Jamie Ellis at GBA

Jamie Ellis' presence at the GBA Spring meeting was absolutely delightful.  The researchers at UGA tend to be telling us something different every time we see them.  Their goal is to come up with a way to deal with the varroa mite because it has been so devastating to beekeepers.

Jamie began his talk to us about the state of beekeeping with a graph from NASS (the National Agricultural Statistics Service).  Here's what it looked like:

This is a photo I took of my computer screen that I took with my iPhone, so if you want to see the real thing, it's on the sixth page of this.

From this graph, Jamie pointed out that the numbers of honey bee colonies in this country have been declining steadily since a peak in 1945.  If you look closely, the decline has leveled off a little since the arrival of varroa!

To listen to other university researchers, we are in desperate times BECAUSE of the varroa.  Jamie pointed out that we are in desperate times because of the lessening numbers of colonies, but not because of varroa.

I was particularly interested in his approach because I now know a number of beekeepers - local ones like Jerry Wallace and Bill Owens, and national ones like Michael Bush and Sam Comfort who haven't used any treatment for varroa or anything else for years.

Jerry Wallace almost sheepishly confessed to me that he (who used to use treatment including oxalic acid) has been splitting his strong hives and not worrying about the ones that died.  Michael Bush doesn't count varroa for the same reason.  He has hives that don't need him to count varroa.  They may be in the hive but his bees are strong enough - whether that means they are hygienic or disease resistant - not to need to worry.

Jamie did not paint a pretty picture of beekeeping in these times for many reasons, but referenced many factors - environmental and otherwise.  His concern was the decline in the numbers of hive SINCE 1945.

He explored the Oxbow Center where the conference was held.  He is with his oldest son in the photo below.

They came to look at a giant turtle near the newsletter table where Gina and I sat, representing the GBA newsletter that we edit.  We spent the day in front of a coiled rattler behind us (in a glassed display, but still...)

We brought several printed issues of Spilling the Honey and a suggestion box for ideas for the newsletter.  We gave stickers that stated "I contributed to Spilling the Honey!" to everyone we saw who had written for the newsletter or who had contributed an idea or photo.

We both wore fedoras with PRESS stickers in the hatbands.  We had a good time.  This is not a good photo of either of us, but at least you can see our PRESS hats.

After a talk on pesticides that I missed, Jamie gave a third talk about the ways honey bees have answered life's four most important questions for him.  I'm not going to try to explain the delightful, hilarious talk, but he ended by telling us how honey bees explain Lady Gaga (don't ask).

Travels with Linda - it's been a long BEE Day

This morning after I re-hived the Decatur/azalea swarm, installed two packages at Morningside Community Garden and packed my car, my dog Hannah and I drove to Rabun County (about 2 hours away) to take two packages of bees to install in my hives at the Community Garden there.

I had been up earlier this year, and knew that one of the hives had died over the winter.  The other hive was alive then but since that weekend we've had a string of five days of temperatures in the teens.  My Atlanta hives did not survive that, so I had reason to think that maybe both of my hives in Rabun County were dead.

To my shock and amazement, bees were flying in and out of the green hive - the one that was covered with kudzu for most of the summer and where the bees had definitely died.  I opened it up and was greeted by a household of ants.  They were nesting in the edges of the inner cover.



Upon my disturbance of their home, they began carrying out baby ants (click on the picture to see better).



Despite the ant invasion, the hive was FULL of bees.  One of the gardeners there told me that he had looked over and hadn't seen many bees but then one day he saw LOTS of bees.  I imagine he witnessed the swarm that actually moved into this hive.  My old hive became an effective swarm trap...Free bees!



I inspected the hive and found eggs, young larvae and lots of activity.  They were using most of the frames in the bottom two boxes.  In the third box they had drone brood in two combs and hadn't started using the rest, but I didn't take it off - they'll need it soon enough.

