Linda's Bees

A Bee-zy Sting-filled Day

2013-05-20T22:36:00.003-04:00

This morning started with the dentist - no fun ever. I had planned to go to the Chastain Conservancy to check on the bees there after my visit to the dentist.

I arrived at Chastain to discover that in my stress over the dentist, I had left both my camera and, more importantly, my smoker at home. I live about 20 minutes from the site so I decided to go into the bees anyway, using hive drapes and trusting in my slow movements to keep the bees calm.

First I opened the drone-laying Don Kuchenmeister hive. They have a queen cell but no queen yet so for insurance I wanted to move another frame of brood and eggs from our nuc that lives at Chastain. I removed a frame to make room for the brood and eggs and promptly was stung on my left hand. I covered the hive with drapes and opened the nuc.

The nuc is full of bees. It has rained a lot over the past few days and the bees were none too happy with my intrusion. A bee flew under my bee jacket and stung me through my t shirt. Then as I removed the frame, checked to make sure I wasn't taking the queen, and shook most of the bees off of the frame, I got attacked full force. I usually wear hiking pants to inspect the hives - they are loose and I rarely get stung through them. This morning I had on jeans and got five stings on my legs during this process.

I closed up the nuc and headed for home, put on my work clothes and headed for my office (I do have a real job!).

I had a break in the afternoon and came home to walk my dogs. I thought I might stop by the Morningside garden to see if the pesticide kill is still ongoing. I stopped and walked up to the hive - no protective gear - all in my work clothes. I walked up to the hive as I often do in my street clothes and took a photo with my phone. There are a lot of new dead bees so the kill is still happening.

One of the bees really didn't appreciate my presence. She began head butting me on the side of my head, the back, and finally she landed on my nose right by my nostril where she planted her stinger.

I've gotten stung once before in the nose and it was the worse sting ever. This one matched it. I began to sneeze and sneezed once per second all the way to the car. In the car I sneezed all the way to my house where I took Benadryl and put ice on my nose!

Then, lucky, lucky me, my dear friend Julia called me to tell me that she was going to pick up a swarm at Atlantic Station. She doesn't want/need it and wants to give it to me. I was thrilled but I wasn't going to be home from work until around 8 PM. Julia said she would leave the swarm in my backyard and I could install it when I got home.

Julia sent me photos of the swarm collection. Atlantic Station is a pedestrian mall in Atlanta near Midtown. Here's what she found when she arrived:

I'm not sure if the blockade was for the bees or for something else.

You can see the bees on the center part bench below. The are clustered on one front leg.

Here they are up close:

Julia brushed and cajoled them into a large file box that she covered with screen.

At my house when I arrived at 8, I found the bees clustered together in the box - about the size of one cat.

I set up a two box 8 frame medium hive with the insert in the screened bottom board. I shook the swarm into the hive:

Julia, with all the brushing, wasn't 100% sure that the queen would have escaped without injury, so she suggested that I put in a frame of brood and eggs. I took one from the package hive in my apiary and put it into the hive box before shaking the bees. And then I got another sting on my finger.

While I was out there, even though it was getting late, I decided to check and see if the Mississippi queen I had installed in a nuc was released. I opened the nuc and to my dismay, my nuc making was unsuccessful. Most of the bees had returned to their original hives (I should have closed it up for 24 hours, but I didn't) and the queen was in her cage surrounded by a handful of bees, but not released.

I pulled the cage out, jumped into the car, drove to Ron's and put the queen cage in his queenless hive that we gave brood and eggs to on Saturday. The bees seemed eager to meet her. Her queen cage is the plastic item at about the center of the picture with bees crawling all over it.

And I got my last sting of the day....the best news of the day was that now that I have developed a tolerance for bee stings, my nose stayed its normal size for the rest of my day in the office!

Truth be told, I get stung all the time. Jeff says that if I would just wear gloves......, but in fact I rarely get stung more than once in a round of inspecting five or six hives. Today was rather constant - a bee-zy, sting-filled day.

Pesticide Kill - Sad Story

2013-05-19T20:49:00.000-04:00

Jeff and I checked on the Morningside hive on Saturday. It was exactly a week ago that I discovered the pesticide kill in front of the hive. I had been back there for the next three days after the discovery and there were no more new dead bees.

But on Saturday, thousands of new dead bees were in front of the hive.

What this means is in my mind one of two things:

1. Someone is spraying their garden on Thursday or Friday and the bees are getting into their flowers and dying. We've had enough rain that after the spraying, the rain washes off most of the poison, but the neighbor who sprays did it again this Thursday or Friday, bringing a whole new wave of thousands of deaths.

2. The bees are getting nectar from Carolina Jasmine which is blooming in force right now and is poisonous to bees.

The first is more likely than the second. If the second were the case, then there wouldn't be these gaps in bee deaths.

I'm sick about it - my best hive being brought to its knees buy someone's uncaring act of poisoning their garden.

Jeff and I took the whole hive apart again. No pesticide smell, but fewer bees, although this is quite a hive.

Michael Young on Encaustic Painting

2013-05-17T13:37:00.001-04:00

The fun lecture I went to at Young Harris was on encaustic painting with Michael Young, a delightful beekeeper from Ireland who is frequently a speaker at Young Harris. Encaustic painting incorporates heat and wax to make paintings on photo-type paper.

It's hard to find the materials. Michael Young said he got a kit at Michael's Craft Store, but they apparently no longer carry it. Here are some retailers who carry encaustic paints.

At the end he polished the finished product with a cloth. In Ireland, he said he would use a yellow duster (?) From searching the Internet, these seem to be very soft 100% cotton pieces of yellow fabric, like flannel without any nap.

Below are some photos to show you what Michael did.

Supposedly below is a slide show so, if the slide show is there for you (Google+ no longer has slideshow capabilities for Picasa) click on the photo to see the pictures larger and with captions. I'll look for another service for slide shows since Google has let me down.

When I Woke Up This Morning, Swarms were on My Mind

2013-05-16T23:14:00.003-04:00

Late yesterday afternoon I got an email from a man asking if I wanted a swarm over near Northlake in Atlanta. The swarm was at an office complex called Northlake Commons. I didn't see the email until too late last night to reply so I called the man first thing this morning.

