BEES AND POLLINATIONS

Today’s entry is a „catch-up” post. With my busy schedule this week, I neglected to report on Sunday’s inspections of my two top bar hives. I will also report on today’s inspections of the „walk-way nuc” I created a few weeks ago, and my examination of Bee Glad…

Sunday, my grand-daughter Taylor and I inspected the two top bar hives. From all appearances these two hives are doing so much better than any of the langstroths I maintain. (Whether this has anything to do with being top bar hives remains to be seen.)

Both top bars are strong with great, solid brood patterns. The bees have brought in a good deal of nectar and pollen. The queens look healthy. There were no signs of swarm or superseder cells as well. I am very pleased with their progress in this cool, rainy June we’ve had here in Winona.

Today I inspected two hives. First I opened up Bee Glad…, a langstorth hive; the only one to survive the winter.

Bee Glad… seems moderately strong, though its brood pattern is too spotty for my liking. I also discovered 10 or so swarm cells not yet capped but containing brood. This was unexpected.( I probably placed too much faith in my first attempts at checker boarding.) I pulled some capped drone comb for mite prevention, as well as two frames of capped honey which I placed in the nuc. I will watch Bee Glad… over the next week.

The walk-away nuc I created a few weeks ago is doing fine. I saw the new queen though no sign of her laying any eggs. I placed two frames of capped honey on either side of the nucs broodnest. I will watch this hive closely as well.

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–Richard

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Oh those silly bees!  As much as you think you’ve figured them out, they will pull a fast one and surprise you.  Case in point, I put honey supers on two of the hives a good while back.  One hive went right to work drawing comb on the frames, and the other took its sweet time.  I sort of figured that the slow response may have been because of swarm season and a changing of monarchs, and I figured they would get around to it.  And they did.  Just not in the way I thought they would.

While checking the hives on Saturday, I did as I always do and looked for brood.  And while I found quite a bit of brood, I noticed something else too.  In the upper deep chamber, I found that the ladies were packing the nest with honey.  I found four frames in one hive jammed packed with honey, and another frame was mixed with brood and honey.  Deciding that I needed to lighten the load and avoid a honey-bound hive, I pulled the frames that held nothing but honey and decided to extract it.  While I got a brand new extractor for Christmas, I decided that it wouldn’t be worth it for a few frames, so I decided to do the „crush and strain” method. After scraping all of the honey and wax off the frames into a strainer, gravity made all the golden honey drip into the five-gallon bucket below.

After all the honey dripped out of the wax, I strained it through mesh and then bottled it.  The four frames yielded almost two gallons, and between all my neigbors and family, it went rather fast.  I still have quite a bit left over and I have even more honey waiting in the hives.  And with the honey that I’ll be getting from the supers on the two hives, that means I’ll have to make the trip to Walmart to buy even more jars.  And I wondered whether I would be getting much honey this year!

As you can see, the honey is a beautiful dark amber color.  It has a heavier taste compared to last year’s harvest, but a delicious taste.  I’m wondering if it came from crimson clover. 

But the ultimate compliment came from my neighbor.  She told me that her grandsons have already dived into the honey and loved it with hot, fresh biscuits and butter.  And while that truly made my day, I can’t take the credit.  The bees did all the hard work.  I just provide the house they live in.

Bon appetit!       

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The owner of Stonehurst who usually lives in Germany came home for a couple of weeks. I wanted to harvest some of their honey so she could get a taste of it. We opened the hives on Sunday.

I always love to see the bees clustering around a broken pool of honey gathering it up. We took four frames of honey from their hives – only from the top box of hive 1 – to harvest.

Crushed it looked really pretty but in the jars was more medium than the light look you see here.

Because the frames were really pretty I cut five squares of cut comb honey and put it in my freezer. My agreement with them is that this year we split the honey. That is my recompense for being their beekeeper.

After I crushed the honey comb, a bee in the house tried to help me with clean up!

Here are my five cut comb squares. Really this probably isn’t pretty enough for a honey contest because the cappings are too „wet” but maybe I’ll enter them or look for better squares in my next harvest hive visit.  Either way they will be delicious to eat on hot biscuits.

I bottled the rest of their honey. From eight frames we got the five cut comb squares, four classic queenline bottles, two refilled Kroger plastic 40 oz containers (I was horrified because I think honey belongs in new glass containers, but Barb has ordered some pretty jars for Stonehurst and this will do in the interim) and
1.5 hex jars.

