I’ve really enjoyed several of the books I’ve read by Sue Hubbell.  She’s a writer now in her 70′s, who was a librarian at Brown University until 1972, when she and her husband moved to the Ozarks to raise bees and sell honey for a living.  After they divorced, she stayed on and worked her 300+ hives, living in the hills of the Ozarks and becoming attuned to the country life.  She’s one of those authors with a really clear sense of voice; though sometimes her thoughts aren’t exactly linear, and bits and pieces of other thoughts get strewn into the essay, it’s never hard to follow.  It’s like someone writing you a letter, or maybe just sitting down with you, drinking a cup of tea, and telling you a story.

Among her other books I’ve enjoyed were “A Country Year”, which is a book of essays covering a typical year in her life, and “Broadsides from the Other Orders”, which is a book about bugs.  Yes bugs.  She’s not an entomologist, not even a scientist, but she’s one of those creatures that are endangered and perhaps almost extinct: a naturalist.  She observes.  She hypothesizes.  She studies.  She experiences.  And then she passes it on.

Having enjoyed those books so much, I don’t know why it took me so long to both discover she’d written one about bees and to read it.  I picked up “A Book of Bees” at Powell’s a few weeks ago, used, and put it on top of my growing stack of to-be-read books.  Fortunately, I don’t follow a FIFO strategy with books to be read, and I started reading it not too long after.

Aside from being a great read on its own merits, it was interesting to me because of the timeframe in which it was written and about which it was written.  It was published in 1998, but references 1988.  That was before Colony Collapse Disorder.  It was when honey was growing ever cheaper because of foreign imports.  It was long, long before keeping bees became trendy again.  It was before much of the uproar about insecticides killing bees, and even before the bulk of GMO crops were introduced (they began in 1994.)   So it’s both strange to read about beekeeping practices and thoughts on bees from almost 25 years ago, and a bit eerie to realize how clairvoyant she was.

“Some agricultural pesticides work so rapidly that the bees die in the field, but with others the bees struggle back and die in convulsions in their hive, where, as long as workers remain alive inside, they are carried out and piled in growing heaps in front of the entrance.  The honey and pollen may be contaminated, and the work force so depleted that the hive will probably die out, even if the workers have not brought home insecticides so potent that they will kill on contact all the larvae and developing brood, although that sometimes happens too.”

So even then, beekeepers recognized the dangers of insecticides to their bees.  It’s just taken the problem of CCD to get more attention to the matter, perhaps.

And she talks about swarms, with the usual resigned mild annoyance of the commercial beekeeper.  Swarms were not appreciated in the late 1980′s, for any reason; today, I can catch a swarm and turn around and sell it for $75 or $80 easily, even un-hived.  I don’t, though, I keep them!   Swarms are sought after by hobbyists and smaller-scale commercial keepers, and there’s actual competition on swarm lists.  The old rhyme:

A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a cow and a bottle (bundle) of hay
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly

still pretty much holds true, though most of us will still try to baby a July or even August swarm through the winter.  Sue says, “A farmer today would scorn a deal offering him a swarm of bees, even in May, for a cow and a bottle (bundle) of hay.  Cows at sixty cents a pound and hay at a dollar fifty a bale are pricey.  And a package of bees (the equivalent to a swarm, but better because it contains a new queen) is not. “

Granted, I can’t imagine anyone actually trading a cow for a swarm, prices being what they are, but a package of bees can cost $85 and up, and queens can run anywhere from $5 to $ridiculous.  The assertion that a package of bees is “better” because it contains a new queen is interesting; certainly, she’s probably got more laying years ahead of her, but she isn’t related to the package bees with her, nor are they necessarily related to one another.  A swarm has flown because the hive is strong enough to do so (usually).

I know how lucky I am to live where bees have forage much of the year.  She continues, “Early, or May, swarms have a chance of building up and proving useful to a beekeeper.  A swarm of bees in July, when the flow of nectar from flowers has dried up, could not even keep themselves alive, let alone produce any extra honey to be harvested.  Indeed, they would have to be fed lest they starve to death.” Our nectar flow doesn’t dry up here until August or even September, sometimes even later.  The bad news with that is that our winters are usually mild, so the bees are more active and require more food to see them through a winter.  I had one hive starve last year because they just weren’t populous enough to build up reserves, or keep themselves warm.

