Yesterday I went to help my mentor, Paul Kent, inspect his hives and remove the queens for the purpose of "requeening." He had secured what are known as hygienic queens from a noted apiarist and researcher named Marla Spivak, who had been doing graduate work in the area of breeding queens that had strong traits for keeping their homes clean and ship-shape. These traits would be passed on to her offspring and the hope would be that this obsessiveness for diligently cleaning house would have a beneficial effect in the fight against Varroa Mites - perhaps the biggest threat to a healthy hive. In theory, these special bees won't tolerate brood that might be hosting mites on their bodies and would thus toss them out, mites and all. The Varroa Mite's reproductive cycle depends on infesting the brood prior to their being capped off in the cells, particularly Drone brood. It is the latest of many strategies designed to combat these little parasites.
Anywho, I thought it would further along my bee education to see his frames and catch some queens. He has two hives that he started on packages like I did but with the advantage that he already had drawn comb on all his frames thanks to the hard work of his bees from the previous year who did not survive the winter. Another reason for my being there was that I was considering replacing the "Arlington" queen with one of these new-fangled hygienic lasses. And so we began...
After detailing my travails with a smoker in the last posting, it was ironic to me that Paul did not use one at all! In fact, he said he rarely used one because handling his bees without a smoker had never been a problem. Sure enough, we went through both hives, frame by frame with nary a wisp of smoke and the bees remained gentle and easy to work. Hmmm.
To make a long story short, we captured the queens, closed the hives and our work there was done. I gained some insight examining frames with someone who had "been there before" and could help me interpret what I was seeing. I even practiced the technique for capturing a queen by trying it out on a drone. You literally have to reach into the multitudes and pluck her out by grasping her gently around her thorax - the middle segment of her body from which her legs and wings sprout. Of course, queens are a rare commodity so it's best to practice on a drone for two reasons. First, if you're too rough and injure a drone, there's no great harm done to the hive, there being many more drones. (Of course, that particular drone may disagree with that assessment.) The second, really good reason is that drones have no stingers! Fearless in my nimble surgical gloves, I plucked out a party boy with no injury to either of us. Piece of cake!
After a couple of hours playing with Paul's bees, I of course couldn't wait to get into my hives and I was determined I would try this smoke-free method myself.
It had been over a week since I checked in on the Georgia girls and I wanted to see how they were doing with drawing out the remaining comb and to install a "slatted rack" under the brood chamber. Briefly, that contraption can supposedly help dissuade the bees from the notion to swarm by giving them a larger gallery beneath the brood chamber to hang out and trade foraging stories and other tall bee tales.
At first all went well. In the top hive box, the bees behaved about the same as when I smoked them. I inspected the frames and was happy to see great progress on all but one of them. The bees were rapidly reaching the point where drawing out comb would be done and they could concentrate on brood and HONEY FOR ME!
About this time, the bees began to collectively put together what was going on and commenced to rise up in serious protest. By the time I had set the first hive body aside and begun to pull frames from the lower box, I began to thank the Lord and all that is holy for the blessing of my veil. At times, I had literally hundreds of bees slamming into the mesh surrounding my face. The sound of buzzing rose to drown out the traffic noise on Lees Corner Road behind me. It was quite an experience! As confidence grew in my veil and other defensive clothing, I think I may have smirked a little at their feeble efforts to get at me. Silly bees! YOU CANNOT HARM ME...I AM BEEKEEPER MAN!!! It was about this time that some of them...I'll call them Mensa Bees...began to get the idea that there was a point where the veil and my sweatshirt were not attached and began looking seriously for an opening. Beekeeper Man had to rethink his strategy. I had seen the queen, no doubt smirking a little herself by now, and I decided to hurry along and get the slatted rack in place so I could get things reassembled before the Mensa Bees discovered the weak point in my armor. I tried to follow the basic rule of remaining calm and deliberate and I'm proud to say that everything went well, but I was a bit rattled. What especially got me was their persistence in tracking down the intruder for over an hour after I had left them be and returned to working on my front porch. I killed two bees who buzzed me and ended up tangled in my hair and another who seemed to get tripped up in my ear. Beekeeper Man not so tough now. I may have changed clothes, but they remembered well my smell apparently because every ten minutes or so, another kamakaze would swoop in. Outside their hive, hundreds of bees flew about for a good hour and a half and I stayed far away. Who knows, maybe some of those Texas girls were still able to get it together and saddle up the posse.
Next time, folks will see my smoke for miles! Miraculously, I was not stung once and though they gave it their all, the tally remains...
Bee stings....6
Friday, May 25, 2007
Monday, May 21, 2007
First Inspection of the New Hive
As promised in my last post, I inspected the new hive today. Though this hive is offically Hive#2, I have decided to dub them the Arlington girls. After all, this is where they came from, right? Sounds better than "Hive#2" anyway. So henceforth, we will be refering to the Arlington girls and the Georgia girls. The Texas girls, having been absorbed into Hive#1, are for all intents and purposes no more. Hopefully, they taught some Texas Two Step moves to the Georgians before they had their Lone Star traits pheromoned out of them!
Anyway, like I said, today was the day for checking in on the Arlington clan. It has been a little over a week since they were installed with their four, fully invested frames and six frames of foundation.
The first thing evident was that they had drawn out all but one frame and had started on the tenth. Wow! These are some wax producing ladies. As a result of this, I added a second hive box so they could have plenty of room for expansion. If the progress in these two hives continues at this pace, I don't see how I can miss pulling some honey out of them before the year is out. What's more, the Arlington bees did it without the benefit of a feeder on their hive.
