Hungry bees

Hello Bee Peeple:

So here is the embarrassing truth: I forgot my password to get back into this blog. Duh! I had written it down somewhere, but well, couldn't remember where I'd put it. Reverse engineered my way back to it somehow and here we are.

So my bees are at risk of starvation - not both hives, just Elizabeth who swarmed first, back in the early summer. Since she took off before the main nectar flow and left her daughters no queen and a diminished workforce, they didn't build up enough honey storage to get through fall, let alone winter. My bee mentor advised me to feed them as much sugar water as they will take.

Kathryn, on the other hand, swarmed late in the season, so she left a super full of honey. Happy hive: apparently one should go into the winter with at least one full honey super. I am feeding both hives to get them through the fall and get stores enough for the cold.

Interesting the difference that the timing of swarming makes. Always something going on.

City bees are all the buzz | csmonitor.com

City bees are all the buzz | csmonitor.com

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Managing Pests (I wish this worked on people)

Bee Colony Collapse Disorder: New Bait Lures Varroa Mite To Its Doom

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Colony Collapse Disorder is a huge concern in the world of beekeepers, farmers - and anyone who likes to eat. One third of our food crops are pollinated by, and thus dependent on, pollinators - honeybees included. All pollinators are declining in number, due to a host of things that people are doing (I could go into this at length but let's save this for a day when i am really cranky).

Honey bees in the past five years have begun to just vanish - something called Colony Collapse Disorder. The whole hive just disappears, no bodies on the ground, just all gone. And the experts are not sure why (though US EPA has recently (finally!) followed the EU in fingering pesticides as a big part of the problem).

Bees are stressed by chemicals used in agriculture, in home gardens, and in beekeeping itself. A common bane in the hive is the varroa mite - a nasty little flea-like thing that attaches itself to bees and their larvae and paracitizes them. Using miticides in hives to eliminate the mites contaminates the honey and is unhealthy for bees. It also builds up in beeswax such that now the commercially available beekeeping equipment, i.e. foundation, often contains traces of miticides. So even if you are trying to be an organic beekeeper the chemicals are present. I hate this.

There are efforts underway to manage mites using Integrated Pest Management approaches. One thing everyone around here does is use a screened bottom board so when the mites fall off the bees they fall down out of the hive and can't climb back in.

Thyme essential oil is known to repel the mites and there are other other plant-based techniques. Sprinkling frames with powered sugar causes the bees to groom extra hard and pull off mites. I haven't done any of these things yet, but these and the trap discussed in the attached article are good to know about.

Bees out West

Hello - just back from 2 weeks vacation on the West coast - on the Kitsap Peninsula (WA) and the San Francisco Bay area. Am experiencing that horrible "first day back to work" feeling- yoiks.

While out there I visited a bee yard in Indianola, WA. My husband and I happened to be walking by when the beekeeper was opening his hives - great timing!  Got to watch and ask questions.  Big take-away was that the drought out there is affecting the bees. Normally at this time (blackberry flowering) the bees would be socking away nectar and making lots of honey. But the two hives we looked into were bone dry - lots of pollen, but little brood and no nectar, no honey stores. Bad.

The beekeeper I talked to said he thought he'd have to supplement - feed them sugar water, something he's never had to do before at this time of year. Yoiks.

Also saw an unusual thing - at another bee yard the hives had entrance holes drilled into the hive boxes  - about 2" in diameter holes drilled into all the handle slots which faced front. Now why is that?  Better circulation?  The hive boxes also lay flat - no bottom board - on the stands. Against mice maybe?  No one was around to ask.

Isn't it great how bees allow one to walk up to a complete stranger and ask probing questions? I  love that.

I will ask about the drilled holes at my next central VA. beekeeper association meeting. We just got our new T-shirts with logos and everything. Cool.

Haven't checked my bees since getting home 2 nights ago- am anxious to see what's going on. From the outside looks pretty busy.

Her Boadiceous Majesty Elizabeth II

We have a new queen!! One of the four queen cells in Elizabeth's hive that the girls raised hatched into a kick-ass new queenlet who knocked out her rivals and is now happily making babies! I looked for her (as noted a few weeks ago) and couldn't find her - but last Saturday there was lots of new capped and uncapped brood, so she's in business. I am so relieved.

For the sake of lineal clarity (I am making up all kinds of words today), we are keeping the names of each queen consistent (Elizabeth and Kathryn) but adding qualifiers (like I and II which are boring but useful) and in this case: Boadicea, becoz my girl had to battle 4 rivals in a truly bodacious fashion). Get it?