“In the days of the rhyme, there were no bee breeders who sold tidy packages of bees, and picking up a swarm was one of the best ways to acquire them.”

And it is again, at least for the organic, more hands-off beekeepers I know.  Me, I’ve never had a package of bees and wouldn’t have a clue what to do with them.  I have installed seven swarms, and inherited a full hive, but have never seen a queen in a queen cage, at least not in person.  I have no idea about the different temperaments of the various breeds of bees like Italian and Carniolan, though I’m aware of their existence.  I have only seen a couple of my queens at all, ever, since I let the hives decide when to requeen.  It’s not a better way, it’s not a worse way, it’s just a way.  My bees are here to help preserve their genetics, help pollinate the local gardens, provide me with a hobby and dinner party conversation topics, and maybe give me some honey if they have the time and energy to do so.  Commercial keepers see things differently, is all.

One last thing that caught my eye when reading this book.  She mentions a time a hundred years ago when bees mysteriously died out.  I can’t tell if she means just in general, they died mysteriously because they didn’t have the forensic science to know about viruses and bacteria, or if it was a larger scale die out.  I’ll have to research it and find out.

“Fashions in beekeeping change, as they do in everything else, and a hundred years ago in this country, when colonies died out mysteriously from moths and disease, the apiarist considered himself lucky to have hives which would swarm because it meant that he could replenish his dwindling stock of bees.”

If you’re curious about bees but don’t really want to read a whole book about the nitty gritty of how to build a super, what to do with it, how to requeen, what medications to apply…this is a great book.  It’s a smooth, easy read and is just an interesting window into the life of a rare female commercial beekeeper, who both appreciates them for the livelihood they provide, and communes with them easily as a unique and beautiful species.

Today was the Solstice, and coincidentally it was warm enough to declare it Hive Day.  The bad news is, I woke up with a screaming migraine.  The good news is, I took a few painkillers, got an ice pack and went back to bed for a few hours.  By the time my headache was gone, it was midday and the perfect time to start on the hives.  Working on the hives in the middle of the day means the foragers are out, and the hive is a little less crowded than it would be earlier in the day.  Must be why I love bees…they like to get a late start, just like me.

First we took care of the hives at our house.  We peeked in the Langstroth, and yes, they’re building comb on the bottom of the stupid inner cover.  Sigh.  We simply lifted the whole inner cover and one hive deep, and slid the second deep under it.  The hive now has two deep bodies, a hollow super, and the inner cover.  Eventually, we’ll treat the inner cover and the super as if it were a Warre box and remove it whole, cut out the comb, and replace it properly.  Later.  For now, I see that they’re happy and bringing in bits of pollen, and all seems well.

We moved on to the middle hive, which is the newest swarm.  If you missed the Facebook update, that’s the swarm I dropped on my bare left arm.  Word of advice:  don’t do that.  I got 10 stings for my trouble, though I didn’t react over much to them.  Anyway, the swarm is building beautiful, surprisingly straight comb in the bottom box of one, and did NOT settle in the lid as I had feared.   When we hived them, most of them didn’t seem to want to go into the box, and wound up bearded all over the front of the hive.  Peeking in, they do have one box nearly full of comb.  I’m a bit concerned that the queen might have absconded with part of the swarm, as they seem a bit sparse for as large a swarm as they were, but 1) they’re bringing in pollen, which generally indicates brood to feed and 2) it’s hard to judge how full they’d be if all the foragers weren’t out in force.  I’ll just cross my fingers and hope.  Right now they have three hive bodies, so they have plenty of room to work with.

Checked on the second Warre, which contains the swarm I caught at my parents’ house last year.  It was full to the top at the beginning of spring, but the weather was so awful they’ve gone through a lot of the honey that was in the top box.  Given the weather right now (overcast, muggy, plenty warm) and the fact that the wild blackberries are blooming like crazy, I expect them to be able to fill it with honey in a week or two, at which point I’ll hopefully harvest it and then give them a new empty box to work with.

