Billy Davis' Robber Screen

What a strange honey year!  After two years of drought, now we have so much rain in Atlanta that it has hurt the bees.  Many hives were unable to put up enough stores for winter and it's prime time for robbing.

Jeff and I keep saying we needed to put the robber screens that Billy Davis uses on our hives.  We put it off and put it off (I am deathly afraid of the staple gun).

While I was in Lithuania, my last hive from the Fatbeeman was robbed out and died.  I think his supplier in south Georgia didn't do well by him this year - one of my packages was the one that had a virgin queen at our Chastain site and the package I installed at home never did well.  They were just limping along, and were easy victims for robbers.  The ground under the hive was covered with wax shards and dead bees on the bottom board.  In a way, if robbers were going to pick one of my hives to destroy, that was the best one.

So Jeff and I put Billy Davis robber screens on almost all of our hives last weekend.  The hive below is the Northlake Mall Swarm.  Billy says for the screen to be effective the hive entrance must be about four inches from the edge of the screen.  This hive has an entrance reducer on it (as do all my hives this year) and the opening is under the bees clustered on the screen.

At first the bees are really confused.  How to get to Mama?  They aim for the entrance but that isn't working so they try the upper part of the hive to see if an entrance has materialized up there.

But after a week, the bees have gotten it figured out.  They've been going in the side and bearding under the robber screen (and on top of it!)

Today at 4:30 - typical time for orientation - there was a frantic energy around this particular hive.  I'm not usually home at this time.  I do have breaks in my day, but my busiest time at the office is from about 2 - 7 at night, so I miss orientation.  Consequently I haven't really seen bees orient since we put the robber screens on the hives.

The other hives in my backyard were orienting at 4:30 and they didn't look as frantic as the Northlake hive.  The bees outside the hive were buzzing angrily.  Now, I've seen robbing and it's frantic, but you also see bees actively fighting with each other and falling to the ground; you see dead bees in front of the hive; and a growing pile of wax accumulates under the hive from wax cappings.  

But this hive has a closed screened bottom board, so I couldn't see wax cappings.  And although there were not dead bees, the buzz was angry and loud.  

The area under the screen is PACKED with bees and bees were actively guarding the available entry.  You can kind of see the bees under the screen in the photo above.

So just to be safe, I threw a wet sheet over the hive, covering the side entrances and waited it out.  I left the front open since there was no entry there and I could monitor the bee population and activity. 

Of course, if this were orientation and not robbing, now the hive bees also don't have access to the hive.

Around 6:30, the activity was back to normal.

In robbing the robber bees keep trying to access the entry of the hive because they smell the honey.  The hive bees go for the pheromone of the queen so they will search different ways to get to the queen.  But typically robber bees just focus on the entrance.

So was this robbing and Billy Davis' robbery screen as well as my wet sheet stopped the action?  Or was this robbing and the screen effectively kept the robbers out?  Or was this just orientation of a strong hive?

I don't know but I felt good about having the robber screen on the hive.   Thanks, Billy.

Maybe tomorrow I'll pull the block to the screened bottom board out and see if there are tons of wax shards there.

Weather Channel Bee Story

On Tuesday a crew from the Weather Channel came over to my house and filmed my beehives for a story they were doing about a video of an electron microscope view of the bee.  It was a lot of fun.

Dave Malkoff and Kevin, his camera guy, came over and took footage of me, opening a beehive.  I enjoyed both of them.  We even put a microphone right up in the entry of the hive so they could get the buzzing sound.  The bees didn't like it because the microphone blocked part of their entry, so they buzzed more than usual.

This photo came from a tweet by Dave Malkoff  [ TWITTER: @Malkoff ]  and was taken by Kevin Bond, his camera man.

You can see the video on YouTube.  Dave was inspired by this video to get interested in the hairy honey bee.

