Rabun County Bees

A couple of weeks ago when I went to Asheville for the Natural Beekeeping meeting, I stayed at my house in Rabun County.  On the way up I saw the bear in the misty rain at Black Rock Mountain Lake.    The day after the conference, the lake was sunny and beautiful and while I didn't see a bear again, I did see Joe Pye weed and goldenrod, evidence of the fall flow (for what it's worth).

Before I drove back to Atlanta, I checked on the Rabun bees.  The last time I was up at the mountain house, I discovered that one of the hives was almost dead and had small hive beetles all through it.

I didn't really check out the cause of the problem when I was there before because I was so upset, so I opened the hive on this visit and brought the boxes back home.  Clearly the hive had been robbed out, and left so weakened that the small hive beetle took advantage of the opportunity.

Two things are evident in this picture.  The edges of the cells are ragged, indicating a robbery.  There were dead bees littering the ground in front of the hive.  And you can see the slime of the small hive beetle.  I brought four boxes back to Atlanta and could hardly stand the sicky sweet smell in the car of the SHB's destruction.

The other hive was almost completely covered with weeds.  It was totally in the shade and had kudzu and other brambles all over the entry.  I didn't take a before picture, but I wish I had.  The bees were still flying happily in and out of the hive.  I knew this vegetation situation was likely so I brought my hedge clippers with me.  I went to work and freed the hive from most of the vegetation.

When I opened it, I was shocked (in all the previous shade) to find that I only saw one small hive beetle in the hive.  Perhaps they were all satiated on the frames from the other hive?

This hive has honey in all three boxes and brood in the bottom box.  I really wanted to taste their honey.  The top box is likely sourwood, but they had not completely capped the honey in those frames, so I brought back a frame from the middle box.

I didn't come prepared for harvest transport, so after brushing off the bees, I put the frame into a pillow case (I'm now using them for hive drapes like Julia taught me), and brought it back to Atlanta.  I crushed and strained it and now have three pounds of luscious grape-flavored honey, likely from the kudzu all around the creek bed where the hive is located!

(The HIDDEN honey frame).

And at Morningside...

Two weeks ago I checked on the Morningside Hives.  I found them surrounded by ever-encroaching kudzu but doing fine.  Neither hive has honey to spare but they do have honey and uncapped nectar.



The blue hive was desperate for space so I gave them another box.




Now both hives are four boxes tall.  They did have brood and eggs and were surviving this Atlanta weather just fine.



This week I went back to look at the hives.  Two weeks later, the hives look about the same but the kudzu has continued to grow.  Vines were between and under both hives.  Since I remember last year when the Rabun hive got completely inundated by kudzu, I don't want that to happen here.

I pulled out my garden shears that are always in my bee bag and snipped and pulled kudzu.  Now at least the yellow hive has front door access!

And the secondary gain is that the whole hillside of kudzu behind the hives may bloom, yielding delicious grape-flavored honey.

Bee Mad, Bee Mean

On my way home from EAS on the 7th, I stopped in Rabun County and spent the night so that I could check on my bees there.  I didn't take my smoker with me on the EAS trip - it makes the car smell like a campout and I was traveling for a week.  I thought the Rabun bees are so gentle - I usually work them without smoke, so no worries.

Well, I went to the Rabun hive on Saturday afternoon.  They were orienting and it had been almost three weeks since I had been there.  Those bees were mad.  They didn't take kindly to my visit and stung me about three times.  So I packed it up and left until Sunday morning.

Sunday morning I returned, again with no smoker which was still back in Atlanta on my deck.  I opened the hive around 10 AM.  I always move slowly and gently around bees, but this time it didn't help.  Those bees were loaded for bear.  I immediately got stung at least 10 times just for lifting up the top cover.

I must have smelled like banana from the stings after that because I dropped my bee gear and moved rather quickly toward the car - bees stinging me the while.  One got inside my veil and tattooed my neck beautifully.  Another flew into my hiking boot and went to town with her stinger.  When I got back to the cabin and undressed I counted 12 stings, not to mention the 20 or so stingers in my jacket that didn't get me.

I wonder if they are hungry or just hot and bored.  I couldn't open the hive that weekend and simply stopped back by and picked up my gear on my way back to Atlanta.  I'm going up this Saturday for a smoker accompanied inspection and we'll see what gives.

I was relieved, if they are hungry, to notice the kudzu blooming in the trees above the hive.  Kudzu has a nectar that the bees like and it results in grape flavored honey.  See the purple blossoms in the center of the picture?

And that wasn't my only recent bee-mad experience.

Remember how my only hive left at home was queenless? Remember how I drove to Lula to buy a queen from Don K at Dixie Bee Supply? I brought her home and put her in the box (see below) and left for EAS.



When I got home from EAS, I hit the ground running. I teach at Emory in the summers and I had 63 grad students about to take my final exam, so I looked out at the bees but didn't open the hive. They looked happy.  I had left the robber screen on.  Bees were moving in and out.  Life in the hive looked fine from my sun porch and I had Emory students on my mind.

Two weeks after installation, I opened the hive to get the queen cage out.  She was not released.  OK, I thought, this must mean that there is still a queen in the hive.  There are lots of bees in that hive, no brood, very little stores, lots of pollen.  I examined the frames in the bottom box and finally, there she was.  The old queen was indeed in this hive that I had requeened!

Ooops.

Today Julia generously gave me a couple of frames from one of her Blue Heron hives and I added to it bees from my Blue Heron hive in a nuc box.

All of the hives at Blue Heron were light with few stores and little brood.  I fed my BH hive with a baggie of sugar syrup.

The weather in Atlanta has been horrendously hot, with no rainfall, and no nectar.  We took a frame of honey from one of Julia's Blue Heron hives to move it to the other one.

I picked up the honey frame to hand it to Julia, and was immediately attacked by the bees.  I'm sure they were thinking, "Hey, that's the only honey any of us have seen in a coon's age and you can't have it."  So six more stings later through my blue jeans and jacket, Julia installed the honey frame in the BP hive at Blue Heron (named for the oil spill).

I brought the nuc home ( I won't tell you the bad parts of the story - about how I didn't block the entrance of the nuc and there were bees all over my car - or how I remembered that it might be good to spray these bees from two different hives with sugar syrup, so I sprayed them in my car, coating the back of my Subaru with sugar syrup - or how in a huge hurry to get the uncontained bees onto my deck, I didn't take the time to unchain the gate and instead carried the nuc through the house to the deck, dripping bees onto the floor as I went).

I set the nuc up on my deck and put an empty nuc box on top of it and fed them.  I put the queen cage on the top bars beside the food.

Cross your fingers - after this fiasco of a bee day, that's certainly what I am doing.

Blooming Kudzu

Kudzu covers the South where it thrives because the frost line never gets deep enough into its root system. It was introduced to the US from Japan in 1876 and has remained a pesty weed ever since, increasing the acres of coverage in the South in particular every year.

People have written cookbooks on how to cook with kudzu. I took a basket making class in which we made baskets out of kudzu vine (I still have and use the basket 10 years later!)

Some beekeepers collect kudzu honey. Kudzu honey is purple and tastes grape-like. I've never seen it bloom, nor have I seen bees on it.

In Rabun County where I was this weekend, the kudzu was blooming in the sunny areas. Here are the pictures I took. I didn't see any bees on the kudzu but the blooms on this weed were really pretty.