Tom Webster, Heat and Nosema

I heard Tom Webster speak on Wednesday night at the local bee club meeting. Dr. Webster is at Kentucky State University and focuses his research on nosema.

He had slides to show how nosema lives as a parasite in the bee's gut. The spore of nosema sends out a tube which finds purchase in the wall of the bee gut lining and embeds itself. Nosema really messes up the bee's digestion then and eventually, if nosema gets the best of her, she dies from lack of nutrition since her digestive system is compromised.

I had a hive which is one of my survivor hives who appeared to have nosema over the winter. When the bees went on cleansing flights, the hive was covered with brown streaks of bee feces. I was sure they would die since I was not treating with anything. But when spring came, the hive has survived and is making honey like crazy as we speak.

Dr. Webster said that without lab proof, there's not a sure diagnosis and sometimes bees get diarrhea for other reasons, but also the presence of diarrhea/nosema does not always mean the hive will die.

Essentially he said the best way to address nosema is to get rid of old wax. He didn't say keep old comb for five years like UGA is now saying. He said GET RID OF OLD WAX.

I raised my hand and said that I have been cutting out the old wax and then dipping the frames in boiling water for 1 minute. When the frame is pulled out of the stewpot, the thin layer of melted wax on the top of the water coats the frame as it comes out. I wanted to know if that wax would still contain microbes for nosema.

Interestingly Dr. Webster said that heat will kill microbes so the boiling water should do them in, while freezing frames would just suspend the microbe. Once removed from the freezer and returned to room temperature, the nosema microbe would be alive and happy.

Since we often recommend freezing cut comb and chunk honey to kill wax moth eggs which might be in the wax, I found that really interesting.

Cold will kill eggs of bugs but will not kill microbes.

Heat kills.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Note: Feedback I got from a reader makes me want to write a little clarification as an addendum to this post:

When you make cut comb honey or chunk honey, you always freeze it so that your friend/customer doesn't open the jar or box to find wax moth larvae floating in their honey. Freezing the product kills the insect eggs. Obviously you can't heat either of these products or all the wax would be melted.

However, when you are cleaning frames, boiling water kills everything in the wax: wax moths, eggs of whatever might have been in the comb (roaches, wax moths, SHB), and microbes for nosema.

Truly, Madly, Completely Foundationless Frames

As most of you know, I don't use foundation.  I have gone through quite an evolution of approaches to reach what I am doing this year.

In the very beginning I used thin surplus wax foundation because I didn't think plastic was natural and didn't want it in my hives.  Then I started following Michael Bush and cut wax strips.  I waxed them into the grooves in the frames to give the bees a starting point.  Then the next year I decided after listening to Jennifer Berry that we were all better off with NO commercial wax with its chemical composition of fluvalinate and coumaphos.  So then I started using craft sticks glued into the groove.

In December on Christmas Day I slipped on ice while hiking in N Georgia.  I didn't know it then, but I tore my posterior tibia ligament and I have been slowly, s...l....o.....w......l......y healing since then.  I still am wearing a wrap on my ankle and tennis shoes every single day.  When bee season started, standing for a long time meant a terrible burning sensation around my ankle bone.

So I have been doing lazy beekeeping.  When my frames have old comb in them that needs replacing, I remove the old comb.  But I haven't been waxing or gluing ANytHing in and the bees are making beautiful comb without my giving them any starting place.

The photos are blurry - I used my iPhone and it doesn't accommodate my shaky hands.

Old comb:

Tear out old comb (really blurry, but it falls into a box of removed comb):

In a stewpot of boiling water, immerse the frame for 30 seconds.  Obviously the whole frame won't fit into the stew pot so I put in one half and then the other.

It isn't in the water long enough to even think about warping and all the wax melts off.  Meanwhile because I do four boxes worth of frames in one stew pot, the water in the pot is laced with melted wax so the frame gets slightly coated with melted wax.  This alone may stimulate the bees to build comb.

I use a skewer or a hive tool or whatever I have to slide along the groove and effectively mess up the patterns for any crooked comb left by the bees.  In the photo below, the right side of the frame has been submerged already and the left side still has old comb on it.  

The water is boiling hot so it quickly evaporates and the frames are ready in seconds to be put back in the hive box.  

With nothing but their bare nakedness, I put the frames onto a hive and the bees build happily.  I do checkerboard as in the post just before this, and that brings the bees into the box, but obviously they don't need my time or craft sticks to know where to start to build their comb.

I am not finding that crooked comb happens often.  When it does, it's in a hive where there has been a tendency to build crooked comb and many beekeepers suggest that that tendency is a genetic anomaly - not great genetics for comb-building = crooked comb.  

And if you don't correct it, the bees continuously build crooked comb to parallel the mess they made at the beginning.  But mostly the bees build straight beautiful comb from the bare top bar and appear to be happy campers about it.