Yes, the bees were still there. Yes, he'd like me to come and get them.

I threw my bee gear in the car and headed over to his location (about a half block from where my daughter Valerie lives).

The swarm was on a Japanese maple in front of the office building.

I felt so lucky it was still there. I spread a sheet on the ground under the swarm branch. The tree was on a hill beside concrete steps, so I had to put the sheet down the hillside.

The swarm had originated from a hive that lives in a column on the front of the building. Even as the swarm hung on the Japanese maple, bees were continuing life in the hive in the column and I watched them fly in and out from the base while I waited for the swarm to gather in my nuc box.

The column is hollow around a metal central pole so there is room inside for the bees to live, but I expect they have to swarm every year to cope with the space limitations.

Because of the location of the swarm, I couldn't just shake it into the nuc box. I had brought a plastic file box that was the size of a banker's box, so I shook the bees into that first and then poured them into the nuc box. It took about three shakes to get them all.

Then because the queen was in the nuc box, the bees processed into the box in an orderly way over about 45 minutes.

When they got to this point, I brushed the rest of them into the box, closed up the box, gathered up the sheet and remaining bees and put all of it into my car.

When I got home, I hived them in a two medium box hive. I closed off the screened bottom board. At Young Harris, I asked Tom Seeley about the swarm we hived at Chastain that left the next day. He imagined that it might have been because they were put in a box with a screened bottom board, giving them too much light. So this box I closed off. As the summer goes on, I'll probably open it but by then the bees will have claimed this house for themselves.

Within a short period of time the bees were orienting, flying in and out, and seemed to be at home.

It's late in the nectar flow, but maybe these bees can get started and collect enough to get them through the winter.

Martha Stewart on How to Make a Lemon Honey Pot

2013-05-16T22:51:00.001-04:00

The National Honey Board posted this on FB today. It's Martha Stewart, so no description is needed because she will cover it all!

Click here to see Martha making a lemon honey pot and filling it with honey from her own bee hives!

Tom Seeley on Bees and Mites in the Forest

2013-05-14T22:14:00.002-04:00

At Young Harris, Dr. Tom Seeley gave a fascinating talk on bees and mites in the forest.

The first part of his talk was about how he finds bee trees in the forest. He risks life and limb to find these bees with only his dog to rescue him should he fall in the woods or off of a tree! He learned how to beeline with Edgell's book, The Bee Hunter.

He built a small box for putting a bee in and giving her sugar syrup. After the bee has recognized the box as a source of food, she returns to her hive and recruits her sisters to come join her at the nectar source. When a number of bees are feeding at the box, he closes the box up and moves it along the direction of the flight path they take when they leave. Then he stops and opens the box and keeps on in this manner until he is really close to the bee tree. Then his job is to look around and find where they are flying to.

He found wild bee trees in the Arnot Forest, owned by Cornell where he works. He had found 11 colonies in 1978. In 2002 there were 8 bee trees. In 2003 he put up bait hives (this is where he climbs trees with no spotter other than his dog) to catch swarms thrown by the eight bee trees. These bait hives had low mite counts.

He began to theorize about the low mite counts - what was it due to?

The bee trees were much farther apart than we typically keep hives in apiaries
This should cut down on drifting (one way to convey diseases between hives)
This should cut down on robbing
Hives not contaminated by other hives might develop Varroa mites that were not virulent

With our hive boxes, close together in apiaries, we subject our bees to drifting. We also have low and large entrances, promoting more robbing. We don't allow swarming, if we can help it. More Varroa may be directly due to large brood nests and less swarming.

In trees, bees coat the inside of the hollow tree with propolis. With our smooth sided hives, there isn't a need for propolizing the walls. Propolis may protect the health of the bees in trees.

Since honey bees live differently, Seeley concluded that increasing colony spacing might reduce horizontal disease transmission. Smaller hives and smaller colonies might result in less honey and more swarming but the pay-off would be better health. If tall hives are used this will increase winter survival in cold areas. Perhaps we should leave the inside walls of our hives rough to encourage the use of propolis to coat the hive interior, promoting better colony health. Finally more drone comb (in the wild bees build 15% of their comb for the raising of drone) might result in better queen mating although might increase the Varroa.

There is more Varroa in crowded colonies because the drift of bees helps spread the mites from colonies that have fast-reproducing mites.

His take-home messages were:

As beekeepers we help the survival of the Varroa mite by:

Sustaining susceptible bees by using miticides (stop using miticides!)
Fostering virulent mites by having apiaries (have colonies in isolation)
Fostering mites by preventing swarming (let colonies swarm)

There are feral bees and they are good for pollination, good for drone production, and through natural selection, resistance will arise in bees in the wild.

It was a great talk and I loved seeing photos of Seeley and his dog standing next to very tall bee trees. Wish you were there!

Sad Bee Mother Reports on a Sad Bee Event

2013-05-12T22:25:00.001-04:00

Today I had a special time for Mother's Day with one of my daughters getting a manicure and pedicure, something I NEVER do - it was so relaxing and a really lovely experience. But before the mani-pedi, I was rushing around checking on bees.

I checked on the bees at my house. The package installed this year was full of honey and needed a new box. I moved one of their drawn frames up into the new box and was happy about that one.

The drone layer hive was calm. They had not used the frame of brood and eggs I gave them on Thursday to make queen cells, so I believe they do have a queen, but I didn't go down deep into the box. I did give them a new box because they were also full in every box with nectar being capped.

The Patty swarm hive had not filled their most recent box, so I didn't change anything in their configuration.

I only had an hour before I needed to be ready to go with Sarah. Over the weekend, I had heard from the Stonehurst that they had dead bees all over their driveway. I had to be creative with my path to Stonehurst because with the gorgeous day in Atlanta, everyone was trying to drive to Piedmont Park and the inn is one block away from the park. But when I finally got there, the bees looked healthy but didn't need another box. I didn't see that as cause for worry because it has been so rainy - when could they have collected nectar?

So I had about fifteen minutes to stop by the Morningside garden hives on my way home. I had an extra box with me - it's a fabulous hive and was filling itself up with honey. I also had a ladder with me which is required for me now to get the seventh box off of the hive.

