BEES AND POLLINATIONS

There’s good news and there’s bad news. Both of these hives were small and not too great going into the winter. The dark green hive had been covered by kudzu at the end of the summer – the gardeners who maintain the area around the garden didn’t realize I had two hives and let the kudzu win. I would take garden shears with me every time I went and cut back the area around the entrance but the kudzu definitely won.

I anticipated that these hives would not make it through the winter. I’ve already ordered packages of bees to replace them, assuming they would die.

Today on my visit to the garden, I found out that the dark green hive at the Community garden in Rabun County is bee-less. I’m sad, but not surprised that they are gone. At first without investigating, I put some food on the hive, assuming there might be bees, but when a hive is dead there is an eerie silent feel and I realized that there was no life there.

But then I went to the second hive and lo and behold there were bees flying in and out. They were really there and I was astounded. The hive felt alive when I opened it, even though I didn’t see bees anywhere except at the front entrance. What a relief!

I saw as many as six bees at the same time, but couldn’t snap a picture fast enough – are digital cameras irritating that way?

Anyway, I took the feeder off of the green hive and poured the contents into the feeder for the living, breathing hive – HOORAY! Hope for the future at the Community Garden.

Interestingly there were spiders nesting in the corners of the top cover of both hives. I like them better than roaches!

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You may have heard that I told a slightly rude story at the ScienceOnline2012 conference.  If you missed it, here you go!

Listen to the (Slightly NSFW) Story  via The Monti

Everything I said is true; there are even photos. (Think carefully before you click this link. You’ve been warned.)

There are still pubic lice out there, even in a world of Brazilian waxing.  Here’s a recent paper from the New England Journal of Medicine. Can you spot the crabs?

Ben Lillie’s story is right after mine, and is very different, and incredibly powerful. I got a little verklempt.  Ben now runs The StoryCollider, which is an amazing project to collect science stories.

I had been mentally drafting something about storytelling and science, but then Emily at This View of Life wrote something so spot on in summary of ScienceOnline I defer to her:

“I think that this tendency to focus on the sexy or the gross, the morbid or the taboo, is not just a symptom of our four days of very little sleep, more than a little alcohol in some cases and a deep sense of intellectual and cultural overstimulation.

No, this is an integral part of who we are as a group. We focus on duck penises because we almost have to.

We are all story tellers, whether scientists, journalists or educators.  We take data and create hypotheses. We take facts and construct narratives. We take a curriculum and transform it into inspiration.

What she said.  Go read the rest.

I’ll try to put together a more meaningful summary of the Science Online conference later this week, but for the moment I’m enjoying the accomplishment of briefly trending on Twitter.  Even if it is for telling a story about Seamonkeys in your Pants.

Filed under: Insects, WTF Tagged: crabs, lice, monti, podcast
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Elementary beekeeping. For reasons beyond me, this book is listed on Amazon at £470.36.

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The bees in the nuc at Blue Heron are ALIVE! I really can’t believe it. These are the vandalized bees that are now housed in a nuc and locked with a bicycle lock against further intrusion. I did not believe they would still be OK and we are not out of the winter death possibilities until March. At least for now they are flying.

I couldn’t believe it so I took four pictures to prove to myself that they actually are coming and going. You can watch a hive and tell if the bees entering and leaving it live there or are robbers from another hive. The residents enter confidently and in one fell swoop into the entry. Robber bees are unsure and tend to hover around the entrance before going into the hive.

These bees own this hive.

At my old house where Jeff and Valerie now live we have two hives we are concerned about – now three. Colony Square is doing great with bees all at the entrance. Lenox Pointe has bees but also evidence of nosema, possibly, in that there are streaks of bee poop on the hive box at the entry way.

The hive we call „Five” is still alive. It was tiny going into winter and we had talked about putting it into a nuc, but never did. It is housed in two medium boxes. Jeff hasn’t seen any bees flying in or out, so we opened the top to take a peek. The rapid feeder was still on the hive and there were bees walking up and down the sides of the cone. We both whooped out loud to see actual bees alive in the hive.

