Last week I was hiking in James Kennedy State Forest in central New York when I came upon the scene shown in the opening photo. A Norway spruce tree had fallen across the trail–not unusual since the trail led through a stand of Norway spruce. What was unusual was the almost perfectly round cavity in the tree. Also unusual were the strangely patterned objects lying on the ground near the cut end of the log. Closer inspection revealed that the objects with the strange texture were fragments of honeycomb–the tree had harbored a honeybee colony! In the photo you can see several large chunks of honeycomb near the cut face of the tree. There are also a few smaller pieces resting on top of the log. The section of the tree that had been removed to clear the trail is in the upper left corner of the photo, tilted at an angle. There were no bees present.
In the photo below you see the cut face of the fallen tree and some chunks of honeycomb next to it. You’ll notice that the honeycomb fragments are curved just enough to fit inside the cavity.
Tree cavities are more common in hardwoods than in conifers, but the cavity in the fallen spruce tree seemed almost as if it had been designed to contain a beehive. The interior wall (shown in the next photo) was remarkably smooth. Honeybees are known to use their mandibles to remodel nest sites, and this is likely why the cavity in the fallen spruce was so perfectly formed.
The next photo shows the opening that the bees had used to come and go from the hive.
This had clearly been a thriving honeybee colony before the tree fell. A close-up of the honeycomb in the photo below shows the remains of some pupae and a few partly filled food storage chambers. Most of the honey, eggs, and larvae that were in the hive had been consumed by some lucky animal, probably a raccoon, skunk, or opossum, that found the tree after it had been opened up.
Thinking back, I realized that I had stepped over that fallen tree several times before the chainsaw work had been done and had never encountered bees. I wondered how the trail crew had managed to do the work without being chased away by angry honeybees. The nest might have been abandoned soon after the tree fell, since honeybees prefer nests that are well off the ground. Or maybe the chainsaw work had been done on one of those days in early April when the temperature barely rose above freezing and the bees were too cold to fly. In either case, by the time I found it last week they had abandoned their precious food stores, eggs, and larvae.
Without an unusual confluence of events I might never have known that beehive existed. But because the tree fell across the trail and had to be cleared, and because I came along to observe the remains, I had an extraordinary opportunity to get a look at the interior of a honeybee hive.