It's a Beautiful Day in my Neighborhood....

It's swarm season and all of us beekeepers cross our fingers that we will get a swarm call - it's an adventure: driving to an unknown address, evaluating the bee situation and rescuing the swarm.  Then you drive back home, bees in the car, and install the bees in your own backyard or bee yard.

Free bees - the best!

But, no.....even better is what happened to me today.

I had two hives that died or absconded before the winter began.  One was the two-year-old Sebastian hive that we moved to my backyard from the professor's yard at the beginning of last year's bee season.  I guess I kept hoping it hadn't really happened so I never took the hive apart.

I've noticed a number - I should say a growing number - of scout bees exploring that hive.  It is four boxes high with a swarm trap entrance.  I've also seen scout bees exploring the hive next to it which is also empty with good comb and two full boxes of honey.  The Sebastian hive also has unharvested honey in it.

Tonight I got home around 7:30 and went out to the backyard to see the bees. I heard a pretty loud bee buzz/hum which is not my usual experience back there at this time of day. Suddenly I looked over at the Sebastian hive and there were orienting bees coming in and out of the entry.

I believe a swarm has moved in and that's even better than going on a swarm call. Free bees and no time or effort spent to get them! I didn't have to sing "Won't you be my neighbor?" throw my shoes around, change my jacket for a sweater or anything!

I guess the best swarm trap of all is an available, empty hive with healthy drawn comb.

These two photos don't begin to convey what a beautiful day it was in my neighborhood today!  So excited about these bees who have decided that they want to bee my neighbor!

I so wish I had been home and noticed the tornado of bees moving in....

Death by Drowning, But Revival by a New Queen

My flower pot swarm trap caught a swarm that I called Little Kitten because it was so small.  I think it was a secondary swarm and was relieved to find that finally a mated queen was laying in the wax comb.

I had a Boardman feeder at the entrance of the nuc - and those of you who have used Boardmans know that they are not designed for a nuc.  To combat the instability I put a package container under the feeder with a small block to support it.  However, one night our evening raccoon or maybe my dog, Hannah, had bumped into the Boardman, turning over the feeder bottle.

By the time I discovered the mishap, there was a pool of sugar syrup all over the bottom board of the nuc and bees were having a terrible time negotiating entry to the hive.  It could have been like that for several days - I don't always look at the hives every single day.  I put the hive on a new bottom board and cleaned up the old one.  Then I returned it to the hive and put it all back together.

Sadly, either the queen drowned that night - death by raccoon/Hannah/sugar syrup??? - or the bees, upset with the state of things, balled her.  The hive was queenless.

I put frames of brood and eggs into the nuc.  They didn't really succeed at making a queen.  There was one small queen cell - obviously an inadequate job (1/2 inch long at best) - and the handful of bees now left could not have managed to take care of it.

My friend Jerry ordered 20 virgin queens from Zia and offered me the opportunity to buy one.  Zia Queen Bees is a family operation breeding survivor queens.  I believe this is the answer to the mite problem - not poison.  I snapped him up on it, got the queen on Wednesday night.  She was alone in the queen cage.  Jerry suggested that I feed her a drop of honey and a drop of water when I got home and that I install her the next day.

An amazing experience but with no pictures:  I put a drop of honey on the end of my finger and held it next to the openings in the plastic queen cage.  She stuck out her proboscis and sucked the honey off of my finger.  I will never forget the experience.  I knew the water wouldn't stick to my finger, so I put it in a spoon and watched her drink, but I wished I could repeat the honey drop!

The next day, Thursday, I was scheduled to give a bee talk at 7 PM and from there to drive to Young Harris, so I had a packed day.  I luckily had a two hour break in my professional day (but only 2 hours) so I drove to Valerie and Jeff's to get frames of bees to create population for the small Kitten.

