A Little More Blue Heron Help

We really have needed three hives at Blue Heron as a teaching spot for the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association. Another member, Cindy Hodges, offered to help us in an interesting way.

She offered a nuc that she had put together and in exchange, she wants her five frames back in August, leaving the queen with us. That way we get a start on a colony and she gets back what she originally had - five frames from one of her hives.

She wants, since she's not getting her queen back, to get a good frame of brood and eggs back in August with her frames.

I picked the bees up between some of the worst storms we've had in Atlanta in a month. I could hardly see through my windshield driving back and just hoped, hoped, hoped that a tree wouldn't fall on my car. As I arrived home, I put my key in the lock, turned it and at that very moment the power went out at my house for the rest of the night.

I took the bees out of the car and set them in my carport where they would be cool. I went into my dark house where I felt around until I found the box I had packed (because I'm moving soon) with all the candles! I just hoped the bees would be OK in the carport for the night.

I got up at the crack of dawn and took the nuc to the Blue Heron, setting the nuc on top of its hive box and removing the screen from the entry at 7:15 AM.




I returned to Blue Heron with Julia and Noah to install the nuc that afternoon.



The brood frames barely had any brood on them as you can see in the two photos below. I didn't look, but hopefully the empty cells had new eggs in them. I have my fingers crossed.



Another of the two brood frames with, as you can see, very little capped brood.



Noah is putting in the last frame in this photo below. It wasn't fully drawn out on the plastic foundation and had a little pollen on it.



Since there were still bees in the nuc box, Julia picked it up and shook it over the hive box. We then left the nuc box on its side to allow the bees to make their way into the hive.



I don't know how this new hive will do because it came with so few resources. We may need to reinforce it with frames of brood and eggs from other hives at our houses to get it to succeed.

But we are grateful that someone stepped up and offered us bees since we have both been on the swarm call list for our club all season and neither of us has gotten a call.



Below you can see the new hive with the nuc box beside it.

Blue Heron Bees are ALIVE and FLYING!

My Blue Heron bees are flying in the 50 degree weather.  I am so relieved.  It's not time to assume they will be alive in March, however.  We have strange months in January, February and March.  Some of the coldest weather I can remember in my 30 years in Atlanta has happened in March.  So we're not out of the woods, but wow, it feels good to see them flying.

The winter bee at this time of year is an old lady.  Winter bees in our climate may live as long as 150 days.  So these bees have been alive much longer than the 6 week life of their summer sisters.  They do look happy to be outdoors again, don't they!



The winter bee has a very different life experience than her summer sisters.  She has never felt the joy of following a waggle dance and actually finding the nectar source;  she has never felt the pollen particles all over her hairy body parts;  she has never felt the satisfaction of sucking the nectar from the heart of a flower and delivering it home to the hive.



Instead she has spent her days clenching her thoracic muscles in an effort to keep the temperature constant in the hive.  According to Winston, the physiology of the winter bee is different from the summer bee.  The winter bee has well-developed hypopharyngeal glands and fat bodies from consuming pollen in the fall.  This feature helps them live through the winter.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to me that her life experience is so different from that of her sisters.



It's so relaxing to see all the bees coming and going in the relief of the warmer temperatures.  I'll take food to this hive over the weekend.

Checking on Blue Heron

We're in early winter phase in Atlanta. The nights are in the high 30s and low 40s but the days soar up to 69 or so. The temperature doesn't rise to flying temperature until the middle of the day. There is, of course, nothing to forage but the bees do fly to relieve themselves. I also wonder if they are generally exploring to see the state of the world at large.

My nephew Ben and his fiance, Stacey, were here this weekend, so they wanted to see the Blue Heron hive. We walked the trail over there - two Eagle scouts have made improvements to the trail that are so wonderful - and then visited the bees.

Here are Ben and Stacey, appropriately attired for the visit.



My hive had bees flying in and out - I saw at least 20 when we first walked up. It was about 59 degrees when we arrived at the hive.
They had emptied the baggie and almost consumed all of the bottled syrup in the interior Boardman. However, clearly it's easier for them to access and use the baggie feed.

I replaced both the baggie and the jar below and cut three slits in the baggie.






