Why do you need a bee suit and smoke when opening the hives for inspection or to collect honey? Bees feel threatened when their hive is opened. Smoke is used primarily for two reasons: it masks their alarm pheromone so they can\u2019t signal other bees; and it simulates a nearby fire, which encourages the bees to start eating honey in lieu of all else in case they need to depart in a hurry. Since the bees are so busy doing other things, smoke makes it easy to check the hives. The bee suit is an extra precaution, but really all that is needed is a veil.<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are excited to announce that we now have a honey bee hive that houses Italian honey bees! We have cultural diversity everywhere here at FOA even in our honey bees! Our hive of Italian honeybees (Apis mellifera) includes approximately 10,000 bees, including nurse bees, forager bees, guard bees, drone bees, and a newly mated queen bee. Our hive is located […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":8099,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/foastatic.local\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}