Mission Not Quite Accomplished

August 24, 2013

 I set out to accomplish four tasks when I opened my bee hive today, the 24^th day of August.

I only accomplished two.

My tasks: one, collapse the height of the hive from four supers to three in preparation of the on-set of fall and winter; two, spot the queen, because I haven’t laid eyes on her the past two times I’ve opened the hive this summer; three, replace the Beetle Blaster beetle trap; and four, install a sheet of bee food.  (Not getting stung this time wasn’t a task, so much. It was a goal, even a down-right hope!)

And here’s how it went: Suited up. Rounded up my handy bee-keeping bucket that has all my supplies – hive tool, etc.;, grabbed the safflower oil from the kitchen cabinet; had the sheet of bee pollen substitute prepped and ready; lit the smoker.

So far, so good. Smoked the hive, and started to work.

I unstacked the supers with the intent of removing the bottom super for the winter so that when the bees cluster around the queen to keep her warm, they would have a tight, cozy spot to do it. When last I inspected the hive, there wasn’t any real activity in the bottom super, just a bunch of baby bees and empty foundation comb.  This time, as I inspected the frames, I was surprised to find the bees had built out comb on several of the center frames, and there was capped larvae. 

Hmm. What to do? I didn’t like the idea of killing any of the bees, so after checking the frames of one another super, I simply reassembled the supers, removing the old Beetle Blaster, filling the new one with safflower oil and re-installing it between frames in the super just below the queen excluder.  Task one, not accomplished. Task three, accomplished.

When I put the top super back on, I added a sheet of bee food – a sheet of brown gooey stuff that is supposed to help  nourish the bees when their natural supply of pollen and nectar is no longer abundant because of the changing season. So, task four, accomplished.

And then there’s task two - spot the queen.  Now for the third time, I have opened the hive and NOT laid eyes on her.  But again, I remain faithful that she is in there.  Plenty of baby bees and worker bees in and around the hive. Still brood in the capped cells.  I'm going on one part faith and one part evidence that she's still in there doing her thing. 

I made it through the entire process without a bee sting.  Well, almost. Thirty minutes after removing my suit and settling down to recap the details for this blog – well away from the hive, mind you – a random bees finds me and pops me on the back of the neck. 

What!

The good news, only one sting this time, compared to two last time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Varro-ly, Varro-ly, They Say Unto Me: Your Bees Have Bugs

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

So, the seasoned beekeepers tell me my bugs have bugs. Or, if they don't, they will. There's just no evading it.  

What!

And, they say, the best I can do -- the best any beekeeper can do -- is work to minimize the Varro Mite population in the hive. We can never eliminate them 100 percent, unless, of course, our hive dies. In that case, so do the Varro Mites.

An experienced beekeeper named Stacey shared all sorts mitey facts and mite management advice during the July  Mid-State Beekeepers Association Meeting (Held on the first Tuesday of evey month in the town of Lexington, SC.)  

Mite-y Force Of Destruction

The facts: A Varro Mite is a parasite and the honey bee is its host.  These pesky fleck-sized critters first lived on the hides of Asian bees, but in 1987 (that's when beekeepers here first noticed them) found their way to the United States and on to the bee population here.  Beekeepers have been managing to minimize them ever since. 

Varro Mites spread disease, cause the bees to be deformed and generally weaken the hive.  Untreated, they can overrun a hive and kill it. 

They feed on the larvae.  They especially like the drones cells because the drones have the longest gestation period, and therefore, provide the longest stretches of protection and feed for the Varro Mites. (What I wonder is whether the Mother Mites know which cells are drone cells or whether they just drop eggs everywhere, randomly, and fare the best in the drone cells because those cells are closed up the longest?)

So how will I know if my hive has too many Varro Mites? 

Two schools of thought on this. One is to test, test and re-test using one of several methods. One: use sticky paper and counting the mites that fall off the bees to the bottom of the hive.  When the number of mites that drop off reach a certain threshold, it's time to take action.  Two: scrape open some of the larvae cells to visually inspect for mites. And, three: scoop up some bees in a jar, cover with a wire mesh top, sprinkle with powered sugar, shake vigorously, and then shake off the sugar onto a paperplate or other surface.  Mites will fall out with the sugar.

