Hive Mind Bee Blog

Chinese Honey Laundering?

2008-10-13T20:58:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't an ethnic slur, I'm talking about the other kind of laundering, like money laundering.

Mike and I were chatting about feeding the bees sugar syrup over winter and how long to feed them in sugar syrup into the spring, when he mentioned something a bit surprising. The beginning beekeeping books typically recommend that you feed sugar syrup to the bees "until they stop taking it." For me, this sometimes meant clear into July (although this past year, I got lazy pretty much right off the bat and didn't feed them anything past the first gallon to get them established).

What that does, though, is give you honey that's basically transformed sugar, rather than real nectar honey. Obvious, if you think about it. It surprised me to learn that that's part of the reason that Chinese honey is so cheap: they'll feed them buckets of sugar all the way through the season, so that the "clover" honey they sell is little more then lightly flavored, bee-processed sugar syrup.

Well, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a little bit of Google is even worse. Try Googling Chinese Honey, and your first two articles are:

Test on Chinese and blended honey show further illegal drug residue: 10 of 16 samples of Chinese honey in this study showed traces of an antibiotic, chloramphenicol, that has been linked to aplastic anaemia and cancer.
Honey Laundering reported from China through Australia into the U.S.: "Death threats and a mystery car brake failure followed after a senior figure in the Australian honey industry attempted to expose a racket involving Chinese honey being relabeled and shipped to the United States."

"Oh, that's not a problem, though, because I don't buy Chinese honey," you may be thinking? Well, it turns out that China accounts for over 40% of the world's supply of honey and growing!

As if you didn't have reason enough already, I implore you: buy local honey!

Harvest News and Free Bees

2008-10-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

I headed up to Everett to pick up my extracted frames from Mike Doleshell on Sunday. My six full supers turned out 174 lbs of honey, just shy of 15 gallons: a fine, fine harvest, if I do say so m'self. (More info on the harvest process back here).

Mike was a bit late for our meeting, as he's in the midst of his own harvest, and apparently fell off the side of his truck in the process of doing some loading. If his frequent winces and grimaces were anything to go by, he did himself a fair bit more damage than he wanted to let on. Thanks, Mike and heal!

Good egg that he is, though, he sat with me and answered all my questions, and the bits of wisdom so gathered, I'll pass along:

Mite Control
It's too late for me to add formic acid to control for mites. Formic acid is the stuff that ants produce, so considered safe and "organic". Problem is, it's heat dependent because it's meant to evaporate into a gas, which is the way it works its magic on the mites. Sounds like I should have done that in late August / September, right after the harvest but before the cold set in.

He also related that a friend of his in North Carolina had good success with substituting his entire bottom board with a piece of 1/2" hardware cloth stretched between a wooden rectangle. That means nothing solid on the bottom at all, just set the screened board on something over the ground and you're good. I see the logic: the mites fall of the bees all the way to the ground and thus don't make it back into the hive, but was surprised that having that big an opening for breeze to get in (the entire bottom board) would be OK.

I guess the bees just huddle for warmth and it doesn't bother them (although you may not want to try this in Canada or northern Maine).

Nosema
At first he thought I had a bad case of Nosema, from the stains on my frames, but when we established that I just didn't scrape them from last year, he felt better about it. Not sure yet whether I'll treat with that, as I really, really don't like the idea of adding chemicals to the hive. If I do, it's mixed in with sugar syrup and fed to them 2 tsp to a gallon.

Overwinter Supplies
I was unsure how much honey to leave in the hives over winter. Mike says rule of thumb is a full super / brood chamber's worth. I left about half a super in each, so I figure I'll have to feed them some sugar mid-winter sometime. I'll check in on them around December / January and see how their stores are lasting.

Free Bees
Want a free hive of bees. A lady he knows wants to get rid of them. You can pick 'em up, they're ready to go. Contact me and I'll pass along her info.

Harvest News

2008-10-10T17:11:00.001-07:00

I just spoke with Mike Doleshell, who's taking care of extracting the honey from my hives for me. He says that I was right about having a good season, looks like we'll fill 3 5 lbs buckets!

He also said that he was surprised at how light my honey was, especially compared to another beekeeper's in my area. It sounds like with the weird weather we had in the Pacific Northwest this year, the blackberry season was shorter than usual, so the bees spent more times in the grasses, which can lead to a darker, and sometimes not as tasty, honey. Mine, though, sound like they found the right stuff.