The bees looked healthy but if you look at the photo below, you can see a red arrow at about 1:00 pointing to a varroa mite on the back of a bee.  If I can see that one, you can rest assured there are many in the hive.



So the once dead hive has resurrected itself and it only cost me 1/4 a tank of gas to find this out.  Hannah had fun running up and down the creek bank while I inspected the two hives and the two packages of bees spent four hours today in the car (as did I).



Both of these hives are doing well.  I'm back up in the mountains for spring break this coming weekend and we'll see how they are faring then.

No Use Crying Over Spilt…..Powdered Sugar!

I'm good at spilling things. I like wine glasses without stems for that reason. If something can be spilled, I'm your woman…..I can do it in a heartbeat.

Today I went over to Stonehurst Place to check on the bees. According to the research at UGA, if you want to treat the bees for varroa mites with powdered sugar shakes, then you start in January, treat four times, three days apart and then repeat the process every other month.

 So it's January and time to get started.

Today I treated my hives at home and then got in the car to take the Dustructor to the Stonehurst Place Inn to treat the hives there. When I opened the back door of the car to get the Dustructor, the cap came off of the canister and powdered sugar went everywhere.

There was powdered sugar in every crevice near the door of the car. What a mess!

I gathered up what I could and returned it to the canister.

The good news is that on this day with 69 degree temps around noon, the bees were flying with enthusiasm out of both hives. I am relieved that they are alive and have high hopes for their making it through to March.

On each hive, as I had done at home, I slid the end of the Dustructor into the entry to about the middle of the hive. Then I gave five large puffs of powdered sugar into the hive with as much vigor as I could muster.

Down with the Varroa Destructor! Long live my bees!

Keith Delaplane on Powdered Sugar as a Varroa Mite Treatment

This weekend the Georgia Beekeepers Association met in McDonough, Georgia just southeast of Atlanta.  Our Metro Atlanta Beekeeping club had the highest number of people there.  It certainly made me appreciate the quality and level of programming our local club has.  The speakers' topics for this meeting were not available ahead of time. I much prefer to know what to expect when I go to a meeting.  There also was no food available except by leaving to go to a fast food restaurant and that made the whole process feel less nurturing.

The two speakers I learned something from were Keith Delaplane and Kim Flottum.  Today I am going to tell you about Keith's talk on the results of the powdered sugar study done by Jennifer Berry at the University of Georgia Bee Lab.

Keith Delaplane talked the most specifically I have ever heard him speak about the results of the powdered sugar study done by Jennifer Berry at the University of Georgia Bee Lab.  Jennifer took the position that it might be more effective to try to address the varroa mite at a break in the brood cycle such as in the winter.

Her study compared a number of factors.  They looked at treating with powdered sugar beginning in January or beginning in March.  They compared using a top sifter (a flour sifter) to using the Dustructor - a contraption they built that blew in the powdered sugar from the bottom of the hive.  Then they compared how often to apply powdered sugar.  Some hives they treated every two weeks for a year.  The others they treated every other month.  On the treatment months they did four applications of powdered sugar with three days between the treatments.

First they found that winter bee populations are better in the spring if treatment begins in January.  They also found that treatment is better with the Dustructor.  Finally the timing of treating every other months, giving four treatments at each treatment month, three days apart was the most effective timing of treatment.

I own a contraption from Brushy Mountain called Varroa-Dustructor and plan to use it regularly on every hive beginning in January.  I"m going to follow the plan for four treatments every three days and do it in January, March, May, July, September and November.  We'll see if I have healthier bees!

And Now the Queen Slows Down her Pace

Yesterday was the summer solstice (also sometimes referred to as the change of days) in the northern hemisphere.  I don't have any pictures to post about this - just wanted to note that beginning with the summer solstice, the queen in the bee hive slows down her laying.  She continues to slow until the winter solstice when she begins to build back up for spring.

