Hive Mind Bee Blog

Shufflin'

2009-07-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

First, for those of you who have been losing sleep over my difficulties in establishing a laying queen in my second hive, rest easy: she's there and she's laying. I checked over the weekend and the two brood chambers are full of good, healthy brood. I pulled over the top feeder and added a honey super. All's well.

The first hive is doing well, too. I checked up on them last week and saw that the second honey super was getting close to full, so I added a third. I decided to try an experiment, though.

I know that every little bit of extra work you make the bees do can come out of your bottom line, even making them climb through two extra honey supers to get to the new empty one I'd put on top. So I tried a little swap: I reversed the positions of the honey supers. That is, I put what had previously been the bottom honey super on top of the stack and added the new, empty super to the middle of the stack, just above the brood chambers.

Since it's not a true, controlled experiment (how will I know whether it "worked"?), I decided to ask the advice of Karen Bean of Brookfield Farm, the beekeeper selling at our local farmer's market who I have drafted as my mentor.

Karen gave my move the thumb's up. She said she doesn't bother with all that switching, mostly to spare her back (a wise woman, indeed), but she did recommend one easier switch:

When adding a new super, she suggested taking two center frames from the top-most honey super, which would likely have some brood in them, and placing them in the center of the newly added super. (The presence of brood on those frames is predicated on the notion that you're not using a queen excluder, which we don't.) Then take the displaced empty frames from the new super and place them in positions 2 and 9 of the almost full super (that is, not outermost, where they may be ignored, but close to it).

The goal of the maneuver is to give the bees some encouragement to start moving in to the new, empty super. She noted that if there is brood present, it's best not to shake off the nurse bees that will be tending them.

I'll give that a whirl next.

Bees in his Bonnet

2009-06-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

Got a question from a reader, Louise:

Wondering if you've ever experienced this: We thought the bees had been particularly busy and were all set to add a second honey super on one hive. Went in to look at the first and were shocked to see that all the cells that should have been loaded with honey had larvae in them! We must have trapped the queen in above the excluder some how. We can't figure out how she got up there otherwise. We're not looking at drone cells either. So technically there are now three hive bodies on one hive. We plan to remove the unintended hive body (the honey super) in the fall and start over. Cannot figure out how this happened. We will place a honey super on top though--have moved the excluder, brushed off all bees before doing so.

We had 5 swarms this spring, not sure if this has anything to do with this--could the queen be small enough to fit through the excluder? We haven't been able to spot her.

For myself, I don't use a queen excluder: I figure a little bit of brood in the lower chamber is small price to pay for the extra ease of motion it gives the bees, and the cells tend to have hatched by the time I go to harvest in the Fall, anyway.

That said, it sounds to me like, despite their best efforts, the queen ended up on the wrong side of the barrier. I doubt it was that she slipped through, otherwise I would expect her to be able to slip through in the other direction, and she would certainly prefer to lay low than high.

Others have advice to share?

Importing Honey?

2009-06-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

I got an e-mail tonight that I almost deleted as spam. It seemed at first glance to be one of those "I want to transfer $2 million to your account" scams. But it isn't. Here's what it said:

Dear Jordan.

Is any way you can find me market of honey in order to increase more Hives in my Farm?

What is the price for one litre in your country.

I can get one 1000 litres per season.

I am from Tanzania East Africa.

Eagerly waiting for your responds and comments regarding this.

Thanks

Joseph Liberio Pablo

Maybe I'm a sucker for the idea of farmers (beekeepers!) in poor countries trying to make a living by look beyond their horizons, but I want to help. I'm also a sucker for exotic honeys: I have a jar of killer bee from Venezuela, what does Tanzanian honey taste like?

So, is there any advice people have for Joseph? My guess is that there are all sorts of import rules and tariffs and quotas and what-have-yous, but maybe somebody has an idea?

Missing Eggs: Solved

2009-06-16T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've got to say, it's become very handy having a beekeeper at my local Farmer's Market. I wandered up there this past week, as I always do, and chatted up Karen Bean of Brookfield Farm. In particular, I wondered if she had any insight into the Case of the Missing Eggs. Turns out, she did!

One reason that a queen will pause egg-laying, apparently, is a "nectar dearth". She said this with some puzzlement, since we've had spectacular weather here lately and we're in the full blush of Spring, so there shouldn't really be any shortage in area. However, when I offered that I had removed the sugar syrup supplies from my hives, she brightened: yep, the withdrawal of a ready source of nectar-like drink could be interpreted as a nectar dearth and would lead to a gap in egg-laying.

