MapMyDCA.com and my friend Julia

My friend and beekeeping buddy, Julia Mahood, is a multi-talented woman. Among other things, she designed the license plate now sported by lots of Georgia cars; she was beekeeper of the year for GBA in 2018; and she is a Master Beekeeper. She, her son Noah, and I went together to Lithuania on a beekeeping tour back in 2013.

Always up for becoming an even better beekeeper, she is working on her Master Craftsman level of certification. The focus of her research for this is the drone bee. She has developed a citizen science website for mapping where the drone congregation areas are throughout the world. If you know where one is or are just interested in drones and their behavior, you'd enjoy her website.

So imagine my delight when wallowing in the middle of the depression of social isolation and never seeing anyone I care about in person, Julia suggested that I meet her in a field where she is catching and marking drones. It would be easy to do that and stay six feet apart!

I believe the way it works is she is interested in how often drones who don't "get lucky" return to the same DCA. She catches drones, marks them in a color representing this DCA, releases them and returns another day to see how many of her painted drones she catches a second time.

On this day, she was using a helium weather balloon for catching the drones.

The helium weather balloon is about a yard in diameter if not a little larger and flies high above the trees. If you look at the photo of Julia holding the balloon down at a lower height, you can see the trap hanging about ten feet below the balloon. The trap has a velcro part at the top where the drones can't escape.

Julia told me that drones only have enough fuel to fly for thirty minutes before they need to be back in the hive for more honey (fuel). So she flies her balloon for about five minutes at a time and takes three minutes or so to mark the drones before releasing them and sending them on their way.

In the photo below, if you look closely, you can see lots of little black dots, all of which are the comet of drones trailing the trap. The trap is baited with queen lure hanging in it (which entices the drones). I am sure the little black dots are all drones - Atlanta air in the pandemic is remarkably clean because there are no cars on the road since everyone is staying home!

Once back on the ground, Julia takes the drones out of the trap one at a time; marks their backs with a permanent red marker and releases them. At another nearby DCA, she uses a yellow marker. So if she sees her red-marked drones in the yellow district, she knows that the red-painted drone frequents more than one DCA.

It was interesting to look closely at the netting of the trap - it's a wide netting and very soft, unlike what I have seen in fabric stores. 

At the end of the whole process (Julia has found that she catches the most drones in the 4PM - 5PM time slot), she puts the balloon in her car and drives home very carefully because the balloon is so BIG that the hatchback will not fully close!

Julia's project has made me much more interested in the drones in my hive and more curious about their behavior in general.

When the Train Has Left the Station.....

You know all those movies where the one person drives speedily to the airport only to see the plane lift off as they reach the runway?

When I went to Lithuania, I committed to the trip months ahead of time.  I also evaluated what I needed to take, what should go with me, what could I leave at home.  Something major, major would have to happen for me to change my plans.

The bees are still there this morning, but they are ready to go.  I should have seen it.  I should never have put the robber screen on - I think they started planning then.



While I can't find anything about absconding in Seeley's books, Malcolm Sanford (Keeping Honey Bees) says, "Absconding rarely occurs in colonies in temperate regions where European bees are usually kept, but it may occur if colonies are under threat from disease, pests, or depletion of forage (pollen, nectar, or water)."

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping   doesn't discuss absconding but defines it as "Absconding resembles swarming except that  no bees are left behind in the parent colony.  The entire colony leaves its hive."

I can't find any description of preparation to abscond.  Usually in my experience the bees take all the honey.  There is one honey super still on this hive unless they emptied it this morning - which is not typical of absconding unless their tummies are full with the other honey supers.  Just like in robbing, there are shards of wax below the hive.  These are shards from brood frames and are brown rather than white:

You can see them under the hive below the screened bottom board.  

And why are the shards brown?  Because before a hive absconds, they empty the hive.  This means that they leave no or very little brood behind.  I've seen them carrying out larvae over the past few days and congratulated myself on having such a hygienic hive.....but that's not what they were apparently doing....

So now I know that before absconding you'll see young larvae being carried out, typically they empty the honey cells, and no pollen bearing bees are coming into the hive.  As a matter of fact, I think the bees out flying are scouts and are dancing to advertise new space.  I saw several rather frantic dances like Seeley describes taking place on the front of the hive. 

The bees flying in this morning were light, carrying nothing, and only doing a scout job.  The working bees this morning were the ones in the hive, still removing larvae.

One theory would be that these bees are sick and that's why they are absconding, but it looks more like they were clearing out the young to leave.  

Last night before I went to sleep, I read on Beemaster that one way to stop absconding would be to do what one might also do when hiving a swarm: put a queen excluder between the hive and the bottom board so that the queen probably can't leave.

So that's what I did a few minutes ago.  I took the hive down to the bottom board where there were tons of removed larvae.  BTW, I looked very closely at the larvae both in person and with the zoom on my Picasa viewer at the computer.  I do not see any Varroa mites.  I think these are healthy bees, sacrificed to the hive's wish to abscond.  

I put on a queen excluder (I do actually own several even though I never use them in the hive.  I use them to drain cut comb honey!).

This should hopefully stop them.  I checked the bottom board carefully and did not see the queen.  Unless she's really skinny, she should not be able to go through the excluder and the hive will stay.  Beemaster says I should leave the excluder on for at least three days.

If this hive survives, then the disruption should help with a varroa problem in that the bees have interrupted the brood cycle and thus the Varroa cycle as well.