Ross Conrad gave a talk at Young Harris a couple of years ago in which he said that splitting your hives after the solstice would be a good varroa control.  The split causes one half of the split to be without a queen until they can make their own, so the varroa mite foundress (the great mother mite) has nowhere to lay her eggs until egg laying begins again with the new queen.  This interrupts the varroa cycle and helps your bee hive rid itself of mites.

Apparently despite the slow down of the queen in a hive that is chugging along toward winter, the queen in a new split after the solstice acts like a spring queen and works hard to build up quickly, knowing that winter is just around the corner.

Jennifer Berry Speaks to our Bee Club

Tonight we were privileged to hear Jennifer Berry speak on IPM management of the varroa mite. It's always fun when Jennifer comes to speak both because she is so entertaining and is so full of good information.

First she talked about the Varroa mite and how it reproduces. As most of you probably know, the mite enters the cell just before the cell with the larvae is capped (on about the seventh day). Within the cell, the foundress mite lays her first egg, a male, and then follows with female eggs. She has 13 days in a worker cell to procreate effectively. She has 16 days in a drone cell, so the varroa mite prefers the drone cell.

Jennifer first discussed the ways varroa has been addressed chemically. Beekeepers used a chemical approach, first with apistan (fluvalinate) and later with coumaphos. With the Apistan, mites quickly developed a resistance to the chemical. With coumaphos there were many issues including bad queens who laid poor brood patterns and didn't live long. She had slides from studies showing that drones survived better in hives with no chemicals and that queens had better, more long lasting reproduction with no chemicals.

Thus, we use integrated pest management or IPM, as it is known in the bee world. There are four main IPM approaches: biological, cultural, genetic and chemical.

The biological approach has not worked with the varroa mite. The idea would be to develop a fungus that kills the mite but it has not been efficacious to follow this approach.

The second approach is the cultural one. This includes screened bottom boards, drone brood trapping, powdered sugar shakes, and brood cycle disruption.

• Bottom screens allow mites to fall or be groomed off of the bodies of the bees and when they fall through the screen, they can't get back up into the hive and onto the backs of a bee. 
• In drone brood trapping, the drone brood is cut out of a frame or a whole frame is pulled and then the brood is either destroyed or frozen. Since the varroa prefers to breed in the longer developing drone cell, this rids the hive of a lot of varroa. 
• Powdered sugar seems to be effective, especially when the sugar is sifted over the hive pre-spring brood build-up. This means that the most effective time to do powdered sugar shakes in Atlanta would be between January and March while it is still winter. 
• Finally brood cycle disruption means doing something to stop the queen from laying. This could include doing a split so that half the hive would be queenless while they make their own queen. It could also include caging the queen for days - Jennifer has done it for seven days; Brother Adam did it for ten. These approaches stop the laying in the hive and since the varroa mite needs larvae on which to lay her eggs, it also disrupts the varroa cycle.

The third approach is the genetic one.  Jennifer encouraged us to buy good queens from breeders who are breeding for hygienic behavior, especially when it comes to varroa mites.  (Varroa Sensitive Hygienic queens are those who breed for hygiene that includes clearing out cells in which varroa lives).

The final approach is chemical.  Jennifer pointed out that she doesn't use Coumaphos or Fluvalinate.  There are a few chemicals that are essential oils with a thymol base that she would consider using.  Jennifer also talked about oxalic acid which is WOOD BLEACH.  She asked would you want that in your hives with your bees?  She also felt similarly about formic acid which is caustic, corrosive to equipment, dangerous for human's eyes, lungs, etc. and hard on bees and brood.  She was not in any way positive about the use of these caustic substances. 

Part of IPM includes understanding the economic threshold.  IPM recognizes that there are pests in the hive and rather than focus on eliminating the pest, the IPM approach is about recognizing when the level of pest in the hive is above a manageable level to a point called the Economic Injury Level, where the hive will be harmed because of the presence of the pest.

