Suppliers of Spring Bees

Since a lot of you readers are nearby, I thought I'd share some of the suppliers  that we recommend to the participants in our short course this Saturday:

Buster’s Bees

Buster Lane

3910 Champagne Dr.  Jonesboro, GA 30236

bustersbees@yahoo.com  

www.bustersbees.com

770-389-0721

Honey Pond Farm  

Jennifer Berry

www.honeypondfarm.com

jennifer@honeypondfarm.com

706-247-2575

5 frame nucs

Jarrett Apiaries
Slade Jarrett
1903 Hwy 198
Baldwin, GA 30511
706-677-2854
www.jarrettbees.com
Jarrett@jarrettbees.com
still has nucs available

Jerry Wallace

826 Courtenay Dr. NE, Atlanta, GA 30306

JerWallace77@gmail.com

 404-402-9308 

will have 50 nucs to sell

Mountain Sweet Honey Company

Ray and Julie Civitts

Toccoa, GA

706-886-1322

ray@mountainsweethoney.com

has 150 nucs available 3^rd week of April

http://mountainsweethoney.com/

Rossman Apiaries, Inc.

P O Box 909  
Moultrie, GA 31777-0909

www.gabees.com/pkg_bees.htm

rossmanbees@windstream.net  

229-985-7200

There are a few others but they have very limited resources or already have a waiting list.

Sunny, Warm, Bees Flying and Hauling out the Dead

Today the bees are bringing in large loads of pollen.

This is a good sign.  When the winter solstice arrives on December 21st and the days change and start becoming longer rather than shorter, the queen senses this deep in the hive.  She begins gradually to lay brood in preparation for spring.  Usually she just lays a little at first and the build up is slow but sure.  The pollen lets us know that there is brood in the hive that needs feeding.

At the same time a lot of bees have died in our recent cold and the bees spent yesterday and today hauling out the dead.  Yesterday the side of this hive looked like this:

This afternoon here's what it looks like in the same location:

These are bees who have died over the recent weeks when it was too cold for the bees to carry out the dead bodies.

Tomorrow we are back to wet and coldish weather so they will be confined again.  Tom reports that the bees at his house are flying (the two Bill Owens' cut out hives); the Stonehurst innkeeper reports that bees are flying from both of their hives; I haven't heard from Sebastian.

Relief - Both for Bees and for ME

After days of below freezing Georgia temperatures and a raging thunderstorm that woke me up at 4 AM and brought flood warnings all over Atlanta, suddenly the sun is breaking through and the temperature is 58.9 degree F.

The bees are ecstatic because they can fly out into the world and relieve themselves, carry out the dead and probably (just to anthropomorphize them) enjoy their aliveness in the world.  I am ecstatic because my bees (at least the ones at home are ALIVE).

You can see the bees both outside of and under the Billy Davis robber screen.  There are hundreds of them.

They also use times like this to take out the dead.  You can't tell in the photo below that there are both dead and alive bees in it but there are at least five live bees managing the body count on the concrete around my hive.

I wrote my friend Tom who has the Bill Owens' cut out hives in his yard.  Hopefully he'll write back that those bees are flying as well.

HOORAY - but not to rain on my own parade, Atlanta's winter has really just begun and we often have much cold weather in March, so my hives are not out of the woods/through the winter yet.

Freezing the Bees

We are having the coldest Atlanta January.  It was 6 degrees F on Tuesday morning - so cold that they closed the public schools for fear that children waiting for early morning school buses might freeze to death!

The average low this week in Atlanta is typically around 32.  But yesterday the high was 28.  Tonight the low will be 28 after an afternoon in the 40s.

Why does this matter?  All of us beekeepers are worried about our bees.  At the bee club meeting tonight an old experienced beekeeper said he actually opened the tops of his hives yesterday (remember the 28 degree high???) to see if his bees were alive.

I'm settling for crossing my fingers and hoping that they live.  I keep think of beekeepers like Michael Bush in Nebraska or Kirk Webster in Vermont.  Temperatures there are so cold AND the beehives are covered with snow.

And yet if they have strong hives, they make it through the winter.

I don't want to open my hives to see if the bees are alive or dead.

What will I do in either case?  I cannot make a difference at this point.

But if I do open the hives, what have I done to serve my useless curiosity?

