BEES AND POLLINATIONS

Today I went through my hives in my backyard.  My friend Julie’s husband, Seth, who used to keep bees in 1989 and wants to get back to it, came over and went through the hives with me.

We’ve had rain and cooler weather over the last ten days or so.  And the nectar flow has about stopped.  So I didn’t expect much.

We found roly-polys under one hive!  There were also earwigs, I saw one roach, and I smashed three large wax moth worms.

It’s the scheduled week for powdered sugar every four days, so I started today.  The bees were not pleased with my effort to keep them healthy!

I only added a new box to one hive (below).  I did shift around some of the top boxes to encourage the bees to build a little more.  I also, to account for drift, add some identifying markings to all the hives.

Below is another hive that I shifted the box positions.

I don’t have photos of the bad part of the day.  We went up to the nuc housing the Little Kitten swarm.  I know not to open or go through it for three weeks after installing the new queen (the Zia queen) but I hadn’t pulled the queen cage and wanted to get it out.

We opened the top of the nuc.  The bees are quiet and calm – there are lots of them thanks to the nuc I created a week ago.  There between the frames was the queen cage, with the queen still inside.  The bees weren’t attacking the cage or biting it.  The queen was not released but was alive and seemed vigorous.

That’s when I did the stupid thing.  I thought, „At this point I should direct release her.”  So I opened the cage and she walked down into the rest of the bees.

THEN I thought, „Wonder why they hadn’t released her…..could there already be a queen in this hive?”

Too late to retrieve her majesty.  I guess I just cross my fingers that they accept her and life is good rather than my other thought which is that there is a competing queen who will kill Zia on sight.

And how will I know later what queen is in the hive, if there is another queen already present?  I can’t say, „Will the real Zia step up.”  I have no idea what she looks like compared to any other.  I guess I can add this to the growing long list of my bee mistakes………….

(więcej…)

(więcej…)

At Sebastian’s and Christina’s house, the bees were doing well.  Interestingly the blue hive which is a 10 frame set up is growing faster than the yellow hive which is an 8 frame set up.

In the blue hive there were only six undrawn frames total in all the boxes.  I might not be back for about 10 days, so I put a new box on that hive.  However, now I am out of 10 frame medium boxes, so I put an 8 frame on the hive and covered the extra two frames below with a 2X4 (see the hive tool sitting on it?).

This year in every location I am finding earwigs on the hives.  Generally they are located like these are around the top edge of the hive often outside or on top of the inner cover.  Wonder what the appeal of the bee hive is for the ear wig?  They eat arthropods, plants and ripe fruit – none of which describes the honey bee, but they do like small tight spaces which does describe the bee hive.  Whatever the appeal, they are in all of my hives this year.

Then I went to Stonehurst Place.  It’s an interesting group of hives.  We’ve had rain and cooler weather for the last week, so the bees have not been able to forage and the tulip poplar is almost done so there isn’t much nectar to be had.  The two new nucs at Stonehurst this year are moving slower than my other nucs.

In the first hive I took this picture of new comb filled with nectar.  I love it that the bees immediately use wax as they draw it.  They will continue to fill this frame but are storing the nectar as the storage are is created.  Even more fun is to find comb that is a niblet hanging off of the top bar of the frame, but is already filled with eggs from the eager queen!

The second nuc at Stonehurst swarmed almost immediately after installation.  However, their new queen is laying and doing well.  If you click on the photo below, you can see an egg in almost every cell.  She is trying to catch up.  However, swarming is almost a guarantee in a new nuc that we will not get any honey from this hive this year.  They will need whatever they store to make it through the winter.

Talk about a bee yard that needs equalizing!  The overwintered hive is full of honey – the bees were unhappy with me because they are in such need of space.  I had no help with me today and no ladder so I simply added a box to the top of this hive.

In the hives at Morningside, I’m finding the same phenomenon that is occurring at Sebastian and Christina’s.  These hives at the community garden were started from packages on the same day.  The hive on the left is smaller and has fewer bees than the hive on the right.