It's the Bear!

Lark, my 2 1/2 year old granddaughter, loves the Jez Alborough book, It's the Bear!  She knows it by heart and her favorite line is: "Out of the woods stepped a big, hungry bear, licking his lips and sniffing the air."

Last night I gave a talk on Low Tech Beekeeping in Pickens, SC and since it was too far to drive back to Atlanta afterwards, I drove to Rabun Gap to my mountain place.  I got here around 10 PM.  I planned to go to a plant nursery this morning, so last night I took all of my bee stuff out of the car, including my show and tell for the speech.  I put it all in the carport and went to bed.

Some time after that, "out of the woods stepped a big hungry bear, licking his lips and sniffing the air."  I guess he was drawn by the smell of the honey comb lure in my flower pot swarm trap.  This is what the trap looked like this morning:


The bear had ripped it apart and torn off the bottom of one of the pots in an effort to reach what he smelled - I assume my honey comb lure.

So I guess the swarm trap attracts bears as well as bees!  How effective can you get?

And the dogs and I slept through the whole thing, happening just outside the house.

Not only that, but the bear rifled through my bag of other items and pulled out the ziploc filled with balls of wax (for demonstrating how to use the solar wax melter).  The bag was ripped and the balls of wax reduced to crumbs!

Lesson learned.  If you don't want a big hungry bear to step out of the woods, licking his lips and sniffing the air, don't leave anything in the carport to lure him/her!

A Mountain of Old Wax from the Bees

Suddenly I find that I am managing 22 hives - I'm not quite sure how that happened and I am sure that the numbers will decrease soon.  In the process, I am desperate for equipment.

To that end yesterday ahead of my inspections, I had to get seven boxes ready in case hives needed new supers.  I had the boxes, but not the frames.  So yesterday morning at 7:15 I was in my backyard, cutting old wax out of frames with my hive tool.

Below is the ensuing collection - there will be more.  I haven't finished.  And we have at least 100 unbuilt frames in my basement.  I took those to Jeff today.  He will build frames; I will build and paint boxes.  Of course this is what beekeepers are supposed to do in the winter, but the numbers crept up on me to my total surprise!

In the next couple of weeks (when I have some spare time - anyone laughing yet?) I'll melt this down a la Cindy Bee.

If you are wondering about the (SHOCK) 22 hives, here they all are:

At my house to stay:
2 package installations
1 nuc installation
2 splits from Colony Square
1 top bar hive

At my house temporarily:
Flower Pot Swarm (this will be moved soon as the queen is mated and laying)

Total at my house:   7

At Jeff and Valerie's house
Colony Square
Lenox Pointe
Lenox Pointe 2 (AKA Swarm hive)
Five Alive

Total at Jeff's house:  4


At Community Gardens:

Morningside Community Garden
2 package installations

Rabun County community Garden
2 hives - one survived the winter, second a moved-in swarm

Blue Heron Nature Preserve (and community garden)
Lisa's hive

Chastain Conservancy:
1 package installation

Total at community gardens:  6

Miscellaneous locations:


At Sebastian's and Christina's 
2 nuc installations


At the Stonehurst Place Inn
2 nuc installations (2012)
1 existing hive from last year


Total at miscellaneous locations:  5

Grand total:  22


I will get it down to 21 and perhaps 20, though.  Julia is going to take the really weak queen and bees from Lisa's hive and put them into her observation hive.  I will take the FlowerPot Swarm and install it into Lisa's Hive.  If the splits from Colony Square don't both make good queens, I'll combine them into one hive.  That would take my numbers down to 20.


I figure that I am likely to get honey from 7 - 10 of these this year.....but maybe that's counting my honey comb before it produces......


I didn't count the club Nuc/Observation hive which is also in my yard because it is going to Julia when I move the Flower Pot Swarm to Lisa's hive.

Setting Up an Old Hive as a Swarm Lure

As you know, my hives on my deck died last fall so I went into the winter with no bees at home. I do have the hive boxes and drawn comb from the defunct hives. I decided to set up one of the hives in my yard as a swarm lure.

I set two hive boxes up with old drawn comb. I took the swarm lure that I made a couple of years ago with lemon grass essential oil (still smells great and lemony) and put some on the hive.



I smeared swarm lure on the landing.


I smeared swarm lure around the hole in the inner cover.






I smeared a little swarm lure at the front of the frame bars in the top box.




The comb in the hive is this past year's comb (only a year old) so it still looks pretty good from when the bees made it.



Now, if I'm lucky and the scout bees fly my way, I may capture a swarm through little effort on my part.

Delaplane on the Hive as a SuperOrganism

The Metro Atlanta Beekeepers meeting drew a large crowd to the Botanical Garden to hear Dr. Keith Delaplane, head of the department of entomology at the University of Georgia speak on the beehive as superorganism.