Jeff has been busy adding boxes to these hives and this is how they looked:



All of these boxes are full of honey and I can't lift the top box on these hives without a ladder and help, so I opened the hive I call Lenox Pointe (second from the left in the collage above).  I took two honey frames with bees from the top box, checking very carefully for the queen.  I did this because I could take honey frames out of the top box without having to lift it off of the hive.  I put these in a nuc I had waiting.  I took three frames - two of brood and bees and one of mostly pollen and honey from the Swarmy hive - the mostly yellow hive on the right in the collage.

I shook a few extra bees, but didn't worry about that as much as I would normally since I am adding this "split" to Little Kitten where there are already some under employed bees.

I had to be back at my office at 1:00.  When I finished at Jeff's, it was 12:25 and I had a 20 - 25 minute drive back to my house.  I drove in my bee jacket as quickly as I could within the limits of the law.  When I got home it was 12:50 and I needed to be at work in 10 minutes.  

I walked the nuc through my house to save time because the nuc is on my deck.  I opened it, took out the frames and put them in a second nuc box on Little Kitten without disturbing the bottom box.  Then I took the queen out of my top pocket and put her cage between two frames, put the inner cover back on, and ran into the house, stripping jacket, etc. as I went.

Oh, and I put an end bar on the entry to give them an entrance reducer of sorts.

I threw on my business clothes, jumped in the car (my office is 5 minutes from home) and got to my appointment there at 1:05.

Returning from Young Harris, I found the bees happily flying in and out of the hive and seemingly satisfied with their new housing. I'll check tomorrow to see if the queen has been released and then leave them completely alone for three weeks.

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!

The Little Kitten Swarm

Cindy Bee who belonged to Metro Atlanta Beekeepers when she was in Georgia once said that when people called her about a swarm, she would  ask how big it was.  She'd say, "Big as a basketball? A football? A baseball?" but people would say, "Well, it's as big as my Mama's purse;" or "It's as big as two cats."

When I got this tiny swarm, I thought, "Only as big as a kitten."  So I housed the tiny swarm in a nuc box to help them thrive.  Since it was so small, it was probably a secondary swarm with a virgin queen and she needed time to mate and start laying.

I looked into the hive for the first time on Wednesday.  They have a laying queen!  She had an egg in almost every available cell. 

I am feeding this nuc, unlike my other hives.  I feel like mothering it - they are so small and I want to make it work for them.  Maybe they won't make it, but I loved opening the nuc and finding all these eggs.  And they were storing nectar.



Notice in the comb below that they have left themselves a passageway right in the center of the comb.  This is one of the advantages to the bees of foundationless frames.


The bees only occupy part of three frames of this nuc, but Michael Bush once wrote on Beemaster that at this time of year, if he had a group of bees about the size of a baseball (or a kitten), he would try to give them every chance.  That's what I'm doing.


And now that they are making a new home in the nuc box, I hung the swarm trap back up again.  It may have already used its 40% chance by catching the "small kitten" but I love it that it worked and want to try again!

Miscellaneous Bee Tid Bits

This morning there were still bees clumped in one of the flowerpots.  This makes me think even more that there is no mated queen.  But I set up the nuc with a Boardman feeder and the bees went into the hive.  I have no idea what to think of this swarm.  I can't check on it until Monday so hopefully they will have gotten their act together by then.



This little clump is pretty connected to the flower pot.


Another miscellaneous topic:  when you buy a package of bees, there are going to be a certain number of bees that die in transit.  This happens simply by the attrition.  In a hive a number of bees die everyday, but in the package, random bees have been shaken in together.  For some of them, their time is up in transit and they die.  In the particular package that I installed in this hive below, there were stacks of bodies on the floor of the package.



Bees don't like to have dead bees in their hive. So the bees quickly moved out the dead bodies. Compare the scene in front of the hive above with the small number of bodies on the ground in front of the other package hive installed the same day pictured below.  The package for the hive below had very few dead bees on the bottom of the package.




And the last miscellaneous bit, the tulip poplar is blooming in Atlanta evidenced by the bloom on the ground below.  This signals the beginning of the nectar flow in Atlanta - much earlier than usual.  Typically in Atlanta the tulip poplar blooms from mid April - mid May.  Now with everything blooming earlier, the question is how will the early spring affect the honey crop this year.

