by Maggie Ellis

The soft hum of Sweet Briar’s first-year honey bees fills the quiet space left when the short rain showers move past campus. Most bees have stayed close to the hives, able to return quickly if the weather turns sour once again, but a few brave souls have risked the weather, choosing to wander to a few nearby Wingstem bushes, a bright yellow-orange late flowering plant, to forage for pollen and nectar.  These early autumn flowering plants produce a swath of bright orange pollen that colors the local bee population’s honey, wax, and nectar its distinctive yellow-orange.

Professor Linda Fink’s Intro to Biology students trek slowly up the soggy hill, having been instructed to wear good boots, tie their hair back, and keep their latex gloves on. Most pull on their bee nets as the class approaches the apiary. Collectively, they stop to take a look at a flowering Wingstem that has just a few insects crawling over it.

“What insects do you see? If any?” Professor Fink asks the class, kneeling next to it for a closer look.

“There’s a grasshopper,” one student says.

“Oh, I see a stink bug,” another pipes up enthusiastically.

“Good, what color pollen do you see?” Fink asks now. “It will be important for your records later, so remember.”

Beth Savage, Sweet Briar College’s only beekeeping expert and hive manager, walks closer to the nineteen hives housed on campus, carried by the kind of confidence only someone who has worked with bees for years has, but she remains careful enough to stay clear of the only entrance to the hives. She raises the bee smoker, currently filled with scraps from her latest Amazon order’s cardboard box and pine straw gathered from her yard, quickly giving a small white hive a few gentle puffs of smoke. “It’s just enough to keep them calm while we open the outside and inner lids of their hive,” Savage explains as her captive audience crowds around her, their bulky bee netting shifting awkwardly on unsure shoulders as they take turns peering into an open hive.

“This is a piece of wax that I’m pulling out now,” Savage says, gently coaxing a frame of pale yellow honeycomb free of the Deep Hive body box, this time a bright sunny yellow sitting atop a sky blue box. A few bees cling to it as she approaches the gaggle of students. “You’re welcome to lightly touch it. They’ve built this piece since they’ve been introduced to campus. All I did was provide them with the frame and a thin piece of paper for support.” Several students step up to hold the frame, smiling for pictures before passing it around, the bees following closely as the frame of labor intensive comb is passed carefully from student to student.

“In this piece, they’ve actually filled it with nectar,” Savage says. “[Bees] have a long tongue called the proboscis that acts like a straw. They suck up the liquid in this second stomach called the honey stomach.” Savage points at a different frame, while students watch her carefully. A few curious bees hover closely, some trying to crawl under the netting, other hanging out calmly on the shoulders and arms of calmer students.

Back in the lab, Savage glances quickly over the three gridded sticky pads spread across the table in front of her. “At first, nothing stands out — but if you’ll pass me that hand lens—we’re looking for signs of a Varroa mite infestation.” Varroa mites, scientific name Varroa destructor, are an unfortunately common bee parasite that is thought to be the most common cause of colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon that peaked in 2008-2009 where entire colonies of bees would disappear, leaving behind a serviceable hive, their queen, and a few workers to care for their immature larvae. The small, flat, oval-shaped mites attach themselves to the bees as larvae before they pupate and mature into adult bees. They slowly kill adult worker and drone bees by feeding off their blood, therefore weakening the bee’s capability to work effectively. The sticky pads used by Savage are a way to test a hive for Varroa mites. The pads, used mainly to assess the severity of a Varroa mite infestation, are covered with a black plastic grate that prevents the bees from touching the adhesive but allows the mites to fall through and get caught. “This is not the best way to test for the mites, but because of the weather we can’t use any other methods today,” Savage says as she selects a pair of tweezers to use on the mats, “but so far I think I’ve only seen one hive and it has just a few mites.” Due to the drop in temperature, the smaller hives, the ones suspected of being infested, cannot be opened for fear of harming the growing brood and disrupting the inside workers’ carefully maintained temperature.

Later this week, a more conclusive study will be conducted. The current forecast predicts warmer weather and a sunny day, so there will be less risk to the hives’ internal temperature dropping too far and too quickly when opened that afternoon. A small sample of bees from the possibly infected hives will be inspected for Varroa Mite infection. If the bees are found to be contaminated, the hives will be quarantined until the infestation can be carefully controlled.

As Sweet Briar’s apiary grows, our personal understandings of these tiny but mighty creatures can grow as well. With increasing interaction between non-aggressive honeybees and students, thanks to a new beekeeping class that meets with Beth Savage a few Saturdays a month, our student population can gain and spread valuable knowledge about caring for and helping bees here in Virginia as well as worldwide.