I don't regret pulling the syrup. I know many beekeepers keep feeding until the girls stop taking it, but I prefer to pull when I put on the honey supers: 100% of my honey should come from Wallingford flowers, not Florida sugar plantations. (No offense intended if you prefer the supplement. I'm sure the amount of sugar that ends up in the supers is infinitesimal, it's just matter of pride for me.)

I'll try again this weekend (I'm giving a tour of my hives on Sunday to some folks from the neighborhood, so I'll have to hassle the girls anyway). Hopefully we'll be able to get both hives back on track.

Pollen

2009-06-10T11:22:00.000-07:00

I'm used to seeing varying colors of honey based on what's in bloom at any given time, but I've never been struck before at how beautiful the different shades of pollen on a single frame can be.

Nasty Thirst

2009-06-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

Despite having a relatively small backyard, having bees has rarely been a problem. This past few weeks, though, it's become increasingly difficult to spend an afternoon out back without getting harrassed by the girls.

I've always had Italian bees up until this year, when I got my first hive of Carniolans, and so I was worried that the Carnies were simply more aggressive. On a recent trip up to the Wallingford Farmer's Market, I chatted with Karen Bean of Brookfield Farm about it, though, and she suggested that they might just be thirsty. It has been unusually hot these past few weeks, and we cleared out a bunch of old pots that had been collecting water for years and that the bees had probably been using as water source.

Karen suggested putting garbage can lid with some pea gravel in it in the yard and filling with water. The pear gravel is to account for the fact that bees aren't so hot at swimming, so they need something solid to take off and land from.

I'm giving it a shot and will let you know how it turns out.

Case of the Missing Eggs

2009-06-07T22:24:00.000-07:00

I'm still having trouble getting my second hive to take. As previously described, back in April (Queens Aplenty and Supercedure) I installed two hives. One did great, the other barely had any brood, just four queen cells. I decided to let the hive replace their defective queen themselves through supercedure, and hoped to see brood after the new queen had had a chance to emerge and mate (about 24 days from the time she was laid, which would have been in mid-April).

However, when I went in in mid-May, there were still no eggs being laid. To beef up the hive, I swapped over some frames of brood from the stronger hive, including, I thought, some frames of unemerged eggs (on the theory that if, for some reason, I hadn't gotten a good queen, the bees would make one out of my eggs).

I've been in once since then and then again today, and I still am not sure I have a good laying queen. There was maturing brood, but I'm pretty sure it's just the brood I carried over from the strong hive: there are only 2 - 3 frames of them, and they're all fairly advanced. No eggs at all that I could find.

I decided to give transplanting frames of eggs over and from the strong hive and letting the weak hive create their own queen one more try, but, amazingly, I couldn't find any eggs in the strong hive either! There's definitely a good, strong queen in there, but I swear I went through all 18 frames in the two brood chambers and found each one either full of developing larvae, capped cells or honey / pollen, but not a single egg that I could see. Now, I know, they're tiny and easy to miss, but I must have been in there for an hour, carrying each frame out into the sun to get a good gander at it, and I'll be darned if I couldn't find a single one.

At this point, I'm fighting the inclination to throw up my hands and give up on the weak hive. My plan at this point is to do some poking to see if I can find a mail-order queen (which is probably what I should have done a month ago) and see if she can save the day.

On the bright side, the strong hive of Carniolans is going like gangbusters. The first honey super is pretty close to full and the second, that I put on last weekend, is filling up nicely (but still less than 1/4 full, I'd say, very little capping so far).

Also, my light sculpture is making slow progress. Last year, I strung some battery-powered LED christmas lights into an empty frame, in the hopes that the bees would build comb around it, creating an organic sculpture (Sculpture Kick-Off). I got the frame into the hives too late, however (they stop building new comb by July). This year, I included the frame in the first honey super I put on about a month ago, and they're making slow, but meaningful progress filling it out:

Pollen advice

2009-05-20T21:57:00.001-07:00

This afternoon took me up to the the first Wallingford Farmer's Market of 2009. It's small as farmer's markets go, probably two dozen booths all told, but all local farmers selling their produce, which is a blessing to have the opportunity to walk to.