Jennifer suggested that at this time of year in general a mite drop in 24 hours of 60 mites or 125 in a larger, more thriving colony, is at the economic threshold.  If your colony measures at that drop level, then you need to do something such as one of the previously mentioned IPM approaches.

In the UGA bee lab, Jennifer is now doing research on the effectiveness of powdered sugar shakes, looking at the timing (doing them before the queen starts laying brood for spring) and the delivery method(top down or bottom up - blowing sugar into the hive from the bottom).

Julia and I left the meeting and decided to put a sticky board under one of the Blue Heron hives with the plan of looking at it on Sunday at our Metro Hive Inspection.

 

Analyzing the Dead Hive - Why did they die?

Today in the icy weather I opened up the dead hive to see what the situation appeared to be. There were a pile of dead bees on the slatted rack landing area. There were tons of dead bees on the screened bottom board. In a hive that has starved, generally the bees all die together with their heads down in the last cells where honey was found.

This hive died with two full boxes of stored syrup. There were about 30 bees head down in a frame but the rest were dead all over the hive. Most of the bodies are on the slatted rack and screened bottom board.

If you look carefully at these pictures, you'll see lots of dead hive beetles in with the bees. The SHBs can't stay alive without the heat from the bees.

You'll also see that most of the dead bees have their proboscis (their tongue) sticking out. Bees do this in starvation, but seeing them on the bottom board with their tongues out seems strange to me. Also a number of these bees have varroa mites on their bodies. I don't know if they are dead from a varroa vectored problem or from starvation or did they freeze to death?

Note: beneath the screened bottom board is the tray from the Freeman beetle trap - lots of dead beetles there too. However the hive is not destroyed by the beetle....there are just a lot of bodies around.

I'd be interested in any theories anyone would like to offer.

I sifted through the bodies and did not find a queen. That doesn't mean she wasn't there - I just didn't find her. Although this hive may have died because they were queenless. There are a lot of dead bees between the frames front edge and the front wall of the hive box and I didn't go through those.

Yet Another New Queen at Blue Heron and Powdered Sugar Shake

When I was last at Blue Heron, our third hive, the one the supplier gave us to replace the queenless nuc we got from him, didn't look good. The hive was not bustling with activity or bees and the numbers seemed small.

I was disappointed to find that the bees I saw on the tops of the frames had many shriveled and deformed wings, indicative of Deformed Wing Virus vectored by the varroa mite. I decided that I would return this week to do a powdered sugar shake.

Before shaking the powdered sugar, I pulled each frame to see how things are going in this weak hive. On the second frame I saw this opened queen cell. This is at least the third queen for this hive. Their first one failed and I don't think the second one was doing anything. Now they apparently have created yet another queen. Hopefully she'll be a good one.




I found two frames full of eggs and brood which was reassuring. The hive had good honey stores in the deep in which they live. The box above was completely empty and I removed it to give them more security (less space to defend).

The powdered sugar shake was quite an event. Here are the bees, covered with sugar clinging to the frame.

Here's how the whole box looked!

I took off the inner cover and put it on the ground and I removed the top box before doing this. When I lifted up the inner cover to set it back on the hive, the bees who had not experienced the powdered sugar shake surrounded one of their sisters to see what was going on with her and all this white powder!

Keith Fielder on Beekeeping more Like Mother Nature

Last night Keith Fielder, Cooperative Extension Agent at UGA, Georgia Master Beekeeper, Welsh Honey judge and all around good guy, talked to the Metro Atlanta Beekeeper's Association on the importance of low impact beekeeping.



As a beekeeper who is trying to stay as natural as possible with my hives, I was thrilled to hear Keith supporting Mother Nature.

By low impact beekeeping he emphasized:

• No chemicals
• A more natural environment both inside and outside the colony
  

He also emphasized the importance of us beekeepers understanding the biology of the honeybee (see my notes from his earlier talk) as well as the biology of the pests that intrude on the bee and the biology of the diseases of the honey bee.

