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A royal jelly factory in New Zealand

Editor’s note: Our international correspondent spent the second leg of her beekeeping trip in New Zealand. So far, she has written three articles about her New Zealand adventures, but we are waiting for final permission to publish the first two. Today’s story is about grafting larvae with the ultimate goal of harvesting royal jelly.

We wake up at 5:30, slap together some sandwiches, and I wrestle a bee suit that’s two extras too large. An hour later, we’re on site, pulling fresh brood from a yard of nucs. There aren’t many bees inside—the strong colonies were taken to the honey flow long ago—but nevertheless we pull two or three frames per colony. In total, we need three boxes (30 frames) of graftable brood and one box of sealed brood. We’ll use the sealed brood later to bolster the starter colonies.

Pulling brood means finding queens, and I’m no good at finding queens when I want to convince people that I’m good at finding queens. When I’m nervous, I forget what I’m doing and wind up missing the queen for the bees. I start admiring and stop searching. My eyes catch on emerging bees, pale yellow birthdays, bustling workers, and bumbling drones. I turn the frames over in my hands, observing without assessing, tucking the queen back into her hive, completely oblivious. I usually miss a couple this way before I have no more cool to lose, and then I can relax and do the job right.

Queen larva floating in royal jelly. Wikimedia photo by pollinator "The Old Drone"
Queen larva floating in royal jelly. Wikimedia photo by pollinator "The Old Drone"

It takes us a few hours to find sufficient frames. Then at 9:30 we head to the grafting shed, which is a small shack in a big field with a bench, some stools, and a radio. We turn on the generator, hunch over our frames, and begin scooping up larvae almost too small to see. We place these larvae into plastic queen cups. There are three rows of cups on each frame and twenty cups per row. The experts average a sixty per cent success rate. These guys have been grafting six days a week since Christmas, and some of them are on their second or third year.

The queen cup frames are destined for starter colonies. These are colonies kept in a perpetually queenless, orphan frenzy. We transfer the queen cups to starter colonies in the afternoon, and we feed them a dollop of pollen goop and a splash of sugar syrup. We also provide sealed brood to maintain the starter colony population. Frantic to grow a queen, these bees pile royal jelly into the queen cups.

We pull out the frames the next day and use a machine to remove the eggs and suck out the jelly. The jelly goes to a royal jelly packer who wraps it in capsules and sells it as a nutritional supplement. I haven’t seen the machine that sucks out the jelly, but I bet it looks like an octopus.

It takes us 4 hours to reach our grafting quota. In between larvae, I hold my grafting tool in my mouth, and I bet I consume a good capsule and a half of royal jelly this way. It’s bitter. Actually, it tastes like the stuff we spray on the TV remote at home to keep my dog from chewing on the batteries. But this stuff is nutritious, and if I want to lay 2,000 eggs a day, I had better take my supplement!

Maggie
HoneyBeeSuite

Hives in New Zealand.
Hives in New Zealand.

Monday morning myth: royal jelly is good for you

Royal jelly is not just good food, it is great food—for honey bees. But let’s leave it at that. Just because it’s a super food for honey bees doesn’t mean it’s the same for humans.

Consider this: with a little help from their symbiotic friends, termites eat wood. The termites grow healthy and strong and have few problems with heart disease and cancer. Termites are never arrested for drunk driving and not one has ever failed a college entrance exam. But if you serve a log to your toddler for dinner, your parenting skills will definitely be called into question.

And how about dung beetles? They eat dung. This super food meets their nutritional requirement for vitamins, minerals, and energy. I’ve heard that the baby beetles grow strong, are never unemployed, and seldom need orthodontics. All the essentials of dung beetledom are found in one slippery package. But feed the same to your family and child protective services will relieve you of all further responsibility.

According to various sources, royal jelly is about 68 percent water, 13 percent crude protein, 11 percent sugar, and 5 percent fatty acids. The rest is a variety of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes—none of which are unique to royal jelly. There are no miraculous components or secret ingredients. It will not cure your disease, improve your sex life, or make you rich and famous. It is not regulated by the FDA and no scientific studies have shown it to affect human health one way or the other.

Regardless of the inanity, people pay top dollar so they can eat royal jelly. How strange is that? It is extremely difficult to collect so it is very pricey. But no matter how much you pay or how much royal jelly you eat, you will never be queen, not even for a day. Trust me.

So save your money and let the bees keep their royal jelly. It’s their province and they deserve it. Besides, we humans have chocolate, so how can we complain?

Rusty

Honey bee eggs in the brood nest

Once the brood comb is prepared, the queen lays one egg in each cell. Estimates vary widely as to how many eggs a queen can lay, but 1500-2000 per day is a reasonable assumption. Over the course of one spring and summer season, the queen probably reaches a maximum of about 200,000 eggs.

When first laid the eggs are about 1/16 inch long (1.6 mm) and a pearly translucent white. Oddly, they stand on end in the cell. Gradually, within the first day, they tip to one side and lie prone at the base of the cell. After about three days, the chorion—the membrane coating the egg—dissolves and the new larva is exposed.

Honey bees keep the brood nest at a constant temperature that ranges from about 91-97° F (33-36° C). This phenomenon is unique in the insect world and requires large populations. If the population isn’t large enough to care for all the brood and keep them warm, the queen will slow the rate of egg laying, and the workers may eat some of the eggs.

The excellent photograph below shows the eggs standing upright in the cells. In the upper left you can see larvae floating in pools of milky-colored royal jelly.

Rusty

Eggs and larvae in the brood nest. Photo by Wausberg
Eggs and larvae in the brood nest. Photo by Wausberg

Pollen collection by honey bees

While we normally think of honey bees collecting nectar, an average-size hive may bring in 100 pounds of pollen in a season. Pollen is an essential part of the honey bee diet, providing a wide range of nutrients including protein, carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins, and minerals.

Although a tough outer coating protects the pollen from environmental stressors, honey bees have enzymes in their digestive tract that split the grains apart at a weak point. The interior is then digested and the empty husks are excreted. Most of the pollen is eaten by nurse bees. They use the nutrition absorbed from it to secrete royal jelly from their hypopharyngeal glands. The jelly is fed to young larvae, including workers, drones and queens. After about three days the jelly is mixed with bee bread—a mixture of whole pollen, honey, and enzymes—and fed to the workers and drones until they spin their cocoons. The queens receive a steady diet of royal jelly throughout their development.

Most bees collect just pollen or just nectar on any trip, but a few carry both at the same time. The pollen is stuffed into hairy receptacles on their hind legs called corbiculae. A single bee can carry about half her own body weight in pollen.

Once back at the hive, the workers stuff the pollen into an awaiting cell. Unlike nectar-carrying bees, pollen-carrying bees have to off-load it themselves. In addition to depositing the pellets from their sacks, they may also groom away any pollen that is stuck to their bodies. The pollen is stored in cells at the perimeter of the brood nest, forming a ring around it. During the brood rearing season, the pollen is stored for only a few days. During the winter it is stored for much longer.

Honey bees usually forage on only one kind of flower on any single trip. This is nature’s way of assuring that plants are cross-pollinated. So a bee going to blackberries, keeps going to blackberries until there are no more blackberry flowers, then she will switch to something else. Honey bees collect pollen even from plants that don’t provide nectar, such as corn. In corn-growing regions, pesticide-contaminated corn pollen is suspected of causing severe health problems within the hive.

Rusty