Mr. Cutts is an apiarist who works for the state of Florida. He answered all my questions about bees, and it was one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had! Without further ado, here is the amazing interview with Mr. Cutts, which speaks for itself. Special thanks to Ned Davis, of the band PopCanon, for setting up this interview.

Janine: First of all, I want you to tell us what an apiarist is and what one does.
Mr. Cutts: Well, an apiarist works with bees. That's what he is and what he does.
Janine: Does that mean you take care of the bees in the hive? What do you do on a daily basis?
Mr. Cutts: Well, as far as what I do, I'm in charge of Apiary inspection for the state of Florida, for the Florida department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Mostly, I sit in an office or I go out to various beekeepers' meetings or schools and talk about bees. My inspection force that is in the field are responsible for inspecting bees and making sure they're free of diseases and pests. They are some pests we can't get free of, but at least they're under control. And certifying them for movement within the state and without the state. About half the bees in Florida are shipped out of the state every year and go north to various states for pollination and honey production and so we have to check them and be sure they're in shape to be shipped out of state.
Janine: And would you tell us why bees are important to the ecosystem and why people would want to use bees?
Mr. Cutts: Well, bees are necessary for the pollination of a lot of fruits and vegetables that make up our diet. We could live without honeybees off of corn, wheat, and rice, but we wouldn't have the fruits and vegetables that make up a balanced diet. About a third of the food that we eat is the result of insect pollination, and probably somewhere around 95% of that pollination is done by honeybees. Essentially, a third of our food is a result of honeybee pollination.
Janine: That's amazing. Now, what about the honey making process? How do the bees make honey?
Mr. Cutts: They gather nectar from the flowers and when they gather it it is somewhere around 85 - 90% moisture very often. They carry it back to the colony in a special honey sac. In the colony, it is deposited into a cell that's not full - it may have some other honey in it that they're ripening. They fan their wings over it and evaporate the moisture until it's down below 18 1/2%, sometimes as low as 15 or less. Most honey runs somewhere in the 16-17% moisture range. If they leave it above 18 1/2% it will ferment. So they reduce it down until it gets below 18 1/2% and we call that ripened honey. While it is still nectar and being ripened it's referred to as green honey.
Janine: Now, what about the different types of bees? What are some of the different kinds of bees? Do you just work with a certain type of bee?
Mr. Cutts: Well, as an apiarist, we work with honeybees. There are other types of bees besides honeybees. There are bumblebees, solitary bees, in Mexico and so on there are stingless bees. And even within the honeybees there a number of different types. The honeybee that we use in the U.S. is called Afis Melifera. There's some other in other parts of the world. Afis Dorsada is in Nepal. If you see the honey honey in Nepal, it's on one of the National Geographic programs, where the man climbs down a cliff and harvests his honey from a nest up under the edge of the cliff, that is Afis Dorsada, which is a different specie of bee from what we use here. And there are five or six different species, depending on who you're talking to, some think that two of them are the same species. Generally, it's considered to be six different species of honeybees that are known around the world. And by far, Afis Melifera that we use here is the dominant one for honey production.
Janine: Why do bees buzz?
Mr. Cutts: I'm not really sure. But they do buzz for a number of reasons that we do know about. They will buzz around your head. They make, somehow in their flying, they will make a buzzing sound. Now, not always when they fly do they make that buzzing sound. But they will make it and fly around your head in an effort to get you to move away from their nest. In that particular case, it is a defense mechanism that they use rather than stinging. They will buzz you very often before they will sting, because when they sting they lose their life. Other bees buzz for other reasons. Bumblebees buzz as they pollinate flowers and it's referred to as buzz pollinating. And they actually vibrate the flower in the process. Although honeybees buzz a lot, they don't buzz pollinate. While they're on the flower, they're fairly calm and collected, where bumblebees get apparently more excited or something in how they have that buzzing technique of pollinating plants.
Janine: Now, I assume that you have been stung by bees many times.