Both have active laying queens and appear to be storing nectar, laying eggs, and generally going about their bee business.  Differences in hive size may be the result of the queen, but it also may be the result of drift (bees coming back to the wrong hive).  These hives are different colors and have different markings on the front, but to further address this potential problem, I added stick-on flower designs to both hives to increase their distinctiveness for the returning forager bees.

(więcej…)

**

• 0: the number of chemicals or pesticides I use in my hive.
• ⅜ of an inch: bee space.
• 1: the number of queens in most beehives
• 1: the number of times a worker bee can sting
• 2 days: the amount of time in which a larva can still become a queen if fed royal jelly
• 3 times a month: the number of times I inspect bee hives during bee season
• 3: the number of segments to a honey bee body.
• 4 minutes: the amount of time it takes for a honey bee to remove and manipulate a scale of wax exuded from the abdomen of a bee (4th to 7th abdominal segments if you are interested!)
• 4 – 5 pounds: the approximate weight of a full medium frame of honey
• 4.9 mm: the width of a natural-comb worker brood cell.
• 5 : number of eyes on a honey bee
• 7:  the number of hives I have in my Virginia Highlands backyard
• 8 feet:  the average height of a wild colony inside a tree
• 8: the number of frames I use in my hive bodies
• 9 ODA:  9-oxodecenoic acid or queen substance – queen pheromone
• 10 nails: the number required to build a frame properly
• 10 – 15 trips a day:  the number of times nectar and pollen gatherers fly out
• 12 – 25 days:  The age of most guard bees
• 16 days:  the number of days it takes for a queen to emerge
• 17: the number of states having the honey bee as the state insect
• 17 – 30: the number of drones needed for a well-mated queen
• 18.6% moisture: the maximum moisture content a honey can have and not ferment.
• 20 times its own weight: the amount of honey a comb can support
• 21: Current number of Master Beekeepers who have earned their certification from the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute
• 21 days: the number of days it takes for a worker to emerge
• 24 days:  the number of days it takes for a drone to emerge
• 24 km/h: average honey bee flight speed
• 25: the number of talks I’ve given to bee clubs and others since January 2011
• 36: the number of days from egg to sexual maturity for the drone
• 40 liters: the size of a hive cavity
• 56:  the number of workers a single worker touches with her antennae in 30 minutes
• 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit:  the temperature of the core of the brood nest in a hive
• 120 degrees: the angle between adjacent cell walls in honeycomb
• 600-800 meters: the average distance a swarm moves from its parent colony
• 800 km:  The distance a forager accumulates in foraging flights before her death

• 
• 1000:  The number of posts on this blog as of this very moment!
  
• Infinite: The amount of joy and pleasure I get from beekeeping and the amazing  people and experiences that it brings to my life…………

(więcej…)

–Richard

(więcej…)

My flower pot swarm trap caught a swarm that I called Little Kitten because it was so small.  I think it was a secondary swarm and was relieved to find that finally a mated queen was laying in the wax comb.

I had a Boardman feeder at the entrance of the nuc – and those of you who have used Boardmans know that they are not designed for a nuc.  To combat the instability I put a package container under the feeder with a small block to support it.  However, one night our evening raccoon or maybe my dog, Hannah, had bumped into the Boardman, turning over the feeder bottle.

By the time I discovered the mishap, there was a pool of sugar syrup all over the bottom board of the nuc and bees were having a terrible time negotiating entry to the hive.  It could have been like that for several days – I don’t always look at the hives every single day.  I put the hive on a new bottom board and cleaned up the old one.  Then I returned it to the hive and put it all back together.

Sadly, either the queen drowned that night – death by raccoon/Hannah/sugar syrup??? – or the bees, upset with the state of things, balled her.  The hive was queenless.