I've broken the propolis seal they have made to protect themselves - chinks and daubing were the processes used in the log cabins of old to keep out the weather.  The bees use that all important propolis.

If my hives die in this bitter cold, I'll replace them in the spring either with nucs that I have ordered or with swarms, but I don't want to increase their risk by opening them in this bitter cold.

Tom Seeley and the Bees in Winter

As I look at my colonies on cold days, they appear to be completely lifeless.  Bees aren't flying in or out and the colony seems without energy.  I understand the bees hopefully are alive inside, but the miracle of what is happening in there is beautifully explained by Tom Seeley in Honeybee Democracy.

As one of the editors of the GBA Newsletter, Spilling the Honey, I just typed verbatim a long explanation from Seeley's book for our readers.  He's so clear in how he explains how the hive functions as an organism that I thought I would share it with those of you who haven't yet read his book:

"A colony of honeybees is, then, far more than an aggregation of individuals, it is a composite being that functions as an integrated whole. Indeed, one can accurately think of a honeybee colony as a single living entity, weighing as much as 5 kilograms (10 pounds) and performing all of the basic physiological processes that support life: ingesting and digesting food, maintaining nutritional balance, circulating resources, exchanging respiratory gases, regulating water content, controlling body temperature, sensing the environment, deciding how to behave, and achieving locomotion. Consider, for example, the control of body (colony) temperature. From late winter to early fall, when the workers are rearing brood, a colony's internal temperature is kept between 34 and 36 C (93 and 96 F) - just below the core body temperature of humans - even as the ambient air temperature ranges from -30 to 50C (-20 to 120F). The colony accomplishes this by adjusting the rate at which it sheds the heat generated by its resting metabolism and, in times of extreme cold, by boosting its metabolism to intensify its heat production. A colony's metabolism is fueled by the honey it has stored in its hive. Other indicators of the high functional integration of a honeybee colony include colonial breathing: limiting the buildup of the respiratory gas CO2, inside the hive by increasing its ventilation when the CO2 level reaches 1 - 2 percent; colonial circulation: keeping the heat-producing bees in the central, brood-nest region of the hive properly fueled with honey carried in from peripheral honey combs; and colonial fever response: mounting a disease-fighting elevation of the nest temperature when a colony suffers a dangerous fungal infection of the brood bees. I suggest, though, that the single best demonstration of the superorganismic nature of a honeybee colony is the ability of a honeybee swarm to function as an intelligent decision-making unit when choosing its new home."

from Seeley, Tom. Honeybee Democracy. pp 26 - 27. 

I've heard Keith Delaplane in numerous talks explain the hive as an organism, but Seeley pulls it altogether in this paragraph.

The next time I look at a winter hive, no activity apparent from the outside, I'm going to think of the bee box as breathing and teeming with internal energy.  This makes me envious of those scientific beekeepers I know who have their hives hooked to their computers and keep records of the changes in temperature inside the hive!

Unexplained Bee Death

Yesterday I was moving equipment in my backyard when I glanced over at my one living hive.  The weather has been extraordinarily cold for Atlanta for the last three days.  Last winter, I think I wore my winter coat on maybe two days total.  I've had my coat on for the last three days and for most days of the last week.  We had a couple of afternoons in the high 60s, but that was as warm as it got.

Weatherspark.com says this about November in Atlanta:

"The month of November is characterized by rapidly falling daily high temperatures, with daily highs decreasing from 68°F to 59°F over the course of the month, exceeding 77°F or dropping below 47°F only one day in ten.  Daily low temperatures range from 40°F to 49°F, falling below 30°F or exceeding 59°F only one day in ten."

The temperatures for the last three days have been lower than typical as per the above paragraph:

November 28:  High  61
                         Low  27
November 29:  High  54
                         Low  34
November 30:  High  54
                         Low  34

So I look over at the one living hive and all around it I see dead bees - probably about 100 of them.   It's not unusual to see dead bees around a living hive in winter.  When it's warm, the bees in the hive carry out the dead but drop them near the hive rather than fly away from the hive with the bodies.  But these bees had pollen in their pollen baskets so they were flying into the hive when they died.

Does anyone have any idea what would kill bees flying this close to home loaded with pollen?  

