Keith Fielder, Master Beekeeper, Speaks at Metro Atlanta Club

Keith Fielder, [if you click on the link, his write-up is on page 3] a Master Beekeeper in the state of Georgia, was the speaker this past Wednesday at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association. He spoke on Bee Biology for Dummies. I enjoyed what he had to say and learned some things I didn't know.



He had marvelous illustrations in his PowerPoint from HowStuffWorks and referred very positively to their Internet site and the illustrations available there. I went for a visit. How's the above for an information-filled illustration (Thanks, HowStuffWorks!)?

Interesting facts from Keith Fielder:

1. Bumblebees scent-mark the flowers they visit. This explains why some flowering plants have one or two bumblebees one day and are covered the next.

2. Flowers have a negative charge. The hairs on a bee's body have a positive charge. Since negative and positive attract, the bees are literally drawn to the flowers. Pollen is also attracted to the positive charge on the bee. And interestingly enough, women's hair is negatively charged so when bees fly into your hair, according to Keith, they are drawn there and can't prevent being pulled into your hair!

3. The pollen basket isn't really a basket at all but rather a concave surface covered with stiff hair. The bee combs the hair on its body, gathering the pollen on its body hairs and bringing the pollen into a ball on its leg.

4. And, away from bee biology into commenting on the hive, Keith said that the honeycomb is the "liver of the bee colony" in that it absorbs all the yuck that comes into the hive. This is important rationale for getting rid of old comb on a regular basis and bringing new comb into the hive.

We are very lucky in Atlanta to have such a wealth of wise beekeepers who come to speak to us.

Keith Fielder is full of knowledge. This is the fourth time I've heard him speak.

• He spoke at my first Young Harris meeting on Requeening your hives;
  
• He gave a similar talk to our bee club earlier this year on making a push-in queen cage of #8 hardware cloth;
  
• He spoke at GABA on giving talks about beekeeping to school children, I believe; and
  
• Now I've gotten to hear him on bee biology. He's always entertaining and I'll look forward to my next opportunity to hear him talk on any bee topic.

Our speaker in October for his second visit to our club this year is Dr. Keith Delaplane.

Wax from the Solar Wax Melter

Here it is - the gorgeous collection of wax from the solar wax melter this year. I love the yellow golden color and wish I could share the smell with you through the Internet. Wax is delicious to smell when it is melted like this. I am constantly amazed that I can put a glob of wax, dirt, pollen, bee parts, etc. on top of a paper towel and these are the results.



Now I will start the process of trying to create a wax block for the Honey Contest at my Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Club picnic on September 14. Last year I poured the block at least 10 times!

Hive Combination continued

I can't say that there is a good ending. I'm not sure about the hive box that I put on top in the combination. Maybe the queen was in there although I didn't see evidence of her and didn't find her.

I put the two boxes together with slit newspaper in between and left them for a week. All of the Internet forums said that within that time the bees would chew through the newspaper and join each other. I should see a pile of chewed newspaper in front of the hive. Well, that never happened.

Instead I saw the bees carrying out larvae (see picture below) and saw a lot of conflict in front of the hive. I had been feeding both of these hives before the one was robbed out. I didn't feed them during the combination week and instead supplied the top box with two frames of honey on either side of the box. The lower hive had stored honey.


I opened the hives on Saturday to see what had happened. Evidence of the mayhem abounded. There were dead bees all over the newspaper and detritus from wax moths that had inhabited the top hive. I pulled off the newspaper, killed some wax moths and put the hive back together.

This coming weekend, I'll probably take off the top box and leave Hyron as a one-box hive. The combination was not a success. I'll have another opportunity to try to do it better in the future, I'm sure.

Unwanted visitor to the bee yard

Yesterday I stacked my unused boxes up in a corner of the deck. Leaving the boxes in the light keeps the wax moth from taking over the frames inside the boxes. I am in the process of removing boxes that the hives don't need so they can get compact for the winter.

I also did a hive combination yesterday and removed a feeder bag from under the Imrie shim. I set the almost empty bag on top of the stack of boxes.


This morning the bag is being worked over by bald faced hornets. I've seen them cannibalizing my bees but never taking sugar water.


Their faces are those that only their mother could love. They look like the stuff of horror movies to me when you gaze at them like this, up close and personal! They even fought among themselves, sending one of the group off to look for live bees to carry home to the nest.



Below is a picture I found on Google of the other cannibal in my bee yard:

The other hornet I see daily in my bee yard is the European Hornet. It seems to be a predator for live bees as is the Bald-faced Hornet. It is brown with a large yellow abdomen. Ugly and threatening, it flies toward bees in the air, trying to snatch them.

Combining the weak hives

Yesterday Hyron and Hyron2 became one.

At the end of the day when hopefully most of the foragers were home, I put the absconded swarm hive and the weak swarm hive together. I carried the absconded hive back up on the deck and put it in combination with the Hyron hive that has been weakly surviving all along.

Hyron was my first swarm hive back on April 1 and has not built out of the first box to this day. It's a sad little group. There is a queen and brood but it never has taken off. Hyron2 which was robbed out and absconded appears queenless at this point although most of the bees are in the box.

I opened up Hyron and put newspaper over the top of the box. I cut several slits with a knife through the newspaper to facilitate the bees chewing through. The idea is that by the time the bees in the upper box chew through to the lower box, everybody will be friends.

I removed the Imrie shim and the feeder bag - I actually don't know what to do about feeding and will post on Beesource and Beemaster to find out how to manage this.



