How our team is growing by 120,000 this summer
It has been an exciting summer at Bakken & Bæck. As a tech company, we spend a lot of time on our computers. We love to learn new skills and have a lot of fun doing so. We also pride ourselves in doing something good for the world. This year we became urban beekeepers, or as we like to call it at B&B; 🐝&🐝 keepers. We now have two beehives with 60,000 buzzing honey bees in each, on the rooftop outside our office windows. This is our bee story.
Last year’s Christmas gift from Johan and Tobias, our company’s founders, were two beehives and a beekeeping class. Everyone who wanted to learn about the secret world of bees could attend. It turned out we were a team of wanna-bees, secretly dreaming of a life as urban farmers. We were thrilled!
We all attended the introduction class in our office, organized by ByBi, the urban beekeeper association in Oslo. A bunch of us went back to school one afternoon every week. We learned about the honey bee colonies, the hive structure, how to prevent swarming and how to harvest the honey. By the end of May, we were ready to suit up and welcome our new friends.
We have to admit that in the beginning we were terrified. We knew we had to act calmly and quietly around the bees. If you’re afraid or aggressive, they will behave likewise. So we took a deep breath and put on an extra layer of gore-tex underneath the suit, just to be sure. We quickly learned that the bees weren’t scary at all. We experienced that honey bees are super friendly and easy to work with. They prefer sunny and warm weather. They are pollinators and only interested in collecting pollen and sipping on nectar from flowers, so they never bother us while we eat our lunch outside.
From a distance, honey bees (Apis Mellifera) can easily be confused with wasps (Vespidae), who are predators and can be both annoying and aggressive. Honey bees die after they sting someone, so they will avoid stinging at all costs unless their queen is threatened. Wasps, however, can sting multiple targets. They are carnivores and are always hungry for your ham and cheese sandwich. While the bees mind their own honey business.
The bee colony has one single fertile female: the Queen. The other bees are sterile female workers and there is a small group of fertile male drones. Our queen bees are marked with a blue dot, indicating she is 2015 vintage. Much bigger than the other bees, she’s easy to spot. The queen bee holds the colony together by sending out pheromones. The worker bees will follow and protect their queen from anything.
She is one spectacular female; she mates once during a flight with the drones and collects more than 5 million sperm, enough to lay eggs throughout her life. Every day during the summer, she lays 2,000 eggs. Laying one egg takes her only a few seconds. It’s very hard to see the eggs; they are about half the size of a grain of rice. After 21 days with plenty of nectar and honey, fertilized eggs will hatch into female worker bees, while unfertilized eggs will become male drones.
Increasing the colony from 20,000 bees to 60,000 bees keeps the worker bees super busy and thirsty. So we built a tiny pool for them with fresh water. They also use the water to keep the hive nice and clean.
As the colony expands, our most important job as beekeepers is to make sure that the bees have enough space. We have added two more boxes to each of the hive bodies to give them more room. If it gets too crowded in the hive, the bees will swarm: they will reproduce a new queen and half of the colony will fly away with her and settle down somewhere else. Usually in a tree, at the house next door — in short, we are trying to avoid that.
We are constantly looking out for signs of swarming. The most obvious sign is a queen cell: it’s shaped as a long open cup and is much bigger than the other cells, for a reason. When the colony wants a new queen, the worker bees identify potential larvae and condition her to become a queen. While worker bees are fed royal jelly only during the first few days of their larval stage, the queen are fed royal jelly for the entire life as a larvae. As a result, a worker bee will live 1–3 months, while the queen bee can live for 5 years. Yeah, that jelly is real magic.
We usually check the hives once a week around lunch time when the weather is good. It takes us 30–60 minutes depending on how focused we are. Not everyone can join each time, so we all possess different knowledge. Everyone knows a lot, but no one knows it all. It’s an exercise in sharing knowledge and learning from each other. We keep track on the development so that everyone is familiar with the condition in the hive.
The most fascinating thing we have learned is about communication. The worker bees communicate to each other where to find nectar, pollen and water by dancing in a precise pattern. The pattern holds accurate information about attractive locations. The bees have a natural GPS system that allows them to fly from our roof terrace up to two miles daily to forage for pollen and find their way back to the hive. There’s a lot of gardens in Oslo that aren’t visible to the eye but are visible to bees.
The foraging bees regurgitate the nectar and pass it to worker bees in the hive. Nectar is as much as 70 percent water, while honey is only about 20 percent water. These bees evaporate the extra water by swallowing and regurgitating the nectar over and over transforming it into honey for food to survive the winter. They store the wet honey in the beehive cells and keep drying the honey by flapping their wings: more than 200 times per second. When we tap some of the surplus of the honey in the fall, we feed them with sugar or syrup for the winter.
Environmental threats have reduced the numbers of honey bees worldwide. Bees and other pollinators transfer pollen and seeds from one flower to another, fertilizing the plant so it can grow and produce food. Luckily, it’s easy and fun to help. Planting bee-friendly flowers in our garden or any green space around, is a nice and easy way to keep your local pollinators happy. It’s important to avoid pesticides while plants are in bloom. Supporting local beekeepers in your area or becoming one yourself, is a great way to contribute.
Becoming urban beekeepers is more interesting than anyone expected. It’s fun and brings us together as a team outside our everyday activities. It’s nice to feel close to nature, especially for a bunch of techies. We will design our own label and give B&B honey to our friends and partners. We’re super proud of our honey bees. We would love to introduce people to the fascinating art of beekeeping. Want to join us visiting our hives? Swing by and we’ll suit you up.
A special thank you to our mentors Ragna Ribe Jørgensen from ByBi and Marie Skjelbred from PWC, for introducing us to the world of bees and providing us newbees with valuable wisdom, patience and assistance along our journey.🐝
