bee blog

Second Swarm, or 2nd-5th Swarm?

2016-05-12T03:34:00.000-07:00

On May 11th, I saw scout bees investigating knot holes on the side of the barn. That happens when a colony either has or is about to swarm. It's a warning—go check the trees and shrubs around the bee yard. They usually cluster somewhere nearby. Here's what I found:

It looks like 4 swarms. More likely, one swarm got separated. I thought they'd eventually combine into one, but they seemed content to stay separate. I believe they parted over some disagreement over a doctrinal issue. I dumped them all into a cardboard box and left a small door open. Within an hour they settled their differences, and the stragglers climbed in the box. They weighed 6 lbs or approximately 21,000 bees. I saw the queen, a big blond.

Making artificial Queen Cells

2016-05-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

To make queen cells, you round the end of a 3/8" dowel so it fits perfectly into a natural queen cell. That's what queen rearing books say, but the entrance of the cell is smaller than the interior, so you have to cut away the top without distorting the bottom of the cell. Plus, when you push a stick into a queen cell, the wax distorts. Just how accurate do you have to be, anyways?
So I tried using a natural queen cell as a mold.

4 queen cells and my queen cell sticks

I didn't have epoxy, but gorilla glue expands to fill a cavity.

A little stick to fit into the queen cell, a bottle of gorilla glue...

Stick it in, let it set...

y, voila!
The glue is too porous to dip into melted beeswax, plus, looking closely the shape is quite irregular, somewhat like one of Mar's moons. My bet is the bees will prefer my queen cells over their own.

Transferring the wild bees to a hive

2016-04-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

We had to make a quick trip to New Hampshire so I couldn't get back to the bees for a week. The old comb has been in a box, separated by 3/8 inch spacers (that's the natural distance bees keep between combs. The bees have to be transferred to a movable comb hive. So to start I move the box about 10 feet away and put an empty box in its place, and add a comb of brood, a comb of pollen, and a comb of honey from another hive.

Comb removed from the barn and stored temporarily in a hive box

The combs are shaken into the new box with regular frames in it.

The new box is placed on the original stand

The old comb containing brood is put over a queen excluder in the hive from which I borrowed the brood. I'll take it out again when the brood has hatched and melt it into beeswax.

The queen didn't survive the transfer, so the bees made queen cells from the young larvae. Most of them were small and would yield inferior queens. I killed them, but saved this frame. I'll have to move it before they hatch. Virgin queens might squeeze through the queen excluder and kill the other queen below. She is due to hatch in about 3 days. The rest of the brood on the comb will be hatched in about 14 days.

3 queen cells

Rescuing bees from a Collapsing Barn

2016-04-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

The old barn had shifted suddenly off its foundation about 18 inches. The owner wanted to save the barn but a colony of bees had lived in the corner for about 25 years. He hired me to remove them.

To the left is the nest, located on the 2nd floor in what was once the granary. To the right notice the biggest white faced hornet nest I've ever seen. I'm glad the hornets were gone.
The nest was obviously occupied for many years, although the colony could have died several times with new swarms moving in. That would hardly be noticed by the people. This is a typical colony size—5' tall and 2' wide. Also typical are the long droopy combs at the bottom irregular comb near the top.

Early in the year the population is low and easy to manage. By July this comb would be totally covered with bees. If I knew how, I'd add arrows to the photo to show drone comb, brood comb, honey comb and last year's unused queen cells.

You can see irregular fault lines in the honey comb where sometime in the past the comb became too heavy, stretched, then was later repaired by the bees. Lots of last year's honey is left in this colony. I'll render about 60 lbs of wild honey from this colony.

Bees are generally easier to handle in the spring. I removed a large portion of the colony with no protective suit or gloves. The owner helped the entire time without any protective clothing. We both tied at 4 stings each for the afternoon's work. I'm filling the box, lower right, with combs of brood. There are thousands of baby bees developing and discarding them would be a huge set back for the colony. I filled a large plastic bin with honey-filled comb and another one with empty comb to be melted into beeswax.

Cutting out brood comb.

The brood needs almost the same temperature that a poultry incubator provides, so I keep as many bees on the brood comb as possible and I brush more off into the hive to maintain the proper temperature. The rest are vacuumed into a special vacuum that doesn't injure the bees and in the evening I poured them into the new hive. The homeowner wants to become a beekeeper. Since he stayed through the entire process, got stung and still shows interest, I have no qualms about giving him the bees once I've established them in a movable comb hive. I like his one comment, "Beekeeping is a lot of work, isn't it?"

Wild Honey

2016-04-06T14:32:00.000-07:00

Rendering old honeycombs from wild bee nests usually yields honey that is black, bitter, and nasty. This batch has a rich but mild excellent flavor.

