Sad Bee Mother Reports on a Sad Bee Event

Today I had a special time for Mother's Day with one of my daughters getting a manicure and pedicure, something I NEVER do - it was so relaxing and a really lovely experience.  But before the mani-pedi, I was rushing around checking on bees.

I checked on the bees at my house.  The package installed this year was full of honey and needed a new box.  I moved one of their drawn frames up into the new box and was happy about that one.

The drone layer hive was calm.  They had not used the frame of brood and eggs I gave them on Thursday to make queen cells, so I believe they do have a queen, but I didn't go down deep into the box.  I did give them a new box because they were also full in every box with nectar being capped.

The Patty swarm hive had not filled their most recent box, so I didn't change anything in their configuration.

I only had an hour before I needed to be ready to go with Sarah.  Over the weekend, I had heard from the Stonehurst that they had dead bees all over their driveway.  I had to be creative with my path to Stonehurst because with the gorgeous day in Atlanta, everyone was trying to drive to Piedmont Park and the inn is one block away from the park.  But when I finally got there, the bees looked healthy but didn't need another box.  I didn't see that as cause for worry because it has been so rainy - when could they have collected nectar?

So I had about fifteen minutes to stop by the Morningside garden hives on my way home.  I had an extra box with me - it's a fabulous hive and was filling itself up with honey.  I also had a ladder with me which is required for me now to get the seventh box off of the hive.

I got to the top of the hill where the bees are.  Should be a great place for bees.  There are blackberries blooming all the way down the hill and kudzu everywhere.  Not to mention the organic community garden at the foot of the hill.

A terrible smell met me as I approached the hive.  In front of the hive was a dinner plate size round of dead bees in a pile about 2 1/2 inches deep.  Thousands of dead bees rotting in the sun.  What I was smelling was dead bees.

I have corks as hive entry reducers on this hive and one of them was lying at the edge of the pile.  I wanted to throw up, but what I did was cry.

This was my best hive.  And here was a pile of dead bees the size of a swarm.

I got kind of paranoid and with the cork on the ground I thought someone had poisoned the bees - pulled out the cork and sprayed Raid or something into the hive.

But there were still bees flying in and out of the hive, crowding the entrance.

I didn't have time because Sarah was coming to pick me up for our Mother's Day fun, so, sad that I couldn't figure it out right then, I went home and went with Sarah for such a relaxing mani-pedi that I almost forgot about the death on the hill.

I couldn't quit thinking about the hive after I got home, so I called my friend Jerry Wallace who lives near me and is a great beekeeper.  He came with me to open the hive around 7 (I figured with the foragers all home, we could see how bad the damage really was).

We took every box off all the way down to the bottom, figuring that if someone had poisoned the bees, we would be able to smell the Raid in the wood of the slatted rack.  The slatted rack smelled normal, no poison residue, and I have a really good nose.  Jerry nor I could smell anything.  He pointed out that even if someone had sprayed a poison in the hive with the SBB and the slatted rack, the spray would have been deflected by the slats back through the SBB.

The most likely possibility, however, is that the bees have found a nectar source that has poison on it or in it.  They don't know the difference and are taking it in and dying.  So the hive is not out of the woods yet.  I often anthropomorphize my bees, attributing wisdom and emotion to them.  The fact of the matter is that they signal each other about nectar sources but aren't wise enough to notice that each bee who goes to that source comes back and dies in front of the hive.  The bees may not yet stop collecting from the poison source.

Meanwhile there are at least two full boxes of honey in the hive and still thousands of bees - it's like a very strong hive after a swarm when you can hardly tell the hive swarmed because so many bees are still there.

So maybe there's hope for the future.   Maybe they will switch to another nectar source.  Maybe all is not lost and the Mother's Day Event may turn out better than I think.

Gosh, I'm Feeling Like a Bad Beekeeper

I went up to the mountains for the Fourth of July to see the fireworks and to check on the bees.  I love the Rabun County fireworks - we go and sit on a blanket in a field near the Rabun Gap Nacoochee School.  We wait eagerly for dark (which doesn't come until 9:30) and by then the grandkids are sleepy.  But the fireworks are grand and glorious - (and don't include Atlanta traffic jams) - so we have a great time and are back at the house by 10:05.

Since the Fourth was on a Wednesday, all of us needed to go back to Atlanta the next day.  Before I left I went to check on the bees.  Sad news:  The over-wintered hive was almost completely dead - all of the honey was covered in small hive beetles and the whole hive smelled of orange crush (a sure sign of being slimed by the small hive beetle).