Mr. Cutts: Probably the worst day that I ever had I suspect I got over a thousand stings. I have worked bees all day in a bathing suit and not been stung at all. I put on a bee beard regularly at the state fair and I have put a bee beard on and not gotten stung at all. I usually do get stung, because I get careless and mash one, and when you mash her she's going to sting you. But if I'm careful, I generally can put on a beard without getting stung.
Janine: How does that work, the bee beard?
Mr. Cutts: I take the queen out of the hive, put her in a small cage, and fasten her up under my collar, up under my chin, on my collar, and then shake the bees out of the hive into a pasteboard box, sit back in a chair and pull them up on my chest, let them form a beard around my chin. The day that I got stung so bad, was back when I was still a beekeeper, before I went to work with the state. It had been raining for three days, and we had gone out to shake bees out of the hive to ship to Canada, which was the main part of my business then. The weatherman had said it was going to clear up but it didn't. It just stayed a drizzly rain all day. So we decided we were going to try to go out and shake bees in the rain, and we did not have gloves and beesuits and so on at that time. We were dressed in short sleeved shirts with no gloves and when you go out and start taking the tops off of their hives on a rainy day they get upset. We were determined to do it anyhow and we were punished for the effort. And it did give me a fever. But the normal healthy adult can stand around ten stings per pound of body weight before their life would be in danger.
Janine: What causes a bee to sting?
Mr. Cutts: They sting in defense of their nest or in defense of their life. A honeybee - in fact, none of the stinging insects - will sting just from being aggressive. We consider them aggressive, but in essence they are defensive. The honeybee in particular has a barbed sting and her sting stays in your flesh and pulls out of her, pulls part of her guts out and she dies. She seems to be aware of that and she's not out looking for a place to commit suicide. She's only going to sting if she thinks her nest is in jeapordy or if her life is in jeapordy.
Janine: Can you tell me a little bit about the queen bee, the drones, and the workers?
Mr. Cutts: The queen bee is the mother of all the bees in the hive but she is not a queen in the sense that she rules the hive. She is actually ruled by the worker bees. She is essentially an egg-laying machine. She lays eggs depending on how much she is fed. If they have a real good honey flow, lot of food coming in, they feed the queen heavy and she lays eggs. She can lay over twice her weight in eggs in one day. That's over 2,000 eggs a day. The drone is the male bee, and he does no work in the hive at all. He is so lazy he can stand knee-deep in honey and starve to death if there's not a female there to put it in his mouth. Actually I don't think he eats honey, I think they feed him something else, but the females feed the drones. When the weather turns cool in the fall, plants quit blooming, and there's nothing coming in, they quit feeding the drones, kick them out, and let them starve to death. It's nice to be a drone in the beehive when times are good, you can live the life of riley, but when food gets a little scarce and times are not so good it's not too good to be a male around the beehive. The worker bees are females, the same as queen, but they're not as fully developed as the queen. Any egg that makes a worker bee is capable of making a queen bee. If it's fed royal jelly during its larval stage it will make a queen bee. If it's fed honey and pollen it will make a worker bee.
Janine: What made you want to devote your life to bees?
Mr. Cutts: Heredity. I'm a third-generation beekeeper. My grandfather started keeping bees in 1889. He got started because he was a bill collector for Singer sewing machine company. He went to collect for a sewing machine that a man only owed a few more payments on but times were hard and he couldn't pay for it. He had eight hives of bees, and he made a deal with my grandfather to sell him those eight hives of bees for what he owed on that sewing machine and my grandfather took the hives of bees home, and from that, he eventually wound up in bees full time, built them up into a commercial operation. And my father took that over, and I took that over. But we did divert the business from honey production into queen and package production so that we were shipping queens and package bees and our market was primarily Canada. In 1984, the trachial mite was found in Florida and we were quarantined and overnight put out of business. I wound up as a bee inspector.
Janine: Now, how can people who are interested in bees and apiarists learn more about this subject?
