Listed as an "Awesome Sustainable Garden Blog!"

Today I was notified that I was on the list of blogs noted by a British site called "WhatShed" which is a British gardening site. The list is long and I am third on the list. I thought you might want to see the list to find gardening blogs that might be of interest to you as well.

One I really liked was You Grow Girl from Canada which has beautiful photos and guides to planting. She has a post about the bumblebee. I also liked Mr. Brown Thumb whose writing seems to apply to my own gardening struggles.

I'm honored that my blog was included - it was apparently based on a poll of readers of the WhatShed site.

Swift Swarm Catching

At the community garden, our bees in one hive didn't make it. They actually dwindled and died before winter. I neglected them with my injured shoulder and they were a swarm that I installed last summer.

They probably came from a yard where the bees were treated and I don't treat my bees, so these bees may have not been able to survive without treatment. In addition, you never know about swarms. Since they didn't come from my bee yard, I can't rely on their genetics. Often swarms don't make it.

But that meant that I was one hive short at the community garden where like in all of my bee yards, I want to have two hives so one can serve as a resource if the other needs it.

So I was DELIGHTED when I got a swarm call from my bee club's swarm list. The swarm was in the yard of a beekeeper who did not have the equipment to keep them. They were described as being six feet off the ground and easy to get.

Now, the call came in at 2:15. The bees were 25 minutes from my house. I had to drive there, get the swarm, drive back to the community garden (25 minutes), install the bees, and get myself to a 4:15 doctor's appointment that is also 25 minutes away (more with the current state of Atlanta traffic due to the I-85 collapse). I had at least 1 1/2 hours of driving with little time to spare to collect the swarm or to install the swarm.

Everything had to run smoothly.

I arrived to find that the swarm was indeed just about six feet up or so.

I had brought my swarm catcher. Here's a photo of it from an earlier swarm catch in 2016.

For this swarm, described as six feet up, I didn't bring the painter's pole in the photo above, but rather brought a mop stick to screw into the swarm catcher. I didn't even use it - instead, I used the swarm catcher on its own. 

I spread the sheet I had brought under the swarm as quickly as possible. I took the swarm catcher and while the man whose bees these were bent the tree branch down, I jerked up on the swarm catcher and the bees fell into it. One more jab at the tree and I had the bees in the box I had brought.

Here you can see the bees in the box under the ventilated hive cover, the swarm catcher to the right, the bottle of sugar syrup which I had used to spray the swarm, my bee brush, and the yellow bungee cord set to secure the ventilated cover to the plastic box. The bees on the upper edge of the box are sending out Nasonov, letting me know that I have the queen.

The whole thing took ten minutes. There were many bees on the outside of the box, but I didn't have time to wait for them to find Mama. I wrapped the box, bees on the outside and all, in the sheet and raced for my car.

I drove the 25 minutes to the community garden. By the time I got there, at least 100 bees were gathered on my back window. I jumped out of the car, put on my veil and jacket, grabbed the bees and my bee brush and carried all of it up the hill to the hive. When I arrived, I could not pry the top off of the box!

I went in my veil to the car where there was no hive tool. What had I done? Cleaned out the car and moved the resident hive tool? ARGHHH. Leaving the bees, I jumped into the car and drove in my veil to my house about two blocks away. I ran into the house in my veil and down the stairs to the basement. As I headed for my bee kit to get the hive tool, I tripped over a box in my way that I couldn't see for the veil and landed smack on my hands and knees on the concrete floor. 

Note to self: Next time, take off the veil before going inside.

Hive tool in hand, I raced back to the garden, opened the hive and dumped in the bees. I grabbed the hive top, put it on solidly, and ran to the car. I got to the 4:15 appointment at 4:13 (with many bees still in the car). 

I didn't have a long doctor's appointment, but right after it I had to go babysit grandkids, so I hadn't been back in my neighborhood since I installed the swarm about 3:30. I was leaving town the next morning, so I stopped by the hive that evening just after dark around 9 PM. I could see bees on the entrance and felt good about it.

I came back to town on Monday and stopped by the other day to check on the hive. While there are bees flying in and out, the numbers don't compare to the overwintered hive which is booming (I know, I know, the robber screen is off and needs restapling. I'll do it when I'm over there on Sunday).

This was done in such haste and today I stopped back by to see how they had survived today's rain and horrors! I noticed that the hive is barely supported on one side. That's something to fix this weekend as well!

