The Honey Bee (Aphis Mellifera) Colony and the art of System Engineering – Fitting the Round Peg into the Square Hole

I started Beekeeping because I wanted my to produce my own Honey. Why? As a Hay Fever suffer since my teens I have tried pretty much everything and anything over the years with varying degrees of success, but nothing ever really solved the problem. There have been times when I hated the summer months and would lock myself in the house until the Hay fever symptoms subsided enough to allow me to function again. I had heard of micro dosing as a method of alleviating the allergy symptoms, but never tried it. To micro dose yourself with pollen; you need honey from a local Beekeeper. Why? Because local honey produced by the beekeeper will always contain small amounts of pollen. This is inevitable, as part of the honey extraction process and a local beekeeper, whilst adhering to food standards, will not have access to, or the equipment that commercial honey suppliers have to force the honey through, the microscopic filters required to extract the pollen from the honey. Therefore by consuming local honey as part of my breakfast I can micro dose myself with pollen. It works! Since consuming local honey over the past year I no longer suffer with the debilitating symptoms of my body’s over reaction to pollen grains. Hence, I decided to contemplate keeping my own honey bees.

Why only contemplate?

Well you never know how you are going to react to a full colony of 60,000+ bees until you open up a hive. It is a lot of bees and they will be buzzing loudly around you. You have to be confident and treat and handle them with respect (trying not to squish any as this can provoke a defensive reaction from the colony). You will feel them ‘bump’ into you, especially your hands; only covered with Nitrile gloves and therefore the most exposed part of your body to bee stings.

Secondly, you never know if you are allergic to bee stings until you get stung. Indeed, it has been known for a Beekeeper who previously suffered no allergic reaction to develop an allergic reaction. Obviously there are many levels of allergic reaction, from swelling of the area of the sting, e.g. hand, arm, etc. to anaphylaxis.

Thirdly, It’s expensive, a Basic hive, flatpacked, will cost ~￡300, a lot more if you want a ready built hive. Then there are tools to purchase; hive tool, smoker, queen marking kit, bee brush, etc. and PPE; Beesuite, Nitrile gloves with long extended cuffs, wellies. In order to maintain a single hive, you will need a second hive – another ￡300, plus eeks and feeders, then there is the bees themselves, a colony nucleus can be ￡250+….it does get expensive to start Beekeeping. Then you need space for your Apiary. You can place an Apiary almost anywhere, a balcony of a flat, or an urban garden so long as the bees have access to water, stagnant water is preferred! However, The Honey Bee has a foraging range of circa 3 to 5Km. Which means in an urban area your bees are going to be visiting a lot of your neighbours. It only takes one to complain and you will have to remove the bees from your premises. The Honey Bee is classified as a wild animal. Each Beekeeper should have public liability insurance for cover upto ￡10 million.

Finally, the Honey Bee and the colony is which it lives is a complicated System. It is the sum of its component parts and it only functions as a colony if all the parts are present, i.e. 1 Queen, >10,000 workers, and a few 1000 Drones during the summer months only. There is a great deal we simply do not understand about the honey bee and it’s behaviour. Enrolling on an introduction to Beekeeping course given by my local Beekeeping association and reading the Book, “The BBKA Guide to Beekeeping” made me view the honey bee colony as the system that is it. Which as a Systems Engineer I found fascinating, and I was sold on the idea of keeping bees and as a beekeeper managing that system.

Now the Honey Bee colony is very adaptable and will form it’s home in a variety of places, so long as it is dry relatively draft free, and has restricted access that can be easily defended. Therefore the soffits of houses and hollow tree trunks make ideal places to set up home. Feral honey bee colonies like to build their comb to store their honey and raise their brood (new bees) in long rugby ball shaped combs with many of these combs side by side. I, on the other hand, as a Beekeeper would like them to build their comb in square boxes. Hence the eternal battle of fitting the round peg into the square hole.

The honey bee, apart from being a wild animal is part of the generic Bee genus which in turn is part of the insect family and closely related to the wasp.

As previously mentioned the Honeybee can only exist in a colony where all the parts are present. The colony is the sum of its component parts.

Each honey Bee starts life an a egg laid by the Queen. The Queen will determine, from the size of the cell in which she is to lay an egg, whether it will be a female worker, or a male drone. Hence the lifecycle of the honey bee is fixed (sort of).

If the colony decides it wishes to split (swarm), or its current Queen is getting old (>3 years) and her best egg laying days are behind her. The colony may decide to raise a new queen. NOTE it is the colony that is making these decisions, not any one bee working alone. To raise a new queen, the Brood, or nurse, bees will start to feed selected lava as substance known as “Royal Jelly” to a few selected lava as soon as they hatch. “Royal Jelly is a milky secretion from the Hypopharynx gland of the Brood bee and is rich in carbohydrates, protein, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals. Everything a Queen Lava would want. As stated the colony produces a number of potential new queens. Why? Insurance. Not each ”Royal jelly” fed lava will develop into a viable Queen Pupa. If the colony decides that, a new queen is not viable they will destroy the queen cell being formed around the lava and consume the lava inside. Once the potential new Queens enter the pupa stage the old queen may swarm with half the colony bees and leave the hive to set up a new home. How do they decide who stays and who goes? Both are taking a great risk. Those leaving taking on and much pollen and honey from the stores as they can carry, because they will have no food and nowhere to store the food until the can find a new home.

For the bees that remain, therie risk is that they have no queen, yet. Hence have no means of producing new bees. As the life expectancy of an adult bee is 9 weeks it is a race against time. For the new pupa queens it is also race against time, because the first new queen to emerge from her cell may well sting the other potential queens to death whilst still in their sealed queen cells. Once emerged the Queen needs to reach sexual maturity and leave the colony to mate with Drones from another colony. She will mate with upto 15 to 20 Drones during these mating flights, which for each Drone involved will result in Death. After mating the Queen will return to the colony and settle down to perform her function as an egg-laying machine. The worker bees will over feed the Queen after she is mated to make it difficult for her to fly and leave the colony. She will become an essential part of the system that is the Honey Bee colony.

The worker bees go through several states during their lifecycle with each state having specific use cases to perfrom.

A Brood Bee will as its name suggests look after the brood initially that of the Clearer Use case and then as a Lava Nurse Bee.

The Foraging Bee, will literally fly itself to death foraging upto 3 to 5km fro the colony in search of raw materials; water, Tree sap, Nectar, and ?pollen. Unlike larger Bees such as the Bumble Bee, the honey bee cannot forage in rain, it also need an ambient temperature of 12 degrees C if it is to forage any distance.

I would like to close this short introduction the Honeybee colony as a system and the management of that system by the Beekeeper with a photo, of what happens when you let the bees do their own thing in an empty Brood Box/Honey Super. It demonstrates not only the architectural brilliance of the honeybee, but also the thermo dynamic skill in the management of air flow throughout the colony. Consider in the photo below that the left-hand side is where the entrance to the hive exists, i.e. air would enter the hive (colony) at this point. The comb is built and shaped in such a way to direct the air to all parts of the comb. Quite brilliant and yet beautiful all at the same time.

The whole point of this post is simple. Systems and Systems Engineering is not just about the next 6th gen fighter aircraft, it is not about the latest national infrastructure project, it is all around us in both its natural complexity and beauty. We should use this message and the examples of systems and systems engineering that are all around us as we try to encourage the next generation to take up the mantle of Systems Engineering.