I bottled the four queenlines as if for a honey show. Stonehurst as an inn is a member of MABA and therefore could enter the honey contest but I can only enter once, so it seems to me, since I like on my own to enter honey contests, that Stonehurst should enter on their own and Caroline, the innkeeper, should make the entry, not me on their behalf.

Because of the four honey contest bottles, I am coming out on the short end of the stick in this division of the honey, since they are getting about nine pounds of honey to my 4.5.

I’ll make it up in the next harvest, however.

It was a pretty start to their harvest. There are still four eight frame boxes to harvest on the hives at Stonehurst.

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 Should you do a MS or a PhD? Does it matter?
And why is the Master’s becoming more rare as an option?

Over the years I’ve been in Academia, I have seen the number of students completing Master’s degrees dwindle steadily. I think this is a bad thing from the viewpoint of student development–but it is understandable as something driven by market forces and the structure of tenure.

A Master’s degree is intended to do two things: to prepare you to be a professional in a disciplinary field, and to learn how the tools of that field are used to solve problems.   Master’s come in lots of different sizes and flavors; they may or may not complete a research thesis, and sometimes complete a practicum.   A Master’s does not always have to lead to a PhD; in the past it was viewed as a terminal degree in its own right.

A PhD is a long research apprenticeship in which a student is expected to create new knowledge, including creating new tools and techniques and broadening the knowledge base of a field.  PhD students are expected to perform original research with minimal supervision.  It is not meant to be vocational or career-related training, as I have addressed elsewhere.

The problem is…over time a lot of things have changed from that basic system.
Somehow, a PhD and an academic professorial job became the only acceptable choice.   For both MS or PhD graduates, taking a job in “the real world” is seen as “selling out” or “settling.”  Even though the vast majority of people with graduate degrees work outside of Academia, there is an odd bit of denial on the part of faculty about that fact.

Master’s degrees are described in a lot of really revealing ways by academics:  as a “consolation prize” for students who can’t finish their PhD program. Students who just want a Master’s are told “You are smart enough for a PhD”, or that “you can’t get a job with just a Master’s.”  You see the implication here?

Less than.

Our current model of PhD student training produces Doctorates that are trained for jobs that….don’t really exist anymore.  Very few PhDs are going to be a professor at a Tier I research institution (and, fewer and fewer PhDs *want* to do that as a career!).   So, if what is needed by employers are people that understand research, but are primarily problem-solvers, that’s a pretty good description of a Master’s.

The Professional Masters of Science is a new program that is career-oriented, and breaks away from the traditional PhD/Thesis model of academia.  It combines business classes and leadership training with advanced coursework in a particular science or math discipline and project-based research.  For someone that wants to work in industry or government, it’s a great choice. A Master’s should not be looked down upon, but valued as a different path with value of its own.

Why is there such a push to skip the Master’s and go direct to a PhD? 

Simple return on investment.  Faculty get more return for their time and money on a PhD Student.  Master’s students do not produce as many papers as PhD students (or PostDocs). Their work on practicums won’t count as evidence of productivity for tenure and promotion.  Because Master’s projects typically run 2 years, they aren’t as fundable by national agencies (NSF, NIH) as a PhD.

You can pay a Master’s student’s tuition and living costs with a Teaching Assistantship, but that still leaves the issue of funding their research.  That can be a considerable expense, especially for the hard sciences.   Masters just don’t fit into the Grant/Publishing cycle that we now use to evaluate and run academia.

Right now, most students entering science graduate schools are routed directly into PhD programs.  Think about that for a moment.  At the age of 21—often with no employment experience outside academia—students will chose the research topic that will set the primary focus of their future research career.

Your PhD dissertation is your first major branding statement as a new professional:  “Bug Girl works on female-female competition in pheromone systems.”   That’s been true for me for over 20 years, and directly relates to what I did my dissertation on.  You had better make a good topic choice, because that dissertation is the base upon which you launch your career.

From a student-centered perspective, the Masters First –> PhD Second Path makes WAY more sense than direct to PhD from a Bachelors.  A Master’s lets a student complete a smaller thesis project, and learn HOW research is done, from planning to communication.  They know more about the field, the top players, and the hot topics than they did as an undergraduate.  When it’s time to make that choice of dissertation advisor and topic, it will be a more informed choice.

