Come and see a glass bee hive! Learn about bee-savior in nature and hives. Discover how pollination works and the benefits of honey! Enjoy games and craft activities!

AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

<p>Come and see a glass bee hive! Learn about bee-savior in nature and hives. Discover how pollination works and the benefits of honey! Enjoy games and craft activities!</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Children

Michael Kevin Johnson

Bee not Afraid

Father in heaven, Lord, we are grateful that we can be here on this beautiful day that you have made for us, that we can talk about things that you have created, and learn more about them so that we don't have to be afraid.

And we ask that you will help us to honor you in every way through this week.

How many people in here are scared of bees?

OK, how many people in here know already that you're allergic to bees?

There's a honey bee sitting on, I can't remember what this is called, but most people call it a bottle brush.

I'm gonna go ahead and take this off of this for right now.

Most people call this a bottle brush and that is actually my wife out in what was our original apiary.

It was a single hive is what we started with.

Actually at this point I had a single hive here at the farm which is up here in a single hive at home.

If you look in the woods right now, you'll see some red flowers starting to come out on some of the trees.

That is the start, the official start, of what we call our honey flow.

When that happens, everything else starts going after that.

You can see on here, the legs, you know, they're usually like a twig.

And there's pollen all up and down its body.

When you look inside of a hive for the first time.

I can tell you I wasn't so thoughtful that I was going to be keeping bees when we started to plant an orchard, but they go hand in hand.

This is what you're looking at and you figure 20 frames basically 20 bars like that filled with bees you're looking at around 50, 000 bees and of course 99.9% of the hive can technically sting you.

This 1 is just taking a drink of water at our little birdbath that we have in our backyard in Deltona.

And this is a traditional what most people will have for an apiary.

It's good to have at least 2 just because if something goes wrong with 1 you can share resources from 1 that might be doing better.

And I can tell you, you can see this is my greenhouse right there, and I walk past here all the time.

So I'm going to tell you a few interesting facts about bees, Things that I didn't even know until really recently.

First of all, they see by ultraviolet light.

That's a flower and I'm not positive but that might actually even be weeds.

When we look at something out in the ground, you know, we see the colors that we see.

Thistle is that, you know, the 1 that gets the thorns all over it.

You always wonder why If you go up to a bee, it flies away real quick?

Because it sees you from the top as well.

I mean, granted, it has all these, I shouldn't say 5 eyes because it's compound eye, but they have the compound eyes and then they have these eyes up here.

There's actually 1 there, 1 there, and 1 there.

I didn't realize that until actually when I was starting to put together the program for here.

And I'm like, I've been keeping bees this long and I didn't know that.

Roughly 70% of what you eat is pollinated by a bee.

If there wasn't a bee, imagine 70% of what you eat, you aren't eating anymore.

That's how serious the situation is with bees at times.

And of course, many of us are vegetarian and or vegan, and then that even increases even more.

And a bee will travel normally 5 miles, but if there's a good sugar source or nectar source they will literally go 10 miles.

This outside ring is 10 miles away from where we are right now.

So what this tells you is my orchard, which is, I was thinking it was around 20 air miles away, it looks like maybe it's closer to 15.

That means that my bees interact with bees that would be sitting here at Camp Kalakua.

It means that my bees will be interacting with bees and bell, so on and so on and so on.

That's how many diseases and many pests get shared, so to say.

And that's why when something happens in 1 hive, and I can tell you in this area right here, I'm going to give you a rough guess that there's at least 50, 000 hives, because there's several commercial growers.

Okay, so that 5 mile distance is a normal, 10 miles is if there's a good nectar source and then they will go that distance.

But it gets to a certain point where it takes more energy to fly that distance than they're going to get.

So they only carry enough with them, enough food source basically with them, to physically make that trip.

So if something happens in between they can end up not making it back to the hive.

That's why a lot of times you'll see a bee that's just sitting on a leaf somewhere or just sitting on a flower somewhere and not doing anything.

It's because it's having to rest, then it's having to basically bring up some of what it was going to get, eat it back down into a different area and so yeah.

And a bee is a very actually very clean animal.

1 of the things that's driving these bees crazy right now is that they are and have been in this observation hive for a couple days.

I let them out yesterday but they didn't have enough time to clean out anything that died in here because every day in your hive bees die.

A bees lifespan is very short but they they will not use the bathroom inside the hive.

They will only use the bathroom even in the middle of winter when there's snow this deep until they can get outside and that's it and the rest of time they hold it.

So if you have wounds, you can put honey on it, and it will actually help treat the wound.

The women in the hive are the ones that do all the work.

There's usually only about let's say 10 males in the entire hive and you can tell the difference later on you'll look but the male drone cells as they're called are actually larger than the worker cells and that's why I brought this particular sheet on the top so that you could see it.

And a worker bee can carry 80% of its weight.

Now I have sat there in front of my hives and watched these things and just been amazed because you will see a bee picking up a bee flying probably 200 feet away and dropping the bee.

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Series

Children

Bee not Afraid

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Short Course: Beekeeping

Beekeeping- Part 1

48m

Intensive: Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping

Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping Part 2

54m

Special Interests

Understanding and Working with Honeybees Part 2

53m

Special Interests

Understanding and Working with Honeybees Part 1

51m

BeeKeeping 101

How to Start Your First Beehive

1h 13m

Short Course: Beekeeping

Beekeeping- Part 3

1h

Intensive: Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping

Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping Part 3

58m

Beekeeping Track

Basic Beekeeping Part 2

25m

Sound Doctrine