After we got done with those three hives, we went over to my folks’ house.   The hive there is a Langstroth I got from someone last year.  They said it had been “a while” since they’d worked it, and they just wanted it gone.  They said it swarmed every year, which means it’s strong.  But, the wood just flat needs to be replaced, and the comb is so old it’s black.  Ew.   The renovations are something of a new thing to me, so we’re taking it in stages.

Today, we lifted off the top box and set it on the ground, then lifted up the bottom box, removed the old bottom board, and replaced it with a new, screened board with a sloped landing porch.  After that, I put a new, empty, clean brood box on top of the bottom board, and we resettled the two old nasty boxes on top of the new one.  That’s a Warre-type box replacement, where you add new boxes to the bottom.  Usually with Langstroth, you swap the hive bodies, and if you do want to add a new one, you add it to the top.  This is kind of an experiment.  We’ll see what happens.

After we did that, we took off the lid, inner lid, and the old rank nasty feeder box.  I replaced them with a deep inner lid (where I can baggie-feed or patty-feed them if I need to) and new outer lid, and left them alone.   We brought the old nasty wood home, and we will be burning it soon. Some of the wood is rotten, and it’s just in bad shape.

In a few weeks, we’ll go over and see what’s what.  The goal is to take off the inner/outer lid, remove the old top brood box  and set it on a sheet of plywood next to a brand new empty box, then replace the inner/outer lid on what’s left of the hive while I go through the nasty box frame by frame.  Honey frames will be uncapped and set out in the yard for the hive to scavenge, then melted down later. Their place will be taken in the new box by empty , foundationless frames.  Brood frames will be put into the new box as-is, including their attendant bees.  Then once the new box has 10 frames either empty or full of brood, we’ll remove the inner/outer lid again, lift the remaining oogy nasty brood box, and put the newly renovated box in the middle of the stack, between the remaining old box and the lower box we just put in place today, then replace the inner/outer lid, so we’ll have one oogy box on top and two new ones below.

A few weeks after that, I’ll again see what’s what.  I’ll probably repeat the entire procedure, but ideally the top box will have little brood in it at that point, and I’ll be able to just ditch the entire top box.  We’ll see.  If not, hopefully I’ll be able to find a place for brood-heavy frames in the lower two boxes.  The key will be to make sure the queen isn’t discarded or squashed!

It’s a mellow hive, thus far anyway.  We futzed with it and completely ripped their house apart from top to bottom.  We gave them new hardware.  We rocked and shook and poked at their house.  And they mostly just got confused because we changed the appearance of their home.  Once they got that figured out, back to mellow.  None of them challenged me at all, or got up in my face.  They have quite an abundance of big fat happy drones, and small happy workers.  They’re not bringing in tons of pollen either, but they are bringing in some.  I did see at least one drone larvae when we opened the hive, because it was wedged into the burr comb between boxes (not where you want to find brood, really) and I ripped open that cell when we were rearranging the hives.  Bummer.

At any rate, I don’t expect to harvest honey out of either Langstroth this year, but I’m hopeful that at least the one older Warre will generate a box full for us soon!

Today was the first decent-ish weather we’ve had in some time.  No rain, and it got up to near 70 degrees.  It was overcast (like always), but it was the first spring day of working in the garden in earnest.  And since I can dig and plant when it’s drizzling or cool, I decided that I’d better get my keister in gear and open up the hives while I had a chance.

I have four hives on my property:  one Top Bar, and three Warres.  The Top Bar was abuzz with activity, though it had quite a bit of bee poop up and down the front of the hive.  Bit of problem with moisture in the hive, I think…they’ve had a fair bit of feces on the front of the hive the past two winters.  But they seem happy, and though I didn’t open up the hive, I watched for a while, and they’re hauling in pollen and generally active as can be.

These cells of capped honey look weirdly swollen. I discarded them. From Hive #1.