The secret is to sort out all combs containing pollen which makes the honey bitter and gritty. Nothing but clean pure honeycomb is put into a giant double boiler (a bucket inside a canner) and heated just below the melting point of the wax. The honey and wax are poured through a coarse and fine strainer into the bottling bucket. I only bottle the honey that runs out freely—no squeezing the combs. That all gets remelted to fully separate the rest of the honey and wax. That honey is black, somewhat bitter, and I can sell it as baking honey.

April Snow Showers bring...

2016-04-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

After a blustery, snowy night I visited the bees.

You can tell the size of the cluster and the health of the colony by the size of the melted snow in the center of the roof. You can also tell which colonies are alive or dead:

I never saw this pattern of melted snow all winter, only this spring. My guess is they are making more heat and using more honey because of brood rearing. The brood has to be kept above 90 degrees.

First Colony Extraction of the Year

2016-03-31T17:07:00.000-07:00

Today I drove to Wellsville to remove a honey bee colony from a house. It was built in the 1820s and with 200 years of additions the inside was like a maze. Even worse was the inside of the walls. I crawled around the attic for awhile then found a likely stain inside an upstairs closet. Drilling two holes into the stain yielded nothing. It was a water leak. The drill bit came out of the 3rd hole with wax and honey on it. That was the wall. I opened the wall and almost not bees came out, until I removed the first comb.

There is the drill hole in the center of the picture next to the stud. When I cut that comb out, about fifty bees boiled out, orbited the closet light bulb for awhile and then found their way to the window. I had to reach into a 4 inch gap and cut out chunks of comb, all the while wondering where the brood nest was. The farther I cut, the less bees until the cavity was cleared of comb.

No bees at all, not even a dead cluster—just lots of honey. Well, "lots" is a relative term. The total yield of hive contents came to approximately 40 lbs, lots more than I would expect in spring. The bees came from nearby colonies and were harvesting the combs.

The homeowner took about ten lbs of honeycomb so I know they hadn't sprayed a pesticide into the nest. I've already taken one order for wild comb honey. The crystallized combs will go into a giant double boiler and I'll sell it as "wild honey"after liquefying and straining it.
Where did the bees go? Possibly uploaded into a flying saucer, possibly a honey bee rapture. Most likely they started dwindling in the fall until there weren't enough bees to cluster, although there should have been some dead bees somewhere. There always are in my dead colonies.

Bees living in a barrel

2016-03-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

Colonies shouldn't last more than a two or three years without mite treatments. This barrel has been next to my apiary for 3 1/2 years and it's still not dead. I didn't hive them last year because they should have died out. So I'll transfer them to a hive in April. The barrel is falling apart so I was able to lift the lid and look inside. Not too many bees but they're bringing in pollen so there must be brood in there somewhere.

You can see the bung hole from both inside and out.

What you missed by skipping the Geneva Bee Conference

2016-03-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

The Geneva Bee Conference (genevabeeconference.org) is held once a year at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, NY. I've attended almost every year usually as a vender. This year I just sat and listened.

First, a record number of Steuben County Honeybee Association members attended—3. The conference was sold out, meaning all the seats in the auditorium were full. But wait! Not everyone who paid actually came, so there were lots of empty seats. That’s good fact of human nature to file away, for next time. Always have pay-in-advance registration, and then allow in the last minute people if there is room.

2. Staying seated for a whole day can be painful, but the seats were padded and the back rests flexed so you could shift a bit.

3. Your $25 fee included free coffee, tea, and pastries.

4. Mike Palmer has presented his talks in Australia and the United Kingdom and both are available on YouTube. Type his name into the search bar and you can have the GBC experience in the privacy of your own home. I’d already watched them twice so it was review for me. Even after watching the presentation 3 times, by the end I feel confused. You remove queens from nucs, but you need new queens to replace them and you need hives in which to place new queens or queencellsandyoushouldhaveremovedqueensthedaybeforefromthehives… Anyways, there is lots of good information. The take away is a quote he borrowed from someone: “All beekeeping problems can be solved by either putting something into or taking something out of a nuc.” I thought Mike had developed his techniques by reading the nineteenth century bee writers, but surprise! He developed them independently, thought he had discovered something radical and new and then, leafing through Fifty Years among the Bees, discovered it had all been done before.