Must be all those beautiful flowers and vegetables my neighbors have been growing.

Hive Mind Halloween

2008-10-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

I'll bet you didn't know that in addition to keeping bees, we at Hive Mind throw some kick a** parties. Specifically, 14 years running, we've been throwing a huge Halloween party, with all the proceeds going to charity. Here's a little FAQ on it:

www.hive-mind.com/halloween/08

What's Hive Mind Halloween? An outrageously fun Halloween party (check out some pictures from last year: Chrissy's and Grover's.) It started as a house party in 1994, with everybody just piling in and doing the decorating and cleaning up together in one crazy couple of days. It outgrew the house, clocking in at just under 1,000 people last year, but somehow has never lost its house party feel. I hope it never does.

Where does the money go?
100% of the proceeds get split between two flat out awesome charities:

Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org): This group helps build schools and libraries in developing countries where poor villages simply don't have the resources to get books for their children to read or even the rudimentary shacks in which to hold classes. Basic literacy is key to freedom and independence. I can't think of a better way to help people then to teach them to read and to think. And get this: by partnering with local communities, they can do it really, really efficiently.

In 2006, for example, the Hive Mind Halloween party raised enough money to build an entire school in a village in Nepal, Shree Seti Devi. See the report and pictures of the school with the kids we helped! See it on a satellite map! Feel it!

In 2007, we raised $9,700 to fund scholarships for girls in poor countries, totalling 32 years of education. Be clear: this isn't scholarship for an elite college, this is scholarship so young girls, 9 and 10 years old, can learn to read instead of working in fields, or worse. Want to see pictures of the girls we helped? Check out the Room to Read Yearbook.
Youngstown Cultural Arts Center is a multi-purpose facility committed to providing space and support for creative expression, community building and positive youth development in the Delridge and surrounding neighborhoods. Besides our 150-seat theater, Movement Studio, and other community rental space, Youngstown houses seven non-profit organizations dedicated to youth empowerment through artistic development, and also has two floors of artist resident studios in the renovated Cooper School classrooms. Donations from Hive-Mind Halloween will go towards our All Access After School Programming, offering free classes every weekday to youth between the ages of 13 to 19 in Basic Studio Recording, Yoga, Spoken Word Poetry, Band 101 and more. The Delridge neighborhood has traditionally lacked safe and creative spaces for young people and funds will be used to pay the teaching artists and enable outreach into the high schools of West Seattle.

Sounds preachy. Is it any fun?
Ummm...yeah. Two rooms of DJ's plus outdoor antic area, tons of art, everybody in costume. Not for the faint of heart. Really.

Can I help?
Yes! First: tell your cool friends about it. Second, we need volunteers to create it, set it up and clean it up. Join the Hive Mind Halloween Planning List if you want in! (Volunteers come for free, of course, if the $20 entrance is a concern)

When is it again?
Saturday, October 25th (the Saturday before Halloween). Full deets at www.hive-mind.com/halloween/08

What's with the "Hive Mind"?
A "hive mind" is the super-intelligence that arises when a bunch of individuals act together, achieving things that each couldn't alone. Think of how useful a single neuron is compared to a brainful of neurons. That's us, everyone who works on something like this, coming together to make it happen. Read more about it.

Beekeepers for Obama

2008-10-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

My friend Marcus just sent this "Beekeepers for Obama" badge to me. I don't know where it came from (here, maybe?) and it just tickled me too much not to share.

It's not unreasonable, either: in terms of being a custodian of the environment as well as a voice for the small business-person (and let me tell you, nobody's buying a second house in Vail off of beekeeping money...it's golden, not gold), Obama's definitely the right man. Check out this amazing graph illustrating the distribution of tax cuts in Obama's plan versus McCain's.

Now, home come my 60,000 girls don't get to vote?

Learnings

2008-09-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

As always, some good advice showed up in the comments to Harvest post.

Andrey suggests using 9 frames not only in the honey supers, but also in the brood chambers. Interestingly, he says "let bees draw out foundation first then remove one frame." I'm curious, though: why let them draw out ten frames and then remove one, rather than just start with nine?