The second thing to cheer me was seeing the unmarked queen scrambling along the comb. Not being painted, it is quite a trick finding her among the throngs, but I not only saw her, my lovely wife caught her with the digital camera she got for her birthday! (It really was for her)
You can see her highness in the middle right of the photo. She's the one without the tiger stripes. (Click on the picture for a close up) There was also plenty of capped brood and honey.
I should tell you here about my smoker. Why? Because I had a breakthrough of sorts today with that little contraption. Even for folks who don't know much about beekeeping, the smoker is an easily recognized part of the business. For the beekeeper it is essential. Prior to opening up a hive, a beekeeper will puff smoke from his smoker into the entrance and under the inner cover to throw the bees off their game enough so that he can do his thing without arousing too much unwanted attention. The theory behind it, so the experts tell us, is that the smoke alerts the bees to the possibility of a forest fire (they live in trees when wild) and they race off into the bowels of the hive to retrieve their most prized possession, honey. This may be true, but I also think that they just plain don't like someone blowing smoke in their faces and so they run off to find some fresh air. Either way, they make themselves scarce pretty quickly and having them so preoccupied holds several obvious advantages for our intrepid keeper.
With regard to my smoker, I have always had trouble coming up with the right formula for keeping it lit and billowy with smoke. I tried the prepackaged raw cotton stuff the supply houses sell, I tried sticks and leaves and pine needles. All with limited success. Today, I kept it simple. I broke up some pine board scraps and lit 'em up with my propane torch until I could roast marshmallows on them if I wanted to. Once they were going good, I clipped some small, leaf-covered branches from a thorn bush I don't like much anyway and jammed them into my little inferno. Instant smoke! Enough that I could send smoke signals to my mentor across town. Best of all, it remained smoky throughout my inspection and for awhile after. Like I said, a breakthrough. I just hope that thorn bush isn't some rare toxic thorn bush!
So, in closing, the Arlington girls are settled in and doing fine. Theresa, the lovely wife mentioned earlier, got to experiment with her new camera. And I received no bee stings, not a one. Of course, as history has shown us, bees are a cunning sort and wait for a moment when I have my guard down to exact their revenge for my intrusions. I am in greatest danger when dozing in my lawn chair.
Sting count...steady at 6.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Boilin' with Bees!
Just a quick little post to let you know that on checking the hives today after work, there must have been a thousand bees flying around the entrances to the two hives. It wasn't a swarm situation. Rather, the mob, which looked a lot like the entrance to the Metro after a sporting event, seemed to be engaged in bringing in pollen and nectar or orienting on the hives. Being a warm day, there were probably a number of them who were just cooling off on the front porch . The second hive, though fewer in number, were engaged in the same way, and so I'm hoping they are going to be fine. I'll be inspecting them on Sunday or Monday. I'm on vacation next week, working around the house, so there'll be plenty of time to do some bee watching. Who knows, maybe even add to the ol' bee sting tote board.
* I added this image on 5/21 because I thought it was pretty cool. During one of my inspections of the Georgia girls, I cut off some burr comb and left nectar all over the middle of this frame. The bees are furiously sucking up the gooey mess. Click on the image to supersize it!
Total stings...holding at 6
Total stings...holding at 6
Monday, May 14, 2007
Another Look at Hive #1
It's been 6 days since I combined the two hives and with the weather warm and sunny, I figured it was a good day to check to see how things have been going with the merger. I was pretty sure that the bees had long ago chewed through the sheet of newspaper that divided them and having seen nothing to indicate open warfare, I really had a couple of other things I wanted to do once in the hive, though I was curious to see the extent to which they had intermingled.
The first thing, as always, was to check the status of the queen. By now, new bees have been chewing their way out of their capped cells for about 10 days and her majesty should have been revisiting those cells to lay new eggs. Conservatively, ten days of emerging bees could equal an additional 10 to 15 thousand bees I figured. With the Texas merger , I could be looking at 30 to 35 thousand bees by now in hive #1. That of course is a semi-educated guess. I wasn't going to be counting!
I was also interested to see how they had been doing getting additional frames drawn out in the lower hive box and if the queen had begun laying eggs in the upper hive box. I had used the inner cover at the top of the hive to provide an entrance to the transplanted Texas girls under the hive top feeder. Many of them had imprinted on this opening and seemed to use it instead of the main entrance at the bottom of the hive. Though merged, I had no way of knowing if any Texas bees were using the lower entrance, or if the Georgia girls used the upper. If you're not a bee, they look amazingly alike. I figured that the Texans were probably working mostly in the upper hive box and the Georgians in the lower. The logic being that old habits die hard, especially for an insect.
Between the nectar flow and the syrup in the feeder, I hoped that they had expanded onto the unused frames in the upper box as well. I've come around to the idea that, in this first year, it is more important to get all the frames drawn out into comb than to worry too much about honey. Fully drawn comb means a better infrastructure to support more bees in the long run. This, in turn, increases their survival chances for the winter through a larger population and more room for food storage. If the hive does not survive the winter - a sad outcome after all this nurturing! - I will have fully drawn frames to hand over to a new package next year. They won't have to waste time and energy on constructing comb and instead can get right to work making baby bees and honey.