The three Warre hives live in the Northwest corner of my property.  I had one little shorty with two boxes, and two taller ones with three boxes.  I’d decided to get all three of them down to two boxes before winter, but well, the rainy season hit before I had a chance, and  hit hard, and stuck around for months, so that never happened.  Oh well.  I did manage to harvest one box of honey back in October, from the strongest of my three Warre hives.   Today I investigated all three of them, and discovered that two were dead.  Not just “a little dead”, but dead dead.  “This hive wouldn’t voom if you put four thousand volts through it!  It’s bleedin’ demised!  It’s not pining, it’s passed on.  This hive is no more.  It has ceased to be.  It’s expired and gone to meet it’s maker.  This is a late hive.  It’s a stiff.  Bereft of life, it rests in peace.”*

More of the weirdly bubbled-out capped honey. You can see where brood would have been below it. From Hive #1.

The first one was no big shocker.  The littlest hive just didn’t make it.  It had never really recovered from the nightmare swarm capture.  It never built up more than a single box of comb, plus a little bit.  The ball of bees went from a giant swarm that wouldn’t even fit in a box down to a double handful fairly rapidly, then hovered there for several months.  When I opened it up today, it was just…void.  There was a little comb in the upper box, but not much.  The lower box had no brood, no bees, and only a bit of capped honey.  There were a handful of bees in the comb, buried deep in the cells, which makes it appear as if they starved.  I’d have an easier time buying that if they weren’t a few cells over from perfectly reasonable capped honey.  But really, it was a failure to thrive.  I’d fed them fondant patties and even comb honey, but in vain.   I cleaned out the boxes, put them back together, and will fill the hive again this spring.

Moldy, icky, empty ex-brood comb from the middle box of the dead hive. Hive #2.

I assessed the frames as I was dismantling the hive.  I ended up burning the whole shebang, the bars and the comb and honey, and scouring out the inside of the hive itself.  I’m sure they were done in by just being weak, but I don’t know, and I don’t want to pass on anything.  Some of the honey in this hive looked…swollen.  Usually capped honeycomb is flattish across the top of a cell.  These bars had patches where the honey looked pooched outward, almost like a brood cell.  I opened them up, and they are definitely honey, and it looked fine, but I’ve never seen this weird bubble-shaped honey cell, so I erred on the side of caution and upended the whole box into a fire.  Sad.

This was a brood comb. The moldy spots are dead bees or brood in the cells. Ew. Hive #2.

The second hive was a bit more shocking to find empty.  It had been my smallest swarm last year, and the first one I caught, but it had also been my strongest producer by far.  I harvested a full box off it last October, and they left me with another full box when they died.  They don’t appear to have starved, as there are no bees in the “tails out” position to indicate they were trying to sop up the last bits of honey.  The bottom of the box was full of dead bees.  I am tempted to blame moisture solely, as the inside of the bottom 2/3 of the hive was quite moldy, but the walls of the hive weren’t wet, and the quilt was still functional, so I don’t know.  Seems more like the bees died, and because they weren’t keeping house or warming the hive, mold set in on the non-honey portions of the comb and on the dead bees.

More dead brood comb. None of those bees are alive. Hive #1.

I discarded the bottom two boxes in the same fiery manner as the contents of the first hive.   The top box was full of mostly usable honey, no mold to speak of, and a few dead bees that had buried themselves in cells and died, then molded.  Weird.   I carved out the spots with the dead bees, and was left with most of a box full of what looked like perfectly normal capped comb honey, which I crushed up and filtered as normal, so not a total loss.  Well, except for the fact that I’m down by 2/5 as far as hives go this year!  (The Langstroth at my parents’ house is alive, and the next task is to renovate it and give them new frames and boxes, because I know the stuff they’re using is gnarly beyond belief.)

This is looking at the comb from the underside of the box. Hive #2.

I’ll be doing a little investigating into causes, but chalking it up mostly to a learning curve.  There appears to be no dead brood to speak of, so I’m not worried about AFB or chalkbrood.  Doubtful it was mites, as they haven’t been a problem.  Moisture?  Damaged queen in the first hive?  I’m attending my first Clark County Bee Keeper’s Association meeting in a couple of weeks, we’ll see if they have anything to say on the matter (aside from calling me names for being an organic beekeeper….seems that’s not real popular in our area.  *heh*)  In the meantime, I’ll be renovating the Langstroth at my parents’ house, and then looking to restock my empty hives with more swarms in the next month or two.