The other method is to assume that the mites are there and use an organic treatment. My beekeeping friends in the upstate of South Carolina prescribe to this method.  Their recommended treatment: feed the bees a crisco and powered sugar patty.  Apparently, the sugar makes the bees clean themselves and the crisco makes them slick, so the mites slough off.

Of course, beyond the organic method, beekeepers can also resort to light pesticides and/or heavy pesticides.

As for me, well, I'm inclined to assume my hive has - or will have - mites and to start with the organic approach.

So, where's that crisco?

 

Stirring Up The Hive

Saturday, June 29, 2013

From the outside, the bee hive seems to be doing fine.  Bees in. Bees out. Bees in. Bees out. Day, after day, after day.

If you're brave enough to get close to the hive - say within five feet - you can see the sacks on the hind legs of the worker bees filled with stuff. So much stuff it looks like they're wearing a super-miniature tennis ball on their eye-lash-like back legs. Amazing to watch.

But I digress.  As we know, a beekeeper can't just count on the external signs to know whether everything is happening like it is supposed to inside the hive.  She has to open the hive periodically to inspect it.

Twenty days since I last opened the hive, so today was the day to crack it open and have another, closer look.

Gear on. Bee-supply bucket handy.  Smoker lit. Here we go.
 

Having A Look

Is it possible? There are even more bees in the hive this time than last!

The top super is pretty light - other than a couple of handfuls of worker bees -  and goes off to the side with no problem.  The girls are drawing out the comb, but no signs of nectar, nor pollen in the top super.  And, of course, no larvae because the last time I worked the hive, I put the queen excluder on before adding the top super, so the queen can't lay in these cells.  

The second super from the top is heavy and takes some effort pry off and set aside.  I'll take a closer look at it in a few minutes.

As I was taught, I pry loose one of the frames in the third super and set it aside. This creates room for separating and lifting out the other frames.  One by one I have a look and they look great. Loaded with nectar and honey and pollen and presumably larvae. (Though, I admit, my eye still isn't trained well enough to consistently distinguish which cells are larvae cells.)  Some of the honey is capped. Some is not. No sign of the queen in this super.

And Then It Happens

Bees - hundreds of them - are buzzing all around me while I work. Angry at my intrusion. (And in my mind, I'm thinking, I'm safe. I'm wearing all the gear - hat, gloves, jumpsuit, closed shoes. All good. Just a bunch of bees buzzing around me. All good.)

Before I retrieve the second super to inspect it, I realize there's something buzzing around INSIDE my Orkin-man-style bee suit.

Ouch! Ouch again! 

Beeswax! Two bees have infiltrated my protective gear. Yes, I squished them both. Needlessly, I know, because once they stung me, their stingers were gone, and they could do no more harm to me.  But when you're in a tiny panic, well...

I meticulously sealed the velcro that cinches up the veil to the jumpsuit and made a mental note: secure your protective gear all the way next time, goofball!

Rookie mistake. And now, I can nolonger say that I haven't been stung.

There She Is!

Embarrassed about my mistake, but not really hurt, I turn my attention back to that second super. Remove a frame and start working my way through. Same thing: Capped honey. Uncapped honey. Pollen. And bees. Lots and lots of bees! 
At about the third or fourth frame in, on the far side of the frame, I spot her. The Queen, with her marquee red dot!

















Isn't she lovely! Isn't she beautiful! 
 
I hear the Miss America tune in my head as I watch my Queen glide across her honey combed stage, with her entourage in tow.

Nothing left to do now but put the hive back together and close it up. 

Footnote: I have to say, more than just the two bees (that were inside my gear) died during the commission of today's inspection.

There are just so many more of them now!  When I restacked the supers, some bees that were on the edges were squished to death from the weight of the supers.  I tried to swish them into -or out of - the hive, but it's not a perfect science.

Must purchase a bee brush to see if that helps next time.  
 

The hive still stirred up over the intrusion.

So Far, So Good

This morning (Saturday, June 8, 2013), for the third time in 43 days, I inspected the fledgling bee colony hard at work in the hive in my suburban backyard in Forest Acres, SC.  And things in the hive seem to be humming right along.