I totally tore off the robber screen in case that was what was bothering them.

So maybe the train has left the station, but maybe I put a big enough boulder on the track to keep the departure at bay.  We'll see.

P.S.  I was at home on a phone appointment at 11:30 AM when the bees started the swirl of a hive that is leaving.  They swirled and swirled, but didn't leave since the queen couldn't come through the queen excluder.  They are still anxiously flying around the hive but haven't left.  I hope I did the right thing.  

There is no nectar flowing in Atlanta and even though the statistics say it has rained on 38% of the past 224 days this year - greater than 1/3 of the days, it seems to me as if it rains almost every day.  If they leave, there are no better areas for nectar collection around, so best if they don't.  If they are leaving because of disease, then who knows if it would be better for them not to be here.  

Billy Davis' Robber Screen

What a strange honey year!  After two years of drought, now we have so much rain in Atlanta that it has hurt the bees.  Many hives were unable to put up enough stores for winter and it's prime time for robbing.

Jeff and I keep saying we needed to put the robber screens that Billy Davis uses on our hives.  We put it off and put it off (I am deathly afraid of the staple gun).

While I was in Lithuania, my last hive from the Fatbeeman was robbed out and died.  I think his supplier in south Georgia didn't do well by him this year - one of my packages was the one that had a virgin queen at our Chastain site and the package I installed at home never did well.  They were just limping along, and were easy victims for robbers.  The ground under the hive was covered with wax shards and dead bees on the bottom board.  In a way, if robbers were going to pick one of my hives to destroy, that was the best one.

So Jeff and I put Billy Davis robber screens on almost all of our hives last weekend.  The hive below is the Northlake Mall Swarm.  Billy says for the screen to be effective the hive entrance must be about four inches from the edge of the screen.  This hive has an entrance reducer on it (as do all my hives this year) and the opening is under the bees clustered on the screen.

At first the bees are really confused.  How to get to Mama?  They aim for the entrance but that isn't working so they try the upper part of the hive to see if an entrance has materialized up there.

But after a week, the bees have gotten it figured out.  They've been going in the side and bearding under the robber screen (and on top of it!)

Today at 4:30 - typical time for orientation - there was a frantic energy around this particular hive.  I'm not usually home at this time.  I do have breaks in my day, but my busiest time at the office is from about 2 - 7 at night, so I miss orientation.  Consequently I haven't really seen bees orient since we put the robber screens on the hives.

The other hives in my backyard were orienting at 4:30 and they didn't look as frantic as the Northlake hive.  The bees outside the hive were buzzing angrily.  Now, I've seen robbing and it's frantic, but you also see bees actively fighting with each other and falling to the ground; you see dead bees in front of the hive; and a growing pile of wax accumulates under the hive from wax cappings.  

But this hive has a closed screened bottom board, so I couldn't see wax cappings.  And although there were not dead bees, the buzz was angry and loud.  

The area under the screen is PACKED with bees and bees were actively guarding the available entry.  You can kind of see the bees under the screen in the photo above.

So just to be safe, I threw a wet sheet over the hive, covering the side entrances and waited it out.  I left the front open since there was no entry there and I could monitor the bee population and activity. 

Of course, if this were orientation and not robbing, now the hive bees also don't have access to the hive.

Around 6:30, the activity was back to normal.

In robbing the robber bees keep trying to access the entry of the hive because they smell the honey.  The hive bees go for the pheromone of the queen so they will search different ways to get to the queen.  But typically robber bees just focus on the entrance.

So was this robbing and Billy Davis' robbery screen as well as my wet sheet stopped the action?  Or was this robbing and the screen effectively kept the robbers out?  Or was this just orientation of a strong hive?

I don't know but I felt good about having the robber screen on the hive.   Thanks, Billy.

Maybe tomorrow I'll pull the block to the screened bottom board out and see if there are tons of wax shards there.

Nine Honey Apiary Visit near the border of Latvia

Nine Honey Apiary Visit near the border of Latvia, a set on Flickr.  To see the slides with labels, click here.  To see the slides, look at the slide below.

The pictures tell the story of this lovely visit to another apiary in Lithuania. This apiary is very near the border of Latvia. We went to their bees and watched them take frames of honey for harvest. We had fun talking to them about bees and getting the feel for their beekeeping approaches.

Like Solys, they also use chemicals in their hives. They treat with Amitraz every two or three years. They have about 30 hives in their apiary.

If you click on a slide, you can see the label.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Candle Making Workshop in Rumsiskes, Lithuania.

Candle Making Workshop in Rumsiskes, Lithuania., a set on Flickr - click on the link at the beginning of the sentence to see the slides instead of these small thumbnails.

On the third day of our Lithuanian tour we went to the historic community open air museum near Rumsiskes. The area is set up in fragments of villages. It was established in 1966 and is a wonderful depiction of Lithuanian life with 140 buildings, flower gardens, orchards, etc.

We were lucky to get to take a candle making workshop and each of us got to try the old-fashioned way of pouring candles.

We discovered that the wax has to be kept at a relatively low temperature - I think wax melts at 140 degrees F. If it gets warmer than that, it won't harden on the wick and just slides right back down into the bowl.

In the end you get a candle that is long and pretty, but a little out of shape. A rolling pin/board is then used to even it up and to make an end for a candle holder.

We each went away with a candle and had a great time - not to mention a really good lunch of traditional food. To see the labels on the slide, click on each individual slide.
Created with flickr slideshow.