I was so upset that I didn't want to look at the evidence and determine the reason the hive failed, allowing the rise of the SHB.

When I was last up there about three weeks ago, there was no nectar and although I saw brood and eggs, the hive had no evident stores (although the slime would indicate otherwise).  I imagine that I may have killed the queen in that inspection.  When I put on one of the boxes, a roar went up from the hive, but I discounted the possibility.  If the queen died in that inspection and stores were so low, the hive may have not been able to make a new queen.

The frame of bees below is all that were left.  Since I didn't know what caused the end of the hive, I didn't shake them into the other hive for fear of contaminating them, if the hive were diseased.

I regreted not having enough supplies - I couldn't move the bees into a nuc because I didn't have one.  I had brought boxes to add but not solutions to problems.



On the good side of things, the other hive, which was a swarm that took up residence there this year, was busting out all over with bees.  In spite of encroaching kudzu, hundreds of bees were coming and going.  Afraid and feeling like a bad beekeeper, I didn't inspect this hive - didn't want to kill another queen.

I looked in the top box which was completely empty on my last visit.  They had filled five frames, drawn new wax and were filling it.  Sourwood is blooming up there now and this looks like nectar that ends up as sourwood honey.  We'll see.

I won't go back until the 22nd and by then the surviving hive may be covered up with kudzu.

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 Nectar Flow has Begun - The Tulip Poplar is in Bloom!

With the bloom of the tulip poplar, the nectar flow begins in Georgia. My neighborhood is full of tulip poplar trees. I have several in my yard. This lovely branch is in front of one of my neighbor's houses, dipping down and showing the large and lovely bloom. The bees must think they are in heaven, diving into the nectar in these blooms.



In another sign of spring, the house finch that has nested in a corner of my carport has hatched her babies and they are about ready to leave the nest. Here are two of the babies waiting to learn to fly. I didn't get a great picture because I was scared to stay too long or get too close. To keep them happy, I haven't turned on my carport light all spring long and have turned off my security light that is right on the other side of the wall at the back of their nest.

Last year chickadees occupied this nest. This year there are these house finches.



And every night a barred owl calls out "Who cooks for you?" into the night outside my window in the trees.

Spring is in full force in Atlanta!

Honeybee Botany and Dr. Paul Arnold

Tonight at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' meeting, Dr. Paul Arnold spoke to us about Honeybee Botany. Paul is a professor and researcher at Young Harris College and I have met him several times. He spoke to us last year about palynology and he was one of the teachers in the Journey(wo)man course I took at Young Harris.

He talked tonight about basic plant biology - the difference in fertilization and pollination as well as the parts of the plant and how they function. I had learned all about perfect and imperfect flowers at Young Harris. Here's a summary of my notes:

1. He described the two types of imperfect flowers: Monoecious and Dioecious. These two terms have Latin roots. Mono means "one" and Di means "two" The "Ecious" part comes from the same root as "ecology" and means "house" So if Monoecious means "one house" that refers to a plant in which the staminate and pistillate flowers are both on the same plant - like corn and cucumber. A Dioecious or "two house" plant refers to a plant that has staminate and pistillate flowers on different plants - such as holly where there is a male and female shrub or the ginko tree where there are male and female trees.

2. Bees find the flowers that they pollinate in several ways - some flowers have UV markers on their petals. Bees don't see red so if they are attracted to a red flower, it is not because of the color, but rather because of something else like UV markers or scent. Bees seek out flowers which will give them the reward of nectar or pollen. Sometimes the scent of the flower draws the bee.

3. Bees make good pollinators for several reasons. First they have perennial colonies which have large populations (lots of pollinators). Second, bees only eat nectar and pollen - they don't eat anything else and aquiring nectar or pollen results in pollination every time the bees seeks food. Bees have plumose body hairs that collect pollen easily ("plumose" means having feathery hair as bees do all over their bodies). Bees tend to stick to one type flower per trip. So if a bee goes out foraging to get nectar from the holly tree, she moves from holly flower to holly flower, rather than to two or three kinds of flowers at once. This makes it easy for her to carry pollen from one holly flower to another. Finally bees are good pollinators because the hives can be manipulated as well as moved to increase effectiveness.

4. The attractants for bees to flowers include sight: nectar guides on petals, color, pattern, and movement of the flower
and scent: the bees hold the scent memory for up to five days.