Keith uses no chemicals in his hives - no chemical treatments and no drugs. He discovered that he lost about the same number of colonies each winter with or without chemicals - so why not leave the bees be?

From the outside the hive natural approach, he put up the slide below. The tree in which a bee colony could certainly live stands alone, and thus the bee colony stands alone. We tend to put our colonies side by side (for the convenience of the beekeeper) and that is not natural. Keith is trying to locate his colonies at least 50 yards from each other.



While that is impractical for me in my urban yard, remembering the consequences of unnatural colony location is important. With hives beside each other, drifting between hives may occur and if you have mites in one colony, you will have mites in all the colonies. Just as if you have small hive beetles, you are likely to find them in all hives.

From the inside-the-colony perspective, he encouraged us to keep our equipment clean, to be super cautious about purchasing old equipment from old beekeepers because all of its problems will come with it, and to change out the combs at least every three years.

I asked him about the old comb in a tree (in other words, how does Mother Nature handle old comb) and he said that bees in a tree continually build upward in the tree trunk. When they've gotten as far up as they can go, they abscond and find a new home. The inherent wax moths then take over and destroy the old comb. Then scout bees show up, attracted by the hive smell, find a new home with no old wax, since it has been destroyed by the wax moths, and move a swarm in to start the process all over.

He said that screened bottom boards are essential to a clean hive. Debris, mites, and other detrius fall through the SBB and don't return to the hive. In addition the SBB provides ventilation, essential to a healthy hive.

While he didn't talk about or encourage foundationless beekeeping, he did say that if you use commercial wax, you will have chemicals in your hive introduced by the wax from the commercial companies. He suggested using plastic foundation with no wax coating.

Michael Bush says that the bees don't like plastic and it doesn't work to give them plastic with no wax coating. Cindy Bee who was at the meeting asked about using a strip of paper in the groove, much like I use a wax strip. Popsicle sticks will accomplish the same thing when glued in the frame groove. The goal of all of the aforementioned is to have fresh, uncontaminated wax in the hive.

He talked about bee genetics - using queens from hygienic stock such as the Purvis Brothers' gold line or from survivor stock - like great swarms. If there are enough drones around, he is fine with the bees making their own queens. (Currently my hives at home all have queens that they have made themselves).

When asked about the bad queens many people got in Atlanta in the early nucs this year, he said that buying commercial nucs means that you are getting old queens from last year that the commercial guys don't want any more and that the new queens, with all the rain this spring in Florida, are (and what I heard here was:) shortbread.

As a cook I wondered how the queen bee can be shortbread, but his answer made me understand that what he actually said was, "short-bred," meaning that instead of 17 or 18 drones mating with the queen, she may have only mated with one. (See the story about Julia's drone laying queen at Blue Heron)

He said that nutrition for bees will be the next area of research after colony collapse disorder. Bees have a hard time now getting variety into their diet. We have a "fragmented habitat" and less plant diversity. You should see in a healthy colony all colors of pollen coming in the door in the spring. If you don't see this, then your bees are probably not being fed in a well-rounded way.

He did encourage feeding nucs sugar syrup - not corn syrup. As an Ag agent, he is quite aware of the process sugar goes through from cane to table and feels fine about feeding syrup made from cane sugar to his bees.

A very natural, as in nonchemical, way to control for mites is to do splits. This is because in a split, the old queen stays in one place and the other half of the split has no queen. bees in that half of the split have to make their own queen from an egg, and the process takes about a month from egg to laying queen. This disrupts the varroa mite life cycle because without a laying queen, the mite can't reproduce themselves in a bee egg. Thus the mites die out over this period.

In essence he promoted in every way that a good beekeeper helps the bees have what they need NATURALLY.

What a breath of fresh air!