Julia is on vacation and asked me to check on her bees. I did not see a single bee coming out of the hive and her feeder was completely full. She asked me to take the feeder off, but I didn't have a reasonable way to dispose of the sugar water, so I left it there. I'm really worried that the hive has died.

Blue Heron Visit on November 9, 2010

Julia and I stopped at the Blue Heron to feed our hives and get a feel for how they are doing.  Her hive is still questionable, but we added food to the hive top feeder that still had a good bit of food left from our previous visit.  We worried that the food was below the duct tape line but it was not.  We did see (and I took pictures of) bees inside the mesh to drink the syrup.

My hive was full of bees and they had emptied the baggie, but not the Boardman jar.  I replaced both the baggie with a new full one and the jar with a full one.  The hive was quite heavy and I am hopeful that they are using the most recent box I added for syrup storage.  I did not pull up a frame to see, but will the next time I am there because there's no point in leaving an empty box on through the winter.

Here's the slide show of what we saw at Blue Heron. Remember you can click on the slide show to see the captions, to change the speed of the picture changes, and to see it full sized:

Blue Heron Check up on September 18, 2010

A Metro inspection is scheduled for Blue Heron on September 25, the last one of the year. We went over this weekend because we wondered how the hives were doing and if they needed feeding. We took sugar syrup in preparation.

When we got there we discovered various problems. Julia's first hive did have some honey and we saw the queen, but the hive was light and needed feeding. Her second hive, BP of the oil trap spill, had absconded - nary a bee in the place. My hive looked like it had been robbed, and it had some other problems which you can see in the slideshow below. We addressed the problems, were sad about the loss, and fed the bees with hope for the future of the two hives that are left.

Both of the hives that are left were low enough on stores that we will need to feed heavily throughout the rest of September and October.

Click on the slideshow to see it full size - also there are captions for each picture.

Distressing First Inspection at Blue Heron

Today Julia ran the first inspection of the year at Blue Heron.  She made a new sign for the apiary from the side of one of the hive boxes that washed down the creek in the flood last year.  It is at once both a sign about the apiary's location and a memorial to the seven hives that died last year.

We installed the nuc we got from Jennifer yesterday into a hive at Blue Heron.  We also looked at the other two hives which were installed on March 30.  I don't really know what to think about the first installed hives.  We saw no eggs or new brood in either hive.  Both were filled with bees.  There were no queen cells in my hive.  There were five queen cups, open, in Julia's hive and one closed one that didn't look like a queen cell....it seemed too small to me.

Jennifer told us that the intense early bloom was making the hives swarm.  She warned us to watch for signs.  We have seen no queen cells in either hive and we have looked.  Usually a hive doesn't swarm until after there are drones in the hives.  Julia's hive had drone brood and we saw a couple of drones.  Mine also had drone brood that looked old.

Also we know not to cut queen cells when there are no eggs in the hive.  Why?  Well, if you cut the queen cell and the hive has already swarmed AND there are no eggs in the brood box, then you have killed the future queen and there are no resources in the hive to make another one.  It's a moot point, really, since there weren't any closed queen cells.

So this is a very odd problem.  Have both hives swarmed without leaving a queen behind?  Did we totally miss queen cells that emerged in both hives and they both have virgin unmated, as yet, queens? 

Interestingly, without discussing it,  each of us went home feeling awful and opened our hives at home.  We each have at least one hive with brood and eggs to spare so we are going to add a frame of brood and eggs to each of the first installation hives at Blue Heron.  If they have a queen who isn't laying for whatever reason, the brood and eggs will boost the numbers, but if they need a queen, the brood and eggs will give them the resources to make one.

Oh, and while this is good news, it also felt like a let down.  I had put a sticky board on my Blue Heron hive. We pulled it and after three days, only saw one mite, and it was questionably identified.  I've seen mites on boards easily before, but I think Jennifer's bees came with very few mites so our mite drop was beyond insignificant.  We thought we'd show the participants what a mite looked like and weren't able to do even that!.

So here's the slideshow of the nuc installation. When we realized we had a problem, I got so worried that I forgot to take many pictures after the installation. 

New Bee Locale for Blue Heron Bee Hives

Seven beehives floated down Nancy Creek in the floods in September, 2009, in Atlanta. We want to start back up but everyone is anxious - both about the possibility of the creek jumping the bank again and the need to have stable hives. Kevin and his brother Pete are getting new bees in March and Julia and I have bees coming at the end of March or in April, so we are all invested, just uncertain.

