Bees and Asters

This weekend in N Georgia there were asters of many sizes and colors blooming everywhere. We stay in the mountains at my house across the valley from Black Rock Mountain so we often hike there.

At Black Rock Mountain State Park, there's a lake with a path to walk around it. We saw tons of these white asters, covered with honeybees and other bees as well. The first picture is a honeybee on the aster. The second picture is some other bee, also enjoying the aster.

I'm reading Sue Hubbell's A Book of Bees. She raised her bees in Arkansas, but says in her book that in the fall, the bees feed on asters as much as they feed on goldenrod. Either flower makes a rank-tasting honey, but mostly beekeepers leave this honey on the hive for the bees.

In the city of Atlanta we don't have much fall flow, but out in the country or up in the mountains, goldenrod and asters - blue ones and white ones like these are everywhere in abundance right now.

From reading the Internet today, I believe this is heath aster, or aster ericoides, found prolifically in Georgia. I'm not sure what these flowers are, but if you want to see a lovely collection of aster photos, click here.

Jennifer Berry and Queen Rearing

Tonight Jennifer Berry talked to the Metro Atlanta Beekeeper's Club meeting about queen rearing. She talked a little about grafting, but focused on choosing the bees from which to rear your new queen. I was most interested in what she said about hygienic queens.

She chooses the hive from which to make a queen based on many factors including honey production (which she said was 15% genetics and 85% management), hygenic behavior, gentleness, and several other factors. She said to determine whether a queen was raising bees who were hygenic, you can do the following:

• Cut a section of comb out of a brood frame - about 3- 4 inches round or square
  
• Count the number of empty cells, ones with pollen, or ones with honey so you'll know how many in the section did not contain brood to begin with
  
• Freeze the section overnight in the freezer
• Return the section to the brood frame and toothpick it back in place
• The next day (24 hours later) check on the section and count the empty cells.
  

Since all of the brood in the frozen section will now be dead, what you want to find is that the bees have cleaned out the cells in the section. This will be a great indicator of good hygenic behavior and will then indicate a hive from which to raise a queen. If they don't do a good job of cleaning out the dead cells, then you wouldn't choose to raise a queen from this hive.

Isn't that fascinating?

BTW, her reference for a good book about queen rearing is Successful Queen Rearing by Spivak.

More from the History Center

The kids who came to the talk (see previous post below) were interested as much in the wax as in the honey that I had for them to taste. This young man wanted to smell the wax block. I can understand how he feels - the smell is heavenly and it is as if you are standing in between the hives on a warm day to smell a wax block.

Everyone was interested in the chunk honey so I opened the jar so they could taste it with popsicle sticks.

For the last of my three talks, my sweet angel grandson showed up to help me. I am holding him and answering questions in the last picture!

Bee Talk at Atlanta History Center

Today I did three talks at the Atlanta History Center about harvesting honey as a part of their Harvest Day event. I took bee stuff to help illustrate what I had to say. Here's what my table looked like - you can see that I took an empty frame, a frame with small comb built on it, a frame with larger comb and a completely filled frame. I also took a borrowed model hive - an 8-frame medium. I took my hat and veil, my gloves, my bee brush. I had some honey to show how you harvest it - cut comb, chunk and clear. And I took wax both in my big wax block and in smaller blocks.

The kids who came liked trying on my bee veil and tasting honey. This is the first time I've given a talk about beekeeping to non-beekeepers and I had fun. I hope I get to do it again.

Small Hive Beetle Status as of Today

I opened the hives today to find more beetles than last Saturday. I smashed as many as I could with the hive tool. To think that last year I found it difficult to smash one - now I do it with abandon - not reckless abandon because I watch out not to injure a bee with my hive tool, but I certainly get into smashing the beetles.

I brought in the feeding jars from each hive to refill them in my kitchen. These are the beetles around the lid of the jar. While I don't use grease patties because they are known to increase the SHB, I must say that my feeding jar experience would indicate that an explosion of SHBs occurs with feeding sugar syrup as well. So far both hives are holding their own and there is no beetle damage - just lots of beetles.

At the end of the day, I've replaced the syrup feeder with more syrup, rejuvenated the bait in the Sonny-Mel trap on the left and just looked at the few dead beetles in the apple cider vinegar trap on the right in the frame.

I also saw a Varroa mite on the back of a bee, so I did another powdered sugar shake as well. Today was a pest control inspection!

The Difference in a Palynlogist and a Pollenologist

is my spelling error! Horrors!

I have been appalled that "ginormous" is now a word that is accepted and is in the dictionary. I certainly don't want to supply any more terrible contributions to the English language, so I want to do my part to rectify an error.

