I saw the QUEEN!

OK, I've been a beekeeper for a year and I've never seen the queen, but today I finally did in Bermuda. The population is burgeoning and I didn't see any wing problems on the bees I looked at. I was thrilled that things looked better. And then.......

I saw the QUEEN. I would never have seen her, but for the fact that there are less bees and she is obviously still my original queen so she has a white dot painted on her back. The marking color for 2006 queens is white. The two new queens I will get with my two nucs this year should have a yellow dot, the marking color for 2007, on their backs.

You, too, can see my queen - sort of blurry but there she is in the bottom of the picture below. Like me, you can recognize her by the dot on her back. Walt Wright says that you don't ever have to see the queen as long as you can see that she is hard at work by seeing eggs and larvae in different stages, but as much as I respect everything of his that I read, I don't care, I was thrilled to meet her at last.

I will be doing a powdered sugar shake at every hive inspection this year. Until my bees are regressed to small cell, the Varroa is vigorously in the picture. I didn't do a count today - thought I would be too discouraged - but I'll start a count record of Varroa on a sticky board starting next weekend. This year instead of the complete mess I made last year, I simply used my flour sifter and sifted sugar over the brood box. Then I took my bee brush and brushed the sugar that landed on top of the frames in between the frames.

Here's how the bees look after the sugar shake. Very ghost-like, huh?

The Sad Story of the Death of a Queen

In repainting Destin to get ready for bee season, I took the hive apart. When I removed the frames from the medium brood chamber, I noticed lots of empty, opened queen cells. You can see two below and in the picture below that you can see a row of these cells. There were two frames each with five or six opened queen cells. I think this means that when the queen died, the bees made an effort to requeen themselves, but never succeeded. Without the queen, the rest of the bees, unable to create a new queen, starved to death. So sad........

Transformation of Destin

It's time to get ready for Bee Season. I painted Destin today and reclaimed the hive for new life for my new bees coming soon. I have lots of quarts of paint in my basement from indecisive moments choosing colors for my sunporch, so I am painting Destin with Grape Beginnings, hoping it will mean a GREAT beginning for the new hive. On the right of this picture, you can see the yellow of the previous hive and on the left, the new paint being applied.

I broke the hive down into the component parts - here's the hive stand - everyone doesn't use these but I like it because in taking pictures I can sometimes catch the bees on the landing strip that it provides.

And here is the screened bottom board - essential for mite defensiveness - if a mite falls through the screened bottom board when the bees groom themselves, or, I guess, if the mite is awkward and loses its footing, the mite can't come back up through the screen.

And here is the whole kit and caboodle newly painted from the yellow of Destin to its new Grape Beginnings color....guess it may look a little lavendar when it dries. I'm going to call this new hive Mellona - the name of the Roman goddess who was the patronness of bees. Maybe with a goddess looking after it, this hive will do better than its predecessor!

Activity at Bermuda and the Cycle of Life

There are bees flying in and out of Bermuda - they often are carrying heavy loads of pollen on their legs. I didn't get a good picture, but the activity is the most I've seen this year. In the heat of summer and the height of the nectar flow, the arrival and departure of bees is like Hartsfield/Jackson Airport in Atlanta, but today it's sufficient to make me happy and optimistic!

Also I left the two frames of head-down starved bee bodies out on my deck. As you can see from the one below, some part of the cycle of life has contributed to cleaning up the frame. I imagine the wren or one of the woodpeckers I've seen eating bee bodies on the deck has feasted on my dead bees. Less work now for the new girls when they arrive in a couple of weeks!

Complaints of a Beekeeper with a Full Time Job

I wish I had a job with more flexibility. Truth be told, I do have a lot of flexibility....I am self-employed but the kind of work I do involves regular commitments and I need to make a living to support all of this bee equipment purchasing I keep doing!

So I end up with a set schedule (which I set) in which I leave early and return home after dark. It's, of course, different in the spring when we are on daylight savings time (coming soon - March 11). Now, however, I don't have daylight to work the bees unless it is the weekend and then I am often busy or out of town. And even if I come home and it is still light at the end of my day, it is not the time to open the bee hives.

My new nucs (two of them) should be here in the next week or two (the beekeeper from whom I'm getting them said it could be as soon as next week.) I need to paint hive boxes and get ready, but I haven't yet. I'm hoping I can find some time for these getting ready tasks before the bees actually arrive. I do own the hive boxes already and am not waiting for an order to arrive.

I did find some paint for the new hives. I have several quarts of paint left from when I was choosing paint for my sunporch - so one hive will be painted "grape beginnings" and the other "peach blush." I don't want to leave Destin yellow since all the bees in it died - bad sign. So I want the new bees to have a fresh color and new start to their lives on my deck. I'll have to come up with two new names as well.

