Where do Bees and Babies Come From?

Today I spent my morning giving a presentation on bees and beekeeping to the second-grade classes at Chestnut Elementary School in Dunwoody, Georgia. The kids were adorable and listened with open mouths when I told them all about the bees and the beehive. I took an observation hive with me and after hard looking, at the very end, one of the students found the queen on the frame for all to see.

I'm explaining to them the jobs of the bees in the hive. I tell them that the queen bee is an egg-laying machine and that she lays eggs all day long. I also tell them that in the dark, she knows when it's the longest day of the year on June 21, and at that point begins to slow her egg-laying down until the shortest day on December 21. Sometimes by the winter solstice, she may have ceased laying eggs altogether. But that date is also the marker for when she begins to increase her egg laying to build up the population for spring.

I explain that the bees in the hive take care of the queen - they feed her, they groom her, and, ...wait for it..., they carry out her poop! Their eyes get big for a second and then they start laughing.

Then I turn to the drone. I ask them if they know what a couch potato is? They all laugh and say yes.

I tell them that the drone is the couch potato of the beehive. They've all seen The Bee Movie and I tell them that it's all wrong. The boy bees don't do any of the work - they just get fed by the girl bees.

"Just like in my house," a little girl says.

Then I say that the drone has one job to do and that is to fly up into the air every day to hang out with other drones in the drone congregation area. The drones all wait, I say, for a queen to fly through the drone congregation area and they try to give the queen a "special hug."*

"A special hug?" they question.

At this point, as the speaker, I am in a bit of a bind. These are seven and eight-year-olds. Have their parents told them about sex yet? Maybe some have, but surely some haven't, and it's not my job.

"Yes," I say, " A special hug.....and then the drone dies."

He dies?

They gasp! They don't get this. He dies?

One little girl says, "Probably the queen hugged him too hard."



*(thanks to Dean Stiglitz for the special hug explanation!)

Safety First in Beekeeping or Where has my Girl Scout Training Gone?

When I was a Girl Scout and later as an adult, when I was a Girl Scout leader, we always emphasized fire safety. Building a fire meant clearing an area of combustible material and taking every precaution to make sure fires could not spread from the site of the fire we built.

As a beekeeper, I have been working my bees for eleven years without paying good attention to my smoker. I light it on top of beds of pine straw; I set it down amid combustible material on the ground; I am simply ignoring all the possible dangers.

The President of GBA (the Georgia Beekeepers Association) several years ago literally burned up her apiary - hives and everything - from not being careful with her smoker.

Jeff, my son-in-law, was helping me at Tom's house where we light the smoker on top of the pine straw Tom has strewn over his hillside. 

I told Jeff about Tom bringing out a GIANT fire extinguisher the last time I had worked the bees there. I mean, look at that photo - it's a conflagration about to happen! But Tom's fire extinguisher is huge and heavy and I can't imagine lugging it about in my hive kit.

So the next time I saw Jeff, he had gotten me a present:

It's a fire extinguisher in a small can - a fabulous thing to have in my hive kit. I will never go to a beehive without it again. So grateful to have a son-in-law looking out for my bee-ing safely.

I hope I never have a reason to try it out, but if I do, like a good Girl Scout, I am now prepared.

AZ Hives in Gilmer County

I was invited to speak to the Beekeepers of Gilmer County on the topic: Fun and Facts about Wax. I love giving that talk because many beekeepers know very little about wax. The talk covers the history of beeswax, its many uses, and how I gather and use it in my beekeeping and bee products.

Because of Mary Lou Blohm, Gilmer County is all about the AZ hive. How they are putting the Slovenian AZ hive to use reminded me of Les Crowder in New Mexico. Les kept top bar hives. He became the bee inspector for New Mexico for five years and was the president of the New Mexico beekeepers for five years. He has taught beekeeping classes in New Mexico since 1983. And as a result of his expansive influence, almost all beekeepers in New Mexico use his top bar design as their hive structure.

Well, in Ellijay, Georgia, Mary Lou Blohm has been singing the praises of the AZ hive and as a result, there are many Gilmer County beekeepers with bees in AZ hives. Before my talk at the Gilmer County bee meeting, I was invited to visit Brian Drebber at his home to see his AZ hives and hive house.

AZ Hives live in a house and are worked from the back. Brian's daughter painted all of these beautiful hives. The bees enter from the front. The typical AZ hive is only two boxes tall and has no honey supers, but Brian has built the bottom boxes to be the right size to use Langstroth sized frames.

From the back, the AZ hive is like a kitchen cabinet with frames that slide out. He also has a working tray that is used at the back of the hive.

People can work AZ hives from a sitting position and no lifting is involved. 