On the mite front, Andrey pointed me towards Thymol as a natural remedy, in addition to affirming the need for a screened bottom board. I did a bit of reading on Thymol, a derivative of thyme, and it does seem safe (although I'll admit I'm often skeptical of the belief that anything "natural" or "plant-derived" is somehow intrinsically safe). An article from BBC News suggests that it can kill off 90% of the mite population. Might be worth a go.

Finally, Beek pointed me towards a "clearer board" or "Porter", a device for getting the bees out of supers without wasting hours trying to brush them off. Best I can tell, it's a sort of one-way door you put into your hive, so that they can exit the supers but not re-enter. Leave it in for 24 hours and all the bees inside will have dropped off honey and headed out to gather more, then not been able to get back into those boxes. The nurses and such that don't leave the hive will be down with the brood, so you should have relatively bee-free honey supers you can just pluck off.

Great. NOW you tell me.

Harvest Time

2008-09-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

In all my years, I have never dealt with a feister, more ornery bunch of bees than I wrangled with this Saturday. It wasn't just the stinging, which there was a lot of (the suit is good but not perfect protection), it was that they just refused to go where I wanted them to go.

The nectar flow has pretty much ceased for the season, so it was time to pull off the honey supers and set the bees up for their winter quiet time. We had a bit of an Indian summer this past weekend, highs in the 70's, which is unusual for late Seattle September, so I took advantage, clad my armor and headed out to the yard. The trick of this stage of the adventure is to separate the honey from the bees. That means taking the top boxes (supers) off the hive and clearing the bees off them so that I can bring them elsewhere to extract the honey, while not bringing the bees elsewhere to sting me in the car while I drive to elsewhere.

I started with the Sunny Hive, and quickly started wrestling with a bad news good news story: the hives were so heavy with honey, it was back breaking pulling them apart. I asked Michelle to pull down our bathroom scale so I could see exactly how heavy each was: the heaviest came in around 60 lbs!

I hauled the honey supers across the yard to my deck, and then poked around a bit in the lower two boxes (brood chambers, these I'll leave for the bees to overwinter in). I was a bit worried to find that there was virtually no honey in either of these boxes. Lots of brood (bee larvae) and lots of pollen (which they store near their larvae to feed them), but almost no honey whatsoever (see below left). This is not a good thing, I don't think, because it means that if I took all the honey and harvested it, they'd have nothing to eat all winter.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I also saw the same old problem with the remaining plastic frames I have (below right). They take to it grudgingly, at best. See how they've avoided working out whole sections?

I spent some time going through the brood chambers, frame by frame, looking for drone cells (distinguished by their larger, bullet-shaped profile) because I'd read that one way to fight varroa infestation is to kill off the drone cells, which are better home for the mites' eggs. Surprisingly (to me), I found hardly any at all, just a few at the bottom the upper chamber. I'm supposing that I got to them too late?

Next, I set up about separating the bees from the comb. My strategy, which has worked in past years, is to establish a "clean area". I remove frame individually, brush the bees off, then carry the beeless frames over to a separate part of the yard, where I reconstruct the now empty supers.

Maybe I did something different this year, I'm not quite sure, but it didn't work so well. Despite my best efforts, they kept following me over, so that my "clean room" was not clean, but, instead, bee infested. I did manage to come up with a significant number of half-filled frames that had enough honey that the bees would enjoy enjoy it overwinter, but it wasn't worth my time trying to harvest. Many of these half-filled frames weren't capped, which means their moisture content would be too high to harvest, anyway, so I left a honey super, partly filled with honey, on each hive.

Shady Hive had a better outlook for the brood chambers, with a significant amount of brood, pollen and honey in the brood chambers. (That's solid brood on the left and solid honey on the right).

On the downside, as I was partly through working Shady Hive, a bee managed to worm her way inside my suit, up under my shirt, where she proceeded to do the expected. Howling, swatting, swearing and slapping ensued (me, not her).

Eventually, I landed on a system where I set up a bee-free(ish) area in my driveway, brought only bee-less frames to it, and quickly covered it as I deposited each, so minimize the number of bees that were left on the frames. I also found that if I left them covered for a while, the bees that had managed to sneak in rose to the top and few away the moment I removed the cover, so I was able to clear them out over time.