Well, with all this in mind, I set about smoking the little critters and opened things up piece by piece to have a look-see. The first thing I noticed after pulling a couple of non-drawn frames in the upper was that they had made short work of the newspaper. All that remained was a 2-3 inch fringe around the outsides of the hive. The upper box contained about six frames almost fully drawn out that contained mostly nectar and pollen. There were patches of capped brood scattered around that I believe tended to be drone brood because they protruded out a few millimeters beyond the rest of the cells. The patches tended to be around 2 to 3 inches in diameter and were not in any particular pattern on the frames. Could this mean laying workers? The queen was alive and well in the lower box and she seemed to be doing fairly well in keeping the cells occupied with brood down there. But I wasn't sure I saw evidence that she had been at work in the upper box. The Georgians had not done much in expanding onto the 3 frames they had not touched before, but the seven frames that were fully drawn out were heavy with bees, brood, pollen and honey. Most of the progress in drawing out comb had occured in the upper box. I decided to try to rectify that by moving two drawn out frames that were full of nectar and pollen to the lower box, replacing two of the lightly drawn frames down there, which I moved upstairs. In this way I hoped to get the bees to fully invest the lower box and only after that would I work to get the upper box's frames completely drawn out.
I am a little worried about the possibility of laying workers in the upper box. Will the queen and a laying worker coexist? Can a worker who has begun to lay eggs continue doing so after she is introduced to a hive with a functioning queen and her pheromones? I think for my next inspection, I'll need to have my mentor on hand to help me interpret what I'm seeing. Things seem to be going generally well, but I have nagging feelings that I may be missing some vital clues for things that could have an undesirable effect down the road.
One of the guys I met while in class, who was a second year beekeeper, said that he found it easier to take digital pictures of each frame during inspection and then he could review them at a more leisurely pace at his computer rather than making quick interpretations at the hive itself. Having been through a couple of inspections now, I think his method is an excellent one.
The other benefit to this is that I can show pictures to other bee people and thus get other opinions without having to troop them to my hives. I see a digital camera in my near future!
On a separate note, I have been surprised to find a slight up-tick in the bee's aggressiveness in the past couple of days. The vast majority remain too busy to pay me any mind, but I've sustained two more stings in the past two days from single bees who have gotten it into their little heads that I am a pin cushion for planting their business ends. Ironically, both stings occurred, like the one mentioned in my last posting, while I was sitting a short distance from the hive, watching them do their thing. Out of nowhere, individual bees came barreling straight at me to plant their little darts into (a) my finger and (b) my back.
If only the little buggers could understand...I'm only here to help! Sadly, they don't, and so our tally grows...
...Sting count, to date: 6
The first thing, as always, was to check the status of the queen. By now, new bees have been chewing their way out of their capped cells for about 10 days and her majesty should have been revisiting those cells to lay new eggs. Conservatively, ten days of emerging bees could equal an additional 10 to 15 thousand bees I figured. With the Texas merger , I could be looking at 30 to 35 thousand bees by now in hive #1. That of course is a semi-educated guess. I wasn't going to be counting!
I was also interested to see how they had been doing getting additional frames drawn out in the lower hive box and if the queen had begun laying eggs in the upper hive box. I had used the inner cover at the top of the hive to provide an entrance to the transplanted Texas girls under the hive top feeder. Many of them had imprinted on this opening and seemed to use it instead of the main entrance at the bottom of the hive. Though merged, I had no way of knowing if any Texas bees were using the lower entrance, or if the Georgia girls used the upper. If you're not a bee, they look amazingly alike. I figured that the Texans were probably working mostly in the upper hive box and the Georgians in the lower. The logic being that old habits die hard, especially for an insect.
Between the nectar flow and the syrup in the feeder, I hoped that they had expanded onto the unused frames in the upper box as well. I've come around to the idea that, in this first year, it is more important to get all the frames drawn out into comb than to worry too much about honey. Fully drawn comb means a better infrastructure to support more bees in the long run. This, in turn, increases their survival chances for the winter through a larger population and more room for food storage. If the hive does not survive the winter - a sad outcome after all this nurturing! - I will have fully drawn frames to hand over to a new package next year. They won't have to waste time and energy on constructing comb and instead can get right to work making baby bees and honey.
Well, with all this in mind, I set about smoking the little critters and opened things up piece by piece to have a look-see. The first thing I noticed after pulling a couple of non-drawn frames in the upper was that they had made short work of the newspaper. All that remained was a 2-3 inch fringe around the outsides of the hive. The upper box contained about six frames almost fully drawn out that contained mostly nectar and pollen. There were patches of capped brood scattered around that I believe tended to be drone brood because they protruded out a few millimeters beyond the rest of the cells. The patches tended to be around 2 to 3 inches in diameter and were not in any particular pattern on the frames. Could this mean laying workers? The queen was alive and well in the lower box and she seemed to be doing fairly well in keeping the cells occupied with brood down there. But I wasn't sure I saw evidence that she had been at work in the upper box. The Georgians had not done much in expanding onto the 3 frames they had not touched before, but the seven frames that were fully drawn out were heavy with bees, brood, pollen and honey. Most of the progress in drawing out comb had occured in the upper box. I decided to try to rectify that by moving two drawn out frames that were full of nectar and pollen to the lower box, replacing two of the lightly drawn frames down there, which I moved upstairs. In this way I hoped to get the bees to fully invest the lower box and only after that would I work to get the upper box's frames completely drawn out.
I am a little worried about the possibility of laying workers in the upper box. Will the queen and a laying worker coexist? Can a worker who has begun to lay eggs continue doing so after she is introduced to a hive with a functioning queen and her pheromones? I think for my next inspection, I'll need to have my mentor on hand to help me interpret what I'm seeing. Things seem to be going generally well, but I have nagging feelings that I may be missing some vital clues for things that could have an undesirable effect down the road.