Brian wanted to use Langstroth deep frames so he built hives to fit those. As you can see in the photo, the tall narrower frame is the standard AZ frame. Behind it is a Langstroth frame by virtue of length and height, but the Langstroth size AZ frame is exactly the same top and bottom - no top bar and bottom bar.

We left Brian's (and lucky me, I got eggs to take home from his chickens - delish) and drove to the Gilmer County where they were having a public hive inspection. 

So often beekeepers feel like they have to hide or be cautious about their beehives. Not Gilmer County where the hives are right in front of the entire community.

These are their three AZ hives, educating the community with the idea.

And here are the club members inspecting the Langstroth hives as well.

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I really enjoyed my visit to the Beekeepers of Gilmer County in Ellijay, Georgia.  Below you can see a video that Brian (who is a TV commentator in real life) made about the AZ hives.

A Swarm by Invitation

When spring arrived, I had one hive alive at my friend Tom's house. The other, which had lived through the previous winter, had died. I had a lot of hope in those bees, had thought they were survivors and would outlast the attacks of varroa mite-vectored viruses, but that was not to be.

When I first went to check on the living hive, I took some swarm lure with me. The front hive was a sort of patched together split that I did last year. The bottom box was a deep. Four years ago I bought two hives from Bill Owens in the MABA auction. I picked them up in October. He required that they be in a deep hive box, so I complied and bought two deeps - one for each.

At home I mostly have mediums. I do have one or two hives on deep bottoms but mostly I like all mediums. So when that front hive died after its second winter, I wanted to fill it with a split from Bill Owens' daughter hives at my house. I brought medium frames of brood and eggs and a couple of empty deep frames (to accommodate the box) and made a split into the deep at Tom's house. Consequently now that hive has some really wonky frames in the bottom box. At least two of them are mediums with bottoms extended of wax and brood.

Side note: In most people's hives, if you put a medium frame in a deep box, the bees use the free space to build drone brood because they are desperate to find places to put drone brood when they are on foundation (designed for worker comb). But when bees have foundationless frames, they build drone comb wherever they want to. So in my hives, the extension below the medium frame is always used for the bees for worker brood, just extending the worker brood area in the medium wooden part of the frame.

Indeed at Tom's house, the front hive was thriving. He took these photos. So I took out the second frame from the box and it was a medium with comb below and I don't know how it happened, but I dropped it!

It was a complete mess. Lots of lost brood and bees and sticky honey everywhere. I was so embarrassed because Tom was filming as we worked!

Here is a beautiful bee he shot afterward as well as a crew of cleanup bees.

You can see larvae on the top as well as spilled honey.

So after that mess, I looked at the empty hive that had died and decided to set it up as a swarm lure hive. I put swarm lure under the entry and around the inner cover and lo and behold, bees had moved in by the time I returned about 12 days later.

It's nice to invite a swarm and have them take you up on the invitation!

Jeff and I checked those bees about a week after they moved in and there were queen cells as well as eggs and brood. We decided that maybe the swarm that moved in was with a virgin queen who hadn't mated well so they were superseding her.

We'll see what happens. They looked OK this week but I'm not sure there is a laying queen. There was capped brood but I didn't see young larvae or eggs. This may be while the new queen is mating. If there are no signs of a laying queen next week, then I'll add a frame of brood and eggs every week until they successfully have a laying queen.

To my disappointment, neither hive had the need for another super. My hives at home are growing exponentially and I expected these hives to be needing more room as well, but it was not the case.

A Thorny Third Atlanta Swarm

And so for my third act, I went into Buckhead to get a swarm out of a holly bush. It was about the size of a basketball and on the side of a very slanted backyard. It was a little hard to get to, but the homeowner said it was fine to clip back the holly. I took him at his word and cut off the branches that were anxious to prick my hands as I worked with the swarm.

You can see the challenge the holly imposes in its thorns. Before dealing with this swarm, I clipped all the branches between myself and the bees (or why it's a good idea to carry pruning snips in your bee bag).

I spread out a sheet on the hillside, sprayed the swarm with sugar syrup and tried to cut the branches to get the swarm into the banker's box (my standard for carrying a swarm home). I couldn't get photos and keep my balance, but it went rather smoothly.

In this photo above you can see the bees with their rear ends raised to send the nasonov signal that the queen is here!

I left an opening in between the ventilated cover and the box to allow the bees to join their queen. Hundreds of them did. I then, as in the last swarm, covered the whole box up with the sheet, draping it over the bees who had not entered the box, and carried them to the Morningside community garden.

I had a waiting eight frame hive there. I used a third box as a funnel to help me pour the bees into the hive. It works well this way with no frames in it.

Then I added the eight frames back into the box.

I closed up the box and left the bees to adjust to their new life as community garden bees. Pickings should be bountiful!