Don't know how it is barely on the corner of the cinder block, but that obviously will not do and both hives need entrance reducers.

Package Bees are not Loyal to Their Queen

When the package bees woke up that morning, they didn't know they were going to be shaken into a package with a bunch of strange bees, often not their sisters. Then they were hanging around in a screened cage complete with a syrup can and a queen (not THEIR mother) in a cage. Loyalty to a stranger has to be earned.

So when the beekeeper picks up a package, it's not a bonded group. It's a loosely connected bunch of unrelated bees with an unrelated and heretofore unknown queen.

I took two packages to Stonehurst Place to install the bees on March 29. The packages were about equal in size:

As in the typical package installation, I sprayed both packages with sugar water and then installed them. The hives are side by side facing a privacy fence so that in flying out, the bees have to fly up and over the fence.

Here's the first hive that I installed:

You can see at the front of the box the tape on the top of the queen cage which I jammed between two frames. Although you can see the syrup can sitting on top of the frames, after the bees settled in a little, I removed that and put on the inner cover. Then I gave them a feeder of Bee Tea on top of the inner cover hole.

As you may remember, I have been dealing with an injured shoulder (from a fall in October) that is just now getting better. When I finished the first install and turned to the second my shoulder hurt and I didn't have it in me to be quite as thorough. 

I had a terrible time with the staple holding the Hive 2 queen cage to the package and destroyed the tape in the process. I decided to put the queen cage on the floor of the hive under the frames instead of putting it between two frames. 

When I returned three days later to give them more food, there were about three times as many bees in hive 2 than the first hive. 

And today when I went over to see if they needed a new box, here's how the bees looked in hive 1:

They are in the hive and working, but not nearly like hive 2:

Hive 2 had bright white wax drawn on every frame. I gave them a new box and pulled up two filled frames as ladders to encourage the use of the new box.  

I think all of this is about lack of loyalty and strength of pheromones. The bees were looking for a place to go and probably the pheromone of the queen in hive 2 was stronger than the queen in hive 1. And with queen 2 on the bottom of the hive, it was probably easier to smell her pheromone than the queen in hive 1 who was wedged between the frames.

So the bees who had no loyalty to begin with, gravitated to the queen in hive 2 - whether because of her strong pheromone or advantageous cage placement.

How I will handle this, in the long run, is that the next time I am over at Stonehurst Place, I'll move a frame of brood and eggs from Hive 2 to Hive 1.  If I do that every time, gradually I'll help build the population of Hive 1.

The Hive Drape as a Swarm Kit Asset

One of Jeff's friends had found a swarm in her compost bin and told Jeff he could have the bees if he'd like to get them. He texted me yesterday but I was too busy. "No problem," he told me. "They are already building comb and have moved in. We can go tomorrow."

I had just heard Bobby Chaisson talk about doing cut-outs at my local bee meeting. So I packed the car this morning to cut the bees out of the compost bin - big, big rubber bands, two nuc boxes with totally empty frames, a spray bottle of syrup, in addition to my hive kit which has everything. I asked Jeff to bring a sharp knife and a flashlight.

Here's what we found when we arrived at a beautiful Garden Hills home in Atlanta:

You can see the comb that has been drawn through the clutching bees.

The bees were using the air holes in the compost bin as entrance into the compost bin. The holes just fit a bee.

I truly didn't know how we would get them. My first inclination was to spread a hive drape under the bees to help us see the ones that fell. Turns out that was the best thing we did. I started by spreading two hive drapes.

If you don't know/remember, I regularly use flour sacking towels as hive drapes when I inspect bee hives. I cover the exposed top of a box and only uncover the frame I am taking out of the box. The bees stay calmer. So here are Jeff's hands and the hive drapes inside the composter.

My guess is that this is a secondary swarm who left their hive with a virgin queen. Then we had cold weather and the queen couldn't fly nor could the scouts. They decided to remain in the composter and started drawing comb. It's not much different than top bars in Africa inside split barrels. I expect they've only been in the composter for a couple of weeks.

We cut the tiny teardrops of honeycomb one layer at a time and rubber-banded the pieces into empty frames. This piece has pollen in it and we saw bees flying into the composter with pollen on their legs:

Even after we had cut and rubber-banded all of the comb, there were still tons of bees left in to composter. The bees were indicating that the queen was still in the composter.