There could now be twice as many bees in the hive as compared to when I first installed the package in late April.  There is definite nectar and pollen storage going on.  Water from some of the nectar is evaporating, and some of the stored treasure has probably turned into honey.  (Yes, I robbed a one-inch block of the comb and had a tiny taste. Golden and delicious.)

But back to what’s happening in the hive:  There’s even some propyls usage going on because the boxes (supers) and the hive frames had to be pried apart. While I’m not experienced enough yet to really pick out the bee eggs in the cells in their various stages of development, SURELY the queen is laying and the larvae are developing to maturity.  I base this conclusion on two clues…. the sheer number of worker bees in the hive and the math.  Based on how long the colony has been in the hive, at least one, and possibly two, generations of worker bees have had time to mature to worker status.  (A regular worker bee egg takes 21 days to mature.) 

A key task of any hive inspection is to check on the queen.  It took a few minutes, but I found her! Right there in the central section of the top super. Exactly where she was supposed to be.   

My hive system is an eight-frame system, so the bottom two medium-sized boxes (or supers) form the brood super.  This is where the queen lays her eggs.  As the frames in the brood super fill up, the queen typically works her way up the hive structure.  My queen followed protocol. Since the second super literally was full of nectar, pollen and,  I’m assuming, larvae, she has moved up the hive to the third super.  She’s got plenty of room there to lay.  And, the workers have plenty of space to store their harvest. 

But back to the queen. The queen is easy to spot because she has a big red dot on her mid-section.   The queen is also significantly bigger than the worker bees….both in length and girth.  Some day in the future, I should be able to spot the queen without the aid of the colored dot.  Until then, it was worth the extra $5 I paid to the beekeeper - whose whole business model is based on breeding queens – to put the dot on my queen.  As a side note, the color of the dot changes from year to year as a means of keeping track of the age of the queens.  Apparently, red is the color of 2013.

The queen is a big deal. She’s the lifeblood of the whole system. Without her, things go wrong.  Really wrong.  Even deathly wrong for the colony.

You can just imagine that I’m holding my breath during the inspection until I spot her and her tell-tale red dot!  Big sigh of relief when I spot her.

In addition to inspecting the hive today, I removed the top feeder and I added the queen excluder and a fourth super.

The top feeder is a fairly new addition to beekeeping hardware technology. (It didn't exist 35 years ago when my Dad kept bees in our backyard.)  The top feeder is a shallow super that sits on the top of the hive and is filled with sugar water. The design creates a screened "trough" that lets the bees feed on the sugar water without drowning in it. 

Beekeepers use a feeder in at least two circumstances: First, when a colony is newly installed into a hive as a way to jumpstart the hive, until the  bees find their nectar and pollen sources; and second, in the winter when the colony has consumed its food stores, the weather is still too cold for them to forage and the nectar flow hasn't yet started.  There are definite advantages to using a top feeder as compared to other feeding systems. You don't have to open the hive and the bees don't have to go outside to feed. 

Meanwhile, the queen excluder I added is a nifty sheet of plastic mesh, like a grate, on which the uniform slots are big enough for the worker bees to pass through but too small for the queen to pass through.  Above the queen excluder is yet another super, empty except for the eight frames and their foundation comb. 

In a text-book scenario, the worker bees should eventually fill this top super with honey.  Nothing but honey!  Who knows, maybe we’ll get a tiny harvest before the season ends. (Not that I know how to rob the hive...because, of course, I don't. But I'm up for some on-the-job training.)

I’ll keep you posted. 

 

 

 

At Last - The Girls Are Home

You might say, these girls get around.

So, my honey bees had a bit of a journey before they finally made it to their new hive in my backyard.  Their lives started at an apiary in Jesup, Ga. On a Friday in late April 2013, Tim Dover visited the apiary and loaded his horse trailer to the brim with packages of honey bees and hauled them to his shop, The Carolina Honey Bee Co. in Travelers Rest, SC. And, on the following overcast Saturday, I picked up my three-pound package of Italian honey bees, complete with a fertile, marked queen, and drove them to Columbia, SC. 

