Bee Tea for Blue Heron

On Thursday I checked on the Blue Heron hive. They had emptied the Boardman (interior) and had emptied the baggie feeder. It is increasingly cooler at night. As winter approaches I may start feeding with an upturned jar but instead of the Boardman, simply balance it on two end bars.

Jennifer Berry talked about this at our bee meeting on Wednesday. She feeds her hives through the winter. Most of her hives have a larger (jar accommodating) circle cut out of the inner cover and she has a cut in the top cover on which she can upturn a jar. So she can feed the hive without opening it. However, an alternative she suggested would be to use a box as a surround for a jar feeder sitting on end bars just above the cluster so that the bees can access it easily. To access a Boardman, they have to leave the cluster and walk into the feeder, a challenge when you are a cold bee.



I brought bee tea to this hive both for the baggie and in a jar. I lower the bag gently and slowly to allow the bees to get out of the way into the cracks between the bars.

Still going very slowly down (I even had time to take a couple of pictures, as you see!)


Once down I left this hive for the weekend, fed with the interior 1 pint boardman and a baggie with about 2 1/2 quarts in it. Julia's second hive at Blue Heron is not doing well - small hive beetles everywhere - so we are concerned about all the Blue Heron hives and their ability to get through the winter.

Feeding Topsy on Tuesday

I fed Topsy on Tuesday. They are really going through the food. I found both interior Boardman feeders empty. I'll need to think about this hive as winter approaches. They are only occupying 10 bars of the 40 in the hive.

I'll need to move the follower board close to bar 10 to make the space smaller for winter. I'll also have to rethink feeding. Currently the feeders are far down the hive from the combs in unused space. I don't know how to locate feed close to the used bars for winter feeding.




You can see in the comb below that the bees are back-filling comb that has been used for brood raising with honey as the cells become available.



They are doing the same in this comb.



I have a ways to go to learn how better to handle the top bar hive. I still squash bees even using the scissor method of lowering the top bar. However, I find this a very calm hive and often wear open-toed sandals and just a jacket and veil when I am working with them.

Relief at Blue Heron

While I was waiting today to show Travis, a new beekeeper, how to inspect the beehive, I saw bees all over this aster that is blooming. Look at the pollen packed into her corbicula (pollen basket). This was the best picture of many I took.



I fed the Blue Heron hive 2 1/2 quarts of Ross Conrad's bee tea on Thursday afternoon. It's Saturday afternoon and all of it is gone! Travis and I reloaded the interior Boardman I was using with a new pint and we put a baggie filled with 3 quarts of tea onto the hive.

As we opened the hive, we clearly broke open some honeycomb. I love it when the bees efficiently circle the honey leak and all stick in their tongues to suck it up. Bees are really waste not, want not creatures! See how they completely circle the honey so as not to lose a single drop.



Here's Travis wearing my ill-fitting bee helmet looking at a beautiful comb of brood laid by this queen. In the bottom deep we saw several frames - actually almost all of the eight - with dark brood cappings - meaning it's not new - probably bees that are about to emerge. If this hive keeps putting away the syrup I am giving them, they may make it through the winter - fingers crossed, everyone!



Some of the frames are incompletely filled with comb as this one is. You can see the liquid in the cells. We saw lots of festooning bees in this box and hopefully they'll use the syrup to draw some wax to contain winter stores.



The hive was much heavier than on my last visit and I am well pleased with how it is growing.

The nights are much cooler now so I removed the ventilated hive cover and replaced it with a solid inner cover.  I will do that with the Rabun county hive next week when I'm up there.  I also plan to replace the cover of Topsy with a solid board like Sam Comfort uses.

The Pollen Basket on the Bee

Feeding Topsy was my mission the other day and I was pleased to find the bees falling all over each other trying to bring pollen into the hive. We have lots of aster - goldenrod and other varieties - blooming right now in Atlanta and these bees are taking full advantage of it.

The bees are crowding each other trying to enter the top bar hive in the photo below.