I got to the top of the hill where the bees are. Should be a great place for bees. There are blackberries blooming all the way down the hill and kudzu everywhere. Not to mention the organic community garden at the foot of the hill.

A terrible smell met me as I approached the hive. In front of the hive was a dinner plate size round of dead bees in a pile about 2 1/2 inches deep. Thousands of dead bees rotting in the sun. What I was smelling was dead bees.

I have corks as hive entry reducers on this hive and one of them was lying at the edge of the pile. I wanted to throw up, but what I did was cry.

This was my best hive. And here was a pile of dead bees the size of a swarm.

I got kind of paranoid and with the cork on the ground I thought someone had poisoned the bees - pulled out the cork and sprayed Raid or something into the hive.

But there were still bees flying in and out of the hive, crowding the entrance.

I didn't have time because Sarah was coming to pick me up for our Mother's Day fun, so, sad that I couldn't figure it out right then, I went home and went with Sarah for such a relaxing mani-pedi that I almost forgot about the death on the hill.

I couldn't quit thinking about the hive after I got home, so I called my friend Jerry Wallace who lives near me and is a great beekeeper. He came with me to open the hive around 7 (I figured with the foragers all home, we could see how bad the damage really was).

We took every box off all the way down to the bottom, figuring that if someone had poisoned the bees, we would be able to smell the Raid in the wood of the slatted rack. The slatted rack smelled normal, no poison residue, and I have a really good nose. Jerry nor I could smell anything. He pointed out that even if someone had sprayed a poison in the hive with the SBB and the slatted rack, the spray would have been deflected by the slats back through the SBB.

The most likely possibility, however, is that the bees have found a nectar source that has poison on it or in it. They don't know the difference and are taking it in and dying. So the hive is not out of the woods yet. I often anthropomorphize my bees, attributing wisdom and emotion to them. The fact of the matter is that they signal each other about nectar sources but aren't wise enough to notice that each bee who goes to that source comes back and dies in front of the hive. The bees may not yet stop collecting from the poison source.

Meanwhile there are at least two full boxes of honey in the hive and still thousands of bees - it's like a very strong hive after a swarm when you can hardly tell the hive swarmed because so many bees are still there.

So maybe there's hope for the future. Maybe they will switch to another nectar source. Maybe all is not lost and the Mother's Day Event may turn out better than I think.

Noah Macey at 16 is Youngest Master Beekeeper in the state of Georgia

2013-05-11T21:07:00.000-04:00

HOORAY! Noah, one of the best beekeepers I know, passed his qualifications and last night was awarded his Master Beekeeper. At age 16, he is the youngest person in the state ever to be awarded Master Beekeeper.

I've known Noah since he and his mom, Julia, and I started beekeeping together at the Blue Heron in 2008 or 2009. He was just 11 or 12 and already a great beekeeper. He has now read many books, read online, gone to and paid attention to conferences, built his own top bar hive, installed and raised many bee hives. And he got his Master Beekeeper on his first try - unlike lots of people who try for it. What a great guy!

Our club did really well. There were actually 11 Master Beekeeper certifications awarded this year and at least four of them were members or former members of our bee club.

Scotti Bozeman, a former member of MABA who has moved to Alabama, achieved her Journeyman certification and won a number of awards in the honey show. There were three Journeyman certifications and two of them came from our club - the second one was Jane Lu.

Julia, my beekeeping buddy and Noah's mom, won a blue ribbon for a gorgeous honey bee drawing with beautiful calligraphy labels.

And a member of our club, Ronnie Brannon, won best in show for his amazing close-up photograph of a honey bee on a rosemary blossom.

Metro Atlanta was well-represented in all areas at Young Harris - we had many people reach levels of certification, many honey show award winners, many attendees who came just to learn, and I taught there - low tech beekeeping - which was a lot of fun for me.

What to Study for Journeyman in Georgia

2013-05-11T20:45:00.003-04:00

Many apologies to the man who asked me a question at Young Harris today at the lunch break. We were leaving the cafeteria and this man came up to me and asked me a question that I failed to answer well. I thought he asked me where on my blog could he read about how to be an advanced beekeeper.

He did ask something about books he could read and I answered that the blog included a bookstore with books that I recommend. Then I said since I had gone through a lot of changes since I started, I guess he could just read the blog entries.

When we walked away, Noah said what the man was really asking was what books to study for the Journeyman exam. I feel so bad that I didn't respond to or understand what he was asking.

So if I had a chance to do it over (and if he happens to visit this blog), here's what I would study for Journeyman if I were taking it next year:

I'd read from cover to cover Mark Winston's The Biology of the Honey Bee
I'd read Honey Bee Democracy by Tom Seeley - not because swarm behavior is essential to the test but because in the process of explaining swarm behavior, Dr. Seeley covers a lot of the new knowledge about bees today.
I'd read Delaplane's First Lessons in Beekeeping since it's the official text
I'd go to EAS or another professional bee meeting this year and listen to the featured speakers rather than to what I thought would be fun to hear
I'd learn everything I could about queens, their biology and behavior
Even though I'd hate every minute of it, I'd learn everything I could about diseases - causes and treatments
I'd study the bee catalogs because they always put some weird instrument or another on the practical exam
And I'd study insects of other species than apis mellifera because I would know I'd have to identify a number of them! (and on that item you have to get 100% right)

Sorry, nice man, that I misunderstood what you were asking. Hope if you read this, that it helps.

Dave Tarpy on Good Queens

2013-05-10T23:06:00.002-04:00

At Young Harris this morning I heard a talk by Dave Tarpy on how good queens = good colonies. A study by Dennis vonEngelsdorp found that of hive deaths over the winter, 31% of the deaths were attributed to poor queens.

Dave Tarpy is on the left, Tom Seeley on the right (weren't we lucky to hear both of them!)

Tarpy pointed out that the queen serves many more functions in the hive than simply being a good egg laying machine. When the queen is a virgin, her QMP (queen mandibular pheromone) is low but after mating her QMP is high and stays high during her lifetime. Her emission of this pheromone does many things for the hive.