Powdered Sugar and the Bees

Yesterday I did an inspection of all of my hives to make sure they have enough supplies for winter. I added a Ziploc feeder baggie to Persephone because that hive has been low on stores. I considered doing what a friend on Beemaster's Forum calls the Robin Hood principle: taking a full super from Bermuda and giving it to Persephone, but the drought and dearth being what they are in Georgia, I was hesitant to take any of the Bermuda bees' hard earned product away.

While I inspected, I did a powdered sugar shake on all but the nuc of bees who found me. Then I read this article by Randy Oliver and felt somewhat purposeless in my powdered sugar efforts. He says that powdered sugar really doesn't do much in the fight against the varroa mite and that mite-resistant bee development is the answer. However, he does say that a powdered sugar shake at this time of year, when there is little brood raising going on, may move varroa out of the hive for the winter.

Randy is a scientist and I respect his careful examination of beekeeping tenets. Here's what he said might be effective:

"Sugar dusting can be quite effective for
reducing the mite population in broodless (or nearly
broodless) bees, such as during summer dearths or in
winter (if the bees are not tightly clustered). It also
works quite well to drop mites from package bees,
shook bees, or swarms. Another use is to “clean up”
new nucs (best applied at day 7 after the queen begins
laying--just before the first brood begins to be sealed)."
----Randy Oliver

This is what a bee looks like up close and personal when a powdered sugar shake has occurred.


The powdered sugar clings to the hairs on their bodies and they groom themselves and each other to get it off.

In the grooming process, varroa mites are groomed off as well and fall through the screened bottom board to the ground below, hopefully never to return to the hive.

Randy Oliver on Beekeeping in the 21st Century

Randy Oliver gave three talks at GBA. His energy and smile infuse all of his talks with enthusiasm and his obvious love of beekeeping. I read his articles in ABJ and he is someone who is referred to often on the bee forum discussions online, especially on BeeSource.

One of the talks I heard was on beekeeping in the 21st century. I'm going to try to share what I learned from this talk.

He said that management in the 21st century would include optimal nutrition, managing parasite loads, and using appropriate biotreatments at the right time.

Optimal nutrition means having a variety of pollen being brought into the hive. If you pull a frame with pollen on it, you should see lots of colors - this indicates a varied diet for the bees. He showed a slide comparing a "fat bee" with one that is not. House bees have lots of vitagellin and this keeps them alive and kicking. Foragers lose this fat and begin to age rapidly. Although he encouraged avoiding feeding bees as much as possible, if one feeds a pollen patty to the bees, they should be fed sugar syrup 1:1 at the same time.

For parasite management, he talked about the rapid increase of the varroa in the hive - at the rate of a 2.5% population increase per day. Sugar dusting with powdered sugar can help.

He had a wonderful picture of his methods, as he has described in ABJ.....a bee brush duct taped to a measuring cup in such a way that one can dump the cup and then with a flip of the wrist use the brush to brush the sugar off of the frame tops. The brush is taped one way for left handers and the other for right handers. I can't find a picture on his site, but you can imagine.

He also discussed working on retarding mite growth during spring build up and encouraged us to check for mite levels before supering up. Beginning August 15 all beekeepers should work like crazy to get the mite levels down in the hives so that the September bees who live through the winter will not be mite-infested.

When he is checking for mite levels with a sticky board, he sometimes does a check 10 minutes after sugar dusting. He uses his sticky boards over and over and cleans them with an ice scraper - really quick and effective.

If you can keep mite levels down under 1%, this will help not only with bees' health but also with honey production. Under 1% means that a 24 hour sticky board fall would be 10 mites or less, doing a sugar shake with a jar of bees - I believe he said 1 inch of bees in a mason jar = 100 bees - should only yield 3 mites, or a 10 minute sugar shake check of the sticky board should show a drop of only 5 - 10 mites.

He has invented a fabulous frame for drone management in the varroa fight. People use drone cell frames to grow drones and freeze the frame to kill the mites. These frames have to be on the hives for 28 days to assure readiness to freeze. To address the time issue and be more efficient (I experienced Randy Oliver as incredibly efficient about time usage), he invented a frame for drone management that does not involve freezing.