5. Dr. Tom Seeley talked about his research on the wild bees of the Arnot Forest near Ithaca. Again, his presentation is available on YouTube. Two takeaways: First the population of wild colonies is approximately the same as before the mites came and we all assumed the wild colonies had been wiped out. Second, as a youth Seeley had pinned a bunch of bees in the 1970s and by genome sequencing those and the modern Arnot forest bees, surprise! There had been a big gene shift indicating a population drop and then a recovery. The wild bee genes indicate a mix of Italian, Black bee, Carniolan, and Middle Eastern and even some African genes.

6. There were also presentations on bee nutrition, mead making, dealing with pests, and labelling honey.

7. I’d say the really big climax of the day, not counting the bad bee puns that the masters of ceremonies filled in with, is the free refrigerator magnet with the date of next year’s Geneva Bee Conference—March 18^th, 2017.

Feeding a late fall swarm

2016-03-17T04:58:00.001-07:00

A swarm moved into our building in September. Since most late swarms don't survive the winter, it wasn't worth moving them into a hive. They did barely survive, at least until now. Here they are on March 7—just a small cluster and almost no food. With nuc colonies and packages costing over $100, it seems cost effective to give them a little extra care. I've added a Boardman feeder. It took them two days to notice it. Later I'll transfer them to a hive. When I fix the siding, I'll leave an entrance to the old cavity which will act as a bait hive for wandering swarms.

Feeding bees

2016-03-17T04:45:00.000-07:00

On March 7, I checked the hives. Two were almost out of food. The easiest way to feed is to dump sugar on the inner cover and shim up the telescoping cover so the bees have room to walk.

Metal Bee Frames?

2012-10-28T17:13:00.001-07:00

Dan told me he had a couple boxes of metal bee frames and if I wanted them, I could have them for free, next time he was driving by. Curious about who manufactured metal frames, I couldn't wait and drove over to pick them up-6 miles. They turned out to be queen excluders, 23 total. The wood framed excluders were used, the metal framed excluders look unused but showing rust. I'll put them in the lumber kiln and cook them at 250 degrees to kill AFB spores and melt the burr comb.

Cell Phones and Collapsing Beekeeper Disorder

2010-10-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

Here's my article in the November issue of Bee Culture. It cost money to subscribe, but you get to see it FREE!

Philadelphia Honey Festival

2010-09-20T17:38:00.000-07:00

Here's me talking to Lorenzo Langstroth's great great granddaughter at the American Philosophical Society building in Philadelphia. No, I couldn't convince her to take up beekeeping. We missed the plaque dedication, but did manage to drive past Langstroth's house on front street after circling downtown Philadelphia and a brief sojourn into NJ. You can drive into NJ for free, but you pay to exit. Next thing you know, they'll put up an iron curtain to keep them in.

9-1-1

2010-08-31T08:42:00.000-07:00

Our local 9-1-1 just called me and asked if I can be their emergency contact for bee swarms. I hope I don't regret this.

Books available online

2010-08-29T15:22:00.000-07:00

My how-to books can now be ordered at www.makingbeehives.com.

Sad end of a promising Queen

2010-08-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

I volunteered to supply bees for the observation hive at the Steuben County Fair, the oldest continuous fair in the United States (they are very proud of that). I had a little colony in a four frame nuc. No brood at all, but when I looked, the frames were packed with eggs. Apparently a new queen just starting to lay. I put them into the observation hive. There weren't enough bees for the hive so they couldn't maintain proper temperature. They ate the eggs, the glass fogged up, and they wouldn't or couldn't take any sugar syrup for the two weeks they were confined.
As soon as I brought them home, I opened the entrance. A few tumbled out and the rest of the colony looked damp. I noticed fecal material on the frames and soon around the floor below the observation hive.

I thought the bees were in the process of dying, Then, Suddenly! They were gone! Here's what their domicile for the last 3 weeks looked like after they absconded. You would move out, too. Look at all the brown spots—bee poop.

I found the bees in a nearby plum tree, looking much cleaner and happier:

Anybody want a tiny swarm at the end of August with a brand new and, I think vigorous queen? I'm not going to do anything with them because there's not enough time and it's too much trouble.

Lunch with Ross Conrad

2010-07-24T05:03:00.000-07:00

http://www.farmtraveleronline.com/pollinators-and-pesticides-symposium.html
If you missed the Symposium, too bad. It had all the advantages of Eastern Apicultural Society Conventions (meet other beekeepers, listen to lectures, see exciting bar graphs, and win door prizes) and none of the disadvantages (it was free, short (no need for hotel rooms and good for attention deficit people like me), and not as complicated (everyone sat in one auditorium-no simultaneous lectures). That ends the most complex sentence that I have ever written since sixth grade.