A Master’s can be a really important first step towards stretching a student’s research legs, if you will.  We are asking them in a PhD program to run a science marathon. Why would we not want them to go into training ahead of that event?

So–how do we balance what is good for the student, and what is good for the faculty mentor?  I don’t have an answer, unfortunately, and as long as funding for universities is in flux, I expect faculty will continue to route students toward PhDs.

For some undergraduates who were involved in undergraduate research, this isn’t a big deal.  I work with students that are smarter than me all the time.  Those kids will go straight to a PhD and be fine.  But not all students–for many different reasons–have the experience or confidence to jump straight into a PhD program.  There are many worthy students that need a little extra time and patience to grow as scientists.

My own Master’s degree was one giant string of research disasters, and yet somehow I still produced a useful bit of science that helped reduce the number of pesticide sprays on a fruit crop. I also had quite a few existential research crises that led me to try to drop out of graduate school at least 4 times, and each time my thesis advisor patiently talked me down.  I would never have made it as a straight-to-PhD student.

When I did get to the PhD program, I had grown enough confidence to take the project I was initially offered in a whole new direction after my first year’s preliminary data.  I had the courage to push back against my advisor and committee–and I’m really glad I did, because I found some cool stuff that was MINE in a way that would never have happened if I hadn’t gained confidence in myself by doing a Master’s first.

Academia is a world where your research is your identity (and your value).  It’s important to make a good choice, and an informed choice. You can do a better job of that if you’ve completed a Masters, IMHO.

And let’s stop talking about a Master’s degree as a sign of failure, and value it as a career-building step.  Not everyone has to follow the same path for the path to be a good one.

Bug Girl’s Graduate School Series:

• How are Undergraduate and Graduate School Different
• Should you do a PhD?
• What to look for in a mentor and a graduate department

External Resources:

• Questions to ask when thinking about a PhD
• 20 Questions to ask a graduate program you’re considering
• The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research
• No, You’re Not an Imposter

Filed under: Science Tagged: careers, graduate school, Masters degree, phd, professional science masters, psm
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On Saturday, I paid a visit to a friend’s bee hives.  Keith Mabe started beekeeping this year with his own two colonies.  After taking the basic beekeeper course that was offered through the Rockingham County Beekeeper’s Association, he bought his hive set ups and his bee packages and got started right away.  Here you see Keith as he stands next to one of his hives. This one is booming by the way.

Keith was a little concerned because one of his two hives seemed to be running a little slow.  He told me that he didn’t see a lot of eggs and spotty capped brood, and thought something may be wrong.  So he asked me if I would come out and take a look and give him my opinion.  Always glad to see another beekeeper’s hives, I accepted and met him on Saturday morning.  The hive he was concerned about is on the left.

Based on what he told me, I though he may have a failing queen.  But once we got into the hive, I found a lot of eggs in a tight pattern.  And we also found the queen as she made her way across the frame with all the eggs.  There was also larvae present that was hidden under bees on the frames.  I told Keith that it appears that all is okay with this hive, and that some colonies are faster in building up than others.  My advice was to close the hive up and not disturb them for a week, and to continue to feed them sugar syrup so they can finish drawing the frames.  Even without smoke, the colony was gentle and easy to work with.  

The hive on the right is doing great!  Keith told me that this colony took off as soon as he hived them, and that’s apparent by the numbers of bees and the eggs and honey all throughout the hive.  They had so much honey there that I advised Keith to put a shallow super on top and let them fill it with honey, then he could have some for himself and leave some for the bees.  This colony was a tad testy at times, but they had a lot of honey to protect and we didn’t smoke them either.  Overall I say that this is a very prolific colony that should do well through the rest of the year and hopefully overwinter well.

Keith has a great location for his bees.  They are near several area gardens and he provides water for them near the hives.  They are in a rural area of the county, not far from the county seat, and the area isn’t accessible unless you drive through a parked gate.  So they should be protected from vandals or theft.

My only advice was to keep an eye on them to make sure that he sees eggs and brood, and that we would check them again in a few weeks.  I also advised him to switch to a non-toxic weed killer to spray around and under his hives, and to not use something like Round-Up which the bees can get into take back to the hives.  I use a gallon of vinegar to one full container of table salt.  Once I mix it in a sprayer, I use it liberally around and under my hives.  While you have to apply it more often, it doesn’t carry the risks of poisonous chemicals.  You can also use rock salt under your hives to kill weeds and grass.