The presence of QMP in the hive suppresses laying worker tendencies
Workers are instantly attracted to QMP and want to touch the queen and disperse the QMP throughout the hive
QMP is a great attractor for drones - drones even have a special segment on their antennae just for smelling QMP
QMP includes 9-ODA as well as 9-HDA. The 9-HDA is needed to encourage the clustering of a swarm when the hive swarms
The queen also has a footprint pheromone which is emitted with each footfall. This pheromone inhibits queen cell production. The queen spreads this herself as she walks throughout the hive
If laying worker eggs are present, QMP influences the workers to cannibalize those worker-laid eggs.

It's crucial in the life of a hive that the hive have a really good queen. In the hives we run where we let the hives requeen themselves, there is a possibility that the bees will not make a good queen. I've always heard this but never understood why until today.

If the hive is queenless and desperate for a queen, then the beekeeper gives them a frame of brood and eggs to help them make a queen. The pheromone emitted by the eggs and young larvae is helpful in making the bees react as if they have a queen. But they are still desperate for a new queen as quickly as possible.

In the general development of a queen, the bees feed the egg and larvae only royal jelly until the cell is capped. If the egg is to be a worker, then after the third day, the bees feed the larvae bee bread and other things - not just royal jelly. With their goal being to replace the queen as quickly as possible, they may very well pick an egg or larvae that is older than 3 days and start feeding it royal jelly. In the interim, it may have had a couple of days of being fed like a worker, meaning that it has a lesser quality developmental start and will be less of a great queen.

Not only that, but a queen cell made from a four or five day larvae is going to emerge in 11 or 12 days rather than 16 (as in a one day egg). The bees may pick for speed of emergence rather than quality so that they get the new queen sooner than later. The newly emerged less-than queen will then kill the other queens in their cells and you the beekeeper are stuck with a less than wonderful queen.

To prevent this Dave says to check the hive five days after installing the brood and egg frame. If you find any capped queen cell at that time, remove that cell, leaving any still uncapped queen cells which were of course started with younger larvae and thus more likely to be successful queens.

That last paragraph was worth going to the conference to learn - thanks, Dave Tarpy.

Tom Seeley Speaking at MABA on Wednesday Night

2013-05-06T23:06:00.001-04:00

Tom Seeley is coming to town. (Author, scientist, and probably the world authority on how/why honey bees swarm) Really he's coming to Georgia to teach at the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute on Friday and Saturday. He agreed to stop and speak to our bee club on Wednesday night before driving up to Young Harris.

Unfortunately our bee club has this awful policy of just one person hosting the guest speaker for dinner. I wish we shared the policy of some other clubs such as the Macon County Beekeepers in Franklin, NC. When I went to speak to that club, they invited any club member who wished to join us to come to the restaurant with the speaker so I got to eat with ten wonderful beekeepers before going to give my talk.

The person who invited Tom Seeley to speak to our club literally said she was going to be selfish and not allow anyone else to join her in having dinner with him. I have to work right up until fifteen minutes before the meeting, so I wouldn't have been able to eat with him, even if anyone else were invited to go along. But think how inspiring it would be to new beekeepers to get a chance to sit and have a casual dinner conversation with him! Oh, well.

We have great speakers at Metro - Juliana Rangel who was Seeley's assistant in the Honey Bee Democracy study, Billy Davis, Keith Delaplane (comes every year) have all spoken to our club, for example. They each get taken out to dinner by a host before the meeting. I wish the policy would be changed to include anyone who would like to go and is willing to pay for their own dinner.

I am so excited because I will get to hear him speak on Wednesday night and then he is giving three talks at Young Harris. Luckily I'm not scheduled to teach in conflict with him so I'll be able to hear him give all three talks. I'll take notes and share them with all of you. Young Harris is usually sold out by now but they've increased registration to 150 this year, so there still may be some openings.

But, if you are in Atlanta and would like to hear Tom Seeley talk about bees, the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association meets at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in midtown at 7 PM on Wednesday night. He will be speaking in Day Hall - it's the first large building you come to after leaving the entry building. You don't have to be a member to come to the meeting and there's not a charge to attend. You can either park in the parking garage (there's a fee) or in the neighborhoods across Piedmont Road and walk over.

It's a great beekeeper opportunity! Join us.

There's a fabulous exhibit at the Garden right now of large creatures made of plants. Day Hall where Seeley will be speaking is just past the two cobra plant sculptures.

Here, for example, are the fish sculptures that both spew water and spin around, much to my granddaughter's delight:

And here is the monster - we call him the Gruffalo because he looks like the Gruffalo in a book Lark (my three year old granddaughter) likes:

Drone Layer Hive

2013-05-06T22:50:00.001-04:00

Yesterday we had about a 2 hour break of sunshine and blue sky - followed, of course, by grey sky, clouds and, you guessed it, more rain. It's raining now.

It was like the eye of the storm that I remember from hurricanes, growing up on the Mississippi river. We would take a breath during the eye as it passed over, but the hurricane would start again. I know it dates me, but the one I really remember was Hurricane Audrey in 1957. I remember the eye because of the startling contrast to what was going on just minutes before - I was little and this fierce weather really scared me. Hurricanes would devastate south Louisiana and then would come up the river to Natchez, MS where I lived. By then they would be weakened and still wreaked havoc.

In our small calm of sunny weather, I opened the split to see if the new queen were laying and I opened the drone layer hive to see if their new queen had succeeded. The split was doing great and had wall to wall cells of eggs and tiny c-shaped larvae.

The split was made on April 13, so the queen should have emerged around the 29th. So checking on the 5th might have been pushing it. We've had bad weather and I was concerned she might not have been able to go on a mating flight but she had and was working hard.

In the drone layer colony, I didn't find a laying queen. I did find a queen cell on the frame I had given them that had been ripped open from the side, indicating that a queen had emerged, and I found a queen cell opened appropriately at the tip. The last frame of brood and eggs I gave them was on April 15. Doing the math, at the longest, the queen should have emerged on May 1 and this was just May 5. We've had terrible weather for most of those days. So either she hasn't mated; she was lost in a storm; she has mated but hadn't started laying.

So as a panacea, as per Michael Bush, I took a frame of brood and eggs out of the Patty swarm hive and gave it to the drone layers.

I'm leaving for Young Harris on Thursday and this way they'll have a chance if they need it.

I'm stopping by Chastain tomorrow and taking a frame of brood and eggs out of our nuc there to put in the Don Kuchenmeister drone laying hive tomorrow if I have enough time.