Swarm Capture or Swarm Catastrophe?

For the last couple of days, I've been pretty sure my swarm trap had captured a swarm.  Bees flew in and out all day.  None of them had pollen on their legs, though and the hive didn't buzz at night so I wasn't certain.

However, I'm going to the mountains for a couple of days and I didn't want to come back and find the trap all filled with comb and impossible to move.  So tonight was the night to move them into a hive box.

For some reason I was so nervous and kept putting it off and putting it off until it was almost dark.  Then I rationalized that after all, this would mean all the bees had come home.





I unscrewed the connecting four screws and found a very small swarm (a kitten - to those of you who know what I mean  - not even a cat).  They had begun building comb attached to the side of the swarm trap.



I spread a sheet under the nuc box I planned to put them in and shook.  I hit the bottom of the flower pot onto the deck to loosen their hold on the pot walls and then dumped them into the nuc.  A lot remained behind, attached to the comb.



I carefully removed the three pieces of comb and rubber banded them into a frame.  Even if they don't reattach and use the comb, they can still reuse the wax.  I put one frame in that was fully drawn and one that was half a frame of comb.  The third had their three pre-made combs rubber banded in and the last two had starter strips.


When all was said and done, there were still a lot of bees in the comb end of the swarm trap.  So I shook again but this time by accident slammed the edge of the flower pot into a pile of bees - probably killed the queen as I'm doing this in the dark.  Who knows?



I brushed the little cluster you see on the side of the nuc onto a magazine and shook them onto the landing.

An hour after all of this, there are still many bees in the side turned flower pot.

Theory:  I killed the queen.
Theory 2:  It's a secondary swarm and the queen is a virgin and either hasn't mated or got eaten by a bird while off mating with drones so they don't have a reason to go into the hive
Theory 3:  They recognized how totally klutzy I was in this process so why should they like a home I provided them?









Footnote:  I moved the bees 1 1/2 hours ago.  I just went out there with a flashlight and they've moved out of the flowerpot and into the hive.  There are still about 20 bees hanging out but most went in which may mean there is a queen!  And maybe I didn't kill her.

It's such a tiny swarm.  I'm planning to leave the nuc on the top of a ladder directly under where the swarm trap was hanging until I get back and can put them somewhere permanent to live.  I'll bungee cord it to the ladder so there's no chance of it falling off while I'm gone.  Or maybe in the morning I'll move it to my backyard.

Swarm Trap Success or Honey Bee Democracy?

Tonight when I got home, I noticed bees flying in and out of my swarm trap!  Miracle of miracles.

So now the $64,000 question or at least the $85 (cost of a package) question is how do I know if these are scouts or if a swarm has moved in?

I stood there for 15 minutes and bees continually flew in and out.  I know from reading Thomas Seeley's Honeybee Democracy that they send more and more scouts to determine if a place is the place of choice for the swarm….but with only this one entry way, how will I know?



If they start to build comb, it will be like tearing apart a skep to get the bees!




I tried slightly lifting the hive but it was light as a feather - which makes me think these are scouts, but then a pound of bees might not feel like much up in the air like this.



Here you can see the whole trap.

Anyone have any ideas about how to determine if it's a success and has trapped a swarm?

Travels with Linda - it's been a long BEE Day

This morning after I re-hived the Decatur/azalea swarm, installed two packages at Morningside Community Garden and packed my car, my dog Hannah and I drove to Rabun County (about 2 hours away) to take two packages of bees to install in my hives at the Community Garden there.

I had been up earlier this year, and knew that one of the hives had died over the winter.  The other hive was alive then but since that weekend we've had a string of five days of temperatures in the teens.  My Atlanta hives did not survive that, so I had reason to think that maybe both of my hives in Rabun County were dead.

To my shock and amazement, bees were flying in and out of the green hive - the one that was covered with kudzu for most of the summer and where the bees had definitely died.  I opened it up and was greeted by a household of ants.  They were nesting in the edges of the inner cover.