I put frames of brood and eggs into the nuc.  They didn’t really succeed at making a queen.  There was one small queen cell – obviously an inadequate job (1/2 inch long at best) – and the handful of bees now left could not have managed to take care of it.

My friend Jerry ordered 20 virgin queens from Zia and offered me the opportunity to buy one.  Zia Queen Bees is a family operation breeding survivor queens.  I believe this is the answer to the mite problem – not poison.  I snapped him up on it, got the queen on Wednesday night.  She was alone in the queen cage.  Jerry suggested that I feed her a drop of honey and a drop of water when I got home and that I install her the next day.

An amazing experience but with no pictures:  I put a drop of honey on the end of my finger and held it next to the openings in the plastic queen cage.  She stuck out her proboscis and sucked the honey off of my finger.  I will never forget the experience.  I knew the water wouldn’t stick to my finger, so I put it in a spoon and watched her drink, but I wished I could repeat the honey drop!

The next day, Thursday, I was scheduled to give a bee talk at 7 PM and from there to drive to Young Harris, so I had a packed day.  I luckily had a two hour break in my professional day (but only 2 hours) so I drove to Valerie and Jeff’s to get frames of bees to create population for the small Kitten.

Jeff has been busy adding boxes to these hives and this is how they looked:

All of these boxes are full of honey and I can’t lift the top box on these hives without a ladder and help, so I opened the hive I call Lenox Pointe (second from the left in the collage above).  I took two honey frames with bees from the top box, checking very carefully for the queen.  I did this because I could take honey frames out of the top box without having to lift it off of the hive.  I put these in a nuc I had waiting.  I took three frames – two of brood and bees and one of mostly pollen and honey from the Swarmy hive – the mostly yellow hive on the right in the collage.

I shook a few extra bees, but didn’t worry about that as much as I would normally since I am adding this „split” to Little Kitten where there are already some under employed bees.

Oh, and I put an end bar on the entry to give them an entrance reducer of sorts.

Returning from Young Harris, I found the bees happily flying in and out of the hive and seemingly happy. I’ll check tomorrow to see if the queen has been released and then leave them completely alone for three weeks.

(więcej…)

Home from Young Harris Beekeeping Institute today and I’m exhausted.  This, for me, is the end of seven weeks of over-commitment and now it’s setting in that I am TIRED.

Young Harris was great in so many ways.  I learned a lot and heard some good speakers:  Juliana Rangel from NC State and Gary Reuter from the University of Minnesota, in particular.  I also taught two workshops on Low Tech Beekeeping and tested the candidates for Certified Beekeeper on their practical exams.

Julia and Noah went also.  Noah earned his Journeyman certification – he’s only 15 and I imagine he’s one of the youngest, if not the youngest, person to get this certification in Georgia.  He is such a knowledgeable and excellent beekeeper, and I love being associated with him.

I couldn’t believe that I left my camera in Atlanta so I couldn’t take photos of Noah and Julia in their moments of reward, but I’ve put in pictures of them in inspections that we have done together.

Julia who earned her Journey(wo)man last year, this year went for her Master Beekeeper and she DID IT!  I have loved working with her over these years and was sure she would achieve this.  There’s an old saying that if you ask 10 beekeepers a question, you’ll get 10 different answers, but Julia, Noah and I generally think very similarly and agree in philosophy.  I feel lucky and really privileged to be friends with and to keep bees with both Julia and Noah.

I didn’t enter any honey in the honey contest – all of my cut comb has been opened and shared with others; my liquid honey is beginning to crystallize, and I never got around to making a wax block or creamed honey, so I didn’t have any honey to enter.

I did enter the „art” category of the honey show with the quilt I’ve made for my newest grandson:  Max who is now five months old.  Jeff, who is his father, keeps bees with me, and he and Valerie decorated Max’s room in bees.

I’ve worked on it for six months and was thrilled to win a blue ribbon.  I’ve made a number of quilts in my life, but this is the first quilt that I actually drew the design myself so it is totally original.  The six honey bee blocks are based on a traditional quilt block but I made the heads smaller like a real honey bee and put a floral block in the center.

