The Demise of the April Swarm

When I went through my hives yesterday, I was concerned about the hive in the medium nuc box. I hadn't seen much activity and had given them a frame of brood and eggs to help them make a new queen.

Originally I thought this was larvae of the wax moth, but I looked with a magnifying glass after an email from "Doc" and found that the larvae has 6 anterior legs - which distinguishes the small hive beetle larvae from the wax moth larvae. The weak hive wasn't able to withstand the invasion of the small hive beetle. I have never before seen a frame in the middle of its destruction by SHB larvae.

It was the grossest, stickiest, nastiest frame. It was dripping with honey. All sides of the frame were glistening and sticky. And the frame was filled with 1/4" larvae, wriggling and squirming in the honeyed mess. Be sure to click to enlarge the picture so you too can have an up close and personal view of the squalor.



After leaving the frame with one side down on the deck railing, I turned it over to the other side. Larvae can't tolerate sunlight, so I thought I'd rid myself of them that way. This morning when I went out to examine the larvae with a magnifying lens, earwigs were feasting on the remains! Here are the dead larvae floating in the remains of the honey.



While this is the first time I've seen small hive beetle damage in process, I'm sure it won't be the last. I don't look forward to my next sticky encounter!

Swarm Has Moved In? Or Is this Scouting Behavior?

I left this old deep nuc sitting where ProteusA and B as well as Persephone had been housed in past years. I've smeared the landing area, the underside of the front edge of the top cover and the tops of the frames with my homemade swarm lure. I've pretty much ignored the nuc this spring - just hoped one of these days a swarm might want to move in.

I've been gone all weekend and returned to bee activity. There are 10 bees around the nuc in the picture below. Either this home is winning out in the scout's search or perhaps the bees have already taken possession.



In my carport are two boxes ready to go to Blue Heron to super the hives there. This box had three bees flying in and out of it as I drove up to my house. Maybe it is also being scouted by a potential swarm. We'll see and I'll let you know if it ever quits raining so that I can open my hives and see what's what at both places.

Visiting Clairmont Elementary School

Yesterday I started my day in Clairmont Elementary School in the Pre-K class. There were 18 kids there who had learned a lot about ants and now wanted to learn about bees.

I had so much fun. The children tried on two bee veils that I passed around.



Here is my friend Tracy's daughter, Ella, looking snappy in her bee veil and gloves. Tracy, her dad, had bees in his family when he was a kid. Ella was my assistant and helped in so many ways during the presentation.



We talked about how beekeepers put the bees in boxes and about how the bees build and live in honeycomb. They liked hearing that the bees don't wipe their feet when they come inside the house so after a while the comb isn't white any longer but is dirty and brown from bee footprints.



We all did the circle dance and the waggle dance together.

Then before I left everyone got to taste honey. I had a great time and I think they did too. One of the joys of bee-ing a beekeeper is getting to share information with other people.

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.

Eco-Fair at Blue Heron Nature Preserve

Today there was an Eco-Fair at Blue Heron Nature Preserve. I went to represent beekeepers in the natural environment. Several members of Metro Atlanta stopped by and Gina, my local beekeeping friend, helped me run the table.

We took Julia's observation hive, which I had to go get from her house. What an adventure, but I got the bees without mishap. I have the Ob hive at Blue Heron from 11 until 4 when the bees began to act agitated and I thought I should take them home!

Here are Gina and me, working together to explain bees to all the passersby. We handed out information about how to learn more, including information about Metro Atlanta Beekeeper's Association.


Gina did a great job of explaining bees to this family and everyone got to taste honey.



Several of the kids tried on bee veils and loved doing that.


At the end of the day the hive was acting agitated and buzzing. I left the festival early to get them back to Julia's. I was so scared trying to take the cork out of the hive, uncover the pipe to the outdoors, and hook the whole thing up without mishap.