Although it is called the pollen basket, the bees don't actually have a basket on their rear legs. Instead it's a depressed area called the corbicula on the bee's hind leg. Before she heads for home, while still on the flower, the bee uses her forelegs to clean the pollen from her head and thorax. While she flies home to the hive, she passes the pollen from her forelegs and the back of her thorax to her middle legs.

Then (still in flight) she passes the pollen to the basitarsus of her hind leg. In reading Winston (p. 23 -  25), I don't quite understand the next step but it sounds like she scrapes the pollen comb of her opposite hind leg across the pollen comb of the other leg, moving the pollen to the corbicula, or pollen basket.

She does all of this in flight - no wonder the old saying is "Busy as a bee." The bee is working hard enough to fly home, but in addition she is moving pollen the while.



Because the pollen basket is an area rather than a basket, you can see on these bees that the pollen is packed in many different shapes coming into the hive.



At first in order to keep the bees calm as I opened the bars where the food is kept, I draped the hive with this red dishtowel.  It's good that bees can't actually see red, or they would have been madder than they actually were.

I looked over at the area of the hive entrance while I was putting in the food and bees were buzzing and collecting in large numbers in front of the red towel covering their entrance.  I had blocked them from coming into the hive!  As soon as I realized I had done this, I folded back the towel and everyone was happy again.

Ross Conrad's Bee Tea

 August's Bee Culture has an article by Ross Conrad (he writes an article every month) on beekeeping in the northeast.  As it is autumn, he talks about preparing the hive for the winter.  Included as a sidebar for the article is his recipe for Bee Tea.  I decided to try it for feeding the bees at Blue Heron.

Here's the recipe:
16 cups white cane sugar
6 cups hot tap water
2 cups Chamomile or Thyme tea (already brewed)
1/2 tsp natural sea salt with minerals

You add the hot tap water to the sugar and salt and stir thoroughly (?).  You do boil the water for the tea and steep it for 10-15 minutes.  Then you mix it all together and store unused amounts in the refrigerator.

I have a hard time making 2:1 syrup without using really hot water.  Maybe the water out of the tap in Vermont where Ross lives is hotter than here in Atlanta! (note:  comment below indicates it's probably the chemistry of the water in Vermont compared to my Metro Atl water).

So  I heated my water and then stirred in the sugar and salt.  Even at that, I couldn't add the last four cups because the first 12 had not thoroughly dissolved.

My answer was to stir the last four cups into the hot tea after it had steeped.

The next time I make it, I will steep the tea and then stir the steeped tea into the water heating on the stove.  Then before the water boils, I'll turn it off and then stir in the sugar and salt.

Making the tea:

 Stirring all of it together:

Adding the syrup to my Blue Heron hive (notice it is more yellow than the usual clear syrup, courtesy of the Chamomile) :

You may wonder why I have both a baggie and a Boardman inside this hive.  It's an 8 frame hive and can't take two baggies, so I put a Boardman in so that I could put more feed on the hive at the same time, since there's room for the Boardman inside the medium box that is surrounding the feeding mechanisms.

Another post about Ross Conrad

Ravenous Rabun County Bees

The bees at my Rabun County hive are flying enthusiastically in and out of the hive, bumping into each other on the landing and generally looking as busy as bees.

I haven't looked in the hive in about three weeks. I came to Rabun County planning to feed the bees at the community garden, so I am armed with bottled sugar syrup - I have about 1 gallon with me.

Here is the hive with bees flying in and out rapidly.

It's nearing the end of the fall flow here but there is blooming goldenrod everywhere as well as many asters and the bees are having a field day.



I took off the third (top) box which is full of foundationless comb and completely empty. I was pleased to see in the second box that the bees are putting up nectar and therefore storing honey.



I had brought two medium nuc boxes with me as demos for the festival. These boxes were filled with drawn comb on medium frames. I decided to take this drawn comb and substitute it for the foundationless frames in the third box. Fall is drawing near by the minute and I didn't want them to need to create space in which to store the syrup I am giving them today.



