Surprise Swarm on Deck!

Today I was the Granny-Nanny for my adorable grandson, Dylan. Unlike the Granny in the NY Times article, my grandson lives in Atlanta and spends every Friday at my house. It's the most fulfilling part of my week.

He was at my house today and he loves to stand at the sunporch door and look out through the door to the bees. While he and I were standing there, I thought about a post on Beemaster from Robo, one of the members, who had gone home and found a deep box that he had left near his hives, filled with a swarm.

You may remember that I found Bermuda to be a very weak hive at the beginning of the bee season this year. I moved the medium box in which the four or five frames of bees left in the hive were living onto the hive stand and took off the deep box. Like most things with the bees, when you change any configuration, some of the bees are reluctant to leave the original. So I had left the deep standing on its side with the frames vertical, diagonally facing Bermuda.

Remembering Robo's post I thought, "I ought to move that deep and set it upright and maybe I'll get a swarm like he did." So I left Dylan watching through the door and went onto the deck and picked up the deep and carried it about six feet across from its current location and set it down.


It dawned on me that the deep felt kind of heavy for an empty box. I looked down and the box was at least half full of bees! Unbeknownst to me, a swarm had moved in - either one of my hives had swarmed or they appeared from somewhere else! I looked over where the hive box had been and bees were circling looking for their deep box. Oh, dear, I thought in panic, and picked the box back up, took it back to its original location and set it back on its side.

I went back into the house and looked with Dylan through the door and realized that I had set the box on yet another side so the frames were now stacking on each other, probably killing bees and maybe injuring the queen. You can see the fallen stack in the first picture. I couldn't suit up or light the smoker or even go back to the bees until Dylan left around 5 PM. I wish I approached situations like this in a calmer fashion because I could make less mistakes if I weren't so distressed when something like this happens.

When Dylan left, I suited up and went out with the plan of putting the box to rights and setting it on an extra hive stand that I had. When I arrived at the box, the bees were "balling the queen" - you can see the bunch of bees in the lower right of the third picture.

I took my bee brush and brushed the "ball" onto a plastic sheet. Most of the bees left and the four who remained looked like three workers and the queen. I held the plastic over the hive box and I hope all of them returned to the box. Otherwise this will be a queenless hive.

I set the hive box upright, put it on a bottom board, and a hive stand and covered the top with a plastic bottom board as the rain began to fall in Atlanta.

I left and went to Lowe's where I bought a 2' X 2' square board and when I returned, I put this on top of the hive with a flower pot weighing it down.

Immediately I ordered another screened bottom board, and two hive covers (see, I'm an optimist!)

Dr. Keith Delaplane Speaks to Bee Club on CCD

Tonight at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers meeting the speaker was Dr. Keith Delaplane speaking on CCD. Interestingly the media was there. I saw camera people from two TV stations and he was asked to go to a different room after his talk with us to speak to CNN.

I'm only the messenger and don't necessarily know that he has all the answers (personally I think Michael Bush has all the answers!)

This is what I got from what he said:

**Honeybees have been on a steady decline in this country over many, many years, due increasingly to our agricultural practices no longer requiring animals to feed in the fields, so less crops for the honeybees.

**With the advent of the varroa mite, beekeeping went from an organic, hands off endeavor to a chemically dependent endeavor. This has resulted in

• The quality of queens going down, with many queens living only 6 months - 1 year; finding drone brood among worker brood, and having high supercedure rates. (He had a chart showing that with increased use of chemicals in the hive, a study done at UGA showed shorter life for queens.)
• Poorer life span and sperm quality for drones
• Increased cognitive dysfunction for worker bees, including not being able to find their way home to the hive.
  
  He encouraged us to buy our queens from people working to develop hygienic queens such as the Purvis Brothers in N Georgia. The University of Georgia is also working on developing hygienic queens which will be available for distribution to queen breeders in August. They will, of course because it is a research university, not be for sale but will be distributed by lottery, I think he said, to the queen breeders.
  