Upon my disturbance of their home, they began carrying out baby ants (click on the picture to see better).



Despite the ant invasion, the hive was FULL of bees.  One of the gardeners there told me that he had looked over and hadn't seen many bees but then one day he saw LOTS of bees.  I imagine he witnessed the swarm that actually moved into this hive.  My old hive became an effective swarm trap...Free bees!



I inspected the hive and found eggs, young larvae and lots of activity.  They were using most of the frames in the bottom two boxes.  In the third box they had drone brood in two combs and hadn't started using the rest, but I didn't take it off - they'll need it soon enough.

The bees looked healthy but if you look at the photo below, you can see a red arrow at about 1:00 pointing to a varroa mite on the back of a bee.  If I can see that one, you can rest assured there are many in the hive.



So the once dead hive has resurrected itself and it only cost me 1/4 a tank of gas to find this out.  Hannah had fun running up and down the creek bank while I inspected the two hives and the two packages of bees spent four hours today in the car (as did I).



Both of these hives are doing well.  I'm back up in the mountains for spring break this coming weekend and we'll see how they are faring then.

Swarm Catching - Iwo Jima Style!

(Title thanks to my friend and fellow swarm catcher, Curt B)

Curt's bees all died over the winter, so our friend and beekeeper, Bunny, called Curt when her bees swarmed and offered him the swarm.  He asked me to help him and I jumped at the chance.

The swarm was really high up in a hemlock tree - I mean like 25 - 30 feet up.  We gained some height by working from the neighbor's yard.  You can see it in the tree top below in the center of the photo.

Curt borrowed an extending pole from George (this was a real team effort!).  George's pole extends much farther than mine.  Tom, Bunny's husband and fellow beekeeper, holds mine up and it is still about 15 feet short of the swarm.  Of course, at this point we hadn't thought of the neighbor's yard.

The first aspect of successful swarm removal is to follow the Scout motto:  Be Prepared.  I was woefully unsuccessful at this part, as you'll see.  However, the first thing we did was to position the hive box into which we planned to dump the swarm.

We set the hive box on a sheet in case we missed the box altogether and the bees would still be accessible.  We also put bungee cords under the box, ready to secure it and had a piece of screen wire ready to block the entrance.

Then Curt did a practice run to see how he would move the water jug mounted pole after he got the swarm.  There were so many tree branches - it was really like maneuvering through a maze.  Don't the two of us look tiny in comparison to the length of that pole and the height of the trees!

Curt was operating this incredibly long pole and the hive was high up a tree and across a fence from where we stood.  He positioned the water jug under the swarm and did the prerequisite quick movement upward to capture the swarm........and half the swarm went into the water jug and half fell 30 feet to the ground below, covered with leaves.

OK, remember how I said the thing about the Scout be prepared.....well, we missed thinking about a very important thing.  I put a sheet under the hive box, but did NOT have one on the ground under the tree.

We still had to get the swarm into the hive box.  Curt's caption for the photo below is:
"Swarm Catching:  Iwo Jima Style".  His second choice was  "Moby Bee."

The water jug was surprisingly heavy and the tip of the pole bent and swayed awkwardly.  To put the swarm into the box, we had to turn 180 degrees from how we are standing in the photo and lower it.  What a challenge!  We both felt like circus acrobats trying to manage poles on a tight rope - what a hoot and what an adventure!

We returned to Bunny's yard where Curt gathered up as many bees as he could from the ground below the tree and also dumped those into the hive - if we had spread a sheet under the tree it would have been so much better......live and learn.  He was quite the trooper with bees crawling up his pant legs and stinging him left and right.

In the end we put the hive right beside the dropped bees on the ground so that perhaps they would join the queen *hopefully* in the hive box.

We left the hive until morning.  I drove over to Rosedale Road the next day and the good news is that the bees were still in the box.  I added frames to the box and Curt will go by to pick up the whole thing to take it to his yard.....

so thanks Curt, Bunny and Tom for a great time and a good story!

Note:  Bunny took all of these great pictures - thanks for letting me use them.