I put the third box back on the hive. I also brought a shim to surround the baggie feeders. This is the first time I have fed this hive.

Now that I know there is a hive in the walls of the building just across the field from this hive, I am worried about robbing.  I put two ziploc baggies side by side inside the shim.

The bad news is that I am using a bottom board from a 10 frame hive for the top cover of this hive.  This means there is a back entrance and there is no way to close this hive up completely.  I feel sick that I didn't think to bring an inner cover and a top for a 10 frame hive.  I certainly have them in Atlanta.

Because I had no entrance reducer and wanted to make these bees safer from robbing, I stuffed pine needles into the opening at the upper rear of the hive to close it up.  I hope they will make quick work of moving the syrup from the baggies into the drawn comb I left them.

When I come back in two weeks, I'll put an inner cover and top cover on, but I hope they will be OK until then.  The good news is that there is a good fall flow ongoing right now in Rabun County, so maybe the temptation to rob will not be there for the in-the-wall hive or any other neighboring bees.

Rabun County Foxfire/Mountaineer Festival

On Saturday I ran a booth at the Foxfire/Mountaineer Festival in Rabun County. I taught a class for children called "Meet the Bee" twice during the day and actually talked about bees to everyone and anyone who came up to my table all day long. When I taught the class, I used the board in the center of the table to show how a bee grows from egg to bee and how a brood comb looks.

There are "pollen" cells on the lower left and right and "honey" cells in the upper left and right with "brood comb" in the center. People were fascinated to learn about the bees.



The festival included a scarecrow auction. Here's a collection of the scarecrows. My friend Robin won best in show for his gourd-headed scarecrow holding a little gourd dog in his arm. He's in the center of the photo collage.



All day long I let the kids who stopped by the booth put on my bee veil to see what it might feel like to be a beekeeper. They were enthusiastic and had fun. Here a some of the kids who stopped by in their veils.

I had a great time and I hope some of the attendees learned a little about the bees. As in any mountain festival, they had a greased pig contest (which I couldn't bear to watch)  and people were there demonstrating how to carve wood with a chain saw. Smokey the Bear was there as well as great mountain music all day long.

In addition, a man named Steve showed me where a trapout had been attempted to get bees out of the old school building near the field where the festival was held.  The guy said he trapped out NINE pounds of bees but there is still a quite-active hive in the walls of the building.  This picture is of the entry to the hive.  There is one blurry bee flying out if you look hard.

Feeding Frenzy for the Blue Heron Bees

At the recent Blue Heron inspection, it was clear that both remaining hives are way too light to make it through the winter.  We have committed to feeding them heavily through the month of October and maybe into the first two weeks of November (after which we generally have our first freeze here in Georgia).

I put a baggie feeder and a pint jar in a Boardman inside a medium box for a surround on Thursday.  That's really only 1 1/2 quarts so I plan to check it on Sunday or on Monday morning and probably add some more food.

 I really want these bees to live through the winter, despite the fact that they stung gloveless me THREE times while I was simply removing the old empty baggie and adding a new one!  

Two of the stings weren't bad - my left hand little and third fingers - but the third sting was on top of a bad burn I got on my left hand knuckle while making baked oven fries (500 degree oven).  My hand swelled up around the burn and was generally uncomfortable until today.



Julia bought at the Bee Club Auction in September this hive top feeder from Mann Lake.  This is the first time she is using it.  It holds four gallons of syrup so she won't have to return to refill it as often as I will.  However, we found a post on Beemaster indicating that bees feeding with enthusiasm can drown easily in this feeder.
 


The hardware cloth is not secured at the bottom and the bees in their enthusiasm can end up in the holding tub rather than behind the hardware cloth by pushing through the bottom.  Julia had intended to bring duct tape to manage this problem as in the post mentioned above, but forgot it, so she only filled the side that seemed tight enough not to allow the bees to drown.



This is how we left it.  I guess the bees crawl up in the center, cling to the hardware cloth and stick their little bee tongues into the sugar syrup and suck it up.



We'll see how this works when we check it next weekend.