I managed to get the cork out of the hive and cover the opening with a card. Then I eased the aluminum stopper off of the pipe to the outdoors. Then I slid the Ob hive so that the only thing between the hole in the hive and the hole to the vent was a thin card. I slipped it out and slid the two together.

One bee escaped into the room, but I got a cup, rescued her and sent her on her way outdoors.

The bees clearly were desperate to get out of their cramped quarters. They poured out into the tube. Here they are "escaping."

Keith Fielder on Beekeeping more Like Mother Nature

Last night Keith Fielder, Cooperative Extension Agent at UGA, Georgia Master Beekeeper, Welsh Honey judge and all around good guy, talked to the Metro Atlanta Beekeeper's Association on the importance of low impact beekeeping.



As a beekeeper who is trying to stay as natural as possible with my hives, I was thrilled to hear Keith supporting Mother Nature.

By low impact beekeeping he emphasized:

• No chemicals
• A more natural environment both inside and outside the colony
  

He also emphasized the importance of us beekeepers understanding the biology of the honeybee (see my notes from his earlier talk) as well as the biology of the pests that intrude on the bee and the biology of the diseases of the honey bee.

Keith uses no chemicals in his hives - no chemical treatments and no drugs. He discovered that he lost about the same number of colonies each winter with or without chemicals - so why not leave the bees be?

From the outside the hive natural approach, he put up the slide below. The tree in which a bee colony could certainly live stands alone, and thus the bee colony stands alone. We tend to put our colonies side by side (for the convenience of the beekeeper) and that is not natural. Keith is trying to locate his colonies at least 50 yards from each other.



While that is impractical for me in my urban yard, remembering the consequences of unnatural colony location is important. With hives beside each other, drifting between hives may occur and if you have mites in one colony, you will have mites in all the colonies. Just as if you have small hive beetles, you are likely to find them in all hives.

From the inside-the-colony perspective, he encouraged us to keep our equipment clean, to be super cautious about purchasing old equipment from old beekeepers because all of its problems will come with it, and to change out the combs at least every three years.

I asked him about the old comb in a tree (in other words, how does Mother Nature handle old comb) and he said that bees in a tree continually build upward in the tree trunk. When they've gotten as far up as they can go, they abscond and find a new home. The inherent wax moths then take over and destroy the old comb. Then scout bees show up, attracted by the hive smell, find a new home with no old wax, since it has been destroyed by the wax moths, and move a swarm in to start the process all over.

He said that screened bottom boards are essential to a clean hive. Debris, mites, and other detrius fall through the SBB and don't return to the hive. In addition the SBB provides ventilation, essential to a healthy hive.

While he didn't talk about or encourage foundationless beekeeping, he did say that if you use commercial wax, you will have chemicals in your hive introduced by the wax from the commercial companies. He suggested using plastic foundation with no wax coating.

Michael Bush says that the bees don't like plastic and it doesn't work to give them plastic with no wax coating. Cindy Bee who was at the meeting asked about using a strip of paper in the groove, much like I use a wax strip. Popsicle sticks will accomplish the same thing when glued in the frame groove. The goal of all of the aforementioned is to have fresh, uncontaminated wax in the hive.

He talked about bee genetics - using queens from hygienic stock such as the Purvis Brothers' gold line or from survivor stock - like great swarms. If there are enough drones around, he is fine with the bees making their own queens. (Currently my hives at home all have queens that they have made themselves).

When asked about the bad queens many people got in Atlanta in the early nucs this year, he said that buying commercial nucs means that you are getting old queens from last year that the commercial guys don't want any more and that the new queens, with all the rain this spring in Florida, are (and what I heard here was:) shortbread.

