Sue Hubbell and A Book of Bees

I decided to read a bee book a month in 2008. My January 2008 book is A Book of Bees by Sue Hubbell.

As a commercial beekeeper in the Missouri Ozarks, she takes us on her own journey from winter through the year with her bees. The book is chatty and feels like a conversation in the author's kitchen.

In the course of the book, we are carried through all the intricacies of her thoughts about raising bees, building bee equipment, managing the queens in her hives. I love the way she writes because it reflects the way I feel when I manage my bees. She talks to her bees, even though they can't hear biologically. I find I often also talk while I am working with the bees.

Note: Hubbell says in the book that bees can't hear and that probably was based on the knowledge at the time she was writing, but as a result of a comment below, I found the research that honeybees can hear by way of an organ at the pedicel of the antenna.

She talks about the peaceful way she feels in the presence of the hive. I feel comforted by the slow pace that we have to use as beekeepers to avoid increasing the intrusion on the hive. And I love to sit and watch the bees from my sunporch - the amazing life and activity of the beehive are intriguing to observe from that vantage point.

Some parts of A Book of Bees make me laugh out loud. She quotes EB White's poem, "Song of the Queen Bee" which is funny from start to finish. I'd type the whole thing for you, but you can find it on one of my favorite bee blogs by clicking here.

As a side note: I bought my copy of the book used and it came with a 4X6 head shot of Antonio Banderas tucked in the back. I assume the previous owner had used it as a bookmark, so I have also marked my place with the picture. I'm sure the former reader simply liked to look at him, but I found myself wondering if he were in any way linked with bees. A Google search resulted in finding two things:

• He escaped being stung by a swarm while pruning a tree (doesn't sound like swarm behavior, but that is how it was reported). To his credit, he called a beekeeper to come and capture the swarm, rather than poisoning it, and
• He is the voice of the yellow-jacket looking "bee" in the Nasonex commercial!

Feeding the Bees - Part two

Today I opened the two hives to check on the Ziploc bags of honey I left on them about 10 days ago. In Mellona, most of the honey had been eaten and I didn't see many small hive beetles - I believe the cooler nights are taking their toll on the growth of SHB. I pulled the bag out and hung it over the deck rail. See how the bees gather around the slit (on the top of the rail). The rest of the bees clustered over the honey that gravity pulled to the lower corner.

I put a bag of 2:1 sugar syrup in Mellona and cut a slit in it. I also returned the remains of the bag of honey, pulling the corners up against the hive body to encourage gravity to draw the honey toward the slit.

In Bermuda, the situation was about the same. Most of the honey was gone from the bag. In this hive I discovered small hive beetles clustered in the zipped opening of the bag.
See them in the last picture? It's not clearly focused - the camera focused on the bees behind the bag on the frame of honey. I squashed the beetles by pinching closed the zipped area - some escaped by flying away.

In this hive I returned the honey bag, turned upside down with the split against the frames, again raising the corners of the bag to encourage the help of gravity. I added a bag of 2:1 sugar syrup beside the original bag and using a sharp knife, cut a slit in the bag.

The whole time I fooled around with this task, I kept thinking of Sue Hubbell's book that I am reading, A Book of Bees, in which she gently points out that when we approach the hive with the hive tool, every time we free a part of the hive - like lifting up the inner cover - we are destroying the hard work of propolizing the hive to keep the cold air out.

I know I'm in Atlanta where it's 70 something today and almost every day of at least 8 months of the year, but I feel bad that after I do my beekeeping tasks, the bees have to redo work that they didn't destroy - I did.

Bees and Asters

This weekend in N Georgia there were asters of many sizes and colors blooming everywhere. We stay in the mountains at my house across the valley from Black Rock Mountain so we often hike there.

At Black Rock Mountain State Park, there's a lake with a path to walk around it. We saw tons of these white asters, covered with honeybees and other bees as well. The first picture is a honeybee on the aster. The second picture is some other bee, also enjoying the aster.

I'm reading Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees. She raised her bees in Arkansas, but says in her book that in the fall, the bees feed on asters as much as they feed on goldenrod. Either flower makes a rank-tasting honey, but mostly beekeepers leave this honey on the hive for the bees.

In the city of Atlanta we don't have much fall flow, but out in the country or up in the mountains, goldenrod and asters - blue ones and white ones like these are everywhere in abundance right now.

From reading the Internet today, I believe this is heath aster, or aster ericoides, found prolifically in Georgia. I'm not sure what these flowers are, but if you want to see a lovely collection of aster photos, click here.