It's a Rainout in Georgia

2013-05-04T13:44:00.000-04:00

It's not just a rainy night in Georgia - we have flood warnings for the next several days and the promise of three to four inches of rain as a possibility.

And we haven't even completed the fifth inning....so the game doesn't really count,

There's no re-play in the nectar flow like there might be in baseball.

It's also COLD to add insult to bee and beekeeper injury.

Jerry Wallace posted on the MABA Facebook page a couple of days ago a photo of blown down tulip poplar blossoms. Here's one blown down (among many, many, many) in my backyard right in front of my hives.

The blown down blossoms are multitudinous and are no longer blossoms from which the bees can draw nectar. The tulip poplar is only one of the spring flowers currently in bloom now.

All of our bees are being affected by the weather. Both they can't fly and when it's raining, blossoms are destroyed and the nectar available that particular rainy day is not reachable for the bees.

Also virgin queens can't mate in these conditions, so people who made splits in the last three weeks are not going to get well-mated queens, if the queen can mate at all - can you imagine being a drone trying to aim for the queen in rainy, windy conditions?

So time will tell sooner than later what the impact of our very wet and cold spring will have on the honey production for my area.

PS. I just heard on the news that the Atlanta Braves are rained out tonight for only the 17th rainout in the 16 year history of the Braves at Turner Stadium in Atlanta. So the bees and the Braves are suffering.

A Strange Find in SHB Trap

2013-05-02T21:18:00.001-04:00

Today I went to check on Sebastian's hives. We had put a new SHB trap on one of those hives on April 21. I wanted to see if the trap were working and I wanted to see if either hive needed a new box.

We are in the middle of the Atlanta nectar flow but the weather has beaten the tulip poplar blossoms off of the trees and hasn't really been conducive to nectar collection - cold nights, drippy days.

I pulled out the oil trap in the new SHB trap first and this is what I saw:

In case you are confused, those are NOT small hive beetles - those are earwigs drowned in oil. I didn't see a single small hive beetle either in the hive or in the trap!

The hive was doing fine but did not need a new box.

The second hive - the survivor there from last year - was doing great. There was lots of brood. As is true in hives with slatted racks, the queen had laid the frames from end to end. What I mean by that is that she had brood from the end bar on one end to the end bar on the other end!

Not only that, the frame below with solid brood on both sides was the last frame in the box, right by the side of the box.

The frame on the far side of the box was solid honey. I moved it out and replaced it with a foundationless frame. I then moved that honey filled frame into the middle of a new box fitted with foundationless frames. We'll see if they fill it up.

I then went to Stonehurst to see how the hive there was doing. Here's what the top box looked like:

I moved one of these up into an empty box and added a box to this hive. I also met the very nice new innkeepers, Paul and Lorrie. Caroline and Gary have retired so I'll get to know this new couple as I work the bees over there.

I also made a quick stop at Morningside to add a box to that fantastic hive. Here's how it looks now:

Hope and the Honey Bee

2013-04-27T17:10:00.000-04:00

This bee season I have learned something about hope and the honey bee through having two drone laying queens. The first drone layer was in a hive I purchased as a nuc last year whose queen was obviously not mated well enough to last beyond one year. The second drone layer was the package I bought from Don Kuchenmeister this year whose queen wasn't mated or was barely mated. She was never released (she wasn't sending out queen pheromone so the bees weren't interested) and when she was directly released, only laid drones.

In each hive I followed the standard recommendation that I put a frame of brood and eggs into the hive weekly until they successfully requeened themselves.

It may be unfair to attribute hope to the honey bee. After all, they are incredibly efficient creatures. Every bee has a job to do every day. When a different need arises, she moves to the next job. Each job she takes prepares her for the next until she becomes a forager and wears herself out (and dies) in the service of perpetuating the life of the hive as an organism.

For the honey bee, it is inefficient to use the resources of the hive taking care of drone brood once enough drones have been raised by the hive to contribute to the general environmental needs for mating with a queen in the general drone congregation area.

In The Wisdom of the Hive by Tom Seeley, he says that "the pheromones that provide the proximate stimulus for workers to refrain from laying eggs come mainly from the brood, not from the queen."(reviewed in Seeley 1985; see also Willis, Winston, and Slessor 1990).

So giving the hive a frame of brood and eggs brings a pheromone into the hive emitted from the brood that helps the hive know that there is the possibility of a queen or at least the perpetuation of the hive through new workers - even if there is not a current queen or if there is a queen that they don't like. In both of my drone laying hives, shortly after the first frame of brood and eggs was added to the hive, they began casting out the drone brood, ripping them out of their cells and throwing them in front of the hive for the birds to eat.

Here's what it looked like in my backyard. And here's what Noah and Julia photographed on a visit about a week after April 16 when I gave the Chastain drone-layer hive a frame of brood and eggs.

Look at all the dead drones in the grass at the front of the hive at Chastain!

At the point of these photos both in my home apiary and at Chastain, each hive had either killed the drone-layer or appeared to be planning to cast her out. The drone laying hive at my house had chewed off the wings of the drone laying queen in preparation for pushing her out of the hive. With the frame of brood and eggs, they know a good queen is now possible even though neither hive made a queen cell from the first frame of brood and eggs given to them.

Today at Chastain, there was some capped worker brood from the frame of brood and eggs that I gave them on the 16th. That brood will probably emerge in three or four days to help the hive, but they did not make a queen cell from those eggs. I had to transport the frame for 30 minutes. I put it in a nuc box but didn't really have an appropriate way to keep it warm and probably none of the eggs were good enough when they were finally in the hive about 45 minutes after they were removed from their home hive.

In my hive at home with the third added frame of brood and eggs, they now have four or five queen cells on the frame I most recently added and are probably now home free (assuming the emerging queen survives her mating flight). The hive at Chastain today got a good frame and I'll give them another next week and the next, if that is what it takes.

