It's a Rainout in Georgia

It's not just a rainy night in Georgia - we have flood warnings for the next several days and the promise of three to four inches of rain as a possibility.

And we haven't even completed the fifth inning....so the game doesn't really count,

There's no re-play in the nectar flow like there might be in baseball.

It's also COLD to add insult to bee and beekeeper injury.

Jerry Wallace posted on the MABA Facebook page a couple of days ago a photo of blown down tulip poplar blossoms.  Here's one blown down (among many, many, many) in my backyard right in front of my hives.

The blown down blossoms are multitudinous and are no longer blossoms from which the bees can draw nectar.  The tulip poplar is only one of the spring flowers currently in bloom now.

All of our bees are being affected by the weather.  Both they can't fly and when it's raining, blossoms are destroyed and the nectar available that particular rainy day is not reachable for the bees.

Also virgin queens can't mate in these conditions, so people who made splits in the last three weeks are not going to get well-mated queens, if the queen can mate at all - can you imagine being a drone trying to aim for the queen in rainy, windy conditions?

So time will tell sooner than later what the impact of our very wet and cold spring will have on the honey production for my area.

PS.  I just heard on the news that the Atlanta Braves are rained out tonight for only the 17th rainout in the 16 year history of the Braves at Turner Stadium in Atlanta.  So the bees and the Braves are suffering.

Sorry for the Radio Silence

In my real life, I have two jobs in the summer - my usual job and in addition I teach in the Emory Med School, teaching communication skills to the doctoral students in the Department of Rehabilitative Medicine.  I've been drowning in grading final exams and videos, and thus off the air for the last couple of weeks.

I'm going to post some activities from the last month to catch me (and you) up, and now that the semester is over, I'll get back to blogging about my bees.

A couple of weeks ago I went to check on the Morningside hives and found them hidden by tall grass.  The community garden is on land owned by Georgia Power and they usually do the maintenance, but someone apparently dropped the ball and the grass hadn't been cut in forever.

I had recently been up to Rabun County where I had to cut the kudzu off of the hive so I had in my car some hedge clippers.  So I grabbed them and instead of doing bees, I did landscaping.

Now I and the bees can see their front doors.  I have Boardman feeders filled with water on the hives to keep the bees from going to the neighbor's swimming pool.  Who knows?  They probably like the chlorine better, but at least I am demonstrating an effort to keep them away!  The hedge clippers are on top of the closest hive.

Then I went over to Sebastian and Christine's.  I didn't post about it, but one of their two hives was robbed out.  It was sad and I assumed the hive that was beside it, which was also the stronger of the two hives, had done the robbing.

I opened this hive to see the spoils.  Instead I found bees that were doing fine - lots of brood and bees, but very little honey.  I went all the way down to the bottom box to see what I could see and found little nectar.  

That was two weeks ago and the asters and goldenrod have begun to bloom so maybe they will bring in some nectar.  I also have some honey that I can feed them.

You can see in the photo above that there is lots of brood but no honey in the corners.

In the bottom box which is a deep (this hive started from a nuc this year), I found Her Majesty, walking regally over the frame:

I don't usually wear gloves but a bee stung me on my right hand and I threw on a glove so I could finish up.  The queen is marked with a yellow dot and is in the upper left corner of the frame.  So this hive MAY make it through the winter if they can gather some supplies in the fall flow (which in Atlanta is generally minimal).

Rabun Hives are Honey-Less

Before going on vacation this past week, I went up to Rabun County to check on the bees on June 6.  Both hives had bees but both were WITHOUT honey.  They didn't even have honey on the corners of the brood frames.

I had read in the The Macon Beekeeper (the monthly newsletter of the bee group in Franklin, NC) that there was little nectar in the area - here's the quote:

"Reports from all over indicate that at this point the honey crop is a failure. With one exception beekeepers report that their honey supers are, essentially, empty. A few are feeding their bees to hold off starvation.

It’s no different here. The tulip poplar did bloom. I do see some dark nectar in a few colonies. However, in reality, the nectar flow did not happen. My bees continue to work, and they are not starving. But there is no excess honey. It’s hard to take, but that’s agriculture."

My bees are about 10 miles south of Otto, NC, which is the area referenced in the above quote, so I'm not surprised, but sad to find that they had eaten through earlier honey stores.  That's just the way it is.

Here are the bees from the surprise move-in swarm hive happily (or not) entering their hive.


Note the corner of this frame by my thumb - NO honey for the brood.


I did see nectar on a few frames.  The sourwood was just starting to bloom when I was up there on the 6th.  My house up there is on a mountain of sourwood and the trees each had a few blooms.  My bees are at the Rabun County Civic center and not at my house, but they may have found some blooming sourwood to put the nectar in these frames.