All in all, it looks like it will be a good harvest. Five full supers of honey. Mike Doleshell has agreed to extract for me again this year, so I'm arranging with Alyssa to ferry the supers up to his place.

A few final pieces of note:

Mike was absolutely right about using fewer frames with a separator. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, having nine frames with more space between them definitely led to more honey than 10 frames with less space. They simply build deeper cells, rather than wasting space on separation space between frames and foundation.
I am somewhat stymied on how to handle the mite issue. I'm going to need some advice on how to treat without chemicals. I'm going to try to pick up some screened bottom boards and try the powdered sugar technique, but I'm afraid I'm coming in too little, too late. I don't want to lose my hives again this winter.
Apparently, yellowjackets aren't the only enemies of bees. Check out this little scene from near the hive. Welcome to my parlor, indeed!

My latest art experiment failed. Apparently, the bees simply won't build out new comb late in the season, and I didn't put in my lights until late July. Oh well, I put this frame back in to Hive 1 and we'll see if they take to it next Spring.

yIkes, photo edition

2008-09-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

As our little bit to help in the wake of Hurricane Ike, I posted a question on Sunday from Gabriela, a beekeeper hit by Ike. There's been an educational conversation going on in the comments, and Gabriela just sent me these pictures of her hives to help further. The first shot is the hives strapped down for the storm, then some of the sludge that appeared after the storm, and the bottom left photo is fighting around the hive entrance.

Thanks, Andrey, for the useful insight!

yIkes!

2008-09-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

Just received this from Gabriela. I thought maybe someone reading this might be able to offer some advice?

We keep bees and have 2 hives at our house. We strapped these down for Hurricane Ike. As Houston took a direct hit so did the bees. Post IKE the first and older hive is being attacked by wild bees and the golden hue of the landing platform has turned black, they are severely stressed. We have cleared off the bamboo leaves off the hive tops.

2 days ago I suited up and filmed some close ups and observed that the bees are getting highly inspected inside the opening gap. It is peculiar - some bees entering are lying down subserviently like a dog, literally, the other bees touching and inspecting the dormant bee
lifting it's legs and wings, underside. After the inspected bee it leaves slowly and does not fly off as expected.

Hive 2 (5" apart from Hive 1 and a different breed) has remained quiet for 3 days after the storm, most bees lying very still in the corner entrance, only moving slowly as huddled. Sadly they now seem to be under attack. there is frantic activity around both hives. We had just harvested a week before the storm.

Any ideas or suggestions or members of your site that have had their bees through a hurricane? We think we may lose the hives. If wild ones take over, are they bees that can be kept and harvested?

Carlisle Vandervoort (cc'd above) is the actual beekeeper but is away for a few days.

We would appreciate your feedback.

With best regards Gabriela.

Anyone have any advice?

Sundial talk at Gnomedex

2008-08-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

You may rememeber that I'm in the process of building a green wall cum sundial (or sundial cum green wall) next to my hives. I'll be giving a short talk tonight at the Gnomedex 8.0 conference tonight about sundials in general, as well as a bit on this sundial.

One of the amazing things about the Gnomedex conference is that the entire thing is being broadcast live on the web, so, if you're interested, visit http://www.gnomedex.com/ at 5 pm PT tonight and watch. The talk is short, just 5 min, so tune in early.

Bee Update / Sculpture Kick-Off

2008-08-06T21:31:00.000-07:00

Checked out the hives last week. I had expected that with the cool weather, the hives would be as stunted as my tomato plants, but was pleasantly surprised to find both hives had filled both the honey supers they had access to. I know I'm supposed to add a new super when the old one is about 2/3rds full, so this left me late to the game. Ah, overachiever bees, we should all have such problems.

Actually, although I say the supers were completely filled, what I really mean is that they were completely filled except for the few plastic frames I had left in there. They did end up working over one black plastic frame (left), but it was clear from its state of completeness that they had started on it later than the frames around it, no doubt reluctantly. I gave away my remaining plastic on Craigslist for free.

But check out the chunks o' honey in the other frames. Full capped and back-breaking heavy!

Now, you may remember that last year I experimented with encouraging the bees to build burr comb around objects I put in the hive as a sort of bee-human sculptural collaboration. It worked out well last year, so I decided to try it again this year.