Keith is such an engaging speaker that he kept everyone's interest as he taught us a lesson on genetics and then helped us all to understand the concept of the superorganism.



He pointed out that the hive survives best with a genetically diverse population. This is supported by the mating of the queen with 15 - 20 drones, thus bringing a complex genetic pool to the hive.

William Morton Wheeler introduced the idea of the hive as a super-organism in 1911. A super-organism is "a complex, coordinated, individualized system of activities directed at acquiring and assimilating resources from the environment, protecting the system and producing other systems."

Dr. Delaplane said that thinking of the hive in this way means that we can imagine the hive as a total functioning body with the ovaries being the queen; the testes being the drones; the body being the workers; the liver being the beeswax; and the uterus being the brood cells.

He emphasized that the comb is the liver of the hive.  This does not mean that the comb processes yucky stuff in the hive, but rather that it absorbs the dirt, the chemicals, the bee footprints, the cocoons, etc.  So if your bees use old comb to raise brood, in essence they are raising the brood in the liver rather than in the uterus.

Note: (in support of those of us using foundationless frames and thus encouraging our bees to build new comb each year): In a tree, bees raise brood in the newest comb (the uterus of the superorganism). The following year, the same bees would use the former brood comb to store honey and again raise the brood in new comb.

When a hive swarms the organism essentially splits itself in half and one half moves at least 500 meters away from the original colony to avoid competition. From that moment on, both halves of the original super-organism are tasked with surviving the winter. This swarm/splitting occurs in early spring because this gives both halves opportunity to recover from the split and to build up resources to survive the winter.

Delaplane pointed out that all the disease resistant traits are recessive genetically. This, he explained, is because for the super-organism to survive, there must be bees whose main best focus is foraging, fanning, nursing, etc. The traits that promote disease resistance such as hygienic behavior can't be dominant or the bees would all be in the hive dragging out varroa infested larvae rather than out foraging for winter.

So if we are thinking of the hive as a super-organism, then beekeepers might change how they operate in the following areas:

• Rethink density in the apiary (in the wild, bees locate 2 hives per acre)

• Cull old combs and give bees opportunity to build new comb for brood raising

• Feed more and better

• Emphasize high drone density

As always, Dr. Delaplane brought his energy and enthusiasm to his talk and I really enjoyed hearing him.

Before I left the meeting, I bought a copy of Cindy Bee and Bill Owens' new book on Honeybee Removal.  I don't think I'll ever do bee removals other than collect swarms, but I wanted to support my friends.

Rendering wax from old comb

In the Appalachian mountains, people would say that they learned to use every part of the hog except the squeal. I would like to make the most use of my bees - I love their honey and the wax they produce is amazing. Watching them produce the wax from the glands on their thorax and watching them connect with each other with the wax as they work to build comb makes me really respect what goes into the product.

We are all being taught that old wax is a source of disease and is not good for the bees to reuse year after year. I believe the current thought is that all brood comb should be changed out every three years. In addition, when you lose a hive and the small hive beetles take over (two hives for me this year), the slime on the comb makes it unusable and unattractive to bees.

Consequently I have a lot of old comb that needs to be addressed. I could throw it out but I want to respect the work that the bees put into it. In addition, if I get wax, there's lots I like to do with it in making lotion and lip balm. So I want to try to recover usable wax from these old combs.

I don't have the huge turkey fryer that Cindy Bee uses, nor do I have a propane tank, but I do have this stew pot that everyone hates - it's not heavy enough to do the kind of job I want it to do in my kitchen, making gumbo or stewing a chicken, so it's now been relegated to the rendering pot. I have a single burner, designed for apartment dwellers, so I plugged it in in my carport, filled the stew pot with water and began heating.


Lesson for next time: Put really hot water in the pot to speed up the heating time.

Cindy says to get a 100% cotton flannel old pillow case from a flea market or thrift store. I didn't have that but did have some pale yellow 100% cotton flannel material that I bought at Hancock's. So I stitched up the sides and made a pillow case of sorts. I didn't have time to age the pillow case, however!



I filled the pillow case with old brood comb from the dead hive Julia and I rescued earlier in the season. The comb was wired and as I pulled out the wires, I could see the layers of cocoon casings that now lined the honey comb cells. You can see it too, if you click on the picture below to enlarge it.



When the bag was full, it included the blackened brood comb from a 10 frame deep super, slimed comb from a 10 frame shallow super, and a half bucket of old comb from the rescued hives.



I put the filled pillow case into the hot/heating water.

As the comb melted down, I twisted the pillow case to squeeze out the liquid wax, etc. as it melted.  Combs that have been slimed by the small hive beetle smell a little like Orange Crush and as this melted, that is the smell that emanated from the mixture.  The water turned dark, dark brown.