  He also laughed at himself in his earlier books in which he highly encouraged medicating the bees and said that he is the author of the new edition of First Lessons in Beekeeping from Dadant out later this year and in this new book he encourages IPM and no chemicals.

The issues contributing to bees disappearing from hives (CCD) are some not in our control (environmental pesticide usage, the presence of mites in the world, viruses, etc). However the issues that we can change include:

** In hive pesticide use
** Old comb
** Migratory stress
** Nutritional deficiencies
** IPM (Integrated Pest Management)

He encouraged using no pesticides in the hives and replacing old comb regularly.

He said that migratory stress is about how the honeybee in one setting works about 6 - 10 weeks per year during the honey flow. Commercial beekeepers by moving their hives from flow to flow ask the bee to work many 6 week periods in the year, thus wearing the bees out and making them more subject to disease.

He mentioned a commercial beekeeper in N Georgia (Bob Binnie) who feeds each hive 5 gallons of syrup every fall and Dr. Delaplane said that we are not feeding our bees enough, thus resulting in poor nutrition and this makes the bees vulnerable to disease.

He strongly encouraged IPM - screened bottom boards, powdered sugar shakes.

He cited studies done at UGA for all of what he had to say and presented graphs and data to support his talk. In general he doesn't think that CCD is anything new, but is the cumulative result of chemical beekeeping.

A kid in the audience asked if cell phones were the problem and he smiled and simply said, "No."

A New Beekeeper Emerges

Yesterday I got an email from a new beekeeper who belongs to my Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Club. He had arranged to get two hives of bees from Cindy Bee (the Georgia Beekeeper of the year). He was going to pick up the bees tonight from Cindy. I was so complimented to find out that he thought, from reading this blog, that I might be able to help him set up the hives. I was thrilled to be asked and made plans to drive and meet him and his new bees at an organic vegetable garden which was to be the bees' new home

Here is Derrick with his first hive set on the cinder blocks he had put there earlier in the day.


Derrick planned to feed the bees for a few days to get them up and running. Here he has set up his Boardman feeder. Cindy had closed the front of the hive with foam
.
Derrick is removing the foam to allow the bees to "bee" in their new location. Bees, of course, clung to the foam so we left it near the entrance of the hive so the bees could make their way back inside.

So here are Derrick's two hives, mostly set up and ready to go. (We couldn't figure out how to undo the strap wrapped around the two hive boxes so Derrick will return with the instructions to do that in the daylight.) A new beekeeper has joined the rest of us in this wonderful hobby! And I had a great time being a part of it!

Bees and Smelly Water

I provide my bees with a lovely watering hole made of two pot saucers, one inside the other and blooming plants on the outside edge. But do they use it? Sometimes I see bees watering there. However today as I pulled into my carport, I noticed a lot of bees diving into the gutter on the edge of the carport roof.

Hmmmm, I thought. Maybe one of my hives has swarmed and is building a hive in my attic. I went to get the ladder, set it up, and carefully climbed up to look at the gutter for the entry way to this hive I imagined in my house. As I rose to the level of the gutter, a gross smell wafted through the air. You know the smell of rotten leaves in the bottom of a gutter? That's what I smelled. Upon looking into the smelly gutter, it is now clear that the bees prefer this water source to any botanically lovely site I might provide.

I keep the water in the inner bee pool quite dirty. The water is gunky with dirt from the outer ring plants. However I know when I'm not wanted. The bees much prefer the swamp in the bottom inch of my gutter.

birds, bees, FLOWERS.....

I'm up in the north Georgia mountains just south of the North Carolina border. I sometimes see bees up here, but the observation hive in the Osage vegetable market isn't up yet this year.

I hiked a trail in the rain today just to see the flowers that bloom there at about this time every year. The main flower I went to see is the pink lady's slipper in the photo below. It is hard to find but I know this trail where I see it around May 5 or 6 every year.