Today Kevin and Pete set up a new location for the Blue Heron hives. They cleared an area up on a bank, above the area where the highest water was in the flood. They put in these great rock steps to allow easier access.



Then they moved all of our cinder blocks up so that we could envision the new apiary at Blue Heron.



Here are two cinder blocks overlooking Nancy Creek from (this time) high above the water line. The highest flood waters stopped at about the base of the tree you can see on the left.



If you double click on the picture below to enlarge it, you can see the outline of the fence around the community garden and Roswell road off the other side of the hill. Again, we are well above the 500 year flood line. Julia and I walked the trail at Blue Heron and took these pictures so we can dream again of our hives there.

Urban Beekeeping - Bees in the City

The Daily Green and Bee Culture teamed up to gather data and photos from urban beekeepers. Today the first pictures that were sent in response to Dan Shapely's request to hear from city beekeepers came out.

Here's the link.

I sent a picture of a hive inspection at the (now lost until next year) Blue Heron hives and sent them a story about my beekeeping adventures.

My picture and story are located at picture #36 in the slideshow. It's fun to look at all the pictures and see how many different ways people keep bees in the city.

Loss ..... and Gain

We had wondered about the hive with food that we set up at Blue Heron - were the bees there homeless or were they robbers from the neighborhood? Yesterday Julia and I went over and removed the empty boxes.

Under my box which had had the most activity was a clear sign of robbers. When robbers open honey cells, they rip the cell open, leaving ragged edges on the comb and dropping wax shards carelessly below. You can see the wax shards on top of the cinder block.

The reason there are shards on one block and not so much on the other is that some of the frames we put in the wrecked hive had dead brood and some had capped honey - so the honey must have been on that side.



We left the cinder blocks to inspire us for next year and to remind us that once there were bees thriving at Blue Heron.



From a practical point of view, last night I decided to look at the cost of what was lost.

Hive Body - 2 per hive $24
Telescoping Top $20
Inner Cover $10
Screened Bottom Board $15
Frames $20
Slatted Rack $11
Original nuc bees $75
Replacement Purvis Queen $50

Total $225

That's a lot of stuff floating down the river. Since there were seven hives there, each with approximately the same equipment, that means the total losses at Blue Heron for all the beekeepers there amounted to about $1575. Goodness -

While the whole thing was and is very sad, I spent some of Sunday afternoon with a young woman and her family who wanted to learn about bees to see what it would be like to start keeping bees in the spring.

Here's Annie in one of my beesuits, happily opening and exploring beekeeping as a possible new venture for herself.



So I tell myself there is balance. The bees and hives may have washed down the river, but there's at least one new beekeeper who wants to bring the tiny insects into her life.

And next year there will be more beehives and more beekeepers in the world.

No Bees at Home, No Homeless Bees - Blue Heron Update

I have been concerned about the fact that the bees I saw on Thursday night looked like robbers rather than homeless bees. They were approaching the hive in the frantic way that robbers do. But still, if there were still homeless bees in the vicinity of the Blue Heron hives, now gone, I'd want to try to make them a home.

Today it is pouring rain in Atlanta. But it is still daylight. I decided to drive over to Blue Heron in the pouring rain and look at the hives. If any bees are taking shelter in their old home box, they should be there now, taking shelter from the rain.

I arrived in the rain at Blue Heron, put on my muddy tennis shoes and rain jacket and sloshed through the mud over to the hives. No bees were anywhere. I opened the nuc box - no bees. I opened the yellow hive - no bees. I opened Julia's hive - no bees. Her hive had six dead bees on the top of it.

We can now definitely toll the bells for the Blue Heron bees, rest their little souls. All of them are no more.

The bees eating the honey must have been neighborhood robbers or bees who survived the flood but were so worn out that they have died this week.

I didn't move our equipment in the pouring rain - but I'll go get it in the next day or two.

And we'll try again next year.

Current Blue Heron Report on Homeless Bees

On Wednesday, Julia and I set up these hives on our remaining cinder blocks - we put a nuc with drawn frames on top of one set of cinder blocks and we uprighted the yellow hive and returned it to its cinder blocks. The frames in it were wet and muddy but we put them in the hive all the same.