Michael Bush says it takes several weeks of weekly addition to make it work. He is a great fan of adding brood and eggs. Here's what he says:

"There are few solutions as universal in their application and their success than adding a frame of open brood every week for three weeks. It is a virtual panacea for any queen issues. It gives the bees the pheromones to suppress laying workers. It gives them more workers coming in during a period where there is no laying queen. It does not interfere if there is a virgin queen. It gives them the resources to rear a queen. It is virtually foolproof and does not require finding a queen or seeing eggs. If you have any issue with queenrightness, no brood, worried that there is no queen, this is the simple solution that requires no worrying, no waiting, no hoping. You just give them what they need to resolve the situation. If you have any doubts about the queenrightness of a hive, give them some open brood and sleep well. Repeat once a week for two more weeks if you still aren't sure. By then things will be fine.

If you are afraid of transferring the queen from the queenright hive, because you are not good at finding queens, then shake or brush all the bees off before you give it to them.

If you are concerned about taking eggs from another new package or small colony, keep in mind that bees have little invested in eggs and the queen can lay far more eggs than a small colony can warm, feed and raise. Taking a frame of eggs from a small struggling new hive and swapping it for an empty comb or any drawn comb will have little impact on the donor colony and may save the recipient if they are indeed queenless. If the recipient didn't need a queen it will fill in the gap while the new queen gets mated and not interfere with things."

I've now added brood and eggs several times to these hives - twice to the Chastain hive and three times to my hive at home.

I love thinking that they are hopeful for their future and trust that they will be able to make a functioning queen.

Despite that romantic thought, in fact what probably is happening is that they recognize that there is healthy brood now and they need enough energy to manage the healthy brood well, so to that end they get rid of the energy sucking drone brood that is way more than they need.

But I like the sentimental thinking better.

Bee Culture Article That I Wrote

2013-04-25T00:14:00.003-04:00

I was so pleasantly surprised to find an article that I wrote had been accepted by Bee Culture and is in this month's issue:

I wrote about how to establish a hive inspection program for your bee club. We have a great hive inspection program at Metro Atlanta that is now in its fourth year and doing well with good participation. I had sent the article in at the beginning of the year and didn't have any idea that it had been chosen for publication!

This is my second article in Bee Culture. I had an article in the February issue earlier this year on "Treating Your Speaker Well" - about how a bee club should manage guest speakers.

Here's what the article looks like in the magazine:

It's two pages - I felt quite honored that mine was chosen.

Trying Out a New Small Hive Beetle Trap

2013-04-24T14:09:00.003-04:00

Jeff and I decided to try out a "new" small hive beetle trap. I put the "new" in quotes because I think I have owned the kit for this trap for three years, but never have used it. It is from David Miller in Jackson, Tennessee and I bought it at the Young Harris bee institute about three years ago (maybe four???)

Jeff put it together and we decided to test it on one of Sebastian's hives, so we installed it on Sunday. We'll follow up and let you know if/how it is effective.

Below Jeff is deciding which extension to use - it came with an extension to make it useful on an eight frame hive which is what we are running at Sebastian's house (and everywhere).

Here Jeff is adding the section which is screwed onto the trap. The trap goes on the front entry of the hive. It provides an entrance for the bees with a screened floor so that the small hive beetles fall through the screen as they enter the hive.

Below you can see the trap attached to the hive, waiting for the bees to notice their new entrance.

Jeff slid in the oil trap. It comes in on the side, is comprised of three chambers, each filled with oil to drown the icky creatures.

The bees were a bit confused about their entrance, but they were beginning to figure it out when we left the apiary.

The trap kit included some soft screen to put over the inner cover opening to keep SHBs from entering through the top. We didn't have a staple gun with us so we didn't put that on the hive, but may at our next visit (I have to get over my fear of the staple gun which is IMMENSE). However, advice in the kit says that the bees may propolize the soft screen.......hmmm, now there's a rationalization for not getting out the staple gun!

News from Drone Layer Queen

2013-04-22T22:12:00.000-04:00

The bees are rid of the queen. I've added weekly a frame of brood and eggs for the past three weeks.

Today I saw queen cells - at least FOUR of them - on a frame of brood and eggs I left them last week. The best looking one is below. The second photo is blurry but there is another queen cell. I saw two others - all on this same frame from the nuc Julia gave me the queen cell to use to start it.

Michael Bush says that with a drone layer, you need to give them brood and eggs three times and then they will probably make a successful queen. I hope this time, they get a good one.

I'm so glad I got to see this process so close up - watched them remove the drone brood in a good housecleaning; saw the old queen with her wings chewed almost off; now see they are making a queen cell. From just watching the front of the hive, you'd have no idea this was going on!

The brood you see is capped brood from the frame of eggs I gave them last week. It was a good testament to why a beekeeper should have a nuc or two going all the time. I took a frame out of a nuc. It was two large tear drops of newly drawn wax, covering about 2/3 of the frame. Almost every cell had an egg in it. There was no honey or capped brood.

These bees managed to make four queen cells from the eggs. So by the middle of May the hive should be queenright again.

They are not missing the nectar flow which is currently going. They have really been storing up honey.

Note: Each time I have opened this hive, I've had to squash at least 30 small hive beetles. Today I only saw five small hive beetles the whole time I was fooling around with the hive. I need to order nematodes which I have not done yet.

Honey of a Dinner on Saturday night

2013-04-22T12:11:00.001-04:00

On Saturday, my daughter Sarah and I enjoyed the company of six people for dinner in which all the menu items included honey as an ingredient (well, almost all). We had a great time. Ernie, the man who purchased the dinner at the bee auction last September, brought his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law and her parents to the dinner.

The first course was flat breads made with Mahon cheese and drizzled with honey and thyme:

photo by Stan Williams

We served them on a honey bee tray that Sarah's mother-in-law had given me.

The second course was a spring pea soup with cream. It had about a teaspoon of honey in it.

For the entree we had roasted cornish game hens with honey, thyme and lemon. On the plate also were the two items that included no honey - a wild rice pilaf and asparagus ribbons (way too much trouble - note to self: Don't make these again!)

We also had Canadian Buttermilk Honey rolls - no photo again. We were busy in the kitchen - no time for cameras!

The asparagus was pretty but a lot of trouble:

Then, European style we had a simple butter lettuce salad with bleu cheese and a honey champagne vinaigrette dressing, but none of us remembered to take a photo!

For dessert we had profiteroles with honey lavender ice cream. I made the ice cream earlier in the week and made the profiteroles the day of the dinner. I've made the profiteroles before for Sarah's birthday.

