.
“Pollinating is a bee’s No. 1 job,†said Tim Tucker, owner of The Tucker Bee Farm. Tucker’s bees pollinate not only his crops, but also the crops and plants of neighboring farms. Bees make up 80 percent of all insect pollination, which helps keep the supply of fruits and vegetables produced in the South East Kansas community of Niotaze steady.
The Tucker Bee Farm evolved after a neighbor gave Tucker two starter hives. Bee keeping began as a hobby for Tucker and his wife, but soon developed in to a successful business.
After purchasing more bees and assembling and placing additional hives on his land, Tucker began to bottle and sell his own brand of Tucker Bee Farm honey. Tucker now works year-round producing and selling honey. He also enters his brand of raw honey in local and national competitions.
The science behind Tucker Bee Farm
Bee farms vary by state and climate. Tucker said that on his land, the bee hives must be placed many yards from each other to allow each hive enough plants and trees to pollinate.
Within each bee hive, a queen bee, drone bees and worker bees, work hard to make honey and wax. The queen bee is much larger than the other bees and plays a significant protector role in the hive; she has a stinger that can penetrate multiply times unlike the worker bee that has a stinger that can only penetrate once and the drone who does not have a stinger at all.
Besides being a protector, the queen bee has the most important job in the hive because she is the only one able to reproduce. After mating with several drone bees, she will remain fertile for life. As long as she is the queen of the hive, she will lay up to 2000 eggs a day. If for any reason she is unable to reproduce or dies, the drones and worker bees will choose a new queen by selecting a young larva and feeding it royal jelly.
Royal jelly, a milky substance, is made up of honey and digested pollen that is mixed with a chemical secreted from a gland in the nursing bee’s head. The royal jelly substance turns the average female bee into a large queen bee.
The worker bee also a female and if needed can be fed the royal jelly to become the next queen bee. Worker bees live longer in the winter months and die within the first six weeks of summer. Drones are the male bees of the hive and are used to mate with the queen. Once mating with the virgin queen, it dies. Usually there are only about 300-3000 drones in a hive. During the fall, the drones are kicked out of the hive where they then die from the cold.
Tucker explained without these three different types of bees, the hive could not produce honey or pollinate other plants. Every year, Tucker purchases a new unborn queen bee that replaces the older queen. The unborn queen is then placed in the hive for the worker bees to feed so that they will accept her once she hatches.
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