As winter closes in, honey bees clean house. This means an ignominious demise for the male honeybee, also known as the drone. Booted out in large numbers, a beekeeper will often walk by the apiary on a cool fall morning and see hundreds of dead drones in a pile in front of the hive.

It’s a nasty sight, sure to strike fear into the heart of the beekeeper. But it’s normal. Life goes on in the hive.

Outside, things make a dark pilgrimage to the golden morgue. They come from high and low, flying and crawling and rising from the ground. Not to pay respect.



They feed.



This continues our occasional series on the spookier residents of Satoyama Homestead.



One early visitor to the hive’s graveyard, during a cool spell in early May, was the American Carrion Beetle (Necrophila americana). They are a striking, helpful, if ghastly bug, and can be found anywhere that corpses are found, particularly in early summer. You’ll notice them by their bumbling pace and bright yellow spot. Feeding on fly larvae, they plant their own eggs on carcasses, displacing other scavengers. The carcass becomes a food source, as well as bait for other carrion-eaters, which the beetle and its larvae will attack. Interestingly, the carrion beetle cares for its young until they are prepared to defend themselves. These pictures were taken by Sarah when carrion beetles visited a rotting kohlrabi plant in the biointensive kitchen garden. That’s a fat, happy beetle right there.

One of the more obvious areas where visitors are feeding is this spiderweb of an unknown spider, strung up around the bottom of the hive. It’s a perfect place to catch falling corpses from the upper entrance of the hive. Or a lucky catch might be the worker bee that wasn’t wary. Whatever spider built this web has been successful.



Speaking of spiders, here’s a famous arachnid commonly referred to as a spider, but not properly. It is also known as Opiliones, daddy longlegs, or harvestmen. They are opportunistic scavengers. The cull means a full belly for the leggy fellows. Contrary to popular myths, harvestmen are not poisonous. They do have some defense mechanisms involving unpalatable scents, but do not carry venom. Their jaws are perfect for eating dead bees, though.



Note the singular, unsegmented body.

In an earlier post, we wrote about the yellow jacket and its consumption of rotting flesh. The hive cull is a great place for it to hang out in the late fall.

Again, the fall die-off is very normal for honey bees and is part of their winterization cleanup. The nest is brought down to a manageable size for the cold season. Less honey is consumed and the bees can be judicious about resources. Bees are nothing if not frugal.

Stay tuned for a post about winterizing the beehive, which includes some tips on how to keep out another predator of bees, the deer mouse.

Works Cited:

Why Your Drones Keep Getting the Boot, by Katie Lee, Bee Informed Partnership, November 8, 2013

Daddy Long Legs Myth, University of California Riverside Spider Research

American Carrion Beetle (Necrophila americana), Ninnescah Life, by Rachel Havlik, July 2014