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to put in there. I did spend a day biking around to various garage sales and toy stores in search of an appropriately sized Winnie the Pooh doll (thanks for the suggestion, Nader Enthusiast), but came up empty handed. (Well, found one Piglet, but what's a Piglet without a Pooh?)

And then I hit on it: Christmas lights! When it's done, I can drain the honey and hang them from somewhere as lighted decoration.

I poked around in the bins of lights we have in the attic (for parties, not Christmas, nor Jewsmas, I'm just not much of a holiday-decorator) and found a goodly-sized string, but when I tried plugging it in, the bulbs felt too warm too quickly. I was afraid they'd melt the wax the first time I turned them on.

Fortunately, digging around in Burning Man bins, I found a short string of battery-powered, LED lights. They're perfect for wrapping into a costume to be seen at night, and perfect for stringing through a bee hive.

I took one of my crappy, bees-hate-em plastic frames, popped out the plastic, and strung the lights into the frame. I tried to get it as flast as possible so it would fit into the natural pattern of the comb, tying the bulbs to the adjacent cords with thin wire, but I'm still pretty sure the bees will balk at the odd shapes in places. To help them feel more at home, I painted the cords and bulbs with a thin film of beeswax I melted down from burr comb I stripped out of the hive last week.

I can't wait to find out how it turned out. I'm worried that I put it in too late in the season for them to build new comb around it. Last year when I added empty frames this late in the season, they didn't build it up, and a commenter said they won't build if the summer's too advanced, so we'll see.

As always, I'll keep you posted.

Bee Swap!

2008-07-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

I swear, you can't make things like this up. Last year, Nerve.com published a Sex advice from a beekeeper article, featuring advice from yours truly, among others. Now, here's what I found in my inbox this morning:

Hello,
My name is Elisha and I am a Casting Assistant for ABC's hit show "Wife Swap." I hope you don't mind me contacting you. I'm currently searching for a beekeeping family! Are you a beekeeper who shares their passion of beekeeping with their family? If you are interested in sharing your family philosophy with us, I would love to hear from you.

The premise of "Wife Swap" is simple: two moms from two different families get the opportunity to swap lives for a week to experience what it's like to live a different lifestyle - and to see what they can teach each other about their own!

Potential families can live anywhere in the United States. Families must consist of two parents that have at least one child between the ages of 5 to18. Families that appear on the show will receive a financial honorarium for their time and commitment. If you refer a family that appears on the show you would receive $1,000.

If you and your family are interested in participating, email elisha.deleon (at) castingrdf.com ...ASAP with a description of your family, photos (if available) and contact information.

And wouldn't ya know it, Michelle and I are expecting our first child in November, so we don't qualify (cuz I'm sure Michelle would have jumped all over the idea, otherwise). So sad.

But hey, if you go for it, tell them you read about it here. Thousand bucks, yo.

Growing

2008-07-08T23:11:00.000-07:00

My neighbor Lesli popped over yesterday to drop off some empty jars. She'd been asking for a tour for some time, so I took advantage of the excuse to take a break and tend to the hives.

Both had two honey supers, and both were almost full, with the outer frames filled, if not completely capped (below left). There was quite a few drone cells in the sunny hive up in the upper super, with some worker cells as well (below middle). (I don't use a queen excluder. I tell myself its because I want to 'go natural' and let the bees tend the hive their own way, but really it's because I'm exceedingly and increasingly lazy.)

I added a third honey super to each, this time slotting it in between the two existing supers rather than layering it on top (consistent with the advice I received on my Movin' Up post) and sealed it back up without digging down much further.

As I went to write this post, I happened upon the pictures I took last year, and realized that I had put on four honey supers on the sunny hive by mid-July 2007. Another sign of a dry year.

Rorschach Declined

2008-07-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

One of the treats of having bees in your backyard is that you can just sit down next to the hive whenever you feel like it and pass the time, watching them go about their day.

I was doing just that the other day, when I noticed an odd behavior. There was a bee out on the stoop with slightly shorter wings then her compatriots, and a larger bee was working her over. The larger bee stood over her, fondled her with her tentacles, licked under the wings, the works. A couple times, another bee came over and they had a three-way tete-a-tete(-a-tete). Notice, too, in the bottom photo that it's clear that smaller bee had less hair on her back than the others.