I think Keith is going to make an excellent beekeeper.  He’s very excited about his bee colonies and doing all he can to help them.  Plus he wants to learn all he can from more experienced beekeepers.  And as we all know, that’s what it takes to survive the ups and downs of helping the bees.

Happy summer!

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As I returned home today, I stopped at the Blue Heron to see if the new queen had been released. Remember, she had not quite been released on Tuesday. The hive seemed calm and happy. I left my smoker in the car, so it was nice to discover that the bees were calm.

In the second box, the queen had been released and the queen cage was empty. I guess it just took them longer because there was more fondant to eat through.

I didn’t check to see if she were laying. I would have been so disappointed if she were not, so it was simply enough that she had been released.

The hive started with the nuc was very quiet – no bees on the landing. I decided even though they were feisty bees and I was without my smoker, I’d still give them a look. As you can see in the photo above, it’s a hive in only one deep box.

I am not a foundation user, and this is the first time I’ve ever looked at black plastic foundation. Wow, can you see eggs and brood well. You can have the same experience looking at the photo below. There is lots of brood and c-shaped larvae on this, the only frame I looked at.

Don’t worry, I’m still a foundation-less beekeeper, but I’m glad I’ve had the experience now of looking at eggs and larve on black plastic – no wonder people like it.  I still think the bees like having the opportunity to make their own foundation and I’m sticking to that!

I am relieved – this hive may turn out to be a good one after all.

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We went down to the farm about three weeks ago to find all the bees starving. The area hasn’t had rain in two months – actually since the tornado in late April. Nothing is growing in the woods, in the fields, nothing. So the bees were in terrible shape.

We put food on all the hives except one – the only one with substantial honey in several supers. None of us live down there and I came back worrying about the bees. After they ran through the feed, they would be in the same shape as before – no resources, no stores. Greg has no irrigation system on his farm so he can’t plant without rain. The only dependable bee crop in the county appears to be cotton and it doesn’t bloom until August.

When we came back to Atlanta I talked to the guys and we decided to bring most of the hives back to Atlanta. At least here we can keep an eye on them and keep them thriving instead of living on a desert as they were in Taylor county.

Jeff and I drove down and back last Saturday. We loaded up hives and equipment into two cars and drove back to Atlanta. It would have been fine, but Interstate 75 is under construction and a trip back that should have happened in two hours took four and a half! We were ready to scream.

We installed three of the hives in the backyard of my new house where I will move on July 15. I’m there almost every day and can keep an eye on the bees.

The rest of the farm hives are in the backyard of my soon-to-be old house where Jeff and Valerie will be living. So there are five farm hives in Atlanta – two at my old house and three at my new house. We had done some combining of weak hives with strong ones, so we left two hives at the farm….the one that had been doing well and another that seemed in OK shape. Greg goes down every other weekend and he can mind them.

So today I opened all five hives to see how they were doing. All of them have been flying well and seem happy.

The first hive in my old-house yard had a huge tree branch fall on it in a storm on Friday night. I was worried that all would be a mess in the hive. However, they were doing fine.

The queen had been laying and the bees were calm. I only looked at a couple of frames, reasoning that these hives have been through a lot.  I just wanted evidence in each hive that the queen was alive and laying.

The other hive at my old-house yard is the swarm hive we captured in Dallas, GA. The brood pattern in it was great and I saw eggs on both frames I looked at.

At my new house, the bees were quite happy. I saw eggs in every hive, which relieved my worries that the queens may not have traveled safely….or been happy with the journey (I certainly wasn’t). You know how when there are bees in the car, they usually go to the back window? Well, sitting so still on I-75 that the speedometer didn’t register movement for several hours resulted in loose bees right by my driver’s side window. Not the most pleasant trip for me.

You can see tiny c-shaped larvae in these cells.

You can see eggs in these.

I had to increase the contrast (our bees don’t begin to be this dark) so you could see the eggs in this hive.

And in the last hive, there were brood, larvae and eggs all on this one frame.

I also met my next door neighbor who looked over the wall at me and my veil and smoker. He seemed nonplused by the fact that a beekeeper had moved in next door and asked if he would get to taste the honey!

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Mark Moffet is up for a Labby award for this video.  Go vote!

The weaver ants of Angkor Wat Cambodia are a local delicacy, and Mark attempts to get some tourists to sample them.  Warning: contains puns.

Filed under: Entomology, Food, Insects Tagged: cambodia, entomophagy, weaver ants
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