As a cook I wondered how the queen bee can be shortbread, but his answer made me understand that what he actually said was, "short-bred," meaning that instead of 17 or 18 drones mating with the queen, she may have only mated with one. (See the story about Julia's drone laying queen at Blue Heron)

He said that nutrition for bees will be the next area of research after colony collapse disorder. Bees have a hard time now getting variety into their diet. We have a "fragmented habitat" and less plant diversity. You should see in a healthy colony all colors of pollen coming in the door in the spring. If you don't see this, then your bees are probably not being fed in a well-rounded way.

He did encourage feeding nucs sugar syrup - not corn syrup. As an Ag agent, he is quite aware of the process sugar goes through from cane to table and feels fine about feeding syrup made from cane sugar to his bees.

A very natural, as in nonchemical, way to control for mites is to do splits. This is because in a split, the old queen stays in one place and the other half of the split has no queen. bees in that half of the split have to make their own queen from an egg, and the process takes about a month from egg to laying queen. This disrupts the varroa mite life cycle because without a laying queen, the mite can't reproduce themselves in a bee egg. Thus the mites die out over this period.

In essence he promoted in every way that a good beekeeper helps the bees have what they need NATURALLY.

What a breath of fresh air!

Powdered Sugar Shake at Blue Heron Hives

Yesterday (before the current monsoon rains hit Atlanta) we went to the Blue Heron preserve and did a powdered sugar shake on the hives there.

The idea of using powdered sugar is to cover the bees with sugar and encourage their grooming. In the grooming process, they knock off the varroa mites on their bodies. The mites fall through the screened bottom board and can't get back to the hive.

While there is research to suggest that this isn't really an effective mite control, I still do it because by using it in my oldest hive that almost died from Varroa vectored disease, I could really see a difference. The hive is quite healthy today.

Randy Oliver is trying to research this in three articles. Here's the first one and you can find the others on his site.

We used powdered sugar on all three Blue Heron hives. Sam, Julia's youngest son who is in the FOURTH grade, took amazing pictures of the process. I have labeled his pictures with his name on the slide show.

We found two things during the inspection - one great and one not so good.

Great: Julia's hive that appeared to have no queen at our Sunday inspection actually has a laying queen. We didn't see her but saw a good frame of brood and eggs - Woohoo!

Not so good: Our first nuc at Blue Heron came from a supplier who gave us the nuc without a queen . To make good on this he gave us a second nuc - this one had a big beautiful queen. We installed her in another hive, since the first queenless hive had successfully made their own queen.

In the second hive the bees were doing a lousy job of comb building in the second box. We cut out the bad comb, put a drawn frame in the center of the hive (instead of the frame of foundation that was originally there) and moved the frames around so that the badly drawn frames (without the badly drawn comb) were on the edges.

Here's the slide show. Click to see it larger and to be able to read the captions.

Inspecting and Festooning

Since we are in the middle of the 2009 honey flow, I keep a close watch on my hives over the next two months to make sure they have boxes when they need them. Today I did a 30 minute inspection of the four hives on my deck and found good work going on there.

In the tiny swarm nuc, they still weren't building up in the second five frame medium box, but they had begun to store honey in the bottom box. Here's an example. At the lower right of the picture, I've drawn a square around a small hive beetle, calmly living in the hive.



In Aristaeus2, I found the bees working in the top box, festooning as they build wax. A post on Beemaster right now deals with the feeling some beekeepers have of intruding on something private when you find the bees festooning.

I feel like the beekeepers who posted there - when I find festooning, the bees immediately take action to stop what they were doing. It feels like I have invaded their privacy and I want to leave them in peace. But before I left, I shot this picture. It's not the best festooning picture but you can see how the bees hang in a thread as they create wax.


The picture below shows you how the bees first draw comb in a foundationless frame. They usually make these three startup combs and over time they fill out the frame entirely. You can't delineate these three starter parts when the frame is fully drawn. It's amazing to me that they can do this.



In this frame you can see how they took the frame and built it entirely out before storing nectar in it. If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see that the next frame in the box is built out the same way. They have just started work on this box in this hive. Only a few days ago there was NO wax in this box - just empty frames.