We tried using the bee brush and brushing the bees into a plant saucer, then dumping them into the cardboard nuc we had brought, but that only yielded a few bees each time. Then we figured out how to use the hive drapes. We added a few drapes so that we had about four stacked up. Then we brushed the bees off of the inside of the composter and onto the hive drapes.

Instead of picking up the drape, I folded the edges into the center, picked up the drape which was full of bees and put the cloth, bees and all, into the cardboard nuc. We did this until we ran out of both bees and hive drapes!

Finally the bees let us know the queen was in the hive box. We must have gotten her in one of the drape carries. 

 

We waited about 20 minutes until most of the bees were in the hive and then put the nuc in the back of my car.

After lunch, I installed them into a hive in my backyard. First I dumped the drape covered bees into the open space in the hive and then moved in the rubberbanded frames. 

This afternoon the bees were all in the hive and doing orientation flying.

Hidden Cost of the Forest Fire in Rabun County

Last year in the fall, Georgia was plagued with two forest fires. The Rough Ridge fire was in the Cohutta Wilderness. The Rock Mountain fire in Rabun County where I have bees engulfed over 40,000 acres. The smoke from these fires was so bad that the air in Atlanta over 100 miles south of the fires was smoky.

This is a photo from the US Forest Service:

My bee hives in Rabun County are on my friends' mountain property. They live on the edge of the national forest off of Patterson Gap road. As Thanksgiving approached, so did the fire. Photos from their land at night looked like this with the forest fire just over the ridge from their house:

Helicopters came to their land to drop big buckets into their pond to get water to dump on the fire.

When the fire was the closest, here's how it looked through their window at night (these photos were taken by their daughter-in-law):

My beehives were about half a football field's length away from this window in the direction of the fire.

This past week I was up in Rabun County and when I went to check the hive, the bees (as one might imagine) were gone. We smoke bees when we inspect the hives to create the illusion that a fire is nearby, distracting the bees to go in panic and address the question, "What should I take with me if my house is on fire?" For the bees, what they should take is honey. 

Of course bees absconding at the end of November would not survive. And where would they go? The county was thick with smoke and the fire moved through slowly as it made its way up to Gatlinburg.

Engulfed in smoke for days, at some point these bees left. There was not a dead bee anywhere in the hive. I'm sure they took what honey they could, but they left behind full supers of honey. 

I brought these supers home to harvest and set both Rabun County hives up as swarm hives since swarm season is just starting in north Georgia. I left the hives with two boxes of drawn comb each and smeared swarm lure at the entrance and on the top bars. Maybe I'll get lucky. If not, I'll make a split later this spring to take up there before the sourwood season.

Discouraging to see mosquito treatment starting

I know everyone is scared of Zika and/or inconvenienced, especially in the south, by the prevalence of mosquitoes. However, there are alternatives to spraying. I posted this on my local NextDoor email site:

I'm starting to see mosquito treatment signs in people's yards. As a beekeeper, I'd like to urge any of you who are considering treating for mosquitoes to consider several things:

1. The bees (honey bees) and other pollinators are in danger. If you must treat, please choose a provider who follows the rules for pesticide use on the container and who will TREAT AFTER DARK. The bees and other pollinators are flying during daylight and WILL be killed by your mosquito treatment. Spraying after dark gives the bees half a chance that the poison will be all dried up by morning and not kill them. And dark is defined as DARK - not dusk.

2. Try alternate methods before you choose treatment - in your own yard pour out any standing water in plant saucers, in containers of any kind. Put sprigs of rosemary on your barbecue coals (repels mosquitoes). Put mosquito repellent on yourself and your family rather than poison the plants in your yard for the bees.

3. Please think of the bees and our environment before you choose to spray.

4. There are good articles all over the Internet for alternative ways to deal with mosquitoes, such as this one.

One man wrote in response to my post on Next Door that he leaves a little standing water in his yard and floats in the standing water a product sold at the big box stores like Home Depot and Lowes called Mosquito Dunks. I looked for research on them and found this which says they are not dangerous to bees.

In general, the pesticide industry needs a wake-up call about the harm to pollinators dealt by all the mosquito spraying. Not only are the pesticides used inappropriately (not according to the instructions on the package), but also trucks carrying the chemicals used in lawns and gardens can be quite careless. My friend Julia was in her car the other day behind a pesticide truck that was totally leaking pesticide all over the road.