This hive with five boxes on it had two full boxes of capped honey when I was here at the beginning of May.  Now they are empty.



Another sign that they may be finding a little nectar now is that they had begun building beautiful wax on this frame.  Just a little, but it takes nectar to do that.



The hive seemed listless, though, and the population was down although I saw eggs in both hives so I know the queens are OK.  The queen won't lay more eggs than the bees can support, though so she may have slowed down.



There are eggs and young larvae in the frame below.



Again, here's a little capped honey and some nectar being stored now.  Since the sourwood flow is starting, I took one box off of the tall hive and left them with room to store sourwood.  I didn't change the configuration of the surprise swarm hive, so their house is like it was the day they moved into it.

Signs of the diminshing Nectar Flow

In Atlanta our nectar flow is tied to the bloom of the tulip poplar.  When the tulip poplar is done, the nectar flow is pretty much over.  We will continue to have nectar sources and we always have a little bump in the availability of nectar when the sumac and catalpa bloom in late June/early July, but for now, it's over.

This has been a funny spring.  Everything is two weeks earlier than last year.  The privet hedge bloomed in coincidence with everything else, and it will be interesting to see how that flavors the honey.

If I couldn't look up in the tulip poplars above my backyard and see that the bloom is done, I could tell that the nectar flow is over by the behavior of the bees.  They are still primed to collect nectar and disappointed that it has almost suddenly stopped.

They indicate that it is over by collecting honey wherever they can.

I had the two frames below sitting under my deck since January when I discovered that my hives in my backyard had died.  These frames had been somewhat slimed by the small hive beetle and the bees ignored them…….that is, until today.  Today there are bees robbing out these two frames like crazy.




Also I have lots of wax under my house cut out of frames and waiting for Jeff to build us a bigger solar wax melter.    Some of that had remnants of honey in it and you can see bees all over the comb in the foreground.



Another way to tell that the nectar flow has ended is that the bees have slowed down in building comb.  Whether you use foundation or not, when the nectar stops, the bees stop drawing wax.  They have to have resources to build wax and without nectar, they have no fuel.

When you have foundationless frames, it's quite obvious as you can see in the empty hive box below from Morningside.  If you use foundation, there's an illusion that something is going on because each frame is full (of plastic foundation, that is) but in those boxes as well as my foundationless boxes, NOTHING is happening in Atlanta today.

Bees in Atlanta Still Going Strong, Gathering Nectar

Side note: This is my 880th post on this blog!

Difficult Bee Landings

Today the bees were falling all over themselves trying to land on the hive entries. For fun I filmed it:

Well, Shut My Mouth, as they say in the South

I think my bees must read my blog.  No sooner do I post that the nectar flow is slowing, based on my observation of the tulip poplars and blackberry bushes around here, but the bees show me that I must be wrong.

I came home the next day around 2:00 and the bees at both hives were falling all over themselves as they landed in the entry to the hive.  So many bees were coming and going that stepping into the flight pattern was hazardous:  a guaranteed bee-in-the-hair.

If you enlarge the picture below, you can see the little golden bodies speeding through the air on their way to and from Colony Square.



At the front door bees were landing on top of each other and pushing through other bees on their way to the hive entrance.


Even though Lenox Pointe is not as vigorous, they were exhibiting the same behavior.



So, shut my mouth, I take it back.  The flow isn't thinking of slowing yet.  They aren't gathering tulip poplar and blackberry but something very light is being brought into the hives by the bucket.

The Georgia Flow is Slowing Down

In my neighborhood the tulip poplar has finished its bloom and the blackberry is all done. The air smells of privet but even the privet is at the end of its bloom with the flowers changing from bright white to old yellow on the branches.

It's amazing to me that the bees have so little time with an abundance of nectar before they are in short supply.  And here at the end of the flow, we have had a sudden spate of cold weather - temperatures in the low 60s for several days and in the 40s at night.

Now the bees who have been very productive over the last month will have less to gather and will have no major source of nectar blooming in this part of Georgia.  They will still forage and will find garden blooms, milkweeds on the sides of roads and ditches, with sumac yet to start blooming as well.  But the big push for nectar gathering is done.

We only have one big nectar flow in this part of the state.  Goldenrod and asters provide a minor early fall flow, but those are not delicious honey flavors.  In Rabun County the sourwood flow doesn't start until June, but it too only lasts for a month.

Now the work of the bees is to ripen the nectar they have gathered and to cap it for storage for the winter (and for harvest for the beekeeper).  After only a short, intense month, they will have to make do for the rest of their winter stores.