I returned on Thursday to find that the bees had emptied the jar of honey completely. However, they were not flying in and out of the nuc. Instead they were flying in and out of the yellow hive.



So I moved the nuc and set it on top of the yellow hive. At least the frames in it are habitable. I set the Boardman up at the entry to the hive as one would normally place a Boardman.

If any of you are wondering why there is a frame stuck in the side of this hive, there is a reasonable explanation. The yellow hive is an 8 frame hive. Its bottom board, slatted rack, inner cover and top cover were washed down the creek in the flood. I had an 8 frame top cover at home, but not another 8 frame bottom board or slatted rack.

I brought from home a 10 frame bottom board and we set the hive on that. This leaves that front corner unsupported. To keep the hive level we had to slide something into the space and in the middle of the Blue Heron field, all we had was an extra frame - so I poked it in the space to level the hive.



Julia and I decided to determine if the bees were considering occupying this hive (they are flying in and out of it). We didn't know for sure so I resolved to return to the Blue Heron at dusk to see what the situation was. I returned at dusk to find a confusing picture. Bees were flying frantically all around the hive, as it looks like when a hive is being robbed.

The only way to see if bees are staying in the hive at night would be to go look after dark. I couldn't go back there after dark - it's just not safe - to go alone to the back of this field where a flood has just happened. I didn't particularly want to meet either a snake or a wandering human back there in the dark, so I didn't go.



If the bees are occupying the hive, we have two options:

1. Purchase a queen from someone close to Atlanta like Purvis or Fatbeeman and install her into the hive. Then we'd foster the hive through the winter at Blue Heron.
   
2. Move the hive with the homeless bees to my house and combine it with another hive.
   

I asked Cindy Bee about doing that and she said that it probably wouldn't work because Blue Heron is only 2.4 miles, driving from my house and as the crow (bee) flies, it is only 2 miles from my house. She said the bees would return to Blue Heron and not stay with the hive combination.

So I think I may have only prolonged their lives a short bit by this effort.

What to do? What to do?

Homes for the Homeless Bees

Today was an amazing day. One of Julia's friends called her from Chastain Park (about a mile from the Blue Heron as the creek flows). She had seen a hive box in the creek over at Chastain. Julia and two friends met there and really got down and dirty.

They pulled hive boxes and hive parts out of Nancy Creek and in effect salvaged whatever they could find.

Then they went to Blue Heron and found another stash of hive stuff cast into the brush on the creek bank by the flood. Julia said there were even bees flying around.

I couldn't get there until 2, so Julia and I met there, suited up and tried to fashion a home for these homeless bees. We called Cindy Bee who said to put together a dry hive box with drawn comb frames and feed honey to the bees in an effort to gather them in one place.

The hardest part was seeing the survivor bees. Julia and I each suited up for fear that in their confusion they would want to sting us, but it was like being in a swarm - the bees had no inclination to sting - they had nothing to protect. We saw a few live bees that were muddy and trying to just move and it was awful to watch. Heart breaking, really.

We did everything Cindy said and the results you can see in the slide show below. Julia took most of these pictures. If you click on the slideshow, you can view it in a larger size:



We'll check in a few days and if the bees are in any organized position to be moved, we'll move them home and combine them with a thriving hive. Cindy said if enough moved in, we could order a queen and start another hive.

This whole event has been so sobering for us as beekeepers. The thought of "here today, gone tomorrow," is not one we have considered often as beekeepers and it made us sad.

A man who works at the Blue Heron headquarters stopped by while we were working:

"We loved having the beehives," he said. "I hope this won't discourage you from putting them here again."

And we talked about the probability of another 100 year flood!

Below is the graph of the level of Nancy Creek - it's remarkable to see the difference in the flood yesterday and the level today:

Tragic Bee Loss at Blue Heron

Atlanta has had torrential rains in the last few days. The Atlanta paper said that two storm systems came together to create this perfect storm that has dropped 12 inches of rain onto some parts of Atlanta in the last 24 hours. The Blue Heron Nature Preserve is located beside Nancy Creek.

The USGS monitor reading as per their webpage at the Blue Heron gauge for Nancy Creek is currently two feet above "Major Flood Stage" of 13 feet. This morning creeks and rivers all over the city jumped their banks. Roads were closed, including the downtown connector because the water made them impassable.



