ETE’s Newest Busy Workers

With the ongoing expansion of our nursery, ETE brought in some new workers to help. Fortunately, they are continuously busy and never stop working, live right here on the property, and there is over 40,000 of them!

ETE has brought in two beehives, having roughly 20,000 – 25,000 honeybees per each hive, to help in the native nursery.

The goal of bringing in honeybees is to help pollinate our native nursery, and to help demonstrate another way how ETE is leading the way of local sustainability and restoration through natural means.

Sweet Bees LLC is a local apiary (a place where bees are kept / a collection of beehives) that provided the honeybees and hives for us. In turn, we will provide honey for the apiary.

We are excited to see how our new employees enjoy their new home.  In the meantime, here are some fun facts about bees!

 

– A typical healthy and thriving hive can vary from 10,000 to 200,000 bees.

– There are three castes of honeybees within a colony:

  • The Queen – the longest bee in the hive, she is the mother of all the bees within the hive. Not necessarily the ‘ruler’, her sole function is to reproduce. She can lay up to 1,500 eggs a day! Life span about 3 – 5 years.
  • The Worker – These sterile females are the smallest bees of the castes, but do not lack in number; up to 100,000 worker bees can be in one hive. Their jobs consist of gathering nectar, and to feed the larvae.  Life span typically 6 weeks.
  • The Drone – A male honeybee that does not have a stinger and does not gather nectar or pollen. Their primary goal is to fertilize new queens, which results in death. Life span typically 8 weeks.

– It takes about 2 million flowers to gather enough nectar for 1 pound of honey. A honeybee worker can visit around 50 – 100 flowers during one collection flight (roughly 20 minutes), visiting up to 5,000 flowers in one day. That is a lot of trips, and a lot of bees! Considering a beehive can make upwards to 200 pounds of honey a year, a colony can visit up to 400 MILLION flowers a year.

– A honeybee can produce about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.

– Honeybees perform around 80 percent of the pollination of cultivated crops, and contributes to an estimated $15 billion to the U.S. economy each year.

 

Visit again soon to read updates about our growing nursery, and other exciting things that ETE is doing!