I stopped by yesterday to check on how they are doing and they are flying well. 

Second Atlanta swarm on I-Beam in Forest Park

My second swarm call of the year came just a couple of days after the first one. I was told the bees were on rebar at a construction company. When I arrived I found the bees tucked into the squared corners of an I-Beam!

So I did the swarm catching prep while I decided how to get these bees that I couldn't shake and didn't want to make angry.

I set up a sheet under the swarm, got my ladder, my plastic banker's box, a spray bottle of sugar water, and my bee brush. I climbed up the ladder.

I held the box and brushed the majority of bees into it, but huge numbers flew back to the I-Beam. The bees in the box were not tail-up and were not sending out nasonov. The queen must still be on the I-Beam.....

I felt discouraged after several brushing attempts and angry bees in response. So I took a round Ziploc 16 oz container and scraped the bees into it by running it along the interior of the I-Beam. Then I dumped them into the box and repeated, dumped, repeated, etc.

I decided to leave them for lunch and see if the queen was in the box after lunch. Forest Park is 30 minutes from my house so I drove back the 30 minutes, had lunch with Julia, and returned to the scene.

The bees were in the box and had left the I-Beam. I must have gotten the queen in one of my Ziploc container sweeps.

Because there were lots of bees outside the box on top of the ventilated cover, I decided to bring them home just like that. I secured the cover with the bungee cord and then gently wrapped the box, exterior bees and all, in the sheet. I carried it to the car and set them in the back. Now I'm driving with hundreds of bees outside the travel container!

I installed this swarm at Stonehurst Place Inn on Piedmont. Their bees died over the winter and they were glad to see me. I hope they will do well in the hive at the bed and breakfast.

Atlanta Bee Swarm - My First of the Season

I got a call to go to a house near Chastain Park to collect a swarm. The man who owned the house is a beekeeper and these were his bees. He understood that if we came to help him, he would be giving the bees away. I assured him that I would install them in the community garden near my house.

Bee swarms are always their own unique challenge. He had reported that these bees were 20 feet up in a tree but that he was fine going up a tall ladder. So I arrived to find the bees high up in the tree, as he had said:

I spread my sheet twenty feet below, under the swarm. There was a deep, deep hole directly under the swarm and I kept forgetting about it and stepping into it as I walked on the sheet.

First Peter climbed his yellow ladder and jabbed the swarm with my swarm catcher on a pole. Many  bees fell into it.

We dumped the bees into the box and covered them with the ventilated cover. It was clear that we hadn't gotten the queen because a huge ball of bees flew back to the branch and the bees in the box were not sending the nasonov signal.

So now Peter gets his largest ladder and climbs even higher in the tree, preparing to cut the limb on which the bees are gathered. I am not thinking this through well. Peter cuts the limb and it falls onto the sheet - bad plan - I should have been on the other ladder with the swarm catcher. Still no queen or at least the bees are not indicating that she is in the box.

So we tried one more time (and there's not a photo because this time I held the swarm catcher right under the branch as he cut it.)

This time we got the queen and the bees are signalling. All seems well with the world of this swarm.

There were still many bees on the sheet (from the falling branch), so I wrapped the box which also had a lot of bees on the outside in the sheet; put the whole contraption in my car and took the swarm off to their new home.

Good job, Peter. I'm hoping he becomes more involved with the local beekeepers. 

I put all of the photos on Google + (they are doing away with Picasa where all my photo albums and slideshows are).

Painting boxes Efficiently

OK, I know we all say that in the winter is a great time to paint boxes and read bee books. Somehow I always manage to get all the way to spring without accomplishing this.

So it's time to move my overwintered nucs into boxes and to make splits and to move some bees around. There's a good chance that a camera person will be in my apiary this year, so I wanted my boxes to look slightly more like Martha Stewart. (As a well-known blog states, I am NOTMARTHA)

The GBA newsletter had an article this month about painting boxes in a stack using a paint roller. The author had found the method on YouTube. I went and looked at several videos on YouTube an set about trying this out for quick, efficient box painting for the procrastinating beekeeper.

You start by stacking the boxes one on top of the other, upside down. An adorable boy on a YouTube video explains that putting them upside down means that when you paint the handholds, the paint collects on the ledge instead of dripping down. I painted the boxes on top of dirt, mildew, whatever.

First I painted the hand holds since I wanted them to be a different color: green. Then I painted the boxes blue with a roller. The whole process was quick as a wink - took less than 30 minutes. I only know because I was baking bread and started when the bread went into the oven and I was done by the moment the timer went off to tell me the bread was done!

So yesterday I ended up with delicious homemade bread and lovely boxes all in the same day. By afternoon, it was warm enough and the paint was dry so I moved one of the overwintered nucs into its new home.