Make Hay While the Sun Shines

The solar wax melter would be getting rusty at my house if styrofoam were something that rusts.  We have had the rainiest summer I can remember.  It rains almost every day.  You'd think we were in Seattle, but our rain in Atlanta is rather fierce, unlike Seattle, and usually comes with thunder, lightning and heavy sheets of rain.

The fact is that Atlanta has had 41.28 inches of rain in 2013 through July 8.  It has apparently rained every 2.6 days and we are on pace to have the wettest year since 1879.  Not good for the bees or the solar wax melter.

There have only been a few solar wax melter worthy days in the past months. Tuesday was finally one of those days, so I put out two wax melters and set them to work.

This has been a rainy summer in many parts of the country, but especially in the Southeast.  This year, for the first time in the six or so years that my solar wax melter video has been up on YouTube, I've gotten several emails from people who say their wax melter isn't working.  One of them said she had left it outdoors in the hot summer NIGHT of 80 degrees and the wax didn't melt.  Another said that she was experiencing heavy moisture condensation under the glass, but that the wax didn't melt.

Seems like it is important to emphasize that the solar wax melter got its name because the SUN is required for it to work.  The temperature has to be high enough all day, it's true.  But for the solar wax melter to work, the sun must shine for most, if not all of the day.

On cloud covered days when the sun peeks in and out of the clouds, I often also come home to find moisture condensed inside the SWM and the wax unmelted.  I just leave it out for the next sunny day and the wax does melt in the sun.

This time I put out the filters from filtering honey to let the bees clean it up in my bee yard.  When I returned to get the filter, the wax was completely dry and cleaned:

This felt much less wasteful to me than washing the wax and letting the bits of remaining honey run down the drain.  I crunched the wax into balls and put them onto the tops of paper towels on Tuesday.  I also put broken up sheets of wax from melting old brood combs.

At the end of hot and sunny Tuesday (finally), I had some lovely wax.  Here is some of it.

Visit to Ancient Beekeeping Museum

Our last "bee" event took place as a visit to the Museum of Ancient Beekeeping.  It was a fascinating place, full of sculptures of wooden images of beekeepers and pagan bee gods.  The hives were in tree trunks like those of Romas.

Here is an article from Bee Culture about Lithuanian bee culture and the bee museum.

Here's a slide show.  I haven't put any captions on the items yet - it's been a long day and a half of posting photos - but I'll do that later.  For now, you can probably figure out what everything is.




Created with flickr slideshow.
We ended our Lithuanian beekeeping tour with a dinner at a restaurant in Vilnius.  Simona who set the tour up, joined us and we got to recap our experience with her.  It was delightful and I am so glad that we went.  I grabbed a random citizen on the street as we returned to the van and had him take a photo of all of us together on the last day.

Visit to a Lithuanian Bee Supply Store: Wilara

Visit to a Lithuanian Bee Supply Store: Wilara, a set on Flickr.

We don't even have a bee supply place like this in Atlanta. You can get some supplies from Buster's Bees in Jonesboro or drive to Pigeon Mountain Trading Company in Chattanooga, but there is no real bee supply place here. I did go to Brushy Mountain when EAS was in Boone, NC, but that is the only supply store I've visited in eight years of beekeeping!

You may have noticed that my slide shows have changed.  Google's Picasa no longer makes slide shows or embeds them.  Flickr is my new choice.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Nine Honey Apiary Visit near the border of Latvia

Nine Honey Apiary Visit near the border of Latvia, a set on Flickr.  To see the slides with labels, click here.  To see the slides, look at the slide below.

The pictures tell the story of this lovely visit to another apiary in Lithuania. This apiary is very near the border of Latvia. We went to their bees and watched them take frames of honey for harvest. We had fun talking to them about bees and getting the feel for their beekeeping approaches.

Like Solys, they also use chemicals in their hives. They treat with Amitraz every two or three years. They have about 30 hives in their apiary.

If you click on a slide, you can see the label.

Created with flickr slideshow.