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.

And Back in Atlanta....we are Feeding the Bees

Back in Atlanta, Jeff and I are determined that the bees I won at the MABA auction from Bill Owens will thrive.  We are not bee-feeders.  Our general goal is to leave enough honey on the hives to let them survive the winter.

This was a terrible year.  None of my bees had any honey to harvest, but they all had some honey.  I misjudged the staying power of the hives and did not feed my bees as fall approached.  We had a pretty decent nectar flow this fall and lots of goldenrod, but many of my hives absconded in August and early September, leaving me pretty bereft and feeling like a terrible beekeeper.

So I will do anything - compromise my values, etc - to keep the Owens bees alive.  We are just short a gallon of putting five gallons of syrup on each of those two hives.  We have fed them bee tea since mid October just after I picked them up.  

We are using Rapid Feeders - bees rarely die in the RF.  The only ones I have seen die are almost always the result of beekeeper error.  As you pour syrup into the feeder, it also rises in the cone.  As it rises in the cone, the bees move up to dry land.  If you dump the syrup in, bees can drown in the inability to move quickly enough above the rising tide.  So to avoid killing bees, we pour very, very slowly and watch to make sure the bees are in fact getting out of harm's way.

The bees have started buidling comb in the top of the inner cone in the RF.  Jeff and I began to wonder if they had used up all their storage space in the deep box below.  We decided that the next time we came to feed the bees, we would open the hive to see how much storage space they still had.

Another Philadephia Moment

When I was in Philadelphia, a place I'd love to return for more exploring, we went to get lunch at the Reading Market.  The market is in the site of the Reading Rail Terminal.  I immediately thought of Monopoly where you can buy the Reading Railroad.  We always pronounced it the REEEEding railroad but in Philly, it's pronounced properly the Reddding Railroad.

Photo above from Wikipedia.

We went in to buy sandwiches for lunch at a place of great reknown called DiNic's.  But as we entered the market, there we saw this:

We stood in a long line at DiNic's and tried to find a seat at the lunch counter but every emptied stool was immediately occupied by the person in the line standing behind that stool....so we ended up sitting in the food court.

The roast pork sandwich with sharp provolone and brocolli rabe was a gourmet treat!

Philadelphia: home of Lorenzo Langstroth

I'm in Philadelphia for a conference for my other (real) job as a psychologist.  Walking down S Front Street to get lunch yesterday, right in front of me on the sidewalk, I nearly ran into this historical marker:

Amazing!  According to Wikipedia, he was punished as a child for wearing his pants out, kneeling on the ground to study ants.  Since I'm in Philly with my psychology hat on instead of my bee veil, it is also fitting to note that Langstroth took up beekeeping to deal with his bouts of depression.

He recognized bee space and designed the Langstroth hive with respect for bee space. He was never able to patent his design and made no money from his efforts.

He also wrote the hive and the honey bee, now in its umpteenth edition.

There's no birth place to tour although I would if I could.  The space is now a high rise apartment. So I visited independence hall and the liberty bell instead.

New Hive Bees Doing Well

The bees that Jeff and I installed at Tom's house are doing well.  We have been feeding them bee tea (wish I had honey but I don't) and have now given each hive 2 gallons of syrup.  Bob Binnie says if you feed bees going into winter, you should try to get them to take 5 gallons of syrup.  So we'll keep on feeding them.

In essence these are five frames of bees in a ten frame hive.  The five frames are nuc-like because they are full of bees, well-built out, stores of honey, lots of brood.  The other five frames are undrawn foundation.  I think both of these hives will be like taking a nuc through the winter.  I think even with our feeding them 5 gallons of syrup, they'll still just fill the deep box, if that, before winter comes.

In one of the hives - the back one - the five frames were put in the center of the box with the empty frames on either side.

In the front hive the five frames of bees were put in on the side of the box with the empty frames on the other side:

The bees in this box may do fine the way they are and may do better if we move them more to the center and put the empty frames on either side.

Both hives are putting up our syrup and it looks like they already were storing some honey.

Jeff is really excited about these bees for several reasons - they are about a long block from his office so they feel personal to him.  He has been their main caretaker so far, and he REALLY wants these hives to succeed after our year of ongoing bee loss....(I've been scared to list all the losses because I don't want to see them all lined up.)

Today we saw the queen in both hives.

Here's the first one:

And here's the second one:

Both were on the side edge of the frame so Jeff was very careful returning the frame to the box because we know if we kill the queen, this hive is done for.  There are no more drones and no way to make a new queen until spring.

Both rapid feeders were completely empty.  We had to pour v.e.r.y. s.l.o.w.l.y because the bees were so eager and we had to give them time to move out of the cone.

Although we brought a new box with drawn frames in it, it looks so unlikely that these bees will need another box before the cold weather sets in.  I'm going to email Bill Owens and ask him about advice for over-wintering in just one deep box.