One of the guys I met while in class, who was a second year beekeeper, said that he found it easier to take digital pictures of each frame during inspection and then he could review them at a more leisurely pace at his computer rather than making quick interpretations at the hive itself. Having been through a couple of inspections now, I think his method is an excellent one.
The other benefit to this is that I can show pictures to other bee people and thus get other opinions without having to troop them to my hives. I see a digital camera in my near future!
On a separate note, I have been surprised to find a slight up-tick in the bee's aggressiveness in the past couple of days. The vast majority remain too busy to pay me any mind, but I've sustained two more stings in the past two days from single bees who have gotten it into their little heads that I am a pin cushion for planting their business ends. Ironically, both stings occurred, like the one mentioned in my last posting, while I was sitting a short distance from the hive, watching them do their thing. Out of nowhere, individual bees came barreling straight at me to plant their little darts into (a) my finger and (b) my back.
If only the little buggers could understand...I'm only here to help! Sadly, they don't, and so our tally grows...
...Sting count, to date: 6
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Movin' and Shufflin'
Last I left you, I was in a quandary about what to do about my dead Texas queen. I was faced with two choices...re-queening or combining the Lone Star girls with my other established hive. Because it would take some time to secure a new queen - time that the existing bees could ill afford to lose - I decided on the combining hives route. An interesting little bit of bee trivia was my chief concern in prolonging their queenlessness.
Remember I mentioned how the queen has a small arsenal of pheromones that she gives off to perpetuate certain behaviors within the hive? Such as her "happy and contented" whiff? Well she gives off another chemical cocktail that has a pretty amazing effect on all of her daughters. You see, worker bees are equiped with reproductive apparatus of their own, but it is kept in check by this particular pheromone. Their egg producing organs remain undeveloped as long as there is a healthy queen in the hive. If the queen dies and this pheromone is absent, some workers can become functioning egg layers themselves. There is a small catch, however. Because they have never mated with a drone, they are incapable of laying fertilized eggs. Unfertilized eggs become drones - even when layed by the queen. (The queen will do this on purpose to create a requisite number of drones for the hive) The workers cannot lay eggs that will grow up to become worker bees or queens.
All these workers know is that they suddenly find themselves having this maternal instinct to begin depositing eggs in cells. The problem with this is a hive cannot survive on party boys alone - someone has to cover that food thing - and so the colony will soon die out. Not a good outcome. So of course, this was my concern if I let these girls go another week without a queen.
The preferred method for combining two hives is to lay a single sheet of newspaper on top of the hive box receiving the transplants after cutting several small slits in the paper. You then take the hive box containing the new permanent house guests and set it on top of the newspaper. Over the next several hours or days, the scent of all the bees will intermingle, slowly convincing them all that they are just one big happy family. They will chew away the newspaper, and voila! One big hive. And this is just what I did. As of this writing, it has been four days and all seems well, judging from the activity at the hive entrance.
My next issue was rectifying the "one hive" situation. I really did not want to go forward with just one Super Hive. Fortunately, Pat Haskell, my bee class instructor, told me that Dane Hannum, another instructor from the class had "nucs" to sell. For the uninitiated, a nuc is an itty-bitty hive made up of 4 or 5 frames, 3 or 4 pounds of bees and a queen. The frames, in Dane's case, were fully drawn out and loaded with capped brood and honey. The perfect start for a new hive. All I needed to do was install the frames from the nuc into my 10-frame hive body, and add the additional frames on which the bees could expand their holdings. After driving to Arlington to pick up the nuc, I got them tucked in with no trouble. I even did it in short pants and a short sleeved shirt. I've come a long way in suppressing that primordial fear I mentioned in an earlier posting. I've been fortunate in not seeing my bees in a bad mood to this point.
As an aside, I 've spent a lot of time in and around my hives in the last month, and since my experience of the first day, when the girls pointedly showed me their defensive capabilities, I have not had the misfortune of being stung since. Until today. Ironically, it happened not while I was ripping open their home or blasting smoke through every orifice in the hive. No, I was sitting about 10 feet away, in my lawn chair, watching the girls winging about on a beautiful day. Something I've done about a hundred times. Today, though, I lowered my arm down to my side and put the squeeze on a hapless wretch who was drawn to the peculiar pheromones of my armpit. ZAP! She got me. And so you see, boys and girls, one cannot become too cocky about this business. One must always think that one enters the bee's world at the bee's pleasure and one must be thankful that they are a very welcoming, or at least oblivious sort most of the time.
NEW FEATURE!!! Sting count, to date: 4
Remember I mentioned how the queen has a small arsenal of pheromones that she gives off to perpetuate certain behaviors within the hive? Such as her "happy and contented" whiff? Well she gives off another chemical cocktail that has a pretty amazing effect on all of her daughters. You see, worker bees are equiped with reproductive apparatus of their own, but it is kept in check by this particular pheromone. Their egg producing organs remain undeveloped as long as there is a healthy queen in the hive. If the queen dies and this pheromone is absent, some workers can become functioning egg layers themselves. There is a small catch, however. Because they have never mated with a drone, they are incapable of laying fertilized eggs. Unfertilized eggs become drones - even when layed by the queen. (The queen will do this on purpose to create a requisite number of drones for the hive) The workers cannot lay eggs that will grow up to become worker bees or queens.
All these workers know is that they suddenly find themselves having this maternal instinct to begin depositing eggs in cells. The problem with this is a hive cannot survive on party boys alone - someone has to cover that food thing - and so the colony will soon die out. Not a good outcome. So of course, this was my concern if I let these girls go another week without a queen.
