Warm Temps Equal Flying Bees

The temperature is milder today and the bees are flying.

I have three live hives in my backyard which means I lost two over the winter.  One was the tiny hive we moved from Jeff's yard that never really got off the ground.  The other was the Sebastian hive which made good honey and were surprisingly strong.   I'll open that hive soon to see if I can determine what was wrong.

The three who are vigorously flying and bringing in pollen (from where?) are the nuc hive that is going great guns, the Northlake swarm hive - now entering its third season, and the Va Hi Swarm that I caught just up the street from my house during last year's swarm season.

The Va Hi swarm hive looks like they have nosema:

You can see all the bee feces around the entrance.  Still there are tons of bees coming and going.  It's my most vigorous hive.  We didn't harvest from this hive and also didn't consolidate the boxes going into winter (I know, bad beekeeper...) but they are alive and surviving so far.

In Atlanta you never can tell.  We can have snow as late as mid March.  Last year around Valentine's Day we had the worst snow jam ever, ever, ever with really cold temperatures, so who knows what will happen.

There are a lot of dead bees just outside the hive with all of my hives.  This is natural in that the dead accumulate inside when the bees can't fly because it's too cold, but as soon as it warms up, they carry out the dead.

You can see dead bodies on the ground in the above photo.

The Northlake hive is bringing in the pollen as well as the nuc hive.  I saw three bees on several occasions while I watched the nuc hive practically fall over each other trying to make the entrance.

The bees that were coming in carried heavy pollen loads.

These kinds of days make me feel hopeful for the spring!

Winter Bee Deaths - and Still a Strong Hive

The bees that go into winter are not the same as the bees who live in the summer.  The summer bee has her work cut out for her.  She progresses through jobs in the hive, beginning with housecleaner and nursemaid and ending with forager.  Each job prepares her for her next assignment and each wears her out a little more.  Old summer bees have ragged wings and if you see one who looks like that, she is close to death.

Winter bees are different.  First there are no drones in the wintering hives (sometimes one or two) because they are a drain on the hive resources; contribute nothing during the winter; and  the queen can create them from unfertilized eggs as spring approaches.

Winter bees live longer.  Summer bees live about six extremely active weeks.  Winter bees in cold temperate climates may live for 150 days (Winston, p. 215).  In an area like Atlanta where we typically are not a cold temperate climate, the winter bees may live a slightly shorter amount of time.  In the hive during the winter, bees do die and their bodies are cleaned out when the temperatures are warm enough to fly.

Here's what it looks like around my surviving colony in my backyard:

 As you can see around the base of the hive, it looks like an enormous bee graveyard.  The ground has been littered with bodies like this every time we have a cold snap.  In the interim, the yard guys show up and blow them off so this pile is purely from the ice storm last week.

Yet there are still thousands of bees in this hive.  I have a "Billy Davis" robber screen on the hive and there are bees massed under the screened wire, just enjoying the sunshine.  

Here's a closer view or two of the dead, lying en masse outside the hive.

The bees who are flying into the hive have packed pollen baskets.  You might notice that some of the dead bees also have packed pollen baskets.  

I am amazed at the strength of this hive and the numbers of bees who have lived here through our extremely cold winter.  In Atlanta we often have a week of snow in March, so it's not over yet.

Unexplained Bee Death

Yesterday I was moving equipment in my backyard when I glanced over at my one living hive.  The weather has been extraordinarily cold for Atlanta for the last three days.  Last winter, I think I wore my winter coat on maybe two days total.  I've had my coat on for the last three days and for most days of the last week.  We had a couple of afternoons in the high 60s, but that was as warm as it got.

Weatherspark.com says this about November in Atlanta:

"The month of November is characterized by rapidly falling daily high temperatures, with daily highs decreasing from 68°F to 59°F over the course of the month, exceeding 77°F or dropping below 47°F only one day in ten.  Daily low temperatures range from 40°F to 49°F, falling below 30°F or exceeding 59°F only one day in ten."

The temperatures for the last three days have been lower than typical as per the above paragraph:

November 28:  High  61
                         Low  27
November 29:  High  54
                         Low  34
November 30:  High  54
                         Low  34

So I look over at the one living hive and all around it I see dead bees - probably about 100 of them.   It's not unusual to see dead bees around a living hive in winter.  When it's warm, the bees in the hive carry out the dead but drop them near the hive rather than fly away from the hive with the bodies.  But these bees had pollen in their pollen baskets so they were flying into the hive when they died.

Does anyone have any idea what would kill bees flying this close to home loaded with pollen?  

I don't know if the whole hive is dead - I opened the hive top above the inner cover where I have a feeder and added some syrup to the feeder.  One bee came up to partake and a couple of hive beetles.  

I'd love theories about what this means.  Seems late in the year for a pesticide kill and doesn't look like the pile of bees I had at the Morningside hive where there was a definite pesticide kill.  

So naturally I wondered about temperature.  Did it drop precipitously and the bees were caught unaware?  We had cold high winds a couple of days ago as the temperature dropped, but then they wouldn't be right beside the hive, would they, but rather would have been blown away.