While there, I chatted up Karen Bean of Brookfield Farm, a farm with apiary up in the foothills of Mt. Baker. I mentioned the problems I had had with my Italian queen and the steps I'd taken to address them (allowing supercedure, swapping hive positions, swapping some brood frames) and she agreed they were good steps, but also recommended that I take special care to swap over frames that are full of pollen and, if possible place them facing the brood frames, to reduce the amount of work the bees had to do to feed their youngin's (pollen is fed to the larva as they develop, and is often found packed in close with brood). She suggested I might try pollen patties as well, but that outside my "lazy beeekeeper regime".

She also absolutely decried Italian bees for this region. Noting they were from southern Italy, where it is considerably warmer, year round, then the Pacific Northwest, she felt they spent too much time eating and not enough time storing. The "ants" to the Italian "grasshoppers" were the Russians (her favs) and the Carnies (my hive). Things are colder up in the foothills of Mt. Baker then in sunny Seattle (heh), but still good advice, from the sounds of it.

Bee clothed

2009-05-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

No, not a mis-spelling, just a stupid pun. My friend Jen* just sent me a link to this article about people who take the whole "beard of bees" thing do another level: Crazy People Who Clothe Themselves In Bees For Hoots! (follow the link for more pics).

I had always understood that a "beard of bees" was achieved by hanging a queen in a queen cage around your neck: the bees will flock around her (and you). Sounds like these guys have to take it to another level to get full coverage: spray on bee pheremone.

Still, I don't think I'd want to taste the resulting honey.

Supercedure

2009-05-10T22:03:00.001-07:00

Thanks all for the advice on what do with my "bad queen" hive (Queens aplenty). The consensus seemed to be that my best course of action would be to replace the queen as quickly as possible. David Neel of Whidbees, who I bought my colonies from, agreed and offered to provide a replacement queen free of charge. Unfortunately, a combination of distance and laziness (on my part) preventing this from happening, so I had to choose from the menu of secondary options.

There are two problems with simply letting the bees replace the old queen with a new one:

The new queen will be a hybrid of whatever is in the area, instead of a true bread Italian
The time it will take the new queen to grow, emerge, mate and start laying could set the hive back critically. By the time she's ready to go, the population of the hive may be decreased through normal attrition to the point where it collapses.

I'm willing to live with the first issue, as I'm not really clear on what the advantage of a bred queen are from a hybrid. My understanding is that all the bees we have hereabouts are either bred, anyway, or first / second generation feral. There just aren't large populations of honey bees growing generation on generation in the wild. If they could survive, it would imply there was a breed out there that was resistant to all the nasties that plague the domesticated hives.

I knew I had to address the second issue, though, so I tried a combination of tactics:

I moved three frames of brood from the strong Carniolan hive to the weak Italian hive to provide some reinforcements while the new queen gets ready.
I swapped the placement of the two hives at around 3 pm on a warm day, so that some portion of the population of the strong hive would return to the weak hive and move in, taking it as their new home. (The reverse would happen, as well, but to a lesser extent because there are fewer of them to begin with).

Note how the the weak hive (on the right) is already showing more activity than the previously stronger hive, even just shortly after we finished the move?

As of the next day, the previously weak hive was showing considerably more vigor and activity, so I believe the position swapping maneuver worked. It remains to be seen whether it will be enough.

Queens a Plenty (need help!)

2009-04-22T00:43:00.000-07:00

Bad news on the bee front. Truth is I could use some advice.

First, though, the story to this point: as previously blogged, my two hives died overwinter, so I ordered two new colonies through the Whidbees (Whidbey Island Beekeepers). Interested in doing a little comparison, I got one Italian queen and one Carniolan.

I went up a couple weeks ago Sunday (April 5th) to pick them up. This was something of an adventure, as I walked on to the ferry to Whidbey Island, hopped off, met David of the Whidbees to get my bees and walked back on, a colony of bees under either arm. The looks I got. You'd think they'd never seen anyone walking around with 10,000 bees under his arms before!

David mentioned to things that might be helpful to those who want to offer me advice:

He said he'd had much better luck in terms of productivity with the Carniolans in past years than the Italians.
He said the queens had only been with the hives for 24 hours, so he recommended I wait to set the marshmallow / free her.

As soon as I got home that day, I hived the bees and set the queens, still caged and corked, in their hives.