Assuming, as I did, that my hives would make it through the winter, I ordered a comb honey super from Walt Kelly. You have to have a really strong hive, at least in their second season, to make comb honey and my only living hive is quite weak, so I'm putting that box aside until next year. Maybe with small cell regression and more powdered sugar shakes, I can beat the Varroa mite to the punch and keep my hives alive next winter.

Trying to Keep Bermuda Growing

Today I opened Bermuda to transfer the honey filled frames from the dead hive to it. I was pleased to see what looked like more bees in the hive just five days after checking on Wednesday. I replaced two empty frames with honey-filled ones. See my Wednesday, 2/28 post and you'll see that there are about twice as many bees on the tops of the frames today as there were on Wednesday - Hooray!

I then took the empty super off of the hive. There was some honey in it and some bees so I left it standing in front of Bermuda so that the bees could get the honey and return themselves to the hive. I left the one frame leaning against the shallow super - mostly because I couldn't find my hive tool today (note to self: BUY A SPARE ONE for these occasions) and it was hard to pry out the frames with a screwdriver! If the bees don't take the honey out of it by tomorrow, I'll put it in the freezer.

More thoughts about the hive that died

My hives are outside my sunporch door on my deck where I can see them if I eat on the sunporch. It has only been warm enough to do that over the last two weekends. When I've sat and looked at the two hives, I noticed bees going in and out of both hives, but the bees going in to Destin were acting a little strange.

Instead of following up that observation, I thought I'd check it out later. What I saw was that bees entering Bermuda made a "beeline" for the entrance, went into the hive, and never hesitated. Bees entering Destin flew up and looked at the hive and seemed to hesitate, going toward the entrance, and then flying up again before finally entering.

During bee season, Destin always was a less active hive, so I chalked the odd entry up to that.

Tonight in re-reading Hive Management by Richard Bonney I found a paragraph on page 70 that spoke to what I saw:

He is writing about robbing behavior. He says:

"Such robbers have a distinctive action. They tend to be sneaky. They do not approach a hive entrance directly but ease in from the sides. Their flight pattern is somewhat erratic as they bob about looking for a way in......It is this type of activity on a nice day in late winter or early spring that may cause the beekeeper to believe that a hive is alive and well, when actually it has died out and is being robbed of its remaining honey."

I believe that this hive has been without a queen for quite a while - there was no evidence of any recent brood raising. The bees may have died weeks ago. So Destin was a great target for the robbing behavior of the other hive. Today when I took the cover off of Destin for another look around, several bees flew out of the hive - robbers caught in the act!

What I've Learned from the Hive Death

So far this is what I have learned:

1. At the end of the season I left a super on each of my hives instead of forcing them into one box or even two. The super on each hive had frames of capped and uncapped honey in it - every frame had some honey. I thought this would add to the stores that the bees had in the medium super.

The bees moved up through the hive as the winter went on. The super didn't contain enough honey to support the hive and when they got there, they ate all there was, but didn't come back into the medium where there were four full frames of capped honey.

Michael Bush says that bees have a hard time making a decision as a group. If they were trying to decide where to cluster when the cold weather hit and there were no more stores in the shallow super, then they couldn't move down. Next year I don't want to give them too many options as I did this year.

Next year I am going to force the hive down into the brood box and feed honey back to them in that box rather than leave the super.

2. Even when it is cold, it would be better to open the hive if I have any doubt about the stores rather than leave it up to chance in an effort to protect the bees from the cold. Without food they can't keep it warm enough to protect themselves from the cold.

3. I need to learn to see the queen in the hive. I'm pretty sure Destin had been without a queen for quite some time since there was absolutely no evidence of brood raising in the hive. I need to learn the signs of a winter time queenless hive and I need to be able to FIND THE QUEEN.

4. I need to learn more about winter feeding. I didn't want to feed patties to the bees because I had the beginnings of a small hive beetle problem and they explode in population if you feed a hive grease patties. I had a deep frame feeder, but members of my bee club said that bees often drown in those. I need to learn how to approach the feeding so that I don't help the SHB population but still provide for my bees. What I did in Destin was to put in a Mason jar from my Boardman feeder with holes punched in the top. I set that directly on top of the frames and saw sugar water leaking onto the ground below the hive - this is obviously not the right answer either.

5. I need a better system for hive inspection during the winter. I leave for work as the sun is coming up in the winter and come home after dark. This means that any inspections I do are on the weekends. Often on winter weekends, it is rainy, cold or not a good day for some other reason. I need a to commit to checking on my hives on a regular basis in the winter (even if that means only lifting the hive to see how heavy it is). I did that infrequently (about once a month if that) during this past winter.