Relief at Blue Heron

While I was waiting today to show Travis, a new beekeeper, how to inspect the beehive, I saw bees all over this aster that is blooming. Look at the pollen packed into her corbicula (pollen basket). This was the best picture of many I took.



I fed the Blue Heron hive 2 1/2 quarts of Ross Conrad's bee tea on Thursday afternoon. It's Saturday afternoon and all of it is gone! Travis and I reloaded the interior Boardman I was using with a new pint and we put a baggie filled with 3 quarts of tea onto the hive.

As we opened the hive, we clearly broke open some honeycomb. I love it when the bees efficiently circle the honey leak and all stick in their tongues to suck it up. Bees are really waste not, want not creatures! See how they completely circle the honey so as not to lose a single drop.



Here's Travis wearing my ill-fitting bee helmet looking at a beautiful comb of brood laid by this queen. In the bottom deep we saw several frames - actually almost all of the eight - with dark brood cappings - meaning it's not new - probably bees that are about to emerge. If this hive keeps putting away the syrup I am giving them, they may make it through the winter - fingers crossed, everyone!



Some of the frames are incompletely filled with comb as this one is. You can see the liquid in the cells. We saw lots of festooning bees in this box and hopefully they'll use the syrup to draw some wax to contain winter stores.



The hive was much heavier than on my last visit and I am well pleased with how it is growing.

The nights are much cooler now so I removed the ventilated hive cover and replaced it with a solid inner cover.  I will do that with the Rabun county hive next week when I'm up there.  I also plan to replace the cover of Topsy with a solid board like Sam Comfort uses.

The Pollen Basket on the Bee

Feeding Topsy was my mission the other day and I was pleased to find the bees falling all over each other trying to bring pollen into the hive. We have lots of aster - goldenrod and other varieties - blooming right now in Atlanta and these bees are taking full advantage of it.

The bees are crowding each other trying to enter the top bar hive in the photo below.



Although it is called the pollen basket, the bees don't actually have a basket on their rear legs. Instead it's a depressed area called the corbicula on the bee's hind leg. Before she heads for home, while still on the flower, the bee uses her forelegs to clean the pollen from her head and thorax. While she flies home to the hive, she passes the pollen from her forelegs and the back of her thorax to her middle legs.

Then (still in flight) she passes the pollen to the basitarsus of her hind leg. In reading Winston (p. 23 -  25), I don't quite understand the next step but it sounds like she scrapes the pollen comb of her opposite hind leg across the pollen comb of the other leg, moving the pollen to the corbicula, or pollen basket.

She does all of this in flight - no wonder the old saying is "Busy as a bee." The bee is working hard enough to fly home, but in addition she is moving pollen the while.



Because the pollen basket is an area rather than a basket, you can see on these bees that the pollen is packed in many different shapes coming into the hive.



At first in order to keep the bees calm as I opened the bars where the food is kept, I draped the hive with this red dishtowel.  It's good that bees can't actually see red, or they would have been madder than they actually were.

I looked over at the area of the hive entrance while I was putting in the food and bees were buzzing and collecting in large numbers in front of the red towel covering their entrance.  I had blocked them from coming into the hive!  As soon as I realized I had done this, I folded back the towel and everyone was happy again.

Interesting Bee Biology Facts

As I study for the Young Harris course, I'm learning some interesting bee biology facts:

1. The bee is a highly efficient insect - each leg has a specific job - the hind leg has the corbicula (the pollen basket) on the tibia. While not a "basket," it is a concave region with hairs around the edges and a central bristle that anchors the pollen loads. The middle leg cleans the thoracic hairs and moves pollen from the front to the hind legs. (There's a blind spot on the middle leg that the bee cannot clean which often has pollen dusted on it as the bee returns to the hive). The front leg has hair on the basitarsus that cleans the dust, pollen, etc from the head. The foreleg has an antenna cleaner on it (a hook of sorts) that cleans the antenna
   
   
2. When the adult bee emerges from the cell in which she has pupated, she attaches the capping to the side of the cell. Workers come along and recycle the capping on another cell!
   
   
3. Bee brood has a good chance of survival. Drone cells on the outside edges of the frame
   have a lower survival rate - since we know temperature is a factor, the edges probably are less warm. Also the workers remove brood that is the result of the queen mating with one of her brothers. This accounts for some of the empty cells you might see in an otherwise good brood pattern.
   
   
4. Bees are "eusocial." To qualify for this term, bees must have cooperative brood care (bees take care of young that isn't their own), reproductive division of labor (sterile females take care of the young that the fertile queen produces), and overlapping generations (in the bee hive, this means that the older sisters care for their younger sisters).
   
   
5. The queen larva is fed ten times as often as worker larvae. Winston says that "queens literally swim in a sea of brood food."
   
   
6. How do bees signal that they want food from another bee? "The begging bee thrusts the tip of her tongue toward the mouth of another bee."
   The feeding bee then opens her jaws (her mandibles) and pushes her own tongue toward the begging bee. Then the feeding bee brings a drop of liquid up from her honey stomach for the begging bee. This is called trophallaxis.

Just thought I'd share a few fun facts with all of you.....studying like this is overwhelming in the immensity of what I don't know. But it's also fun to take in all this bee knowledge.