When I went in later that week (Thursday, April 9th) and released the queens. I didn't bother with the marshmallow, just turned the queens loose in the hives. I did notice a few strange things in the process:

The Italian hive seemed much smaller than the Carniolan hive. The Italians were all clustered to one side of the hive and not that thickly. The Carniolan hive seemed to fill the box. (See the pictures below. That's the Italian on the left, Carniolan on the right).
The Italian hive barely touched their sugary syrup, whereas the Carniolan hive devoured a good half gallon.
Despite the fact that I say "Carniolan hive" and "Italian hive", all the bees appeared Carniolan to me, with just a few Italians mixed in in both hives. I'm assuming that until the queen starts laying, this is just who was scooped up to start the colony?

Now the grim story starts today, a couple weeks later (April 21st). I went in to check to make sure that the queens were laying well, and, while the Carniolan hive looked just fine, with a good strong laying pattern, the Italian hive had virtually no brood at all except for four queen cells:

So, what do I do? Simply killing off the queen cells won't help, because the hive seems to be without a healthy laying queen to begin with. But how did the queen cells get there in the first place if they don't have a laying queen? Should I bring some brood over from the Carniolan hive?

Help?

Really? Nosema?

2009-04-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

Branden posted this link as a comment a previous post: Cure For Honey Bee Colony Collapse?. The article says, in part:

In a study published in the new journal from the Society for Applied Microbiology: Environmental Microbiology Reports, scientists from Spain analysed two apiaries and found evidence of honey bee colony depopulation syndrome (also known as colony collapse disorder in the USA). They found no evidence of any other cause of the disease (such as the Varroa destructor, IAPV or pesticides), other than infection with Nosema ceranae. The researchers then treated the infected surviving under-populated colonies with the antibiotic drug, flumagillin and demonstrated complete recovery of all infected colonies.

Eh? I'm no microbiologist, and honestly, I'm barely a beekeeper, but I find it hard to believe that after all the hullaballoo, Colony Collapse Disorder could really just be Nosema, a well-known and treatable disease. When they say "found evidence of" CCD, what does that mean, exactly? Are they sure they were seeing CCD and not just Nosema?

I mean, come on, beekeepers have tried treating for Nosema before, and would have noticed if it really led to "complete recovery of all infected colonies", right?

Setting up the set-up

2009-03-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

I decided to take advantage of the fact that I have a clean slate to work with (my hives having died over winter) and fix some problems with my set-up. For one, as previously noted, I replaced my solid bottom boards with Varroa screens.

There were two other problems that needed fixing, though:

The palette on which the hives rested was sagging.
Because the hives are cramped into the northwest corner of my yard, one hive is shaded on the west by a neighbor's garage and on the east by the first hive.

My solution was to prop the two hives up on cinder blocks, but stagger them vertically, so that the westernmost hive was higher than the eastern hive. That way, it will be above the shadow cast by the eastern hive in the morning.

I canted the cinder blocks (and thus the hives) slightly forward to encourage any rain to flow out the front and left enough room in the back to service the Varroa trays.

Now, all I need are some bees, and I just heard from David of the Whidbees that the arrival date is this Sunday.

Carnies and Eye-talians

2009-03-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

I've got my order in for two 4 lbs packages of bees. This year, I'm getting my bees through the Whidbey Island Beekeeper's Association (the "Whidbees"), so I had the option of getting Carniolan queens (named for their historical origin in the Slovenian / Romanian / Bulgarian region) instead of the Italians I've been getting in years past.

Most American beekeepers raise Italians, so I was a bit wary and did some reading. It seems that the main differences are:

Carniolans are more productive foragers, leading to larger yields
Carniolans have a higher resistance to illness
Carniolans are more more prone to swarming

This last issue shouldn't be underestimated. I'm an exceptionally lazy beekeeper, and my lassitude and apathy has encouraged my bees to swarm almost every year I've had them (e.g., Swarm! Swarm! Swarm! and Return of the Swarm). When they do swarm, of course, that means half the hive leaves, reducing output considerably.

On the other hand, I could try harder (i.e., police the hive for queen cells, make sure they've got room, etc.)

So I've decided to hedge my bets: I'm going with one Italian and one Carniolan. They should arrive next weekend. Exciting!

For reference, that's a Carniolan on the left and an Italian on the right.