Gearing up.
As advised, I waited until late afternoon to put these girls in their new home. Though a  novice, I was surprisingly fearless about handling the bees and "installing" them into their new eight-frame condo in my backyard. 
Yes, yes, yes. It was the protective gear that made me brave....A white head- to-toe jumpsuit that looked like something you'd see on a sci-fi show or at a hazmat scene. The get-up even included a helmet and netted veil and sheepskin gloves from fingertip to elbow, both arms. Not a real fashion statement, but not vulnerable to an attack from possible mean girls.  (You do know the hive is made up of the queen and mostly female worker bees. They allow a few drones to hang around for the purpose of fertelizing the queen. But not many!)

Law and order.
I followed the written instructions that came with the colony to the letter, and remembered a few tips from the earlier beekeeping workshop -- all of which made moving these ten thousand to twelve thousand girls into their house less daunting than when we moved our daughter into her College of Charleston dorm. Had the sugar water ready (one gallon of water to five pounds of sugar), so I spritzed the wire siding of the bee package on both sides. Apparently, this is to calm the bees. Seemed to work.
I removed the queen from the package, taking care to replace the thin ply-wood lid so that the worker bees didn't escape.  The queen comes in a container a little longer than a match box, with a cork in one end, along with a block of sugar.  Once I got the queen's box attached to a center frame in the hive using a thumb tack, then it was time for the "big move," getting those thousands of honey bees from their travel package into the hive. Tapped the rectangular box on the ground a couple times to shift the bees down, then held them over the open hive and shook and shook and shook until 85 percent of them were out of the package and in the hive.  It felt like 10 percent of them were swirling around me, but like I said, I was all-geared up and fearless.  No stings!
 
What happened next happened gradually, but quickly -- if that makes sense.  I laid the opened package, now with about 15 percent of my precious honey bee stock still in it, up against the cinder block base on which the hive sits.
 

And I left it there. Five minutes later, some of the bees in the package had found their way out and into the hive. Ten minutes later, even more. Within an hour, the entire container that the bees came in was empty. Completely empty.  And, the bees were buzzing in and around the hive.  It looked like they were getting organized. 

All that activity was/is apparenty being controlled by the queen and her magic, all-powerful pheremones.

Now what?

If this project goes to plan, the worker bees will eat the queen out of her match-box-sized, temporary home within three days (remember the sugar cube I mentioned), and the queen will start laying fertile eggs in the wax cells the worker bees should this very moment be "drawing out." (They are feeding on sugar water I put in the top feeder while they figure out where to go to forage for the real stuff.)

Fingers Crossed!
 I will know for certain in three days, when I suit-up again, open the hive and check to see if these busy bees are sticking to the plan.  

I'll keep you posted.
 
  

Kicking Up Words And Phrases: The Foreign Language Of Beekeeping

The vocabulary of beekeeping is vast and vivid, and, at first, foreign.

Some of my favorite bee terms so far:

Let's start with royal jelly. Royal jelly: In my imagaination I see a handful of prissy worker bees wearing their Betty Crocker aprons, buzzing about the kitchen preparing the queen's breakfast...a toasted English muffin with a big scoop of royal jelly.  Okay, so it doesn't happen exactly like that. Royal jelly is the superfood the worker bees feed the would-be queen egg(s) so that they develop queenly anatomy and have queenly skills, including the ability to round up sperm from the drones, lay hundreds of thousands of eggs in her lifetime, and the ability to rule the hive with her super power pheremores.

Pheremones. What's a pheremone, you ask? In simple terms, pheremones are a sort of magical potion. They  are a chemical excreted by the queen to initiate certain behavior among the worker bees.  The queen, for example, exudes a pheremone that tells the workers to go forage and another when its time for the colony to swarm. She even has one that prevents workers from developing fully functioning ovaries. 

Here's a funny one: waggle dance. Can you see it? Two bees blinged out in their sleekest black and gold beewear, out on the Dancing With The Stars dance floor doing their best waggle dance.  The bees "dance" as a form of communication, telling the other bees, for example, how to get to a nectar-rich harvesting spot.

Queen right.  Nothing to do with politics or winning an argument or a trivia contest.  Rather, when a colony is queen right, that simply means the colony has a healthy queen who is performing her queenly duties. If the colony isn't queen right -- or fast getting queen right -- it's in danger of extinction.  No queen, no fertile eggs, no worker bees, no honey.

