Bees and Beekeeping

Authoring Story Research and Design
21

Excellent timing! The country in the story is fictional, but the climate and fauna are heavily based on midwestern Canada, so I was looking up some of the species native there, to see if maybe Canadian beekeepers (and, by extension, beekeepers in Acarnia) would prefer a native species instead of the global honey bee. This is when I noticed the large number of bumblebees.

I had thought I was good to go. However…

…the main character is specifically trying to sell honey, and does not have a farm set up (at least for a few years). I was starting to get the feeling that bumblebees are excellent pollinators, but break even on honey production. Your comment has confirmed this, and it seems my main character will be focusing on honey bees, instead of bumblebees.

Also, it was rather interesting to learn how one of the most important bumblebee species in agriculture apparently lives underground.

Additionally, 75% of the notes I have so far seem to pertain to the honey bee, specifically, so I seem to have researched this with an outside-in approach, where I started noting behaviors before narrowing it down to the species behind them.

I’m still taking notes on bumblebees, though, because the main character will probably have opportunities to get excited about them at some point. I might also make them her favorite kind of bee, and something she will want to work towards, after getting successes with honey bees. (Similar to how I’m perfectly happy flying an F-16 in a flight-sim, even if the F-22, Extra 300, and Airbus 320 are all missing from the game).

Yeah, a lot of the sources I’m finding say that the properties of honey come from the extremely-low water content. Bees seem to pass honey mouth-to-mouth, taking out fractions of water each time, until (as you say) the water content is too low for the survival of microbes. From there, it’s packed away, and dried even further with wing beats (which is why you can only harvest honey at a specific time, as @Pebblerubble said).

…Huh. I’ve never been able to infodump about something that isn’t one of my special interests before. That’s an interesting feeling. I think I’m getting closer to being able to write this character effectively, lol.

Thanks again to everyone posting info! :grin:

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22

Does this mean if we irradiated honey it would be safe for newborns?

Food irradiation is something already fairly common, so I’m curious why this wouldn’t be used to eliminate this risk. Possibly not worth the cost? Seems hard to believe when it’d be a niche product sold for far more.

Why did that link break? I used the in-site tool… :confused:

ETA: Huh, irradiated honey is already a thing. Shouldn’t that fry the botulinum spores??

ETAx2: Copy & Paste seems unsuccessful. :pensive:

ETAx3: Hey! That worked! Thanks!

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23

Try this:

[Food irradiation](https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/food-irradiation-what-you-need-know#:~:text=Food%20irradiation%20%28the%20application%20of,food%20safer%20for%20the%20consumer.%29)

Your link ended with a ), which breaks the link parser. I replaced it with %29 which the parser ignores, and the web browser converts back into ) when you visit the link.

EDIT: My bad, the spaces needed to be replaced with %20, and the comma needed to be replaced with %2C as well. Updated the new code.

EDIT 2: Just to be absolutely certain, I’ve also updated the code to replace ( with %28.

Food irradiation

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24

I found this: The effect of gamma-irradiation on the antibacterial activity of honey - PubMed which says you can sterilise honey with radiation. They looked at its antibacterial properties before and after and they were the same. Mind you, they didn’t test botulinum spores, perhaps because it’s apparently such a pain to work with.

They don’t report the taste, so my guess is that honey gets funny tastes from the process. It’s not unheard of for meats to get a burnt taste after radiation treatment, so it’s possibly honey does something similar.

I think the answer is “further research is required” :slight_smile:

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25

Yup. We are definitely at the point in the year when the early summer colonies are outgrowing their hives and going “forget this cardboard box, we’re upgrading to a hole in the ground!” So they’re checking out all the little nooks and crannies near the ground. And they’re more agressive when they’re looking for a new home. And yeah, definitely attracted to dark colors.

I had a run-in with one just half an hour ago, she decided to investigate the inviting dark space between my black boot and black sock, and I didn’t notice so when I moved she got scared and stung me. I shook her out and shooed her away and she kept trying to come back and sting me again and would not give up so eventually I gave up and stomped her. They’re pretty slow about stinging: it takes them a couple seconds to get landed and lined up to do it, so you can brush them off if you notice, but it’s impossible to get any work done when they’re persistently coming after you.

But usually they’re pretty chill: we keep the hives right in the rows of tomatoes and as long as you’re quiet and don’t jostle the box too much you can usually work right past them.

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26

@DeusIrae Stingcomp? ^ :grin:

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Just when Mike was starting to emerge from the frog pond and spitting out the reed he’d been breathing through, thinking this thread would buzz past him without stinging…

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28

Maybe? Though it was less of an emotional, memorable encounter than an “ugh, I shouldn’t have gotten cocky and assumed that Insect Friend skill-check was a sure thing, huh?”

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29

This topic could make a good game, with a lot of room for educational content.

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30

I think @inventor200 is incorporating this stuff into their game? I think.

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31

I was seriously considering this, but I’m deciding to write this as an experimental story instead.

It would be an excellent interactive education game (which is a thing I absolutely love), but because of how the story itself will unfold, and how the focus would gradually change, it would actually make for really bad game design.

But there is absolutely a golden idea for an IF title that is exclusively focused on taking care of a beehive, and it should be a thing, too!

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32

Actually, let me take that back and be a bit more specific: The story I’m writing would be an excellent choice-based game, but a terrible parser game.

Having a tightly-designed beehive-management sim in a parser would be excellent too, though, just without the story beats I have in mind.

Either way, though, the story is focusing on how a specific kind of character perceives the events that unfold, so it’s still gonna be “static” fiction.

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