So now I’m going to slow down for a month or two and take better care of myself…..but I will still be sharing my bee life with all of you.

(więcej…)

There is a terrible joke that goes with the title of this post, but there is a less humorous strategy behind the color choice. This year’s color for woodenware matches the shade used for Rubbermaid garden sheds and that is no accident. It’s a strategem for „hide in plain sight,” one of many means a large number of us use to integrate beehives into complex, populated areas without either sowing fear or surrendering to ignorance. I do not feel that my fellow citizens need an „in your face” introduction to beekeeping, and truly believe that behaving in that manner will hurt all of us (and the honeybees). But the bees can make major contributions—and knowledgeable beekeepers can continue to learn and grow—in many locations where „out of sight, out of mind” is not an option.

This blog has languished for the same reason that urban beekeeping can land in a load of trouble if beekeepers are not careful: lack of equilibrium. Every sustainable habitat has one—a unique combination of opportunities and compromises for life that works across different co-located populations, season after season. Ever since starting as a beekeeper, I have tried to hammer home that anyone who really cares about the bees has to make sure that they are good neighbors through insightful and attentive management. I am gonna yammer on about the beauty of that a bit more. An example of what I mean: As anyone who ever had to maintain a house knows, water is both a good thing and a bad thing. Water is a basic input of life and health, and a break in service would be a major crisis in most American homes. Water is also insidious, insistent, and a relentless finder of gaps, reservoirs, and interactions with the substances all around us. Water out of place is also an emergency.

Living things are like water to the third power: your honeybees are not only pollinators and progenitors, they are constant explorers of the surrounding ecosystem, looking for forage and future home places and water sources and, sometimes, other bees of whom to take advantage. They are dynamic, intelligent in ways of which we continue to learn more each year, and dedicated to the pursuit of that ecological niche that will help their family grow and prosper. This means they may be tempted to swarm in your neighbor’s yard, and then move into her/his attic. They might be prefer the water fountain at a park on your block. If they get into a robbing frenzy, the pheromone in the air can lead them to sting unsuspecting creatures. It is your absolute responsibility as a beekeeper to work against any such possibility, and to remediate any situation that develops, whether its your bees or not. In fact, one reason to have urban beekeepers is to make sure that some of them are around to address situations like this that do happen with feral colonies.

You can now buy a beehive from Williams-Sonoma (with no bees, thank goodness), and there are „services” in most major American cities that will allow you to order a hive with bees in it to be delivered. One around here delivers the bees in an unpainted hive (for top dollar, by the way) and as I put on second coats of paint to my woodenware today, I wondered how the new owners planned on painting them to suit their outside decor. With the bees inside? „Natural weathering” of untreated pine? People think harder about buying birdfeeders, I think.

But people can be crazy cool, too, and I think many are just trying to be on the right side of protecting the pollinators. We were called to a construction site near Nationals Park a couple of weeks ago, and the site supervisor stopped work, and eventually moved us beekeepers around in a front end loader, in order to hive a swarm that had landed on some heavy equipment. ALl the guys on site did everything they could to help. I got a call for a bee tree in Upper NW last week from a guy who was just passing by as a crew took down a dying maple that turned out to have 50,000 bees in it. A beekeeper friend came running to help, another turned up with a pickup, and two others helped me take apart the trunk (chainsaw lessons!) and hive the bees next day.

Ask me offline about the Planned Parenthood swarm though!

The bees’ pursuit of living places and forages is their search for equilibrium, and my efforts to educate DC beekeepers and rescue as many good Apis mellifera genes as possible is mine. Some opportunities always do get away in the complicated, multi-variable natural world. But I think a lot about something called „The Nash Equilibrium,” which is a theory that, in multi-player environments (meaning anything from real life) the situation is almost never „winner take all” or „you win, I lose.” It means that there are usually multiple points where well-being is optimised, and our job as the cerebellum-rich species around here is to try to identify and get to those.