This one was taken after the first profiterole on the plate had already been eaten!

Stan, one of the guests, took the profiterole photo, the photo of the dinner plate with the hen, rice, and asparagus, and the photo of the flatbreads. Thank you for sharing it with me, Stan. Stan also brought wine to go with every dish.

I had fun cooking everything; Sarah was a fabulous helper and expediter for the meal; and the company was lots of fun. I'll offer it as an auction item again in September this year.

Tour to Lithuania to Explore Beekeeping There

2013-04-17T08:04:00.000-04:00

In my email box this email appeared:

Dear Bee lovers,

Here is Simona Cibirkaite from Lithuanian travel agency "Visit Lithuania"

writing. We are destination management company offering a new, guaranteed

departure specialized tour "Lithuanian Beekeeping" on 17th - 22nd July

2013.

Beekeeping is one of main crafts Lithuania is proud of. We would like to

share centuries -old beekeeping traditions, which are still alive in some

areas of the country; introduce to beekeeping nowadays, give a chance to

taste divine Lithuanian honey and fall in love with beautiful land of

Lithuania.

Please find the programme attached. Group discounts available.

If any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me anytime by

Email: simona@visitlithuania.net

Ph. no.: +370 61860628

Thank you for your time and hope to hear from you soon.

Best Regards,

Simona Cibirkaite

Incoming department manager

Travel Agency "Visit Lithuania"

Ph: + 370 5 2 62 52 41
Fax: + 370 5 262 52 42

E-mail: simona@visitlithuania.net

www.toursLithuania.com

www.VisitLithuania.net

Seemed intriguing to me and I forwarded it to Julia and to Gina to see if either of them might think of going on this. Here's the link to the tour details:

Lithuanian beekeeping tour

Julia, Noah and I want to go. If there are six people in a "group," there's a discount rate. If anyone reading this wants to come too, let me know and we can be a "group" to go together!

The museum on the last day looks fascinating, the open-air museum, and the candle making workshop.

Today is the Birthday of the Blog!

2013-04-15T19:46:00.002-04:00

Happy Birthday to the Blog!

Today I begin my eighth year of beekeeping! It's been a great ride so far and I appreciate everyone who visits, watches my slide shows and videos, comments, and emails - and there are lots of you.

This is my 1088th post on this blog. I've shared with you all of my triumphs and failures, what I've tried and what has worked and what has not. I've been through several iterations of my beekeeping self, but I've always remained true to what I believed in at the beginning - that it would be better to lose bees than to treat them with poisons and that I wanted to be as natural a beekeeper as possible. I've tried to be a beekeeper and not a bee-haver, as per George Imrie, and I work hard at it.

I usually put up stats in this post, so here I go again.

1040 - people subscribe to this blog by RSS feed
552 - people are "followers" on Google
8000 - hits for this blog since April 1, according to statcounter.com
193 - the number of countries from which people have visited
146,971 - the number of links to my site from various places on the web - it's been my particular pleasure to find that my site is listed on a number of state and club websites across the country as a good resource! What a compliment!

Thanks, everyone, for coming to visit, for cheering me on, for all the support and friendly outreach over these past seven years! You're the best.

Upcoming Honey of a Dinner

2013-04-14T07:54:00.000-04:00

Every year Metro Atlanta Beekeepers has an auction to raise money for the club's projects. For the last couple of years, I've offered as an auction item a "Honey of a Dinner" in which every menu item has honey as one of the ingredients.

This coming Saturday, the man who purchased the dinner at the auction is coming with five family members (his wife, his son and his son's wife, and his son's in-laws) to have this dinner at my house. My daughter Sarah who likes to cook as well, is going to come over to help me cook and serve the dinner on Saturday. She and I make what we call the "Over the Top Christmas Dinner" every year for our families on Christmas Eve, so we have often cooked together and she has great ideas about food, so I'm thrilled she is coming to be with me.

I'm starting to work on the dinner today. I went to the Farmer's Market yesterday to buy some of the ingredients. Also yesterday I made homemade chicken stock for the soup and today I'll make the ice cream for the dessert item. And I might go ahead and make the rolls and/or the profiteroles ahead of time and freeze them. So since it's on my mind, I thought I'd share the menu with all of you:

Honey of a Dinner Menu

Appetizer:
            Flatbreads with Honey, Thyme and Sea Salt
Soup:
            Spring Pea Soup with Cream
Entrée:
            Honey Lemon Thyme Cornish Game Hens with
         Wild Rice and Asparagus Ribbons

Salad:
            Butter Lettuce Salad With Honey Champagne Vinaigrette

Bread:
            Canadian Buttermilk Honey Rolls
Dessert:
            Profiteroles with Honey Lavender Ice Cream

Nuc to Replace Drone Layer Hive at Chastain

2013-04-12T22:22:00.001-04:00

On Thursday morning I checked on my backyard hives and was particularly interested in the nuc we are thinking of moving to Chastain as a teaching hive. Julia gave me a queen cell on a frame for this nuc back on March 18.

As Billy Davis would say, the queen cell looked "medium biscuit" in color which means it was about midway through its development. So I expected the queen to emerge within a week. But I left the hive alone, except for giving it honey to eat in a Boardman feeder inside the hive.

On Thursday I opened the nuc to look at the work of the queen for the first time. Notice the make-shift entrance reducer! Jeff is making us some better ones. I have had no confidence in my ability to make a nuc - have never done it successfully - but this year every one I have made is a success.

The queen was laying and so eager, that she was laying in barely drawn comb. If you click to enlarge either photo below, you'll see an egg in every cell:

The nuc had eaten all of the honey I had provided in the Boardman Feeder, so when I was confident that the queen was there and doing well, I went inside to fill a jar from some honey I had crushed from a deadout.

I filled the jar and then, to my horror, dropped the jar and broke it to smithereens on the rug in my basement honey harvest area. I took the broken jar and honey out to put it where the bees in my apiary could clean it up:

How I left it was how it looked above. This afternoon (one day later) when I arrived home, this is what the rug looked like:

All the bees left was the glass!

Since on Thursday when the jar broke, I was leaving for Rabun County before I could crush any more of last year's honey, I gave the bees a jar of local, but commercial honey.