The preferred method for combining two hives is to lay a single sheet of newspaper on top of the hive box receiving the transplants after cutting several small slits in the paper. You then take the hive box containing the new permanent house guests and set it on top of the newspaper. Over the next several hours or days, the scent of all the bees will intermingle, slowly convincing them all that they are just one big happy family. They will chew away the newspaper, and voila! One big hive. And this is just what I did. As of this writing, it has been four days and all seems well, judging from the activity at the hive entrance.
My next issue was rectifying the "one hive" situation. I really did not want to go forward with just one Super Hive. Fortunately, Pat Haskell, my bee class instructor, told me that Dane Hannum, another instructor from the class had "nucs" to sell. For the uninitiated, a nuc is an itty-bitty hive made up of 4 or 5 frames, 3 or 4 pounds of bees and a queen. The frames, in Dane's case, were fully drawn out and loaded with capped brood and honey. The perfect start for a new hive. All I needed to do was install the frames from the nuc into my 10-frame hive body, and add the additional frames on which the bees could expand their holdings. After driving to Arlington to pick up the nuc, I got them tucked in with no trouble. I even did it in short pants and a short sleeved shirt. I've come a long way in suppressing that primordial fear I mentioned in an earlier posting. I've been fortunate in not seeing my bees in a bad mood to this point.
As an aside, I 've spent a lot of time in and around my hives in the last month, and since my experience of the first day, when the girls pointedly showed me their defensive capabilities, I have not had the misfortune of being stung since. Until today. Ironically, it happened not while I was ripping open their home or blasting smoke through every orifice in the hive. No, I was sitting about 10 feet away, in my lawn chair, watching the girls winging about on a beautiful day. Something I've done about a hundred times. Today, though, I lowered my arm down to my side and put the squeeze on a hapless wretch who was drawn to the peculiar pheromones of my armpit. ZAP! She got me. And so you see, boys and girls, one cannot become too cocky about this business. One must always think that one enters the bee's world at the bee's pleasure and one must be thankful that they are a very welcoming, or at least oblivious sort most of the time.
NEW FEATURE!!! Sting count, to date: 4
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
New Trouble with the Star Crossed Hive
I was finally able to do a first inspection today on the second hive. The Texas girls. Well, if they didn't have bad luck, they'd have no luck at all, as the saying goes. Turns out they had never released the queen. The candy plug was still in place and her dessicated remains were inside her cage. I'm assuming that she must have succumbed to the rigors of her travels north from Texas with an empty food can and she must have checked out early on because it appeared the candy plug had hardly been touched. I guess that's one way to eliminate possible Africanized DNA.
The bees themselves had given every indication of good health and cheer by their activities at the entrance. Constant traffic with leg pouches crammed with pollen was an everyday occurance. On inspecting the frames, they had drawn out six frames about 75% with the other four empty of cells. Obviously, there was no brood and no capped honey as well. Their efforts had not had the inspiration provided by a queen and her magic pheromones.
The obvious downside to all of this is that I'm now in a bit of a time crunch to ensure that this hive can still prosper or survive at all. Without eggs, they can't even make a new queen. The twelve days wasted is 12 more days off of the lives of the existing bees. Remember, workers only live 5 or 6 weeks. Given that the hive population will drop anyway in the three weeks it takes for the first eggs to turn into new bees, the youngest bees currently in the hive will be nearly five weeks old when the next generation can crawl out of their cells to take their place. And that's if I can get a queen immediately.
Another possibility I thought of is combining these bees and frames with the other hive, thus boosting the first hive's population and providing it with additional drawn frames. Of course this will mean I'll be down to just one hive for the year, but maybe it will pay dividends in the form of increased productivity this spring and perhaps more honey to show for it over the course of the year. I'll have to ask someone about that.
I posted my dilemma on the talk group set up for all of us newbies and can only hope someone can come forward to sell me a new queen and maybe even some frames with capped brood. Frames with capped brood will cut the time for some young blood to appear in the hive. Either way, this course of action doesn't seem to alleviate the reality that this hive will be behind the eight ball for this year. This is one of those times where experience would pay off but I have a very short supply of that!
This all makes me more upset with the Post Office for taking 6 days to get a priority package of bees to me. Maybe this is an isolated occurance but it sure seems to have doomed the success of my second hive. I should have refused them when I saw so many dead bees in the bottom of the package but in my enthusiasm I didn't, and so I lost the chance to make a claim on the insurance I had purchased. One thing is for sure, I'll be doing all my future purchases of bees in person or through the club - like I should have done in the first place.
The bees themselves had given every indication of good health and cheer by their activities at the entrance. Constant traffic with leg pouches crammed with pollen was an everyday occurance. On inspecting the frames, they had drawn out six frames about 75% with the other four empty of cells. Obviously, there was no brood and no capped honey as well. Their efforts had not had the inspiration provided by a queen and her magic pheromones.
The obvious downside to all of this is that I'm now in a bit of a time crunch to ensure that this hive can still prosper or survive at all. Without eggs, they can't even make a new queen. The twelve days wasted is 12 more days off of the lives of the existing bees. Remember, workers only live 5 or 6 weeks. Given that the hive population will drop anyway in the three weeks it takes for the first eggs to turn into new bees, the youngest bees currently in the hive will be nearly five weeks old when the next generation can crawl out of their cells to take their place. And that's if I can get a queen immediately.
Another possibility I thought of is combining these bees and frames with the other hive, thus boosting the first hive's population and providing it with additional drawn frames. Of course this will mean I'll be down to just one hive for the year, but maybe it will pay dividends in the form of increased productivity this spring and perhaps more honey to show for it over the course of the year. I'll have to ask someone about that.