The Value of a Camera During Inspection

I've been so glad that I've had a camera when I've inspected the hives. Often I find something unexpected when I look at the photos after the inspection. And I'm not a photographer - just a point and shoot person with a basic camera.

During the inspection, I am wearing a veil, operating my smoker (when I remember that I have it) and trying to move slowly and not drop anything. It's a major challenge to do all of that. So I see what is on the frames but I don't really SEE details until the photos download to my computer.

For example, I had a large picture of a frame of honey and when I cropped one section of it, I found a great view of a bee drinking honey beside a small hive beetle:

When I had robbers in the beehives, I made a robber screen. It confused the bees and they were in the middle of a nectar flow. The foraging bees began flying under the hives, passing nectar to the bees in the hive through the screened bottom board. I couldn't see this, but the camera with its flash exposed the activity for me to see later. I simply held the camera under the hive and snapped without looking through the viewfinder.

I routinely took frames out of the hive and hung them on the rack I attached to the side of the hive. Then I took a picture of the activity. In the picture below, you see a frame of brood with bees all over it.

When I zoomed in on a small section of the picture, you can see the "C" shaped larvae in open cells.

Yesterday when I discovered that the bees in Destin had all died, I was relieved to find some brood in my other hive, Bermuda. When I came in to my computer I looked closely at the photo, examining what seemed like a spotty brood pattern:

In the cropped close-up you can actually see the grain of rice shaped eggs in each empty cell, proving that the queen in that hive is doing well. During the inspection I only saw the empty cells but during the photo inspection later, the eggs are quite evident. If you can't see them, click on the picture below to enlarge it and you'll see eggs in most of the empty cells.

The Live Hive

The frame of honey below is one of four frames of honey left in the dead hive's medium brood box. The Beemaster folks said I should move those frames to the Bermuda hive and let the bees there use it for stores. I haven't done it yet, but will.

Here are the bees in Bermuda - not a particularly thriving bunch - but they are alive and are beginning to raise brood. We've had strange weather in Atlanta. In February we've had a week of 30s at night and high 60s in the day, followed by a week of 20s at night followed by 40 - 50 degree days. The last two weeks have been in the 30s above freezing at night and in the high 60s/low 70s in the day. I think the bees have had a hard time because of the confusing weather

The bees in Bermuda are making brood. The pattern below is a little spotty, but there are larvae (see the cells with white shiny C shapes in them?) and they are bringing in pollen. Look at the red pollen cell directly below the brood circle. So action is starting for spring in this hive. I also looked really hard at the bees. I saw mostly healthy looking bees. I was disturbed to see one bee with ragged wings, meaning she probably has deformed wing syndrome, brought about by Varroa mites. Michael Bush on the Beemaster forum suggested that I do a sugar shake and a Varroa count on this hive, so that will be what I do on Friday.

(Note: If you click on the image below to enlarge it, you can see bee eggs in the empty cells. The eggs look like grains of rice - the good news is the presence of those eggs means the queen is alive and laying - HOORAY!)

There's lots of activity in this hive, so I put a Boardman feeder out to help them build up for spring. I don't want to be guilty of starving another hive. I also called the local beekeeper from whom I had already ordered a nuc for this year so I could have a third hive and ordered another nuc to replace my dead hive.

The Death of a Hive

Today I came home in the middle of the day - it was finally 68 degrees on a day when I had a break to inspect the hives. I opened Destin to find that all of the bees had died. Apparently they starved to death. I am so very sad. I had fed this hive with a jar of sugar syrup but had not replenished it before the 20 degree weather we had two weeks ago because I knew the hive had stores of honey in frames and didn't want to open the hive in such cold weather. I am SO SORRY that I didn't. The pictures below show what happens when a hive starves.

In the cold the bees cluster in a ball around their stores of honey. These bees are on either side of two frames, completely empty of honey. Some of them are deep in the cells trying to find the very last of the honey. The sad part is that there were four full medium frames of honey below them in the medium super (these bees are in the shallow super at the top level of the hive.)

Below are all the dead bees on the screened bottom board. I looked everywhere for the dead queen and couldn't find her anywhere.

I looked at every frame in the hive and couldn't find the dead queen nor any evidence that she had been there for a while. The red maple began blooming at the end of January and bees have been beginning to build brood since that time. There was no capped brood or larvae of any kind in this hive. I suspect that the queen died at some point over the winter and the hive has dwindled until it died altogether.

Well, I'm trying hard not to feel like a bad beekeeper because I didn't know they were starving, but it's hard to know that I could have kept them alive. Of course, if the queen were dead, I couldn't have done much about that without knowing.