Crystals and Pam

2009-03-29T21:20:00.000-07:00

I wanted to briefly bubble up a couple interesting notes from private messages and the comments section of previous posts:

Consensus is that the reason store bought honey tends to stay liquid longer than "craft" honey is that it's pasteurized. Pasteurization involves heating the honey with wipes out any life in it, both good and bad. This has always struck me as an odd move, since honey is a natural antibiotic. Raising the temperature that much alters the taste and also breaks down the natural enzymes that contribute to honey's healthfulness.
If using a tray under your Varroa screen, spray it with pam or wipe it down with cooking oil to prevent the mites from crawling out. Do not batter and fry them, though, as they lack nutritional value.

I made that last bit up.

Lunch, anyone?

2009-03-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I lost my second hive to the extra cold winter, although I have no doubt that the cold weather merely delivered the final cut, it was mites that left them weakened. To better address the mites this next year, I headed over to BetterBee and ordered a couple of Varroa screens and trays.

The idea is that the mites fall off the bees as a matter of course. Ordinarily, they'd jump on another bee, which helps them spread throughout the hive. With the screen on the bottom, though, they fall through the fine mesh and, lacking the wings of a gnat and the jumps of a flea, they die.

I was amused to see the tray that came with Varroa screen: straight off the elementary school lunch line. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, some super specialized high-tech plastic tray designed for mite containment, I guess.

$12.95 for the assembled screen and tray. Hmm....

In the tub with my honey

2009-03-24T08:25:00.001-07:00

I'm not really sure who this will disturb more, the people who enjoy my honey or the people who get in my hot tub. Either way, I'm feeling pretty clever.

Here's the problem: properly extracted and stored honey will never go bad (they've found edible honey in millenia-old Egyptian tombs), but it does crystallize, because the sugars are supersaturated in the water, so the little flecks of pollen and other natural goodness in the honey causes it to precipitate. Again, it doesn't make it go bad, but it does make it hard to use, as you have to scoop it rather than drizzle it.

So what to do? Heating it will reliquify it, but you need to be careful, as part of the magic of raw honey is in the enzymes and proteins that will break down if it's heated too much (I haven't found any solid numbers, but 120° F seems to be a reasonable upper limit). Also, as you get into higher temperatures, you carmelize the sugars and change the flavor.

Thus, my usual strategy has been to take my jars of crystallized honey and give them a slow, warm bath on the stove. Effective, but not efficient: to ensure that I don't accidentally pasteurize or carmelize the honey, it can take 4 or 5 hours on low heat, and with only one small stove top, that can mean days to get through dozens of jars.

But wait! I've got a hot tub in my back yard. And it's set to 104° F! Let's see how it worked:

Brilliant, just brilliant!

PS Why doesn't store-bought honey crystallize as quickly? Likely higher moisture content (i.e., it's been diluted with water).

Yard Rent Jugs

2009-02-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I asked what the standard arrangement is when a beekeeper sets his hive on someone else's property: do you pay rent? how much? Or ought the property owner being paying for the pollination.

The consistent response I heard was that beekeepers generally won't pay money to put their hives on someone else's property. If the hives are being placed to pollinate an orchard, then it's the orchard owner renting the bees, and if it's just hives looking for a place to settle, it's just neighbors being friendly.

One interesting tidbit came from Lou of the Gotham City Beekeepers, who said:

A landowner with crops or a garden most often welcomes the bees without expectations of being paid. Beekeepers always get paid for short-term placements of hives for specific blooms, rarely for long-term placements. Regardless of expectations, "yard rent" is often paid (or gifts are made in lieu or rent) with 5-pound containers of honey. If you Google for "yard rent jug" you will find that a specific class of low-cost large container exists for this specific purpose.

I did Google "yard rent jug" and found that a 3 - 5 lbs jug (a couple of quarts or so) is apparently the standard unit for renting land. Who knew?

Legalize Beekeeping!

2009-02-16T22:19:00.000-08:00

I got an interesting note from Lou of the Gotham City Beekeepers today:

You may not have known, or even cared, but beekeeping is illegal in NYC.

This became a problem for a number of different efforts to raise veggies in various community gardens and urban farming experiments. Suddenly, beekeepers were in demand, but we were considered to be slightly less socially acceptable than skateboarders.

There is now a bill before the NYC City Council to legalize it, so we (a formerly somewhat low-profile set of people) have filed a non-profit registration, formed a Co-Op, and put up a web site: http://gothamcitybees.com/.

I didn't know it, and I find it amazing, if not surprising. Apparently, bees in New York are considered "dangerous animals, naturally inclined to do harm or capable of inflicting harm". (If you gives you any perspective on the ridiculously of this claim, my hives are about 10' from my deck, where I regularly have dozens of people over for bbq's. Haven't had a guest stung yet.)