I couldn't quite figure out what was going on. Was this a newly born bee being cleaned of her afterbirth by one of her sisters, or a runty girl being bumrushed out of the hive?

Take a look at the photos below and let me know if you know the answer.

Movin' on up

2008-07-02T22:28:00.000-07:00

Amanda, a reader of this blog, wrote to ask whether new supers generally go on top of existing honey supers or below. I answered that the second super usually goes on top, and after that, I'd seen diagrams of swapping the new super in to the middle of stack, but hadn't tried it. She responded

Well, that's exactly what we did and they wouldn't touch them. I guess we will just extract what's already on there and return the drawn comb back to them.

My suggestion was as follows:

Make sure you're using wax frames, not plastic
Take outer frames from the existing, filled super and swap them out with middle frames from the new top super
Spray frames with sugar water
Swap the order of the supers

Any other suggestions for Amanda?

Wrong Way Follow-up

2008-07-02T22:17:00.000-07:00

Alyssa gave me on update on the results of yesterday's debacle:

Well, this morning I went and found them just as we left them, all nestled into the nooks and crannies of the ivy and ornamental wall. after explaining to them as nicely as I could WHY they should move into the nice box, complete with honey and drawn comb, they flat-out refused and rebutted with animated buzzing. So I resorted to trying to grab them, first by the fistful, then using a garden trowel, and drop them into the box. No real luck. So I left them for a while. When I left they were pissed, and all over the place.

Came back a few hours later, repeated the futile efforts of earlier (Pavlov was wrong!), the results were no different. Maybe they were more annoyed, hard to tell....

At about 1:00 I got a call from the neighbor who's house they were squatting near that they had swarmed again and were heading South. I drove around and tried to find them...... no such luck. The girls are just plain gone..... sad.

The Wrong Way

2008-07-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

It's amazing the things you know that you didn't realize you knew.

I got a call from Alyssa today, one of her three hives had swarmed and she wanted to know would I come over to help round them up. Sure, it meant stealing precious time away from a backyard BBQ, but a friend in need is a friend indeed (if you knew what Seattle's weather's been like this year, you'd realize that this actually is a sacrifice).

Quick background for those of you not familiar: bees swarm when they feel crowded, under stress or otherwise just want to screw with you. They'll create a second queen, and one day half of them come pouring out of the hive with their new leader heading off to establish a new home. It's not a huge problem except that, you know, you just lost half your hive. The best you can do at that point is try to round them up into a box and establish them as a fresh colony.

The bees had settled down for the night in a neighbor's yard, likely planning to pick their new home in the morning. Unfortunately for us, they chose to settle on wall of those cement blocks with the funky patterns in it.

See the trick to rounding up a swarming hive is to capture the queen. If you can get the queen into a box, the rest of the bees will follow and you're off to the races. The problem is, the queen was likely hiding out in one of those little crevices, so we couldn't just scoop in the lot of them and hope to catch her.

Now, I'd seen in books and such that beekeepers will vacuum bees up to collect them. After a bit of poking, Alyssa's father came out with an old shop vac, freshly rinsed. We replaced the filter with my beekeeping glove: a perfect fit, which I took to be a good omen.

Stupid omens.

We all agreed that we weren't sure it was a good idea, but had little to lose (easy for us to say) and Alyssa set off to the races vacuuming the little guys up. I sat back a bit and chatted with her father.

As she vacuumed, I mentioned to him how I loved the distinctive smell of bee, a bit like honey, a bit like wax, a lot like...bee. I love it.

But...something wasn't quite right. That smell was a smell I recognized...

"Hey Alyssa," I said. "Why don't we take a break and see how they're doing in there, make sure the suction isn't too much for them."

Good idea, we agreed, and ever so slowly lifted the lid off the shop vac, trying to just crack it enough that we could see inside without letting the swarm of angry bees back out.

Oh, no worry there.

See, the smell that I knew without ever actually knowing consciously that I knew was the smell of crushed bee. Lots and lots of crushed bee, in this case.

Turns out, a shop vac is way too strong to suck up bees. Well, too strong if you want them to live, that is. You can kinda see the splatter mark there on the side of the bucket, can't ya?

Obviously, we were pretty mournful. I mean, I try to avoid killing even a few bees when I work with them, and here we had probably wiped out half the hive in one sucking frenzy.