As the comb melted the slum gum inside the pillow case got smaller and smaller.

I didn't have a colander that would fit the stew pot, so I bought this grill skillet with large holes, just perfect for draining the liquid out of the pillow case.

However, the pillow case filled with slum gum did drip a little out of the pot when I put it in the grill skillet.  Later I scraped the hardened wax up off of the concrete carport floor and was grateful that it wasn't my kitchen floor!

I left it to drain all night.  The next morning the non-stick skillet was pretty clean and wax was floating on the surface of the nasty, nasty water.

Isn't the water gross?  And it still smelled like Orange Crush.

Here's the end product - a cylinder of wax about 1/2 inch thick.  This still has a way to go before being in a state in which I can use it for lip balm, etc.  I plan to break up this cylinder and melt it in the solar wax melter where it will get filtered yet again and bleached by the sun.

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!

Raising Bees is About Raising Bees!

I started raising bees because I decided not to raise chickens.

I wanted chickens and you can have them in my county as long as your chicken house is more than 20 feet from your neighbor's house. I measured and my location for the chickens would be exactly 25 feet from her house. But raising chickens would mean getting chicken-sitters when I went out of town and that didn't seem fun and there's always the chance that you'll get a rooster and he will disturb the neighborhood. So I put the idea on hold.

When I heard about the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Short Course, I thought I'd take it and learn to raise bees for the honey and give up the chicken plan.

This little free swarm has emphasized what I have learned about keeping bees. Raising bees is about raising bees. I so want this little swarm to make it and feel horrible that all my moving around of the hive box resulted in their killing the queen. I have no investment in their honey production - I just want them to become a little bee family that makes it.

Today I am going to remove two frames of young brood from Mellona and add them to this new hive to strengthen it. Hopefully if they don't have a queen, they can raise a queen from the frames I give them.

I'm also going to take out the old, old comb in the new hive. This comb was the center of a nuc I got last year and is thick blackened old comb. The new bees wisely avoided those frames and moved into the new frames on the sides.

Wish me luck as I "mother" a new beehive on this Mother's Day.

Dr. Keith Delaplane Speaks to Bee Club on CCD

Tonight at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers meeting the speaker was Dr. Keith Delaplane speaking on CCD. Interestingly the media was there. I saw camera people from two TV stations and he was asked to go to a different room after his talk with us to speak to CNN.

I'm only the messenger and don't necessarily know that he has all the answers (personally I think Michael Bush has all the answers!)

This is what I got from what he said:

**Honeybees have been on a steady decline in this country over many, many years, due increasingly to our agricultural practices no longer requiring animals to feed in the fields, so less crops for the honeybees.

**With the advent of the varroa mite, beekeeping went from an organic, hands off endeavor to a chemically dependent endeavor. This has resulted in

• The quality of queens going down, with many queens living only 6 months - 1 year; finding drone brood among worker brood, and having high supercedure rates. (He had a chart showing that with increased use of chemicals in the hive, a study done at UGA showed shorter life for queens.)
• Poorer life span and sperm quality for drones
• Increased cognitive dysfunction for worker bees, including not being able to find their way home to the hive.
  
  He encouraged us to buy our queens from people working to develop hygienic queens such as the Purvis Brothers in N Georgia. The University of Georgia is also working on developing hygienic queens which will be available for distribution to queen breeders in August. They will, of course because it is a research university, not be for sale but will be distributed by lottery, I think he said, to the queen breeders.
  
  He also laughed at himself in his earlier books in which he highly encouraged medicating the bees and said that he is the author of the new edition of First Lessons in Beekeeping from Dadant out later this year and in this new book he encourages IPM and no chemicals.

The issues contributing to bees disappearing from hives (CCD) are some not in our control (environmental pesticide usage, the presence of mites in the world, viruses, etc). However the issues that we can change include:

** In hive pesticide use
** Old comb
** Migratory stress
** Nutritional deficiencies
** IPM (Integrated Pest Management)

He encouraged using no pesticides in the hives and replacing old comb regularly.

He said that migratory stress is about how the honeybee in one setting works about 6 - 10 weeks per year during the honey flow. Commercial beekeepers by moving their hives from flow to flow ask the bee to work many 6 week periods in the year, thus wearing the bees out and making them more subject to disease.

He mentioned a commercial beekeeper in N Georgia (Bob Binnie) who feeds each hive 5 gallons of syrup every fall and Dr. Delaplane said that we are not feeding our bees enough, thus resulting in poor nutrition and this makes the bees vulnerable to disease.

He strongly encouraged IPM - screened bottom boards, powdered sugar shakes.

He cited studies done at UGA for all of what he had to say and presented graphs and data to support his talk. In general he doesn't think that CCD is anything new, but is the cumulative result of chemical beekeeping.

A kid in the audience asked if cell phones were the problem and he smiled and simply said, "No."