This frame has a bar in it about 1/4 the way down. He puts it in the hive with no foundation. The bees store honey in the upper fourth. In the lower fourth they will build drone comb. He pulls this frame, cuts out the capped drone comb and throws it away or melts the wax down. The process takes 15 seconds, can happen at the hive, and doesn't take up freezer space - see what I mean about his efficiency!

He also discussed, as many people are today, the idea of making late summer splits to interrupt the breeding cycle of the varroa mite.

When he talked about biotreatments, he discussed oxalic acid and formic acid. He treats his hives on the day after Christmas because the bees are not growing brood at that time.

This is purely an overview of what I understood. I encourage you to visit his site and read his many articles. I love reading his articles in ABJ because he writes in a very easy to grasp way. He ran a series on Nosema earlier this year and has written on Honey Super Cell, Powdered Sugar Treatments and many other topics.

And What of the Bees?

I've been focused on the wax block for so long that some of you may be wondering if I have forgotten the bees. I am going to do an inspection and powdered sugar shake tomorrow. I have not inspected the bees in a couple of weeks.

Here's the good news:
At Young Harris this year a number of speakers, Kim Flottum and Ross Conrad, for example, gave talks about how important splits in mid summer are to reduce the varroa mite issue. When you do a split and force the hive to make a new queen, brood rearing is disrupted.

In my hives, the hive I requeened a few weeks ago was in the middle of an interrupted brood cycle. I haven't checked to see if the new queen is laying or if she is established in the hive beyond removing her empty queen cage.

However simply by being queenless long enough to interrupt the rearing of brood, that hive is much less likely to have a varroa problem. Without eggs being laid and brood being capped and growing, there is no place for the varroa mite to lay her eggs or for young varroa to grow and thrive. The Devorah hive is highly likely to have a very low varroa count as a result.

I will check all the hives in the morning to see what's what and I'll report to you about how the requeened hive is doing, how the combined hive is doing and how the other three are doing.

Ross Conrad, Organic Beekeeper, at Young Harris

I had the privilege twice today to hear Ross Conrad talk about his methods of beekeeping at the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute today.

First topic: American Foulbrood:

He discussed a way to handle American Foulbrood without burning the hives. He advocates removing the bees from the affected hive, shaking them into new hive boxes with new frames, all new equipment. Then he burns the old frames. He scorches the boxes, covers, bottom boards, etc. like I did for the boxes donated to the Girl Scout troop.

He notes that the above process allows him to save the bees. What is destroyed are the frames of larvae contaminated with AFB, but the bees are not sacrificed. In general each time he was the speaker he clearly communicated that he was oriented to the bees' needs rather than the needs of the beekeeper.

I hope never to encounter AFB, but what I most learned from was the second talk I heard.

Second topic: Addressing the varroa question by making nucs

As I understand it, this is what he advocates:

We want to promote strength in our hives. This often means promoting the growth of local bees. If you order bees from other locales than your own, then you are asking the arriving bees to adapt to your climate, environment, etc., but if you are using your own strongest bees to expand your stock, then the bees have already demonstrated their ability to thrive in your environment.
Taking this further, he also prefers to use queens that his bees make rather than purchasing queens.

Following this logic, if you have a strong hive then that hive should be one that you capitalize on by expanding it through making nucs.

From his strongest hives that he would most like to duplicate, he makes five frame nucs using as the center frame a frame of new eggs and young brood. On either side of the center frame he puts a frame of larvae and capped brood. Then the last two frames are frames of honey to support the new nuc.

It will take the nuc 16 days to make one of the eggs into a queen. Then the queen has to harden, orient and go on a mating flight. This can occupy a number of other days. By the time she starts laying, there has been an approximate 3 week interruption in the life cycle of the varroa mite. Since the adult varroa mite lies in wait for the tiny larvae on which she lays her eggs, the varroa mite stops in her tracks until the new queen starts laying. Without tiny larvae on which to lay her eggs, the varroa mite can't reproduce herself. This is the cycle disruption.

