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.

Growing a Greener World on Public Television - just not in Atlanta

Joe Lamp'l, host of Growing a Greener World on Public Television, lives in the northern parts of Atlanta.  However, his wonderful show about organic gardening is not available to the Atlanta market.  He films here and all over the country on issues of gardening and visited me to talk about the bees a couple of months ago.

I fed him and his camera guy biscuits and honey when we were all done.  Nothing better than Southern biscuits with honey soaking into them!

Here's the episode he filmed in part in my backyard with my equipment and my bees. (Even if we can't watch it in Atlanta, we CAN watch it on the Internet.)  Check out some of Joe's other wonderful episodes while you are visiting his page.

Joe is signed up to take the MABA short course that Julia and I are putting together for the bee club.  I am hoping I will get to help him get started in beekeeping in that way as well.

Jennifer Berry's Views on Natural Beekeeping

In August, Jennifer Berry spoke to our bee club on the topic of Natural Beekeeping.  I had a hard time with her talk and didn't post about it, but I wanted to now before I get distracted with other things.

Jennifer Berry is Keith Delaplane's right hand person and a very good beekeeper with tons of scientific knowledge.  I think Jennifer Berry is so entertaining - she could be a stand-up comic quite successfully and so she's really fun to listen to, but this talk had me ready to jump out of my chair.

I should also say that when I was in college centuries ago one of my favorite courses (I was a philosophy major) was logic.  I loved logical reasoning and fallacies and really found it interesting to solve logic problems - my logic textbook was the only college text that I kept after college.  

So when Jennifer started with a fallacy of logic, I had a difficult time.  The fallacy is called the straw man fallacy.

"Explanation

A straw man argument is one that misrepresents a position in order to make it appear weaker than it actually is, refutes this misrepresentation of the position, and then concludes that the real position has been refuted. This, of course, is a fallacy, because the position that has been claimed to be refuted is different to that which has actually been refuted; the real target of the argument is untouched by it."

What Jennifer said was that we don't keep bees naturally, do we?  After all, bees live in trees, not in boxes; bees get to choose where they live, but we choose where our bees live;  bees in nature requeen when they need to, but we decide when to requeen and give them a queen that is not their own;  wax foundation is not natural, bees are not native to the United States so even having them here is not natural, etc.  

All of this was to prove that we don't keep bees naturally so practicing natural beekeeping is not possible.  This is the straw man fallacy because while all of those things may be true, none of them have anything to do with whether you use treatment or not in your beehives.  They are not related. 

Proving that we don't start out with a natural situation does not mean that you therefore can't succeed at keeping bees without treatment.

She followed this by encouraging people first: not to believe everything you read on the Internet - probably a good piece of advice - and second:  to know what you are wanting when you purchase a queen.  Are you looking for a queen with hygienic behavior?  Are you wanting a queen who produces good winter bees?  What are you looking for in a queen?  Ask the breeder what he/she looks for in a queen that he/she produces.

Those two pieces of information were valuable and helpful to all beekeepers.

She went on to talk about the use of IPM, including screened bottom boards, freezing drone brood, all the usual suspects, ending with using chemicals, but she had lost me by then because I was so upset by her message to our many new beekeepers in the club that they can't keep bees naturally because, well, it just isn't possible since we don't start out in a natural way.

Registration is Open for the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers' Short Course!

This year my friend and fellow beekeeper, Julia Mahood, and I are the co-chairs for the MABA short course.  The course is a one day event from 8:30 - 4:30 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden on January 18, 2014.

If you are in the Atlanta area or know someone who would love to start keeping bees, please sign up!
It's a great day of learning and finding out lots of tips and tricks about being a beekeeper.  We have a good line up of experienced and Master Beekeepers to provide tons and tons of information.  A good lunch is provided with vegetarian and gluten-free options and we are going to have a great day.

Historically the course sells out long before the day of the course so you have to sign up ahead of time.
Here's the SIGN UP PAGE!


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Come one, come all!

Bees From Bill

I know it's not the right time of year to start bees, because there's no flow and the bees are hunkering down for the winter.  But this year at our annual bee auction for my home bee club, Bill Owens offered ten hives of feral bees that he had removed as auction items.

Bill Owens is the best beekeeper in the state of Georgia with a certificate to prove it.  He is Georgia's ONLY certified Master Craftsman Beekeeper.  I enjoy Bill - he's a great teacher, has an always pleasant approach to things, and started me on the certification road myself.

He gave me the practical test at Young Harris for the Certified Beekeeper level, the first qualification level in Georgia.  (I almost failed it, not because I couldn't light the smoker - which is the first thing that one has to do - but because I couldn't light his cigarette lighter TO light the smoker.)

Bill has appeared a number of times in this blog - for example, here, here, and here.  He has a business (one of his many jobs - he teaches, he's a firefighter, he's a beekeeper, he owns a farm, he's an author) doing bee removals.  In addition, he doesn't treat his bees and approaches them with the idea that if they can survive, then they are strong enough to tolerate the varroa mite.

So of course, I decided to bid on two of Bill's feral hives in our silent auction.  Others were also bidding on these hives, but I was determined to get them so I was one of those lurkers who hung around the bidding table, waiting to pounce if someone stepped in to overbid me at the last minute!

I won the two hives, so Jeff and I went to Bill's house in Monroe, Georgia, to pick them up on Thursday night.  I use eight frame boxes, but he had requested 10 frame boxes into which to transfer the bees.  I unearthed a couple of ten frame deeps (the only two I still own) and Jeff and I headed for Monroe.

We got there just at dark at 7:30 and Bill donned his veil, lit his smoker and transferred the bees into my boxes.  First he shook the bees off of the cover into the box.

You can see our strap under the box in preparation for the move.

He then added the frames, one at a time, until the box was full.  These bees had no stores to speak of and Bill advising feeding them "heavily."  He did say he could smell some goldenrod honey in the hives, but didn't see anything.

Jeff manned the staple gun (which I am terrified of using - I do use it, but if someone else is around to do it, I happily hand it over to them) and we closed up the hives with screened wire.

It was quite dark and Jeff shone a flashlight onto the hive so in this photo it looks as if the bees are in some weird circle pattern, but that's the light of the flashlight - made my camera think it didn't need to employ the flash.

I am now convinced that my yard can't handle more than four hives.  My friend Tom has wanted hives in his backyard so ahead of the auction, I asked him if he still wanted hives in his yard and he said yes.  Jeff's office is just down the street so he can oversee the "heavy feeding" of these hives as we go into winter.






So around 9:15 on Thursday night we delivered my Owens' hives to Tom's house where Jeff and I will keep them.

Leveling the hive was a challenge but my smart phone has a level on it and we managed to get both hives pretty level.

I returned the next day to check on the bees and to give them their first round of "bee tea." 

We'll continue feeding them this as winter approaches.  I wish I had honey to feed them but due to the rain, I do not.

We are using rapid feeders for these hive - they hold about 1/2 gallon of bee tea.

So here are the hives, hopefully adjusting to the new location.  The branches on the front of the hive are to help the bees realize that they are in a new place and need to reorient.

We'll see how this works - starting a new hive in the fall.  Bill loved that he had given the hives for auction and was talking about doing it again next year - if these work, I'll probably bid, lurk, and maybe win again!