We all kind of stared at each other, thinking "what did we just do?" We meant well, right? Ah, the path to hell is paved with good intentions, they say.

Ummm...sorry?

Hives and Dials

2008-06-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

Mixed news on the hives. I checked in on them a couple weeks back and everything seemed pretty peachy. Good healthy brood pattern in both hives (see picture on the left there) and I even caught a surprise glimpse of the Queen in what I'm calling "Sunny Hive" (because it gets the morning sun directly). That's her in the middle and right there. Notice how her wings are a bit shorter and she's a lighter amber color then her daughters?

I had already given them two brood chambers and a honey super that was half-filled from last year. Sunny Hive was making good progress on them, so I doubled her up with an empty honey super. Shady Hive (so called because it's squeezed in there between Sunny Hive and my neighbor's garage) seemed to be spending more time eating the honey then storing it, so I her alone.

I'll also admit at this point that I've been almost completely remiss in my beekeeping duties, busy as I am trying to launch a new business (did I mention I quit my job at Microsoft?). That means that while everyone who knows anything says "feed the bees sugar water until they won't take anymore", my strategy has been "feed the bees sugar water until they drink the little you gave them, then don't."

Clearly less than ideal, and it looks like it's caught up with me. Four or five days back, Shady Hive was showing clear signs of an impending swarm: late in the warm afternoon, they were absolutely pouring out of the hive like kids out of school when that last bell of the season rings in the summer. The way they were circling the yard and humming and singing, I thought for sure they were going to go right then and there, but a dark cloud happened by and a cool breeze and I guess they thought better of it.

Four days of cool weather since has had them biding their time, but they were at it again when the sun broke through this morning, so I'm betting the next good day they're going to pack up and head out.

Oh, if only I had the time to do something about it, but I suppose the frequency of my posts here should be an indicator of how little there's been of that.

I will admit that I managed squeeze in a bit of an art project: my first step towards my green wall sundial. As you may remember, I've got a bit of an obsession with green walls / vertical gardens (here and here, for example). You may also know that I've got a bit of an obsession with sundials (here and here, for example).

Well, I've had this little plan for years now to concoct a combination. It started with having my friend Buphalo (creator of Fire Pod, among other amazingnesses) fabricate a 4' x 5' steel infrastructure. I sunk it in the ground, and...well, it's kind of a long story, and I think I've got a years work left to do, but here's a preview.

When all's said and done, there's gonna be mirrors and burning and growth and all sorts of coolness. But right now, there's going to be sleep, so I'll write another day.

Beauty and the Bee

2008-05-11T12:41:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Magazine had a beautiful set of bee-themed fashion photos today. I couldn't find an on-line version, so I snapped a few pictures with my camera, below.

I love the New York Times photography. It's so much more than just illustrations for the article. Each shot is a work of art in itself, often telling bits of the story better than the supporting text could. Take this picture of the swearing in of Russia's new President and Putin puppet, Dmitri Medvedev. A thousand words indeed.

In terms of my art, I've started to plan my next bee-hive sculpture. Last year, you may remember, I put a bride and groom into the hives and let the bees do their work (below).

So my question now is, what next? What smallish object or objects would look good entombed / enshrined in comb and honey? Suggestions sought.

I also got an inquiry today on whether I'd be interested in selling the sculpture above. Hadn't thought explicitly about selling it, but it's a nice compliment (and, as they, everything's for sale if the price is right).

Beepoint

2008-04-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

As promised, my slides from the Jackson Fish Market talk. They got a little munged in converting from Powerpoint, and they probably won't make much sense by themselves, being mostly pictures, but maybe it will be like that game where you get to make up a story to go along with a comic. Imagine that instead of talking about beekeeping and technology, I'm actually talking about Keynsian economics.

Cold Days, Fireside Chat

2008-04-21T22:33:00.001-07:00

Just finishing up prepping my beekeeping talk for tomorrow night's talk at Jackson Fish Market's product launch. If you're in Seattle, stop by. Hopefully, the fact that I'm somehow trying to cover agriculture, algorithms, art and the apocalypse all in 10 minutes will be rendered less bewildering by a delightful and distracting stream of pretty pictures. I'll post the slides when I'm done.