Ross leaves the nuc alone for 30 days and then inspects it. If there is evidence that the new queen is laying, he moves the nuc into its own hive box. Now his apiary has another hive derived from his strongest hive. And the varroa mite has been stymied for three weeks.



One of the best things about listening to Ross is his obvious earnest, genuine interest in the bees. He has thoughtfully come up with a system that supports this caring for the bees and expresses his own organic approach to the world.



Sometimes he puts two nucs into one hive body to get them started. Here is a rather faded picture of a slide he used to show the division of the hive.

He uses a special bottom board with cut out entrances for both nucs, one on one side of the box and the other on the opposite end. the center is barricaded by a division feeder with all space covered, blocking the movement of the bees from one side of the hive box to the other.

In general I enjoyed so much his positive, genuine approach to beekeeping. I bought his book:
Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture and had him autograph it for me!

Bringing In the Pollen and Bringing out the Dead

It's warm and the bees are flying from both hives. They are both bringing in bright yellow pollen (see first picture) and bringing out the dead.
In looking at the dead in both the second and third picture, it's clear from the deformed wings that I have a Varroa problem. I don't how early I can begin powdered sugar shakes. I'll post on the bee forum pages and let you know what they say.
I also wondered about the white dots in front of both hives. I assume it's bird feces from a bird eating the hundreds of dead bee bodies, but I don't know if I should worry about something else instead.

Joy in Beeville - There is a Queen!

Today was the first warm sunny day when I could open the hive to check for evidence of a queen. On both the Beemaster and Beesource forum groups, I had gotten the message that sometimes a hive goes into winter with two queens. Also Cindy Bee, PN Williams, and Jerry Wallace (all in my Metro bee group) had suggested that as a possibility as well.

When they go into winter with two queens, after a while they get rid of the old queen....but the only way I could know for sure was to check the hive to see if there were new brood or to see the queen.

I opened the hive with the goal of checking for new brood. I don't do well at queen spotting and wasn't going to keep the hive open any longer than I had to. The bees were quite unhappy with me for opening the box. I got head-butted throughout my inspection. The hive is all in medium boxes and went into winter in 2 1/2 mediums. The top box has four frames of honey and the other half is empty for a feeding jar. In the second box (the top full box) I started looking for the queen evidence.

The first four frames were all honey, but that felt reassuring to me since I wanted to make sure they still had enough stores. The fifth frame had capped brood on it and I took it out to look at it closely. There were eggs!!!!!! and tiny brood, as you can see very well in the first picture if you click on it to make it larger. Since I saw the dead queen on Sunday, six days ago, obviously these eggs were just laid - so Princess Honey ousted her mother and rules supreme.

In the second picture you can see older brood, still young, although in the center left you can see larva about to need capping.

The other good news is that the hive was chock full of bees. I didn't brush any out of the way, but in the third picture in the center left, again you can see a cell with an egg in it.

The fourth picture has some very, very young c-shaped larvae in it.

The only bothersome part of this inspection is that I saw lots of SHBs and I thought they were supposed to die out over the winter. I didn't see any damage in the hive from the beetles, but they were still there in force and I currently don't have a Sonny-Mel trap on either hive.

Also you might note in the bottom right corner of the last picture, there is a Varroa mite on the back of a bee. I took lots of close-up pictures and this is the only mite I saw, but it does mean that as soon as I am regularly inspecting the hives, the bees will get a powdered sugar shower!

I also opened Mellona and found a full cluster of bees in the bottom box. They are flying in with pollen and I am not too worried about the hive, so I didn't check it for being queenright.

All I can say now is "Long Live the Queen" - at least I hope until warmer weather returns and drones are again available for their very important job.