So visit their web site and sign their petition. They're also offering free classes on rooftop beekeeping, underway now (not sure if it's too late to sign up).

Who pays whom what?

2009-02-15T10:31:00.000-08:00

I got this question from a reader the other day:

I have someone that is interested in putting bee hives on my property, what would be the norm for compensation for such an arrangement? Are there any concerns I should be made aware of? I would really appreciate any info you could give me.

My answer was:

I'm actually not sure. I'm a hobbyist beekeeper with just a couple hives in my yard. I know that some farmers pay beekeepers to park their hives near their crops for pollination purposes, and I know smaller beekepers will prevail on friendly neighbors to let them park their hives on their property, sometimes in token exchange for some honey, but I'm not sure what the standard arrangement is. Just know that beekeeping isn't big money, and if it costs you nothing, best not to try to make it cost someone else a lot.

What's the real answer?

Cold. Snap!

2009-01-28T00:36:00.000-08:00

In the last post, The Culling Winter, I reported that one of my hives didn't make it, and I puzzled about the reason. The comment section was unanimous in its conclusion: a weak hive plus the cold snap starved the hive. Even the simple two inches from the cluster to the remaining supplies was too much in the frigid conditions. Linda's description had a bit of poetry to it, I thought it worth repeating:

They all then die together in a very democratic way, each getting shares of the very last of the honey available to them until the supplies in those cells are completely gone and then they die, head down in the cell and tongues out to get the last lick.

Sic transit gloria apis.

The Culling Winter

2009-01-19T19:31:00.000-08:00

Like the many of the rest of the northern states, we got more than our fair share of snow this past December. Seattle, which ordinarily might get one two days of snow all winter, often amounting to less than an inch, accumulated got what seemed like a foot or more (but that's with fisherman's eyes, no doubt).

In any case, this time of year I often get the question "what do your bees do over the winter," to which I invariably reply "smoke cigarettes and play cards."

Less flippantly and more generally speaking, the answer is that they're hunkered down in a bunch in the center of the hive, keeping each other warm and living off the honey and pollen they spent the year collecting (minus the honey and pollen we collect, that is.) Cold weather isn't such a problem for them, they survive in much colder climes than Seattle.

Less flippantly and more specifically to my hives, they die.

Half of them, anyway. That is, this past Sunday was balmy and bright, perfect day for mowing the shaggy patch of grass we call lawn and cracking open the hives to see how they were getting on. Upon removing the top inner cover of Hive 1 (aka Shady Hive), I heard the faint annoyed buzz of my girls rousing themselves from below, and a few came out to object to my leaving the door open and letting in a breeze. I shut the top and left well enough alone.

The opening of Hive 2 (aka Sunny Hive), on the other hand, was a more somber affair. Huddled at the top was a cluster of bees, same as I imagine were huddled down lower in Shady Hive, except that the Sunny Hive bees lacked a certain vitality.

In other words, they were dead.

It wasn't hunger that did them in, as there were clearly honey stores all around them, and there were enough of them that I doubt it was the cold, but I'm not sure what else to pin it on. You can see in the top set of pictures that Sunny Hive (on the right) does have more dead bees out front during the snow, but inside they seemed in good physical shape, piled one atop the other and burrowed into empty cells. Good physical shape, ya know, aside from their deadness.

Could be mites, of course, but I didn't see any direct signs.

One interesting note was that I clearly made a mistake in the hole I drilled in the bottom of the hive for ventilation. The idea was to create airflow that would keep moisture from building up. My mistake, it seems, was putting screen on the bottom and top of the hole. It ended up creating a closed area for detritus to build up in, which it did and eventually plugged the hole. Take a peek:

My plan is to replace the whole bottom board with a screened bottom for mite control next Spring anyway, but were I to try this method again, I'd put the screen only on the inside of the hive, not the outside as well.

Pollan, not pollen

2009-01-13T00:19:00.000-08:00

Michelle, Zev and I heard a great talk tonight by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. It wasn't specifically relevant to beekeeping, but is certainly relevant to the locavore mantra we've been preaching here lately. Indulge me then a tangent.