I posted my dilemma on the talk group set up for all of us newbies and can only hope someone can come forward to sell me a new queen and maybe even some frames with capped brood. Frames with capped brood will cut the time for some young blood to appear in the hive. Either way, this course of action doesn't seem to alleviate the reality that this hive will be behind the eight ball for this year. This is one of those times where experience would pay off but I have a very short supply of that!
This all makes me more upset with the Post Office for taking 6 days to get a priority package of bees to me. Maybe this is an isolated occurance but it sure seems to have doomed the success of my second hive. I should have refused them when I saw so many dead bees in the bottom of the package but in my enthusiasm I didn't, and so I lost the chance to make a claim on the insurance I had purchased. One thing is for sure, I'll be doing all my future purchases of bees in person or through the club - like I should have done in the first place.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Another Inspection
After returning from my Florida trip on Friday, it had been just shy of two weeks since I had inspected the first hive. Saturday was a little overcast early on and a tad breezy, but I figured it was as good a time as any to see what the girls had been up to. I noticed that they had emptied the hive top feeder of syrup again (their second batch) and yet they seemed to be going great guns with pollen and nectar at the hive entrance. I was anticipating evidence of some major doings upon opening up the hive. Well, I wasn't disappointed!
I smoked them and opened things up. They were amazingly calm. Very few came up to protest the intrusion and the whole time I looked things over they seemed largely oblivious to me. What nice little bees! They had built a little burr comb on the tops of some frames but the vast majority of their work had been spent drawing out some really beautiful comb on the foundation. Seven frames were fully covered on both sides and on two others the bees had made a good start adding more. On five or six frames I saw large, circular patterns of capped brood, pollen and, in the upper corners, gorgeous, white-capped honey. These girls looked like they knew what they were doing!
On frame four I saw her majesty herself, scrambling around with her conspicuous blue dot and oh, so beautiful, at least as far as bugs go. You can see her for yourself in the photo shown below. My son-in-law Dave Phillips took the pictures with his digital camera and to illustrate how passive these girls were, he basically came right up to the hive to snap the pictures in his "street clothes." They never so much as landed on him. I don't know, maybe it had something to do with that ganja weed I used in my smoker. Just kiddin' ma, I did no such thing!
All kidding aside though, I couldn't figure out why they would be so docile now that they actually had brood and honey to defend. They had been more aggressive when I hived them (you may recall I was stung three times). Of course, I'm not complaining. I happen to like laid back bees.
It was just fascinating to examine the frames, covered with thousands of bees, most of which seemed to be carrying out their little jobs despite the fact that they had just experienced what I would think to be a major disruption to their routine. I mean, think about it, one minute they are working diligently away in the dark, hurrying along on their appointed rounds when suddenly smoke begins billowing in from everywhere. Then the lid to their home is lifted off by our hero to bathe the whole place in blinding light. Their hive is dismantled piece by piece, lifted in the air and stared at by this impossibly large something who most likely isn't giving off any pleasant-smelling pheromones. And despite it all, they continue to do the hive's business, largely oblivious to the aforementioned hero. Quite remarkable!
The key, as any beekeeper knows is working below their radar. In other words, the more gentle you are when rifling through their world, the less likely the vast majority of them will even take notice. Anybody who has ever, as a child, kicked an ant mound and had seemingly millions of ants boil out to protest the intrusion at the mere entrance to their nest will surely find the passivity of the honey bee nothing short of extraordinary. The few bees that do get their knickers in a knot must be quite frustrated indeed. I picture them flying around, hopelessly trying to raise the alarm to their sisters. Shouting in bee talk "Hey!!! What the hell is wrong with all of you! Do you realize what is going on?!?!" Only to have the multitudes go on about their business blissfully ignorant to any danger. A very nice circumstance for the beekeeper!
The other rather obvious thing to marvel at when inspecting the frames is the terrific skills the bees employ in building their hive. The picture below illustrates the precisely engineered comb on which everything depends. Their young are raised in the comb cells and all their supply of food is stored there too. Not only is the hexagon design incredibly durable and strong, it is even built with the mouth at a slight upward angle to prevent the nectar and honey from running out. Water is stored here too. The bees use water to cool the hive and dilute the honey for feeding it to the brood. Another extraordinary thing is that if you look at the cells in burr comb straight on in such a way as to see the walls of the cell behind them, you will see that they are offset to provide maximum strength. In other words, the walls of the front cell do not line up with the walls of the cell behind it. You will instead see the bottoms of the rear cell forming a kind of 'X' to form a rigid cross member on which the front cell can be supported. Whether through evolution, a plan of God's or both, bees are incredibly adapted to do what they do. It's humbling to think about.
I smoked them and opened things up. They were amazingly calm. Very few came up to protest the intrusion and the whole time I looked things over they seemed largely oblivious to me. What nice little bees! They had built a little burr comb on the tops of some frames but the vast majority of their work had been spent drawing out some really beautiful comb on the foundation. Seven frames were fully covered on both sides and on two others the bees had made a good start adding more. On five or six frames I saw large, circular patterns of capped brood, pollen and, in the upper corners, gorgeous, white-capped honey. These girls looked like they knew what they were doing!
On frame four I saw her majesty herself, scrambling around with her conspicuous blue dot and oh, so beautiful, at least as far as bugs go. You can see her for yourself in the photo shown below. My son-in-law Dave Phillips took the pictures with his digital camera and to illustrate how passive these girls were, he basically came right up to the hive to snap the pictures in his "street clothes." They never so much as landed on him. I don't know, maybe it had something to do with that ganja weed I used in my smoker. Just kiddin' ma, I did no such thing!