She took a video from her car (you can hear NPR in the background). She sent the video to the Pollinator Stewardship Council whose spokesperson, Michele Colopy, was a speaker at our recent GBA meeting in February. Michele helped Julia learn how to report to EPA, the GA department of agriculture, etc.

It's important that we take action as spillage and improper use of pesticides is harmful to our bee population.

POST SCRIPT: Julia went to court. The driver plead guilty. He fixed his truck already and he was fined $1000. Yay for Julia for standing up for the bees (and all of our health).

Birthday Week of the Blog

My blog began in April 2006 on Easter Sunday. This week upcoming marks the birthday week of my blog. My twelfth year begins this month. That's a long time to keep a blog pretty continually.



I look forward to this year of posting and seeing what kind of year my bees and I have as another bee season gets fully underway with the blooming of the tulip poplar which began in Atlanta last week.

Honey for Breakfast

My daughter and her family are in Ireland for spring break. This morning they sent a photo of my granddaughter, Lark, at breakfast in Killarney. Look at the full frame of local honey to eat with their croissants!

Installing a Package at Stonehurst

On Tuesday, I got an email from Stonehurst that our bees were ready for pickup at Mountain Sweet Honey in Toccoa, GA. I called Mountain Sweet and they said the bees needed to be picked up right away, so I drove up early Wednesday morning to pick up the two packages. Luckily I had the time and it was a pretty day for a drive. Also, the section of Atlanta I-85 which is one mile from my house had not collapsed and caught fire yet! That happened the next day.

So our bees at Stonehurst died during the winter of 2015. In 2016, a swarm moved into one of the hives and they chugged along but didn't make it through the winter. The owner really wanted bees there again, so she ordered a package of Italians and a package of Carniolans for this spring.

I haven't shown photos of a package installation in a while, so thought I'd share these.

I drove the bees back in the back of my car so when we got back to Atlanta one and a half hours later, they couldn't wait to be put in a hive. I stopped by my house and got two rapid feeders (because you have to feed packages). Packages of bees consist of bees who didn't know that they were leaving home when they woke up on the morning they were poured into a package. If they were swarming bees, they would have filled their bellies with honey in preparation for the swarm.

A package is an artificial swarm in a sense in that the bees have no comb or established brood. Instead they are a bunch of bees with a queen who isn't their mother. They have to draw wax and get started the minute they are installed but without honey in their honey stomachs, they have no resources to make wax. Thus, the beekeeper MUST feed a package.

So I picked up two rapid feeders, mixed up some bee tea, grabbed a squirt bottle of sugar syrup from my swarm kit, and got a couple of empty boxes to use as a funnel to pour the bees into the hive.

I set the packages on the ground while I worked on the hives. I squirted both boxes with sugar syrup on both sides to calm them and give them something to do.

I wasn't planning to do this on Wednesday, so I had to clean out both hives before installing the bees. This meant pulling off the boxes all the way to the ground to clean out the dead roaches, wax that had been consumed by wax moths and other detritus in the hive. I had brought clean new frames. I set each hive up with two medium boxes. Then I planned to leave the rapid feeder inside an empty medium box above the inner cover.

I pried off the wood cover and pulled out the feeder, shaking the bees back into the box and covering the hole with the wood. Then I gently pulled out the queen cage, again shaking the bees back into the box.

The queen cage was wedged between two frames (pretty easy to do in an 8 frame box). Then I put the "funnel" empty box above the two hive boxes and shook in the bees. Usually I bang the package on the ground to loosen the bees' grip so that it is easier to pour them into the hive.

I brushed the bees on the top edge into the box and put the top on to allow them to calm down while I installed the second package. I then returned to the hive and using my bee brush, got them down off of the funnel box. I then slid the inner cover on and put on the rapid feeder. I filled it with bee tea, put on the telescoping cover and left the bees to adjust to their new surroundings.

All of the bees never leave the package so I set the package up facing the hive so the remaining bees could go inside at their leisure.

I edited the above photo to rotate it, but in my new computer without Picasa, I can't get it to save my edit. Sorry you have to twist your head around, but I wanted you to see that the opening of the package faces the opening of the hive.

I went back on Friday and gave them more food and plan to go again on Sunday. But the tulip poplar started blooming today so our nectar flow has begun and I'll not feed them for much longer.