Wet capping and dry capping.  Again, my imagination runs wild...straight to the wild, wild west. Bees "capping" each other with their Smith & Wesson water pistols.  But not so much. These two terms describe the ways the bees close up or "cap" the cells that contain the honey.  One looks dark and wet, the other looks white/tan and dry.

Brood pattern.  Not talking about charting the mood of a bunch of pouty honey bees. Instead, brood pattern refers to the pattern in the drawn out comb where the queen lays her eggs. A good brood pattern contains bees at varying stages of development, from egg to larvae to emerging bees. Beekeepers monitor the brood pattern as a clue about the overall health of the colony.

The colony and the hive. There's a distinction to be drawn here.  The colony is the family of bees that live and work together and include the queen, the workers and a few drones.  The hive is the man-made contraption where the bees live -- the boxes and frames that the beekeeper manipulates.

Like I said, it all sounds like a foreign language right now. They say with enough time and patience, it will all start flowing...the words, their meanings AND, alas, the honey.

 

Beekeeping: A Numbers Game

I am, in fact, bee fuddled with honey bee information right now, having just spent two days at a beekeeping workshop in the Upstate of South Carolina. One day in class, a half-day at the bee yard. And days, weeks, months, yes, even years of bee things still to learn.

If I had to cull what I learned in these two days to a single idea, it would be this: beekeeping is a numbers game, and by that I mean, there are a slew of important numbers for a beekeeper to remember.  Settle in. I've got more than a few examples to offer:

• A honey bee colony has two goals – to reproduce and to survive through the winter.
• Don’t open your hive when the temperature falls below 55 degrees F or you risk killing your bees.  70  or above is ideal.
• A honey bee’s body has three segments – the head, the thorax, the abdomen. 
• Honey bees have five eyes – three on the top of their head, two on the sides.
• Honey bees have four wings and six legs.
• Honey bees have two stomachs – one for their own digestive process, the other for transporting collected nectar to the hive.
• A queen bee takes 16 days to mature from egg to adult.
• A worker bee takes 21 days to mature from egg to to adult.
• A drone bee takes 24 days to mature from egg to adult.
• After birth, a worker bee spends 21 days working in the hive, and then, on average, another six weeks foraging before dying of exhaustion.    
• A hive knows within 30 minutes if its queen is missing and begins to take action to replace her.
• When a new queen goes on her mating flights within her first two weeks of life, she mates with up to 20 drones. The drones die in the act of fertilizing the queen.
• A queen lays 1,500 eggs a day, and about 200,000 eggs in a year.
• Ideally, a queen should be replaced every two years to insure strong bee reproduction, according to a queen breeder who taught part of the workshop. He says  best to re-queen in August in my area (South Carolina) – after the nectar flow and before winter.  
• When feeding sugar syrup to honey bees in early spring, use five pounds of sugar to a gallon of water.
• When feeding sugar syrup to honey bees in winter, use 10 pounds of sugar to a gallon of water.
• Hive woodenware is available in several sizes - the traditional 10-frame and the more modern 8-frame and 5-frame.  While it would make sense for each frame-count system to be a standard length, width, height, etc., they are not. Sizes can vary from brand to brand.  Each frame-count system has its own advantages and disadvantages.
• A nuc has five frames. A nuc is one of several common ways to acquire a new hive.  Among other are buying and installing a package and collecting and installing a swarm. A nuc, a package and a swarm are each assembled differently, but each usually are comprised of a queen, workers and drones.
• Swarming is a natural method of reproduction for the colony. When the queen leaves the hive, 40 to 60 percent of the original colony leaves with her.
• Honey bees collect four things– pollen, nectar, water and propolis for use in the hive.  
• Honey is nectar from which the bees have dehydrated most of the water content. Honey is considered safe from fermentation when the water content is 18.6 percent or less.
• During the harvest, a worker bee makes about 10 journeys a day and works a 12-hour day.
• The average forager makes 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
• Worker bees have to visit 2 million flowers to make one pound of honey.

I know! Lot's of numbers. Surely, you see why I have associated beekeeping with numbers. Numbers are everywhere. And I'm just getting started at this!