I also saw Catesby's trillium
which is interesting with its hanging down blossom that gets pinker as it ages. There were many of these along the trail.

The sweet shrub was in bloom near the end of the trail. I like its burgundy blossoms. We have lots of sweet shrub near my house in Atlanta.

Since the Picasa posting program only allows me four pictures at a time, the last one I'll post is the Mayapple. I took a shot of both the leaf and the flower underneath, but for you here is the picture of the flower. If you click on the link above, you'll see a much better picture of what I saw in the woods in the rain today!

Hopefully the sun will be out some tomorrow and I'll see some bees - usually I do when hiking trails around here.

Mellona is Bursting at the Seams

Mellona needs a new super. I put one on last Friday with starter frames in Housel positioning. Today that box is filled and all but two frames are fully capped! I was supposed to go to the mountains tonight, but I'm leaving in the morning because I needed to give Mellona a new box....how exciting!

Since I don't know if the Housel positioning was the reason Mellona did so well, I decided to go with it again. Again I didn't make a center frame but rather had the "y"s on each side of center facing up toward the outside of the box.

Mellona is making such beautiful honey that I am setting this super up for cut comb honey. I am using new frames with thin surplus wax foundation in six of them and some new 7-11 foundation that I ordered from Walter T. Kelley company at Michael Bush's suggestion. Michael says it makes pretty cut comb honey. The cell size is halfway between worker comb and drone comb. I put it on two frames and did starter strips on two more frames to fill out the honey super.


Looking at the pictures of these frames, you'll see HP for Housel positioning with an arrow. When you do Housel Positioning, you want the "y" in the center of the embossed cells to be facing upwards on the side of the frame facing the outside of the box. So I noted HP for Housel Positioning and the arrow to indicate which side of the frame should go toward the outside of the box. On the four 7/11 frames, I noted that as well and I put 2007 on these frames to let me know what year I began using them.

I think the picture below will demonstrate Housel Positioning. If you look at the "flower" made of seven cells of foundation in this picture, you can see that the "y" in each cell is facing up. The rougher edges mark the outside of each cell and the "y" is more faded looking.


I used my now trusty wax tube fastener to wax the foundation into the frames and poured the leftovers into my beeswax bar mold and the remainder into a bread pan for the next waxing event!

The Privet Bloom has Begun

Jennifer Berry in the most recent Georgia Bee Letter mentions that the tulip poplar flow is minimum due to the freeze in early April but that the privet and blackberry flow are on now and are doing well. In my woods behind my house, the tulip poplars appear to be blooming well, but I'm not a UGa biologist like Jennifer. The tulip poplars started blooming just before the bad April frost, but many blooms continue and it is now May.

My backyard just behind the deck where the bees are is full of privet hedge. Here you see a small part of the privet hedge.
The flowers are on every branch and are just beginning to bloom. I saw bees in the privet today, but they were too high in the hedge for me to get a picture.

Here is privet in bud.

Here are opened flowers - aren't they beautiful and they smell lovely as well. Privet, however, is an invasive plant and is considered a weed in Georgia.

YOU can spend the night outside!

It's starting to be warm at night in Hotlanta and the bees are beginning to feel it. It's the job of the house bees to keep the hive around 93 degrees Farenheit. If there are too many bees inside, the heat will rise above that so some are relegated to spending the hot nights on the front porch.

Walt Wright wrote an article last year on the need for hive ventilation. I do have the top propped which provides some air circulation but I do use a purchased inner cover, so the center opening isn't very large. This may slow down the air circulation through the hive. We'll keep watch as the summer goes into hotter times.

Below you can see the Proteus bees on their porch.

The bees from Mellona are also on the porch tonight.

Even little Bermuda has too many bees inside and has made this tiny effort at bearding. Bearding is what it is called when bees gather like a bee beard on the front of the hive. These beards are quite minimal - I'll keep showing the development of the beard as we get into REALLY hot nights....so watch for hotter night pictures.