All kidding aside though, I couldn't figure out why they would be so docile now that they actually had brood and honey to defend. They had been more aggressive when I hived them (you may recall I was stung three times). Of course, I'm not complaining. I happen to like laid back bees.
It was just fascinating to examine the frames, covered with thousands of bees, most of which seemed to be carrying out their little jobs despite the fact that they had just experienced what I would think to be a major disruption to their routine. I mean, think about it, one minute they are working diligently away in the dark, hurrying along on their appointed rounds when suddenly smoke begins billowing in from everywhere. Then the lid to their home is lifted off by our hero to bathe the whole place in blinding light. Their hive is dismantled piece by piece, lifted in the air and stared at by this impossibly large something who most likely isn't giving off any pleasant-smelling pheromones. And despite it all, they continue to do the hive's business, largely oblivious to the aforementioned hero. Quite remarkable!
The key, as any beekeeper knows is working below their radar. In other words, the more gentle you are when rifling through their world, the less likely the vast majority of them will even take notice. Anybody who has ever, as a child, kicked an ant mound and had seemingly millions of ants boil out to protest the intrusion at the mere entrance to their nest will surely find the passivity of the honey bee nothing short of extraordinary. The few bees that do get their knickers in a knot must be quite frustrated indeed. I picture them flying around, hopelessly trying to raise the alarm to their sisters. Shouting in bee talk "Hey!!! What the hell is wrong with all of you! Do you realize what is going on?!?!" Only to have the multitudes go on about their business blissfully ignorant to any danger. A very nice circumstance for the beekeeper!
The other rather obvious thing to marvel at when inspecting the frames is the terrific skills the bees employ in building their hive. The picture below illustrates the precisely engineered comb on which everything depends. Their young are raised in the comb cells and all their supply of food is stored there too. Not only is the hexagon design incredibly durable and strong, it is even built with the mouth at a slight upward angle to prevent the nectar and honey from running out. Water is stored here too. The bees use water to cool the hive and dilute the honey for feeding it to the brood. Another extraordinary thing is that if you look at the cells in burr comb straight on in such a way as to see the walls of the cell behind them, you will see that they are offset to provide maximum strength. In other words, the walls of the front cell do not line up with the walls of the cell behind it. You will instead see the bottoms of the rear cell forming a kind of 'X' to form a rigid cross member on which the front cell can be supported. Whether through evolution, a plan of God's or both, bees are incredibly adapted to do what they do. It's humbling to think about.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
A Second Package
Well, it's been awhile since my last posting so I'm a little behind. My wife and I made a trip down to Florida to help our daughter Emilie make the transition from college sophomore to working in Costa Rica for the summer. On my return, the bees seemed to be doing fine, just work, work, working away. Probably didn't even miss me! Prior to our trip though, I did get my second package installed. And it is that experience I'll recount for you this time around.
Back in November or so, when I began to get into this whole thing, I read that packages of bees and queens would be at a premium if one waited until spring to order. Not wishing to be left out, I jumped right in to place an order. I decided to go with Wilbanks in Georgia first. A reputable outfit, I called and got the impression I may have been a tad bit early for placing an order. They did say that they would send along a catalog and price sheet though, and so I waited with eager anticipation. Having not joined BANV as yet, I had no way of knowing that Wilbanks were the folks who supplied bees to the club. In fact, it was typical for two packages to be reserved for students in BANV's beginner classes with their annual order of some 900 packages. As I say, I didn't know this and when I grew impatient after a couple of weeks waiting for their catalog, I figured I would order from someone else. Next on my list was a company in Texas called BeeWeaver. They sent me a nice color catalog touting their mite-free bees - well, that's a good trait, I thought - so I picked up the phone and ordered up a package right then and there. I was told that they would be delivered by the USPS in April.
It was shortly after this that I joined BANV and was told of my grave error in ordering bees from Texas. Turns out that Texas has been included in the territory of the Africanized Honey Bee, the alleged "killer bees" of media lore. These bees are not actually deadly, but they are far more ferocious in defending their hive than European Honey Bees. Meaning that several hundred or even several thousand of these girls may decide to chase you for long distances just for the chance to make your life a lot more painful. Beekeepers work very hard to avoid having this breed of bee introduced into their area for obvious reasons.
This was the concern of the folks I met at BANV and I was told that I would have to "re-queen" at some point after I installed the package to ensure that any Africanized DNA would disappear with the new brood. This process involves plucking the old queen out of the hive, and replacing her with a nice Italian girl with a better temper.
Anyways, to make a long story short, I ended up getting just one package through the club's Wilbanks order and the BeeWeaver bees were to arrive a week later. The target date was April 18, but as that day came and went and several more days to boot, I was getting nervous. On Friday, the 20th, I called BeeWeaver and was told my package was going out that day via Priority Mail. I knew I was leaving for Florida just a week later, so I kept my fingers crossed. Well, Monday went by. No bees. Then Tuesday and Wednesday. I called the Post Office and was told that Priority Mail didn't gaurantee 3-4 day delivery! Terrific! I began calculating how I would deal with a package of bees that arrived with no time to hive them before I left for my trip. Of course, the weather turned colder and wetter as Thursday dawned and I finally got the call from the Post Office that my little killers had arrived. Forecasts for Friday indicated thunderstorms, so it appeared I had a very small window available to get these girls into their new home. Running home from work at lunchtime.