Our fourth hive over there is the swarm we caught in June. Although small, it too is alive and had bees in the feeder cone of the rapid feeder.

Don’t be disturbed by the mold in the rapid feeder or the „weeds.” The weeds are actually sprigs of thyme and we’ll clean out the mold on our next opportunity to open the hive.

Today it was still quite cold and we didn’t want to remove the rapid feeder to clean it because it covers the hole in the inner cover and the bees are likely to have propolized any air space to maintain warmth. I’ll take warmth over cleanliness if they can make it through the winter.

Jeff and I are following Jennifer Berry and Keith Delaplane’s system for powdered sugar treatment for varroa mites.  We are dusting the bees with the Dustructor – which means dusting without opening the hive – four times this month (three days apart) and then will repeat this in March.

Today was my third treatment and I dusted the bees at my house and at the Stonehurst Place Inn.  Jeff will do the bees at my old house tomorrow.  It’s out of schedule but I dusted the bees at Blue Heron when I stopped there – they are actually part of Jeff’s schedule, due to be dusted tomorrow.

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Today I removed all the frames in each box of the dead hive in my yard. As I thought the hive died out from being queenless and through beekeeper error (I didn’t realize they were queenless and didn’t combine them with another hive, for example).

There were scattered dead bees throughout the hive. What looked like perhaps the last part of the living bees had died together (about eight of them) in box two on the tops of the frames. I looked through the bodies on the slatted rack and the screened bottom board. I saw no deformed wings, no varroa mites, no dead queen – just worker bees. All told there were about 30 or so dead bees in the hive.

In the picture below you can see numerous small hive beetles dead with the bees.

Because I had fed them bee tea, there was a lot of stored nectar. Here’s one frame with every cell filled with nectar.  There was only one frame of capped honey.  Bees that are queenless can die out with honey in the hive because they simply come to the end of their life span and with no queen, there are not younger bees to replace them.

On the frame below, you can see some evidence of their attempts to make a queen. There was absolutely no capped brood or any brood of any kind.

This is clearly a hive that died out from lack of a queen. I should have paid better attention to it going into winter. It’s also possible that their queen died fairly early in the winter and they didn’t have resources to replace her.

I’m sad that they are gone, but satisfied that I know the cause and that gives me some peace.

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–Richard

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In Atlanta we had a sudden drop in temperature from the highs 60s to the 20s where the temperature has remained for several days.  When it’s cold like this, we only have highs in the 30s at best.  When this goes on for several days, the bees are in real danger.

The warmish weather fools the bees into acting like it is spring and they go out, forge for pollen, raise brood, etc.  Then suddenly we have this kind of cold snap.  

The whole hive can die, if the cluster isn’t located where there is stored honey.

So I am crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

I have one dead hive in my back yard.  I looked through it the other day when I did my first powdered sugar shake.  There is honey in the hive and dead bees scattered through the frames.  I didn’t take the bottom box off (too big a hurry to get back to the office), but I’ll let you know what I find when I do.

My current theory is that the hive went queenless before winter and I didn’t recognize that this had happened so I could combine it with another hive.  I may find something else when I look further and then we’ll know more, but for now, I’d speculate that the hive died naturally because there was no queen.

In the photo above you can see the few dead bee bodies on top of the frames.  I’ll look at these for signs of varroa or deformed wing when I get back into the hive.

For now, I put it back together until I have time in the next few days really to study it.

There was a rapid feeder on top of the hive still half filled with bee tea with a number of dead ants floating in the tea.  I strained it into a jar and may put that on another hive if I don’t find evidence of foul brood when I study the cells in the dead hive.

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How about this for some serious beekeeping: http://fatihmazrek.blogspot.com/

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–Richard

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