Mr. Cutts: There are a number of books that are available; most every library has a number of books on beekeeping. Two of the major ones that are used by people who are wanting to keep bees, not just learn about them as a learning experience but actually keep them, the two sort of bibles of beekeeping are: ABC and Bee Culture, published by Route Company, which is an old bee supply company, and The Hive and The Honeybee, published by Daden, which is even an older bee supply company. Both of these companies are well over a hundred years old.
Janine: I understand that you were a consultant for the movie Ulee's Gold. Did you think it was an accurate portrayal of beekeeping?
Mr. Cutts: It was extremely accurate except for a few little things that nobody else would know, as far as beekeeping is concerned - Did you see the movie?
Janine: Yes, I certainly did.
Mr. Cutts: Alright. Well, when Peter Fonda went in and laid down on the floor in the dining room, under the dining room table, every beekeeper that I've ever heard that has seen the movie says 'Boy, whoever wrote that knew beekeeping. Been there, done that.' But when he put the drum card up under the drum and pulled it over, that drum wasn't full. They were afraid of giving him a hernia, putting a full drum of honey there to pull over. But you don't just put a drum card under a drum of honey and pull it over,you have to get up on it and rear back with all your weight to pull it over and every beekeeper who's ever handled a drum of honey knew that drum was empty. The general public wouldn't know. But as far as the beekeeping part of it, the bee scenes and so on, that was accurate. Actually I had very little to do with the movie. I had one part, the swarm - when they went into the yard, and the bear had torn up the bees and the swarm was on the limb - I put the swarm on the limb. They thought it was a great thing and made a big to-do over it, and it wasn't until I saw the movie that I realized how important that swarm was to the movie. It was sort of the heart of the story of the movie of a distrupted home and Ulee had to put it back together.
Janine: I thought it was a great movie. When you see beekeepers smoking the bees, why do they do that?
Mr. Cutts: Well, if you read the books, they will tell you that the bees think the hive's on fire so they run and gorge themselves with honey, and being real full of honey they're unable to sting. And that is true to some extent. However, if you smoke a hive, you will notice that very few of the bees run and fill up with honey. Most of them just become very still. One of the ways bees communicate is by pheromones. They have an alarm pheromone that smells somewhat like the big old squares of banana candy. If they become alarmed, they put out this alarm pheromone, and that is a chemical language that tells the other bees to sting this intruder. If you smoke them, they can't smell these pheromones, they can't communicate. They become confused and become docile because they don't know how to act otherwise.
Janine: I was wondering if you knew anything about the hexagonal structure of the honeycomb.
Mr. Cutts: All I know is it is a hexagon, and bees build it naturally. Engineers tell us that is the strongest possible construction they could use, and it also is the most effecient use of the space available.
Janine: It's amazing that they know how to do all these things.
Mr. Cutts: It's amazing that they can build it the way they do it, just straight from scratch. We put a sheet of what we call foundation in the hive as a rule to make them build that comb exactly straight, but they build it pretty straight without our help. One interesting fact that I like to tell schoolchildren when I'm talking about bees is that bees build their home out of beeswax and beeswax is bee fat. When the bees get fat, the bee fat is extruded out of the plates on their body, they scrape it off and build their homes out of it. It would be marvelous if we could just scrape our fat off and build our homes out of it, but we can't do that.
Janine: Wouldn't that be great! One last question: I have heard that apparently bees are not supposed to be able to fly because of the way they are contstructed.
Mr. Cutts: I'm told that, too. Aeronautical engineers have said that it's impossible for the honeybee to fly. I think maybe now they don't claim that any more, but 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, man couldn't figure out how the bee could fly because he just didn't have enough wing surface for the body weight that they have. But I think that they now know by the way that they move their wings that they can fly. If it was just the wing surface of the wing, a bee can't just fly through the air. They have to pump those wings to get the lift to fly. Mankind knows, or engineers and so on, know how they do it, but years ago they didn't.
Janine: Well, thank you very much for your time. I've learned a lot from our talk and I appreciate it.
Mr. Cutts: You're very welcome.