That means making honeybees at home near people who do not necessarily want to know about them, making green spaces flourish even when its a low priority for many members of the community, and making people who generally support beekeeping understand where the amount of time and attention they can afford to share works toward balance and peace for us all.

(więcej…)

Yesterday I inspected all the hives at home.  Finding lots of little tidbits of interest, I decided to post a hodge-podge of them, so here goes:

I saw a perfectly lovely queen in SOS2.  She was gliding slowly, unfazed by my arrival in the hive, over her creations and paused so that I could take her photo.  Isn’t she pretty – I love the golden queens that my bees often raise.

It has (finally) begun to rain in Atlanta – we’ve now had several days of it.  My garden is green, and the nectar flow may get a last hurrah with the extra push of moisture from the universe.  Below you can see my water source.  It’s a plant saucer sitting on an upturned pot.  Inside that plant saucer is another one filled with rocks so that the bees have somewhere to light while taking in the water.

I fall in love with the bees all over again every time I pull a foundationless frame and find that they are creating comb.

Remember the frames that have stood around untouched until the nectar flow began to diminish?  There have been bees all over them for the past few days and now every cell has been ripped open and all the honey robbed out.

The shards of wax cappings on the ground attest to the robbery.  That is a way that you can tell if your hive has been robbed.  In a working hive, the bees are quite conservative with the wax – they reuse the caps of the brood cells, they move wax from one place to the next.  But in a robbery, the bees are not invested and tear the cappings off, dropping them wherever they may fall.

Early in my beekeeping, when I was still using sheets of wax foundation, I put a box of wax foundation frames as a new super on the hive .  Later that day, I stood by the hive and could hear a definite crunching sound.  I even posted on Beemaster about it because it was such a strange sound.  I came to discover that the bees were chewing the wax out of the new frames and taking it to a place in the hive where it was needed!

Imagine hearing crunching coming from your hive!

My bees in these hives have really been collecting nectar.  They’ve built some pretty fat honey comb as you can see in the photo below.

I’m off to Young Harris tomorrow night and will be teaching „Low Tech Beekeeping” there on Friday afternoon at 1 and at 2 in room 106.  If you are there, be sure to speak to me and introduce yourself as someone who reads this blog.

(więcej…)

In Atlanta our nectar flow is tied to the bloom of the tulip poplar.  When the tulip poplar is done, the nectar flow is pretty much over.  We will continue to have nectar sources and we always have a little bump in the availability of nectar when the sumac and catalpa bloom in late June/early July, but for now, it’s over.

This has been a funny spring.  Everything is two weeks earlier than last year.  The privet hedge bloomed in coincidence with everything else, and it will be interesting to see how that flavors the honey.

If I couldn’t look up in the tulip poplars above my backyard and see that the bloom is done, I could tell that the nectar flow is over by the behavior of the bees.  They are still primed to collect nectar and disappointed that it has almost suddenly stopped.

They indicate that it is over by collecting honey wherever they can.

I had the two frames below sitting under my deck since January when I discovered that my hives in my backyard had died.  These frames had been somewhat slimed by the small hive beetle and the bees ignored them…….that is, until today.  Today there are bees robbing out these two frames like crazy.

Also I have lots of wax under my house cut out of frames and waiting for Jeff to build us a bigger solar wax melter.    Some of that had remnants of honey in it and you can see bees all over the comb in the foreground.

Another way to tell that the nectar flow has ended is that the bees have slowed down in building comb.  Whether you use foundation or not, when the nectar stops, the bees stop drawing wax.  They have to have resources to build wax and without nectar, they have no fuel.

When you have foundationless frames, it’s quite obvious as you can see in the empty hive box below from Morningside.  If you use foundation, there’s an illusion that something is going on because each frame is full (of plastic foundation, that is) but in those boxes as well as my foundationless boxes, NOTHING is happening in Atlanta today.

(więcej…)