My friend Julia took the two pictures below at Blue Heron around 5:30 today. The sign in the center of the first picture marks the entry to the community gardens and describes who has what plot in the flooded garden to the left of the picture.


Julia took this picture below of the area where our hives were located. To the left of the green tree, you can see something white. We thought at first that this was a hive (because it's where a hive was located) but now we think it's the sign about the bee area that has floated there.



This picture below shows how the area looked from my car at 6:45. You can see that the flood covers the drive into the Preserve. Our hives were located behind the tree with the reddish top. All seven of the hives were swept away by the flood. Julia and I had two of the hives and the rest belonged to nice guys who were just getting started with bees.

I imagine the waters rushed into the front entrance of the hives and drowned the bees before they could abscond, but Julia and I plan to watch the trees in the area for signs of absconded bees hanging in a cluster. We hope that some got out but are not expecting that they did because neither of our hives had a top entrance. If seven hives each had at this time of year around 40,000 bees each, that's 280,000 bees that died last night or this morning.



I put little boxes into this photo where the seven hives were at the Blue Heron Preserve. It was a great place for the bees and we had a good time sharing our hives with beekeepers who came on inspections with us.



More thunderstorms and rain are expected to start between 11 PM and midnight tonight and last through the night. What will tomorrow bring?

"Well, we're moving on up, to the east side...."

The nuc I created with the combination at Blue Heron appears to be doing fine. I didn't open up the bottom box today, but I did look down into it to see so many eager little bee faces. The five frames in the box are fully built out and mostly used. There are three brood frames (one with some pollen) and two solid honey frames. Only one of the brood frames has much space in it, so first I gave the nuc hive a medium box to move on up into.



Then I wanted to feed them since it's only a short time until winter and they are weak and small. So I put a third medium nuc box on top of the hive body and put a ziploc baggie feeder on the tops of the frames beneath. Because it is a quart instead of a gallon bag, I'll need to check on it more frequently.



So here's their new "deluxe apartment in the sky..." Doesn't it look like a row house!

But I think the girls may have the capacity to fill the second medium box before winter hits. Several beekeepers I respect keep bees in nucs through the winter in much colder climates than here in Hotlanta - Michael Bush in Nebraska, Ross Conrad in Vermont. So I am having hope for the future, especially if the new queen emerges and gets well-mated.



The only problem is that the nuc box on the bottom is poorly built and a little warped. I didn't match up the sides well and it's uneven on the top, so the bees are using the space between the bottom box and the first blue medium box as a middle entrance.

Downsizing When the Economy is Bad!

So with neither hive thriving at Blue Heron, I killed one queen, put the other in a nuc, and combined the two hives there. I left this bag of sugar syrup on top of the frames in an almost empty third box. The bees were on it right away.



I put bungee cords around the nuc with the old frame and a split's worth of bees. I didn't block the entrance, figuring that home was only a short drive away and the girls would probably make the trip inside the nuc. Sure enough, they traveled inside the nuc and there were only about 6 bees in the car when I arrived at home.



As I said in an earlier post, when I found the queen, the frame on which she was walking had an almost perfect queen cell on it. The cell was a dark peanut, perfectly shaped and looking ripe for an emerging queen. I assume the bees knew they needed a new queen and made one. When she emerges, I guess one of them will be killed.

I brought the nuc home to my deck apiary. I put it beside the box they had lived in at Blue Heron. I thought it might make them comfortable and reminded of home. If a new queen emerges and this hive does well, I might move it to the larger hive box and keep it over the winter.

We'll see what happens. If their economy gets better, maybe they can move into more upscale housing again!

The Queen is Dead! Long Live the Queen!

Beekeeping takes me into unexpected places - most of them good ones. Today I had a sad, sad experience.

My two hives at Blue Heron are doing badly - one has a queen who appears to be a drone layer (or at least that's how the hive looked at the August 8 inspection) - probably poorly mated. The other has a queen who is barely laying, has a poor brood pattern and was also probably short-bred when she mated. Both of these queens were made by the bees in the hive from their own eggs.

So conferring with other beekeepers, the decision was made to order a new queen. I would then combine the two hives, getting rid of the current queen in both hives and order a new queen to rule the combined hive.