Lunch with the famous author/beekeeper Ross Conrad The Natural Beekeeper
Some people naturally know how to follow the crowd and at lunch time almost everyone disappeared. I still don't know where they went, but it left a few of us wandering around, like scout bees returning to the swarm only to discover that the swarm has just left. This left Vince, Mary Ann, Ross and me. We found a picnic table, sat down and started talking. Never mind what we discussed. It was esoteric bee stuff: things like genomes, adjuvents, and things.I did learn that Ross manages around 50 hives.
Suddenly, we were surrounded by hundreds of screaming school kids. We had inadvertently taken one of the lunch tables belonging to an Alfred summer camp program. Someone remarked that there were no adults among the children. I, who had a college course called Human Growth and Development explained to the others that camps usually hire counselors who aren't much older than the children, and indeed, if you looked closely there were slightly older children, one at each table and others standing nervously around trying to ignore us.
Suddenly, my view of Ross was obscured by a large beekeeper who sat down between us. It was Lash LaRue, a fellow bee club member of mine and nephew of the movie star and comic book character:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6ynI5plve8&feature=related
At that point the conversation turned to railroads and bullwhips.
Here's how Ross and I differ in our approached to chemical free beekeeping: Ross actually takes care of his bees. Mine are essentially wild bees kept in manageable boxes.
I didn't ask how many colonies he lost last year so I can't compare our strategies.
New website for some of my publications: www.makingbeehives.com We're still waiting for the web goddess to set up the online pay program.
To my one reader (everyone else, stop reading here): See you next week, Sweetie Pot.With good timing, you can help me remove some bees from a house in Pulteney. XOXOX

Swarm Season Begins

2010-05-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I found my first swarm at my bee yard, a lovely prime swarm. I had to run back home to fetch loppers to trim away the brush. On returning, I see a new born fawn trying to hide in the foot long grass. His hind legs are so long they stuck up like a grasshopper behind. I walked within 3 feet of him. With one great "bleat!"(translated "Mom!" in English), he ran for the hedge. Mother jumped out of the hedge, considered whether to run or stomp me to death, then ran into the woods with junior. That's when I remembered I had a camera in my cell phone.

Back to the swarm. Dr. Tom Seeley says that to conserve energy, a swarm keeps its temperature too low for flight until the swarm is ready to take off. The scout bees grab hold of the low temperature bees and shake them to get them warmed up. I thought of this as I noticed the top of the swarm seemed to be "bubbling"—a lot of activity. As I trimmed around the swarm the activity increased, then the bees began sloughing off the sides and within a minute they were airborne.

Tanging: the beating on a pot or clanging a bell to induce a swarm to alight. The superstition persists, probably because it appears to work most of the time (especially when the swarm, emerging from a hive, is going to alight anyways). I had a pan handy, and no one around to see me make a fool of myself. So I tanged them out of sight. Good bye bees.

Swarm Call and a Moral Dilemma

2010-05-22T05:36:00.000-07:00

The Avoca School had a swarm on the gymnasium wall at ground level. In their panic, they called 2 beekeepers. When I arrived, beekeeper #1 was already there, trying to brush bees into a hive body. Because the swarm had split into two areas, I offered to scoop up the bees in the second area. My area contained the queen and the bees were soon filing into my swarm box and exiting Matt's hive body.

Who owns these bees, the beekeeper who arrives first, or the one who catches the bees?

Matt should get the bees, but what you can't see in the picture is that these boxes fit into my bee vac and I didn't want to just give them away and I sure didn't want to drive to Wallace to retrieve them.

"You want these bees?" I asked Matt, knowing they should be his. Matt, it turned out was mostly getting the bees as a service to the school. He let me take them. And they moved right into one of my dead hives.

I also received sting #5( hand) and #6(right between the eyes-enough impressing the audience, time to put on the veil and gloves).

First 4 Stings

2010-05-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

One of the local plant that yields surplus honey is blooming. I've heard it called Autumn olive or Russian olive. It's probably an invasive species and considered a pest. I didn't see any bees on these when I looked.

Saturday, May 15th: cool and breezy. Not an ideal bee day but I'm not keeping up with them very well. I opened the first colony. A couple bees seemed annoyed. The phone rang and as I talked for the next 20 or 30 minutes, a lone bee kept batting at my head, until I walked away into the woods.

That colony looked good—lots of brood, nectar, and pollen.

After the phone call I opened the 2nd hive. Suddenly I had a cloud of bees around my hands. I backed away, but too late. Later I counted 4 stings. I closed up that hive but a cloud of bees followed me around the yard so I gave up for another day.

Sometimes "hot" hives return to normal. Sometimes "hot" is a reaction to some sort of stress. I'll use gloves when I work that hive. Some experts say there's no correlation, but in my experience, aggressive hives often produce lots of honey.