In strictly beekeeping news, the two new colonies are busy cleaning out the moldy frames I left them. They've been a bit hampered by the bizarre weather we've had here in Seattle (78 degrees last weekend, then snow and hail for the last three days), given the piles of chewed wax and old pollen on their stoops, they're busy inside.

Bee Christmas

2008-04-16T23:51:00.001-07:00

The bee Santa Claus came to town today, and I felt just like a kid on Christmas morning...a Christian kid...cuz I'm Jewish, so Christmas morning was kind of a non-event in our house...

But please, don't let my desire for precision interfere with the metaphor here. The point is, it was a big day, because the bees arrived.

I got the call from Richard around 2 p.m. letting me know he'd gone to Beez Neez and picked up my new girls, plus Alyssa's as well. Richard is a new beekeeper, so I headed over to his place to walk him through the hiving process. It's ridiculously simple, but it's still nice to have an experienced hand around. Richard was a champ.

I was interested in his hive set-up. Instead of a simple plank for a bottom board (translation: bee house floor), he had a mesh screen with a removal tray underneath. I'd read about these, but hadn't seen one in the ~~flesh~~ wood. They're useful for counting mites (which fall through the mesh) and generally for keeping things clean. I gotta get me one of those. Maybe for bee Chanukah.

Once Richard's girls were settled in, I head back across 520 (Question: Do 50,000 bees qualify you for the carpool lane?) with Alyssa's bees and my own to get my two colonies settled in.

My frames had a fair amount of mold on them from being in the garage with uncapped honey and leftover pollen all winter, but I'm not particularly worried. The bees are industrious housecleaners and should have it tidied up in no time.

It was a pleasure going through the simple motions of hiving them: spraying them down with a bit of sugar syrup, pulling the queen in her little cage out, popping a marshmallow in the end, settling her in, then pouring the rest of the bees out into the hive. The smell was a mixture of honeycomb and slightly humid poo (they'd been caged up for a few days and took the opportunity to relieve themselves, leading to that familiar rain-like tappity-tap sound of bees crapping all over my yard).

Alyssa womanned the camera while I poured the first hive, but five or six feisty ones took exception to her shampoo and burrowed in. The sound of a furious bee in one's hair is one that I'll just never get used to. You know the sting is coming and there's not much you can do about it, and the rattlesnake warning of its wings tangling up just makes it worse. We spent a joyful few minutes ferreting them out of her scalp and sent her home to take care of her own hives (in a suit!)

Within 15 minutes, my girls were hauling debris out the front door, so I've little worry they'll enjoy their new home. Can't wait to get out in the morning and see exploring.

And in my hat...

2008-04-14T12:50:00.000-07:00

My new colonies of bees arrive Wednesday! I'll let you know how it goes, and I'll be helping Richard, an old friend and a new beekeeper, get his hives set up.

In the meantime, please enjoy this fine video of the magicians Penn & Teller pulling tens of thousands of bees out of a hat...and a pot...and a rabbit...

(Thanks Boing Boing)

Hipster Beekeeper

2008-04-02T19:36:00.000-07:00

This guy is my kinda beekeeper. Chill.

(From the SFist, thanks Out)

Back on the (bee) horse

2008-03-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

Just put in my order for two packages of Italian bees, due in April 16th . Prices are up, $104 + tax each for four pounders, marked queens.

On advice from comments, I did some poking for Russian bees, which are said to be more resistant to mites than the Italians, but opted against because of mixed reports on their propensity to sting. Wikipedia says they are not prone to sting, but Jim at Beez Neez say they are more likely than the Italians to do so. Granted, he may have an interest in steering me towards the Italians (which he stocks) than towards the Russians (which he does not), but I try to live my life trusting people the way I hope they trust me. I'd rather be tricked than suspicious (this does not apply to deposed bureaucrats from Nigeria who need help moving their money abroad).

In other news, I'll be giving a short talk on beekeeping at a product launch event for Jackson Fish Market, the curiously named software design shop founded by the Cooperman-Smith-Lam power-trio. The timing is interesting, as it's right around when the new packages should arrive, so there's a chance I can bring some live bees in for show-and-tell. Barring that, I'll bring some of the various honeys I collected while traveling Europe for tasting.

Stop by if you're in the 'hood, April 22nd.