I don't know if the whole hive is dead - I opened the hive top above the inner cover where I have a feeder and added some syrup to the feeder.  One bee came up to partake and a couple of hive beetles.  

I'd love theories about what this means.  Seems late in the year for a pesticide kill and doesn't look like the pile of bees I had at the Morningside hive where there was a definite pesticide kill.  

So naturally I wondered about temperature.  Did it drop precipitously and the bees were caught unaware?  We had cold high winds a couple of days ago as the temperature dropped, but then they wouldn't be right beside the hive, would they, but rather would have been blown away.

Bee Emerging

Dean Stiglitz has a great video on his website of a bee in close-up, chewing her way out of her cell:

Mothering the Bees

This has been a bad bee year for me.  In my eight years of beekeeping, I've had two awful years - that's 25% - not too great.  In one of the years - I think it was 2010 - I got honey but all my hives died (five of them) going into or during the winter.  This is the worst year yet.  This year in 2013, I have lost count (or refused to count) the number of hives that have absconded.

When I tell other beekeepers my hives have absconded, they all say, it must have been the small hive beetle.  But I didn't have a big SHB population this year.  The hive with the worst hive beetles is still alive in Sebastian's yard.

Most of the discovery of empty hives came in late July.  I think it was about no stores.  The bees couldn't collect enough honey during the honey flow because it literally rained every day.  Then in July they were still hopeful that there was honey somewhere - just not in their area, so they left.  Every hive I opened had NO DEAD BEES - just emptiness.  There was absolutely no honey and very little brood and the bees were totally gone.

• The hive at the Morningside garden had a pesticide kill and never recovered.  It was a tragedy because that was an amazing hive.  The split beside it never took off and simply dwindled away.
• Both hives at Chastain absconded.  No dead bee bodies were in either hive and no stores.  
• The hives at Stonehurst Inn are both there and doing fine.  One is a hive that moved into a dead hive in early August.
• At Sebastian's one hive left - no bodies, no stores left behind - and the other hive is there - it's going OK, but there are SHB in that hive.  I have two different traps on that hive - at the entrance and in between the frames, but the beetles are still there.
• At Ron's the splits never became thriving hives.  One colony hived there absconded.  I replaced it with a Wilbanks hive and they left too.  Ron's theory was that the pesticides Emory uses on its campus and in the neighborhood where Ron's house is made the location one that was bad for bees.  Whatever it was, they left lock, stock, and barrel with no bodies left behind.
• At my own house, my best swarm hive absconded when the electricians used jack hammers about five feet away from them.  I had a queen excluder on that hive below the bottom box, and found the queen still in the box.  I made a split and put them in a nuc, but the queen is not in the nuc and the bees are almost dwindled away.  A swarm hive in my yard also absconded as well as the only hive other than Morningside that I had left as the year started.
• I do have one solitary hive in my backyard.  It's the swarm I collected near Northlake and is going gangbusters.  I put a feeder on this hive although it was heavy with honey and the bees only just began to take the bee tea.  They totally ignored it for about two weeks.

I've had a terrible bee year.  And I got no honey.  I harvested one box from the Morningside hive but the honey is too thin - 19.2% water.  And if I had left that box on the hive maybe those bees would still be alive.

So I'm going into winter with six hives and I've been feeding them bee tea like there's no tomorrow.

Here are the two hives at Stonehurst.  I have put almost three gallons of bee tea on these hives.  I feel disheartened, though, because there are roaches under the cover of the hive on the left and every hive I've had with roaches eventually dies during the winter.

Here's the bee tea.  The leaves floating in it are thyme.  You can see the bees crawling up the inner tube to get the welcomed food.

This is the hive at Sebastian's that I fed the same day.  You'd love to see me visit that hive.  Sebastian's new house has a tall gate with the latch on the inside.  To get to the bees, I have to take a Rubbermaid stool and stand on it, reach over the gate and feel for the lock, slide it open and open the gate.  I repeat the action on the stool when I leave!

In this hive there were these little black things that I thought were mouse droppings, but at close look on my computer screen, they are dead small hive beetles.

This hive appears to be doing well going in to winter, but I have two different versions of SHB trap on the hive and still there are these random dead beetles littering the inner cover.

It's going down to the 20s tonight.  I hope the feeding I've been doing of all of these hives will keep the hives alive as winter descends.