Orientation is not Swarming

When you are a new beekeeper, it's hard to distinguish between swarming, orientation, and robbing . A swarm leaves the hive with a roar and in a very determined swirl up into the sky - like a tornado of bees. Robbing involves attacking by one set of bees on the occupants of the hive. You can see the attack, dead bees scattered in front of the hive and general mayhem.

Orientation is a different experience. It can be confusing because it contains some of the elements of both swarming and robbing. There's noisy buzzing like a swarm and the hive appears to have many bees leaving all at once. It's chaotic like robbing and the bees appear to be confused about whether they are coming or going - which is how robbing can look.

Here is a video to at least demonstrate orientation for you to clear up some of the confusion. If you can be calm yourself and watch your own bees, you'll begin to see that the same bees are flying up, turning to look at the front of the hive and then returning to the hive to begin the "practice run" again. The other give-away about orientation is that it happens at pretty much the same time every day - somewhere between 3 and 4 PM.

There's a bee in the house tonight

There's a bee in the house tonight and I feel both sad and hopeful.

I'm sad because she will die. She has been throwing herself up against a ceiling light and she will wear herself out and die. Even if I were to try to rescue her, she's probably a lost cause.

I have no idea how she got in. The glass doors are closed between the sunporch and the house so coming in through some secret opening in the sunporch windows isn't how she got here. Probably she came in on the back of one of the dogs.

I'm hopeful because her presence to me means that spring is really just around the corner. In bee season, I have a bee or two in the house almost every night. With my hives just feet from the door to my house, it is hard to prevent the arrival of a bee in the house. The inside bees don't sting - they are much too frantically trying to kill themselves on the lights.

Note: The bee book I am reading for February is Robbing the Bees by Holley Bishop. My sweet daughter gave it to me for my birthday and I am enjoying reading this "biography of honey."

Preparing to rob the bees!

This is a very busy month for me - I keep looking at the beehives and wishing I could open them up and get the honey....but I'm teaching at Emory right now in a compressed semester that ends at the end of August and I haven't had a weekend at home to open the hives.

This weekend is the moment. I'm home, I've graded the midterm exams and nothing is standing between me and the honey except perhaps the weather and of course, the bees!

I've bought Mason jars; a 17 inch pan to help me cut chunks of comb from the frames; several large plastic buckets; and a very special uncapping fork for the honey that I plan to strain.

The strainers arrived from Dadant this week and tomorrow and Saturday I plan to try to take the honey. I'll try to post step by step how it goes.

I've found a method used by Michael Bush to crush and strain some of the honey so tonight I plan to drill holes in one of my large plastic buckets.

OK, here's the plan:
1. I'm going to open the hives and find one of the filled and capped supers. I'm taking out to the hives a deep super (the only one I have left empty) and a beach towel.
2. I plan to remove the frames from the super one by one;
3. Shake the bees back into the hive and brush off any remaining bees;
4. Put the capped frame into the empty super and
5. Cover it quickly with the beach towel.


When I've removed the ten frames from the shallow, gotten them all to the empty super, and brushed off all bees, I plan to carry the beach towel covered super into the house and go to work.

Stay tuned and I'll let you know how it goes!