Dr. Paul Arnold is a "Palynologist" not whatever I labeled him earlier (not writing it again to avoid continuing the trend in the ginormous direction.)

OK, so let's look at the word. Wikipedia says

"Palynology is the science that studies contemporary and fossil palynomorphs, including pollen, spores, dinoflagellate cysts, acritarchs, chitinozoans and scolecodonts, together with particulate organic matter (POM) and kerogen found in sedimentary rocks and sediments. Palynology does not include diatoms, foraminiferans or other organisms with silicaceous or calcareous exoskeletons."
I heard from Dr. Arnold today about the analysis of my pollen sample. Here is what he said:

"Sorry it has taken me so long to look at your specimen! You had what seemed to be quite a bit of tulip poplar, and some magnolia pollen. Also, quite a bit of rosaceous pollen was found in your specimen (possibly blackberry, strawberry, apple, etc.). Holly pollen was also present in pretty large amounts, as was another very large pollen grain which I have not seen before. I keyed it out through my pollen keys, and it seemed to lead me to either a type of lily or yucca plant. I’m not 100% sure about this last grain, since I have never made a reference slide of yucca, but I wouldn’t rule that possibility out. All in all, a pretty typical spring woodland honey (with the exception of that last grain)."

I wrote back that this super was filled by the bees in early July - actually late June/early July.

Here's his response (what a nice guy - he ran my specimen again.)

"This confuses me too. There are some pollens that can be confused with poplar, but most of these are spring pollens as well. One of these “poplar mimics” are various species of the buttercup family. It would tend to be unusual to find large amounts of this unless there are various ornamental buttercups in your area, or a meadow full of native buttercups (some do persist into July). The only other thing that I can think of is that the bees may have been collecting residual pollen from old blooms or other surfaces. If they were doing that then that means that they were not collecting nectar from these residual sources. One possible support of this idea is, because of the unusual year, I saw many poplar blooms in the piedmont area persisting into late June, quite a few weeks past when I usually see them. We actually had almost no poplar bloom up here due to a warm early spring followed by a late heavy frost. Another explanation is that possibly there may be other types of ornamentals in your neighborhood that are neither in my pollen key, image databases, or from reference slides that I have collected that mimic those golden-yellow poplar grains. So, as you can see, I’m just as puzzled as you. After I received your e-mail, I actually spinned down another aliquot of your sample to check its contents. Once again, the golden-yellow poplar grains seemed to be present, but I found an additional pollen that I don’t remember seeing in your previous sample . . . sumac. Do you have any smooth or winged sumac in your area? This would tend to darken your honey somewhat. Holly was certainly a very significant part of your sample (there is no confusing these grains with anything else), although I can’t narrow it down to species. This is actually also a little unusual for so late in the year, unless you have quite a few late blooming ornamental hollies in your area (most native hollies have bloomed out by mid June). It sure would be interesting to try again next year at the same time to see if you get the same type of honey."

and he straightened me out about the spelling of what he does: PALYNOLOGIST
For those of you who care about words like I do, here is Wikipedia's description of how the term originated:

"The term palynology was introduced by Hyde and Williams in 1944, following correspondence with the Swedish geologist Antevs, in the pages of the Pollen Analysis Circular (one of the first journals devoted to pollen analysis, produced by Paul Sears in North America). Hyde and Williams chose palynology on the basis of the Greek words paluno meaning 'to sprinkle' and pale meaning 'dust' (and thus similar to the Latin word pollen).[5"

So there you go - and down with English additions like ginormous.....

Book club Honey Feast

For my book club where we read Hive of Suspects by Sheila Pim, every item that we ate was made with honey. From right to left in the picture:

**A Waldorf type salad with apples, grapes, dates, walnuts, celery and a honey/mayonnaise dressing from The Backyard Beekeeper
**Honey glazed carrots from the Vermont Beekeepers' Cookbook
**Chicken fingers, rolled in balsamic vinegar and honey, then in breadcrumbs and baked from The Backyard Beekeeper
**Homemade biscuits with either plain honey in the honey server or comb honey in the box
**Lemon Hive Cake with a honey glaze and lemon frosting

The book was good and the food was good and I sent everyone home with a jar of honey from my bees.

Beehive Cake for Book Club

I finished my beehive cake this morning for my book club meeting tonight when we are talking about A Hive of Suspects by Sheila Pim. I can't get over how cute it turned out! The bees are made with yellow jelly beans and almond wings. The cake is a lemon cake....really yummy - I tasted the crumbs when I put the two halves together!