Honestly, I have dreaded the day. I never find queens well in the hive and today I was going to have not only to find them but to do away with them.

This morning the UPS guy arrived at my office with my new queen from the Purvis Brothers Apiary. He had no idea that the package contained bees (it did have an apiary health certificate in bright yellow affixed to the package.....). I asked if I could take his picture and it's not in focus because I did it really quickly.

I opened the package in front of him and showed him the queen cage - he was amazed and wanted to know what I was going to do with it. I guess it was a little strange to deliver a queen bee to a psychologist's office!



So here's where the sad part of the story begins. I loaded up my car and drove to Blue Heron. On the way, I called Cindy Bee for help and advice. I wanted to know if it were OK to install a new queen and put a baggie feeder on the hive at the same time.

She gave me the thumbs up, so I went armed with

• a baggie feeder, full of 2:1 sugar syrup
• a nuc to put one of the queens in (I was planning to give her to Julia, my Blue Heron partner in crime, to put in an observation hive).
• A closed container of vanilla, watered down a little, and a silicone brush to brush it on the top of the frames
• Her Majesty and attendants, now with a string and a push-pin tack to attach her to the hive frame top
• All of my hive inspection paraphernalia

I opened up the third and weakest hive at Blue Heron. There were few bees in the hive, but enough. The queen had been laying - I saw eggs and tiny circles of larvae. But the hive is weak and there were few bees flying in and out.

First I told myself that I would find the queen in each hive. I thought I should have the right mindset and I should believe that I could spot her in order to find her easily . I used very little smoke - just a puff at the door and moved slowly, giving myself plenty of time (I had a 2 hour break in which to do this).

I looked through the frames on this hive and found the queen almost immediately. I took the frame she was on and put it in the nuc (a weak queen is perfect for an observation hive). BTW, the frame also had an almost ready to emerge perfect queen cell on it. The bees must not like this queen either.

Then I added a second frame of brood, a frame of honey, another frame of honey and a third frame with very little brood but some pollen. I turned the entrance away from the hives and put a basket of hive inspection stuff in front of it because it would need to sit there until I was done. In effect I created a split.

The rest of the bees on frames that had a little brood and lots of open cells stayed in the box for transfer to the combined hive. Cindy and I talked about doing a direct transfer at this time of year. The plan would be to paint the tops of the frames with vanilla to confuse the odors in the hive so the bees would be confused and blend with each other.

And then I would simply put the frames from one hive into a box directly with the frames from another hive. Cindy said it's too hot in Hotlanta to do a newspaper combine in August. Below you can see my vanilla concoction and silicone paint brush.



Then I got to hive two and opened it. I found the queen on the second frame in the bottom box (the first one I looked into). I debated. Should I do away with her right then while I could see her or look deeper into the hive to make sure she was still a drone layer.

She was a beautiful, large majestic queen, but I hesitated to go through the hive for fear I'd not find her again.............so I flicked her off of the frame with my hive tool onto the ground. Then I used my hive tool, supposedly to cut off her head, but I couldn't watch so in effect I split her. I didn't take pictures. It seemed so cruel and sad.

I'm never doing that again, I swear. I felt horrible and sick.

I'm going to set up a retirement nuc for aging queens and put them all in there. I can never, never destroy a queen like that again.

Then of course, I looked through the rest of the hive and doubted my decision. The hive looked good with lots of brood and young larvae.

I'm trying to comfort myself by saying that the Purvis Goldlines are disease resistant, the combination will create a strong hive going into winter, it will help the combination to work if they have to all adjust to a new queen, etc. etc, but I still think I'm going to feel sad for a while after this destructive beekeeping act.

So here's the queen cage. I've threaded a paper clip through the top and tied a string to the clip. I uncapped the sugar fondant for the bees to eat through it.



I lowered her Majesty into the newly combined hive, every frame anointed with vanilla (see the brown drops of it on the frame? This is an eight-frame box which has a little wiggle room so I also put a frame into the space where the cage is, put the baggie feeder in a third box with a couple of frames of honey, closed the hive and left them all to get acquainted.



I am serious about never wanting to do this again. Cindy said to put the body of the queen on the floor of the hive so the bees would know, but when I looked down to pick her up, a mortician bee had already carried her off.

A sad day in my beekeeping world.