Special Visitor to my Hives

I spend a lot of time on the Beemaster Forum where I get a lot of my questions answered and have learned a lot from people all over the world. One of my favorite posters is "Understudy." He lives in Florida where he has done a lot of "cut-outs" in which he goes to places where people have found bees and have not wished for the bees to be there. Examples are boats, trailers, inside roof overhangs and most impressively, in a compost pile!

In addition, he travels for his work and has been in Atlanta this week. So he came to my house to see my two little hives and eat lunch. I loved hearing about his bee adventures. He has a blog as well.

To prove he was actually at my house, here he is between my two hives - lucky me - to be entertained and educated by his bee stories over lunch!

Drinking bees

The weather has been cold in Atlanta and the bees have been balled up in their hives. Today it was warm and relatively sunny and the bees were drinking from my water source all day long. The water source is filled with old leaves and gunk - not clean and beautiful like it was during the summer - and they loved it. I saw as many as five at a time, all drinking by sticking their tongues into the holes in the brick and sucking up the water.

A sad winter's tale of bees

Note: Originally the pictures didn't show up in this post. I've had a terrible time since Google went out of Beta for their Blogger program. When I post pictures through Google's Picasa program, they don't show up here online. I tried today and with some effort (and signing in to my blog site numerous times) I have finally managed to get the pictures onto this posting and to make some new posts as well.

We have the luxury in Atlanta of winters that are often quite mild. This winter has been one of the mildest in memory - and I've lived here since 1978. However, we've had several days in a row when the night temperature is 25 degrees and then the temperature in the daytime rises to the 50s. I've seen very little bee activity.

Suddenly yesterday the temperature rose to 60 degrees and the mortician bees went to work. Since my hives are on the deck, the bodies are obvious and not hidden by grass. I opened the hives today and know that the bees are well and active, but the sight of this many bodies all of a sudden was disturbing. The bodies on the landing are dead bees as well as all those bodies on the deck.

Here's a closer view of the bodies in front of Bermuda.

Today there was a lot of bee activity around 3 PM but the skies clouded up and the bees went back indoors to huddle. It will not be as cold tonight (expected low of 40 degrees F) so there may be even more housecleaning tomorrow.


The bodies look so sad to me - their little eyes are still shining and often as in the picture above their wings are outstretched but they are as dead as can be and are just waiting for the wren who likes to eat them. Today I saw a downy woodpecker leave the nearby pinetree which grows through a hole in my deck and land on the deck itself to feast on dead bees.

Beekeeping Short Course at Botanical Garden

Last year I got started with my bees by taking the "short course" offered by what is now my beekeeping group: the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers. This year the short course is on

Saturday, January 20,
from 8:30 - 4:30
at the Atlanta Botanical Garden
1345 Piedmont Ave. N.E
Atlanta, Ga 30309

The course is great to help you get started in beekeeping. I learned how to build the parts of the hive that are essential (how to put together a frame, for example); how to think about the year in the apiary; how to consider handling various pests and bee diseases; when and how to feed the bees; when the honey flow starts; the biology of the bee; and all about pollination (did you know that 80% of what we eat is in some way dependent on bees to pollinate some plant involved in that product?)

There are also great door prizes and lots of them. Last year I won a complete set of deep super frames (looked like a pile of specially cut wood to me, but they were easy to construct and quite helpful). I'm one of those people who never wins anything, but I did at the short course as well as did many others.

My job for the club is to put together the Goody Bag for the course. We do have lots of goodies - from tiny jars of honey put up by one of our members, PN Williams, to literature from the National Honey Board and the Georgia Dept of Agriculture.

If there are any of you out there who'd like to come, here's where you register. A day of bee education like this is not to be missed!

The Birds and the Bees

In the circle of life, everything in nature is part of a great life/death cycle. During warmer days (of which we have had many in Atlanta) the bees clean out the hives and leave the dead bodies on the ground a short distance from the hive. By having my hives on the deck, I can see the collection of bodies. To see them better, click on the picture above to enlarge it.

A wren has a feast on my deck, eating the bee bodies. I tried and tried to get her picture while she was out on the deck, but my camera against the glass of the door always startled her. She ran to safety under one of the hives. If you look closely (or click to enlarge) the picture above, you can see her. She is to the right of the space beneath the hive and her little eye is glistening. She enjoyed the dead bees to her fullest!

Beekeeping Christmas ornaments

This year three friends gave me beekeeping ornaments for my tree. The first is a female beekeeper angel! This is wonderful because I used to have an "angel" tree. You can see her veil, her wings, and the skep in her hand.

The second ornament is a beekeeping glove with a beehive in the hand and a bee on top of the glove.

The third is this wonderful "Bee Merry" message

All of these ornaments certainly made my Christmas a merrier one.