I'm embarrassed to be feeding them commercial honey, but I wanted you to see what it looks like to use the Boardman as an interior feeder in a nuc.

Depending on the weather, I'll either take this hive to Chastain on Monday or Tuesday morning. I'll also take a frame of brood and eggs to put into the drone layer hive now over there to help the bees begin to address their ineffective queen problem.

Morningside Honey - Gorgeous Bee Work

2013-04-12T20:48:00.000-04:00

When I got back from Rabun County this afternoon, I went straight over to Morningside. I've taken frames of brood and eggs out of that hive, but I haven't really inspected the survivor hive in about a month and I haven't ever opened the split hive up there. The split was made on March 9.

I started with the split. The queen, if they successfully created her and she mated successfully, should be laying by now. She would just barely be laying. When the bees make a queen from an egg, it takes 16 days for the queen to emerge. Then she spends four or five days in the hive to reach sexual maturity. (We're up to March 29 at this point). Then she may mate over two to four days, making more than one mating flight. (We're up to April 2). Then she returns to the hive to begin her forever job as an egg-laying machine. (April 3). So she may have been laying for about 9 days at most.

Here is the opened queen cell, so when I got into the bottom box (first), I was pleased.

I was pleased to find that she is indeed laying and the bees seem happy. They have lots of empty drawn comb and have drawn some nice comb.

In the second picture you can see stored pollen and a little capped worker brood. In every empty cell there is either an egg or larvae. Really good results of this split. Since larvae is capped at about 7 days, those capped larvae in the center are probably her first capped brood!

The Morningside survivor hive I first inspected this year on February 24. I haven't looked deeply into it since then (horrors!). I have opened it to steal a frame of brood and eggs to help other hives.

Well, it is boiling over with bees. While I was lighting the smoker (before I put on my veil), I got stung twice in the head by bees blown into my hair from that hive! I opened the hive planning to add a box but ended up adding two.

The top box was filled with almost fully capped GORGEOUS white comb honey. I marked the box as a possible cut comb honey harvest with a magic marker. I brought a box of foundationless frames to give them for more honey. I put it beneath the white capped honey box because I didn't want the honey to make the queen think the hive was out of room.

I was so overwhelmed that I forgot to take a photo of the white capped honey.

I then went into the next box and both it and the box below it were full of brood. The queen had nowhere else to lay. This is a real problem. So I took another hive box and checkerboarded the brood frames with empty frames in hopes that I can prevent a swarm. I didn't see swarm cells but I didn't go into the bottom box.

The photo below was an interesting frame - it was drone brood on either side with worker brood in the center. I think it must have been a drawn frame that I put in the box to act as a ladder so the queen used the cells by virtue of the size of the cells....the large ones for drones and the small ones for workers!

Perhaps if I have time this weekend, I'll make a split (or two) from this hive and take one of them up to be the second Rabun hive. I was hoping for a swarm from the school wall hive but today when I walked up there, the school bees that have been there for years were dead and gone.

Bees are Now in Rabun County

2013-04-12T09:24:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was a tough decision bee day. I was going up to the mountains for the weekend so the queen I was supposed to get from the supplier couldn't be brought back to the Chastain hive. I couldn't move the Chastain hive to Rabun county because it is a failing hive now with few bees since the drone layer queen is not replacing the bees. I'm only up there about once every 3 - 4 weeks so I wouldn't be able to intervene if it didn't go well.

So what I decided was to take a split from my backyard to Rabun. They haven't made their own queen yet, so I could put the replacement queen in it. Then I could keep giving the Chastain package brood and eggs until they finally make a workable local queen. Michael Bush says that when you have a drone layer, just give the hive a frame of brood and eggs every week until they successfully make a queen.

I went over to Chastain to retrieve the drone layer queen, but in the process and in talking to Julia, I changed my mind. I've had two angry/mean phone calls from the supplier and two angry/mean emails from him and the idea of driving to Lula, an hour away, to allow him to say critical comments to my face just wasn't appealing just to get a queen. And since he and I will no longer be doing any further business, what investment would he have in giving me a good queen? For all I know, he would give me another unmated queen.

So Julia was very generous and gave me a frame of brood and eggs to put in the split I was taking to Rabun. I had given it a frame of brood and eggs about five days ago, but didn't see a queen cell, so wasn't too hopeful about them. I put the frame in the split hive and drove to N Georgia, feeling great relief as I passed the turn off to the supplier's house without even considering turning off.

Also the place where I collected the huge swarm on Tuesday was unhappy that there were still a baseball sized bunch of bees still clustered where the swarm had hung, so I stopped there and sprayed those bees with vanilla flavored sugar syrup, shook them into a Tupperware container and when I got to Rabun, added them to the hive split that I had brought. The vanilla allows the bees to mask the pheromone and generally they will combine without killing each other. Cindy Bee taught me that years ago.

So Rabun County now has bees at the community garden with plenty of bees, honey and the resources to make a queen. I left the dead out hive in place there so that perhaps a swarm from the old school nearby where there are bees in the wall might move in as they did last year.

Weather with tornado watches was predicted for Rabun and as I drove into the county at 6:45 PM, the rain started. I installed these bees in the rain, carrying the hive by myself about 50 yards to the bee site. As soon as I had shaken in the bees from the swarm, then the rain started to pour down in full force.

What I have learned from this experience:

Always ask your supplier what their policy is should the queen fail in the establishment of the hive. I did not do that and when I said the queen had failed, his response was that his queens were proven layers. That was a terrible position for me to be in, since I had a failed queen purchased from him. It set the situation up for his stance that the problem was with the purchaser rather than the seller. And this queen was a drone layer from the beginning on March 18. When selling bees, for good will and for continued support from the purchaser, the supplier should assume the customer is always right.

We will leave the drone layer hive at Chastain so that when we are doing teaching inspections, as we do there for new beekeepers frequently over the spring and summer, we can talk about drone layers, demonstrate how to handle a drone laying hive (hopefully), and talk a lot about how to choose a better bee supplier than we did.

Meanwhile so that we will have three good hives over there, I'll move a split I have made with a queen from Julia's yard to Chastain to be up and running since the queen is already "proven" and laying.