However (she said ominously), in neighboring Kathryn's hive I found two swarm cells! ARRGH! Kathryn has been powering along, raised a ton of brood, and packing away a lot of honey. I have 5 hive bodies on now which is a towering inferno of bees; my chin is level with the top box when I take off the roof.

So as I said, I checked everyone the day before leaving on vacation and there they were: swarm cells. darnitdarnitdarnit. I scraped off one and then stopped and thought: what the heck? So they swarm. This is a powerful hive, there is a lot of brood waiting and honey stored up, let them go. My efforts last time didn't do anything but make me queenless for a while, so ok then: build up the neighborhood bee population.

If I hadn't been leaving for vacation I would have pulled out the frames with queen cells on them and out them in their own hive box and started a new hive....just for fun. Next time.

When I get home I expect a quieter beeyard which will be a little sad but: go Kathryn !

Succession?

It's been a few weeks since my last post - my apologies, life is in fast-forward these days between the end of school, start of camp, bees, garden, bike riding and a new kitten (!!). But the bees have been busy.

First a "duh" moment I must own up to: it was not a new queen who left with a swarm of my bees but the old queen, the dowager Queen Mum, Elizabeth herself who abdicated! The bees raise queen cells (swarm cells) expecting the old queen to leave and a new queen to hatch and take charge. But as I had industriously scraped out and destroyed all the swarm cells, Elizabeth had no successor. She had plenty of regular capped brood and honey, but no open brood and no queen cells. A serious problem - we were queenless in that hive.

I remembered my bee mentor showing us how she allowed her bees to re-queen themselves: she took a few frames of uncapped brood from a strong hive and gave it to a queenless hive. The bees would feed a few larvae royal jelly and turn what would've been regular worker bees into new queens.

Having two hives allowed me to borrow a few frames of open brood and give them to Elizabeth's hive to raise a new queen. My lovely girls raised about 4 queen cells - and as of last weekend they had all hatched! Hatching multiple queens is common - if two hatch at one time they will battle to the death and the winner takes all. If one hatches before the others she will go around, find the other queen cells, and sting her unhatched rivals in their incubators. Gotta love the battle of the queens.

I haven't seen the newly crowned queen, but I believe she's regally marching around in there. New queens are very hard to spot, their abdomens do not swell until they have mated and are ripe with eggs (all my fellow moms will understand what that's all about: big pregnant belly).

What should her name be??

Missing: thousands of bees and an adventuresome new queen

I was told several times when starting this adventure that we are "bee-HAVERS" not "bee-KEEPERS."

Queen Elizabeth's hive swarmed yesterday and it was a magnificent (though exasperating) sight. I checked the hives for swarm cells as I described in my last 2 posts and was sure I didn't see any last Saturday, but Queen Bess and her ladies in waiting hid one from me.

I came home for lunch yesterday, checked the fish in the water barrel we keep for the bees (bees like rainwater and the fish eat the mosquito wigglers). Said hello to my brother in law, Charlie, who was working on our back deck, and went in for a sandwich. It was a gorgeous spring day, we've had heaps of rain and unusually cool weather lately, but yesterday was one of those crystalline May days when everything looks possible.

So must have thought the new queen, daughter of Queen Elizabeth, whom we will call "Mary Queen of Scots" for the historical Queen Eliz I's rival. I was inside eating my sandwich when Charlie yelled, "you'd better come out here- your bees are acting crazy."

I ran out and the air was literally full of bees, thousands of them careening around the yard in a chaotic vortex. They were marching out of the hive in a river flow and taking wing. If you looked up at the sky you could see them high up at tree top level, swirling. And the BUZZING - it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I stood in the middle of it and the feeling was electric.

In about 5 minutes they all balled together about 50 feet up in a tulip poplar tree - not a very easy spot from which to reclaim them as many beekeepers succeed in doing. The queen alights and waits, the other bees cluster around her and scouts go out to find another hive spot. They come back and dance their information to the group and somehow, mysteriously, they decide which place sounds best and they go.

When I got home from work yesterday evening they were gone. The hive still has a small crew of bees (how many I don't know. Why do some stay? How do they know who leaves?), plus Queen Elizabeth should still be there. I haven't checked yet.

I felt like I'd witnessed a birth. I was elated and exhausted all afternoon.

And while I am sad my work force took flight I am also thrilled that I got to witness it - and since the larger point of this for me is to increase the bee population, then things are good.