Finally he got to an explanation of my abelia.

5. Some plants, including abelia (I asked him), have "extra-floral nectaries." Looking at the trumpet shape of the abelia flower, it's hard to imagine a little honeybee sticking her body in far enough to stick her tongue in far enough to get the nectar. But as I reported in last night's post, both the bunblebees and the honeybees appeared to be getting nectar from where the flower meets the sepals.

In many flowers, the nectary is in the center of the bloom. But in the case of abelia and tulip poplar and many others, there is an extra-floral nectary. This is exactly what it sounds like: a nectar source outside the petals of the flower. This is the case with abelia and this explains why the bees are hanging on the outside of the flower to get to the nectary at its base.


If you enlarge this picture by clicking on it, you can see that the bumblebee is on the outside of the flower, slurping nectar from the extra-floral nectary.

Meeting a Melissa Pollinologist

I haven't ever met a melissa pollinologist until the meeting of the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association this past week. Our speaker was Dr. Paul Arnold and he refers to himself as such. Paul Arnold is one of the founders of the Young Harris Beekeeping Institute which I attended in May and has taught in the biology department of Young Harris College for 19 years.

He said that he is one of the few people in the country who analyzes honey to determine what pollen contributed to the honey. More people are melissa pollinologists in Europe and Australia. I was one of the nine or so people in the club who drew the straw that allowed us to bring out honey to him to take back to Young Harris and analyze.

Dr. Arnold told us that many people wonder why would one want to analyze honey for the pollen. There were four reasons:

• To determine the nectar source for marketing purposes
• You can't say for sure your honey is sourwood, for example, without this analysis
  
• To determine undesirable nectar sources
• This year there was an abundance of mountain laurel in the N Georgia mountains and because of the late hard freeze, the bees had little else from which to choose. As a result they made a ton of mountain laurel honey with is poisonous and smells like brake fluid.
  
• To verify a pollen contract
• If the person who hired the beekeeper wants to know if the bees he hired actually visited his almonds or blueberries
  
• To determine the source of a pesticide kill
• If bees are dead in droves around the hive, analyzing the honey may give you the source of the kill

There are many drawbacks (he had slide after slide about this) to doing pollen analysis. Among the drawbacks are:

• Equipment cost - microscope, centrifuge, slides, etc.
• Many pollens look alike so it's hard to come to an answer
• There are few pollen guides on the subject

Dr. Arnold makes his own reference slides when he finally gets down to an identification

He had a series of slides which were a lot of fun to see showing the notable characteristics of various pollens:

• Size: tupelo, for example is very large, dandelion is very small
• Shape: pollen is sometimes triangular, 4-lobed, football shaped, round, winged, etc.
• Wall apertures (openings)
• Wall ornamentation (spikes, knobs, pits)

What he does in the process is:

He mixes 50% honey and 50% hot water. He mixes this well and then centrifuges it at 1500 RPMs for 5 minutes. He then pours off the liquid and there is a pollen pellet at the bottom. He pipettes this out onto slides and looks at it under a low light microscope.

I left my dark honey with him. He had said the less filtered the better, so I put some from a cut comb box of the dark into a jar and left it for him. I've been mystified by this honey because it is very dark - less dark this year - but still very dark. The bees made this honey while I was gone over the week of July 4th. I know this because the hive had no honey in any super before I left and this super was full when I came back.

Dr. Arnold did say that the dark honey in Georgia late in the season is often made from smooth sumac or catalpa. It will likely be weeks before I know the answer about my particular honey because he spends about 30 minutes processing each individual sample. He was very kind to do this for our club, and all he gets for the effort is our appreciation and a taste of each honey sample!

So I was very glad he shed a little light on the dark late season honey before he ended his interesting talk at the bee club.

I feel very lucky that he was so generous to our club - taking home members' honey samples to analyze.

Stages as Honey Becomes Ready for Harvest

The bees in this first picture are building comb and filling it with honey at the same time. We are in the middle of a strong tulip poplar flow in Atlanta so they are working as fast as they can. The honey looks light and nectar-like.

Here the honey is much darker. The bees have been fanning it with their wings and working the liquid out of the honey, making it thicker and almost ready to cap. Honey that is mostly tulip poplar is very dark as you can see in this picture.
This honey is being capped. You can see at the top of the picture fully capped honey. As you look at the bottom of the picture you can see cells in various stages of being capped. This type of capping is called dry capping. The bees also do a wet capping that looks more transparent. Both are considered capped honey.