When I put Hyron2 on top, I left the Imrie shim, but didn't replace the baggie feeder. I don't want to encourage any food fights as they get to know each other. Keeping the shim on does give me an easy option for feeding them in about a week when the combination will hopefully be successful.


I also removed the robber screen. I thought since there's not really anything to rob out right now, it isn't really necessary. I also thought that it would be easier for them to carry out the newspaper shreds if I didn't have the entry blocked.


It was cooler than usual this morning but already the bees at this hive were orienting. I expect that it will go well and I am keeping my fingers crossed for a successful hive combination.

The Small Hive Beetle 2008

I am SO prepared for the small hive beetle. I have made Sonny-Mel traps from sandwich boxes, I have ordered and own AJ's Beetle Eaters, I have two of the Hood beetle traps. But this year I'm not using any of them. Knock on wood, I have rarely seen a small hive beetle this year. Amazing luck for me and certainly good luck for the beetles who would meet a vinegar/oil ending should they have visited my hives.

I'm not totally free of the pest. Yesterday I saw a few in my two hives that are in my yard and not on my deck. The bees don't like the SHB and when they see one, they pursue it aggressively.

In the picture below two separate bees are aiming for two different small hive beetles. They run toward the beetle and try to discourage its presence in their domain. I smashed the six I saw with my hive tool.


The picture below is a small hive beetle that I injured with my hive tool. The bees finished him off.

Then, as they would with a member of their own kind, a bee (not well-focused) picked up his little carcass and removed him from the inner cover!

I have strong hives this year that seem to be keeping the SHB in check. However, I have all the equipment, including a mouth aspirator to suck the little guys into a trap, for any occurrence next year!

What Happened to the Absconded Hive

The picture below is a picture of the bees in this box on Saturday. There were plenty of bees in the box and I replaced the baggie feeder.



Last night (as described in the last post) I found the absconded bees attached in a cluster to the hurricane fence between my house and my neighbors. This morning I was determined to move these bees into a box. I wanted to do this to be a good neighbor and to try to save these bees.

I put on my beesuit and went out with an empty wax milk carton to try to gather the bees from the fence and pour them into the hive. At this point, I didn't have access to my neighbor's yard, so it was quite difficult to gather the bees. After a while I gave up and smeared swarm lure on the porch of the hive box about two feet from the swarm.

The hive box was a new box, new SBB, new slatted rack. The frames were the drawn frames from this original hive's box, as well as the inner cover and telescoping cover from the hive box. I took two frames of honey from another hive and there were two frames of honey left from the original hive. So the box included four frames of honey as well as a ziploc bag of 2:1 honey.

I gave up and went inside to finish getting ready for work. When I went to my car, I could see the swarm swirling in the air. I jumped out of the car and turned on the camera. In my excitement, I forgot that you can't turn the camera on its side to make movies, so the movie I attempted is on its side, but I thought you might like to see it anyway.

Hopefully the bees will stay in this box. I'll move it nearer to the other yard hives and combine it with Hyron which is still weakly on the deck.

Disaster and Devastation - Now What?

Over the weekend, I checked all of my hives. I've been feeding the two smaller swarm hives. This is one of them: Hyron2. Here's what the bees looked like between the frames on Saturday morning. I have been putting a ziploc baggie on this hive about every five days. I went out of town on vacation, so these bees haven't had new food for 7 days when I checked them on Saturday. The baggie was empty but the bees were hanging out.


Here's how the front porch looked on Saturday.

However, on Sunday while my daughter and I were eating dinner around 6:30 PM, there were scads of bees on the front porch, all on top of one another, and I couldn't tell if the hive were being robbed or if they were doing late orientation flying. On the ground were a number of yellow jackets in battle with the bees.

Still, the hive has been building up well, and the crowd on the front porch didn't alarm me. This is my only hive without a slatted rack, so I did think as I watched on Sunday that I needed to install a slatted rack so that they wouldn't need to make such a large beard.

The thought of robbery kept coming back to me and I observed several bees carrying out larvae. I wish I had intervened and put on the robber screen, but I didn't. Tonight when I got home, the hive was empty. I opened it up and there were only a handful of bees in the hive. I assume the hive had been robbed yesterday and without stores, had absconded.


As I sat grading papers, my little dog came dashing into the house just covered with bees - there were at least 60 on him. I grabbed him with a towel, carried him to the shower, put him in and turned the water on full force. Most of the bees left and either drowned or flew into the ceiling lights. He wasn't stung too much and made it through the crisis, but I wondered how in the world he had gathered so many bees at once. He had gone out to bark at the neighbor's dogs on the other side of my hurricane fence.

I thought for a while about it and then turned on the outside lights (it was 9:30 PM) and went out to find a huge swarm clinging to the fence between the two yards, right where Henry likes to bark. He had disrupted this swarm of bees. Putting two and two together, I think these are the bees who absconded - robbed and discouraged, they didn't know what else to do. I opened their old hive to find pollen but not any stores other than that and no brood.

I put a SBB, a slatted rack, and a hive box with a top right beside the swarm and smeared the landing with swarm lure that I had made. Tomorrow I don't have to be at work until 10 AM so I'll try to collect my bees and put them back in a box with food. I poured every bit of sugar in the house (4 cups) into a pot and added water to make 2:1 syrup. I can also add a couple of frames of honey from hives with a surplus and maybe these bees will be OK.

And maybe I'll get up and find that they left at the crack of dawn. We'll see.

This is the hive I've been contemplating combining with Hyron to make one healthy hive. I so regret that I haven't already done it. It's moments like this that make me feel like a Bee-Haver rather than a Bee-Keeper.


Taken with a flash at 10 PM. There are just as many on the other side of the fence.