The bees had been through the mill. There were perhaps 2 inches of dead bees in the bottom of the package (they stunk to high heaven) and as it turned out their feeder can was drained dry. I had no time to lose. About 11:30, I raced home and got everything quickly prepared. I had made a gallon of sugar syrup that morning and prepared a pollen patty. Thankfully, the queen appeared fine when I pulled her cage out. I stapled her cage to the top bar this time to try and avoid the burr comb that was built the last time around. I then dumped some bees onto her cage. With all the dead bees in the package, I was reluctant to just dump the rest of the bees into the hive, so instead, I removed 4 or 5 frames and sat the package into the hive with the opening up and closed everything. I figured this way the healthy bees would come out, leaving their dead sisters in the package.
This stategy worked, because when I checked the hive on Friday, the bees were out of the package and all over the frames. I removed the reeking package and replaced the frames so the girls could get going on drawing comb and closed the hive up again. Almost immediately I noticed many, many bees flying around the entrance. So many, so soon, that I got a little panicky that maybe the other hive was launching a full scale assault or that, in fact, I did have on my hands a warrior clan of Afrika Korps bees. I called Tom Merz, the president of BANV for some guidance. He told me that they were most likely bees from the new package doing orientation flights on the hive and that I didn't have anything to worry about. I can assume this to be the case, because on my return from Florida, both hives exhibited the normal activity of bees flying in and out of their respective hives, blithely ignoring each other. I'm also happy to say that to this point, I haven't noticed anything unusual in the way of aggressiveness with the new batch. Maybe they would rather make pasta...
Next up: a second inspection of hive number 1.
Back in November or so, when I began to get into this whole thing, I read that packages of bees and queens would be at a premium if one waited until spring to order. Not wishing to be left out, I jumped right in to place an order. I decided to go with Wilbanks in Georgia first. A reputable outfit, I called and got the impression I may have been a tad bit early for placing an order. They did say that they would send along a catalog and price sheet though, and so I waited with eager anticipation. Having not joined BANV as yet, I had no way of knowing that Wilbanks were the folks who supplied bees to the club. In fact, it was typical for two packages to be reserved for students in BANV's beginner classes with their annual order of some 900 packages. As I say, I didn't know this and when I grew impatient after a couple of weeks waiting for their catalog, I figured I would order from someone else. Next on my list was a company in Texas called BeeWeaver. They sent me a nice color catalog touting their mite-free bees - well, that's a good trait, I thought - so I picked up the phone and ordered up a package right then and there. I was told that they would be delivered by the USPS in April.
It was shortly after this that I joined BANV and was told of my grave error in ordering bees from Texas. Turns out that Texas has been included in the territory of the Africanized Honey Bee, the alleged "killer bees" of media lore. These bees are not actually deadly, but they are far more ferocious in defending their hive than European Honey Bees. Meaning that several hundred or even several thousand of these girls may decide to chase you for long distances just for the chance to make your life a lot more painful. Beekeepers work very hard to avoid having this breed of bee introduced into their area for obvious reasons.
This was the concern of the folks I met at BANV and I was told that I would have to "re-queen" at some point after I installed the package to ensure that any Africanized DNA would disappear with the new brood. This process involves plucking the old queen out of the hive, and replacing her with a nice Italian girl with a better temper.
Anyways, to make a long story short, I ended up getting just one package through the club's Wilbanks order and the BeeWeaver bees were to arrive a week later. The target date was April 18, but as that day came and went and several more days to boot, I was getting nervous. On Friday, the 20th, I called BeeWeaver and was told my package was going out that day via Priority Mail. I knew I was leaving for Florida just a week later, so I kept my fingers crossed. Well, Monday went by. No bees. Then Tuesday and Wednesday. I called the Post Office and was told that Priority Mail didn't gaurantee 3-4 day delivery! Terrific! I began calculating how I would deal with a package of bees that arrived with no time to hive them before I left for my trip. Of course, the weather turned colder and wetter as Thursday dawned and I finally got the call from the Post Office that my little killers had arrived. Forecasts for Friday indicated thunderstorms, so it appeared I had a very small window available to get these girls into their new home. Running home from work at lunchtime.
The bees had been through the mill. There were perhaps 2 inches of dead bees in the bottom of the package (they stunk to high heaven) and as it turned out their feeder can was drained dry. I had no time to lose. About 11:30, I raced home and got everything quickly prepared. I had made a gallon of sugar syrup that morning and prepared a pollen patty. Thankfully, the queen appeared fine when I pulled her cage out. I stapled her cage to the top bar this time to try and avoid the burr comb that was built the last time around. I then dumped some bees onto her cage. With all the dead bees in the package, I was reluctant to just dump the rest of the bees into the hive, so instead, I removed 4 or 5 frames and sat the package into the hive with the opening up and closed everything. I figured this way the healthy bees would come out, leaving their dead sisters in the package.
This stategy worked, because when I checked the hive on Friday, the bees were out of the package and all over the frames. I removed the reeking package and replaced the frames so the girls could get going on drawing comb and closed the hive up again. Almost immediately I noticed many, many bees flying around the entrance. So many, so soon, that I got a little panicky that maybe the other hive was launching a full scale assault or that, in fact, I did have on my hands a warrior clan of Afrika Korps bees. I called Tom Merz, the president of BANV for some guidance. He told me that they were most likely bees from the new package doing orientation flights on the hive and that I didn't have anything to worry about. I can assume this to be the case, because on my return from Florida, both hives exhibited the normal activity of bees flying in and out of their respective hives, blithely ignoring each other. I'm also happy to say that to this point, I haven't noticed anything unusual in the way of aggressiveness with the new batch. Maybe they would rather make pasta...
Next up: a second inspection of hive number 1.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