2008-9 honey bee losses

2010-05-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

I got an e-mail from Dennis VanEnglesdorp with the results of the latest bee loss survey:

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2010/100429.2.htm

Just over one third of bees died last winter: 33.8%. The year before that was 29% and three years ago 35.8% of colonies died.

These are managed colonies and many or most are probably treated for various diseases. If you lose a third of your colonies after treating them, you waste the treatment cost as well as the value of the bees.

How serious are these statistics?

1. Some mortality is normal and acceptable. I don't know what's acceptable, but despite a beekeeper's best efforts, most hives will swarm at least once a year. (My hives swarm somewhere between 1.5 and 2 times a year.) If all colonies survived the winter, we'd be over run with bees in ten years.

2. The survey includes people with 5+ hives. The number of beekeepers with less than 5 has increased in all three years.

3. This number doesn't count wild colonies.

4. These losses aren't cumulative. The losses are replaced every spring and summer through swarming and swarm preventive splits.

The total number of colonies every year may be somewhere in this article and I missed it. That's probably an important number.

Anyways, I lost 1/6 of my colonies, or 16.7%, about half the national average and I didn't waste time and money on medications.

I expect more summer deaths and unless I have time to make splits and add supers, I'll probably have lots of swarms to catch again this spring and summer.

Beekeeping class

2010-05-08T18:20:00.000-07:00

It's snowing now at 9 PM, May 8. Seven hours ago I hosted a "Bee Yard Etiquette" class during a high wind advisory. 5 attended and we broke my first two rules of Bee Yard Etiquette:

1. Don't open a hive when it's cold.

2. Don't open a hive when it's windy.

We broke rule 3 after about twenty minutes:

3. Don't open a hive in the rain.

The first hive was a drone layer.

The second hive was a double nuc—it survived the winter with only 8 frames. I wanted to check the condition but the frames were pretty tight and then it started to rain.

I shortened the class.

The power was gone when we returned home.

Noah's Ark Preschool lecture

2010-05-02T17:50:00.000-07:00

How do you scoop bees out of a hive when it's snowing? I tried putting the jar over the inner cover hole, then tapping on the hive, thinking they might crawl up. They didn't, but the inside of the jar fogged up. You forget how warm it is inside a hive.

There were 20 or so bees on the inner cover and I had a large funnel. Once the bees cool down they don't fly so by the time I thought of it, it was easy to brush them into the funnel and into the jar.

The next morning I took my little pets to preschool to teach the children about honey and bees. There were 10 just over knee high children there and they put them in a semi circle on the floor. I put my stuff on a flannel sheet I use for swarms. I put on my veil and gloves, opened the hive and lifted out the jar of bees. The kids inched closer as I talked until they were all over me and the hive, spreading deadly preschool germs. Could this be how Nosema ceranae spreads?

I passed out crackers with a glop of bamboo honey. Both women later bought some of my bamboo honey at the local bulk food store.

Formic Acid Mite treatments

2010-04-25T14:02:00.000-07:00

At our April meeting of SCHBA, we invited Earl Villecco to speak on treating for mites with formic acid. Earl is a member of the Southern Tier Honey Bee Association, Empire State Honey Producer's Association and the at least temporarily defunct AIAC, or Apicultural Industry Association Commission.

That last group advises NY state on beekeeping issues. According to Earl, it sounds pretty official—the NYS inspection program has been de-funded for this year. I guess I won't have to put my apiary number under my hive cover after all (I was going to wait till the inspector actually came, then slip it in when he wasn't looking.

Earl talked about how he uses formic acid.

The advantages:

It's inexpensive, around $1/hive

It's quick, 24 hours and it's done

Thorough, killing mites outside cells and up to 90% of mites inside cells.

Formic acid occurs naturally in colonies.

Disadvantages:

You have to buy wholesale quantities of formic acid

It's not approved in NYS

It's corrosive and dangerous in the wrong hands

Several club members expressed an interest in buying formic acid and distributing it to others. If you are one of them, here are two links you should check:

http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/varroa/FAFumigat.pdf

This site provides results from a test using an applicator that is more complicated than Earl described at the last meeting but the other numbers and quantities look the same.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODTNVGH5SFQ

youtube video lecture on pros and cons of formic acid and different application methods.

I'm going to continue not treating bees with anything. Earl commented on non-treatment, saying that some people do that and after several years, appear to have colonies that tolerate mites. He didn't feel he could afford that. On the other hand, I couldn't afford the time to treat and monitor mite levels (lazy and cheap might be a better description), so I did lose bees for a few years. I'm waiting for the colony loss numbers to appear so I'll know if I'm still above average.