Pollan suggested that Nutritionism has become the dominant ideology of Western food-thought. Its tenets are:

Food is a nothing but a sum of its constituent nutrients
Because you can't directly see nutrients, knowledge of what to eat is a mystery that must be guided by experts (a priesthood, if you will)
The goal of eating is to improve bodily health (not, say, to savor the meal or one's company at it)
Nutrients are either good or evil (e.g., Omega-3 is Good, high fructose corn syrup is Evil)

This ideology leads to various flawed conclusions. For one, the "good" and "evil" nutrients change over time, like fashion. At the turn of the century, Kellogg preached that protein was evil, and that a healthy diet consisted of primarily carbohydrates (yes, that Kellogg).

Worse, if there are "good" nutrients, then eating lots of them must be better. And this exactly has been the recommendation of the goverment (at the behest of the agriculture industry): encourage people to eat more things with "good" nutrients in them, rather than to eat less of anything.

As a result, obesity, diabetes and heart disease have skyrocketed over the past several decades, to the point where the CDC predicts that 1 in 3 children born in the year 2000 will eventually develop Type 2 diabetes!

Pollan's recommendation? He has lots, but one that resonated with me is "shorten the food chain". If you know the person who you are getting your food from, it's much less likely to be processed "edible food-like substances" than if you are buying it anonymously in the store. In other words, eat local!

And now, for those annoyed at my non-beekeeping tangent, is the obligatory bee-relevant tidbit of the story: another rule he suggested was "only eat things that rot" (i.e., if it has so many preservatives or is so far removed from biology that molds and bacteria don't want any of it, neither should you). He caught himself though, and exempted that one natural food that never rots, that has been found edible in Egyptian tombs after millenia, honey.

Little Beekeeper

2009-01-12T15:37:00.001-08:00

Just came across this picture again. I love it so much, I'm reposting.

Honey Laundering Revisited

2009-01-01T22:56:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Times ran a series of five articles by Andrew Schneider this past week on honey laundering, a topic I blogged about some time ago. The articles are a good read, he manages to bring a bit of James Bond flair to the business:

Seven cars with darkened windows barreled east toward the Cascades, whizzing past this Snohomish County hamlet's smattering of shops and eateries.
The sedans and sport utility vehicles stirred up dust as they rolled into the parking lot of Pure Foods Inc., a Washington honey producer.

Out popped a dozen people in dark windbreakers identifying them as feds -- agents from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some raced to the loading docks. Others hurried through the front door. All were armed.

The gist of it is that Chinese honey producers are apparently no safer than Chinese dairies, using antibiotics and pesticides that are banned for use in foods in the U.S. and adulterating their honey with corn syrup, cane syrup and water.

To get around tariffs and rightly skeptical American consumers, the Chinese honey is shipped to Vietnam, Russia, Thailand and the Grand Bahamas (the Grand Bahamas?!), where they are relabeled as Vietnamese, Russian, etc. and shipped to the United States (a practice known as "transshipping"). American companies such as Sue Bee, Silver Bow and Pure Foods that import and distribute the honey seem, at best, willfully ignorant of the practice.

The articles go on to note that even honey labeled "natural" and "organic" isn't necessarily, as there are few federal standards on what makes honey "organic". Plus, given that bees will forage for miles, it's virtually impossible to ensure that a given hives bees don't come into contact with chemicals somewhere in their travels.

So what's a honey loving consumer to do? I'll tell you what to do!

Buy Local Honey!

It makes sense for dozens of reasons. First, if you want to be sure that the honey wasn't adulterated with antibiotics and pesticides in China before being shipped in a supertanker by way of Russia, buy it from a guy with beeswax under his nails in a farmer's market. Beekeepers working the farmer's market are not in it for the money, believe me. There are way easier ways to make a living. If you're in Seattle, go to the Ballard Sunday market. It's the best.

But there's more to buying local than avoiding contaminants. Think about the carbon footprint. What does it take to ship honey from deep in the interior of China to Russia and then to the United States? How much oil is consumed as those cargo ships chug across oceans? When I deliver honey, I deliver it by foot to friends (and occasionally by bicycle).

But there's something special about local honey, more so than any other food product.

Honey that was produced from flowers in the environment in which you live is better for you by helping you build up immunities to allergies from local pollens. It doesn't do you a spit of good to get immunities to Chinese pollens or Californian pollens if you're sneezing in Snohomish.

OK, soapbox moment over. As you were.

(Photo credits: Customs agent by Meryl Schenker / P-I and Local Honey by Melissa_Thinkspace)