*Apologies to Monty Python.

Something laid eggs on the capped honey. Ew. Hive #1

This was a brood comb, with honey stored above. Hive #1.

A cluster of dead bees, shrouded in mold. Hive #1.

Last week we had some very cold weather, with the chance of snow.  Snowpocalypse, if you listened to the news.  Right.  We never saw any snow where I live, but it did get down considerably cold for a few days.  I worried a bit about my smallest hive at that point, but there wasn’t much I could do in the way of opening up the hive, as it would chill them terribly;  given how tiny a hive it is, I didn’t want to take the chance.

So this week rolls around, and the temperatures are up in the 50′s.  In mid-January.  Good grief.  That’s warm enough the bees are stirring, stretching their wings, going for elimination flights (think “finally get to poo outside the hive for the first time in weeks”), cleaning the dead bees off their porches and out of the bottoms of the hives, and generally getting busy.  The bad news is, it will also make them more active and in turn cause them to consume more of their stores of honey, because there are no flowers out now for them to eat.

Since I have that one hive which is really, really small (only one brood box, and even that wasn’t completely full before winter set in) and which I think has been the target of raiding, I decided that particular hive might need some TLC to get through the winter.  While I’m not generally a proponent of feeding the bees, that’s  because I prefer to leave them their own honey to eat rather than stealing their hard-earned natural food source and making them eat nutrient-void sugar water.  In this case, the little tiny hive didn’t store much honey at all this year, and I’m somewhat concerned that they’ll run out before there are flowers for them to harvest.  I’m also basically out of the honey I harvested this fall, and I have no easy way to feed something liquid back to them at this point anyway.  So, I made them some Bee Candy (fondant patties) to give them, so I could place it inside the hive on top of the bars of the box they’re living in and hopefully get them some extra calories.

My experience making the bee candy was less than stellar.  First off, I didn’t line the pan well enough, and then I didn’t let the syrup cool enough before I poured it into the pan, so it all ran around behind the waxed paper and made the paper completely pointless.  Then it wouldn’t set up.  Just.  Would.   Not.  I poured some of it out onto parchment paper squares, thinking I’d put the thick blobby syrup-coated paper in the hive.  Well, it was thick, but it oozed so far eventually it ran onto the counter a bit.  But then it started to SET.  It got crystalline, and when it was done, I had some cakes of sugar I could easily peel off the paper and take out to the hive.   So…ultimately a success for my purposes, but not exactly what I’d deem the best way to do things!

Today I took one of the cakes of sugar out to the teeny hive.    Given the low levels of activity, I just rolled up my shirtsleeves and tucked my hair into a cap, and had Todd help me open the hive.  It’s a Warre hive, so first I checked the quilt and filling for moisture levels.  The fir chips I’d put in there as insulation were fairly wet, but the quilt itself was dry, and the inside of the hive had no moisture on the walls at all, so yay!   Gonna equip my one Langstroth hive with a similar quilt for moisture control in the spring, I think.  After that, I peeped in at the bees.   I was surprised, they were fairly industrious and building comb upward from the bottom box.  (Not the best way to build comb, but at least I can tell they’ve been active instead of just laying in the hive dying or something. )   The comb I had put in there last fall to help feed them a little was nowhere in evidence *, though it was probably just disassembled and remade into that bottom-up, empty comb I saw.   I put the sugar cake in next to the bits of comb they’d built, and closed the hive back up.  I hope that by feeding them inside the hive like that they won’t be as prone to robbing anymore.  Last year I made the thoughtless mistake of putting a piece of honeycomb on their porch.  It had broken off when I was inspecting a hive, and I just put it next to their entrance.  Not the wisest move.  Pretty sure the other two nearby hives saw that as Open Season on the smallest hive.

I didn’t open up either of the other two Warre hives.  They were both abuzz with activity and bees, and their porches were clean-swept, so I have no particular concerns about them and just left them alone.  One of those was the hive I took the 3/4 full deep off of last fall, and they both have three boxes full to the top of comb, honey, brood, and bees.  (Well, the brood and bees have retracted for winter, but they’re still pretty full!)

I did go over and peep at the Top Bar hive.  Their activity level out front was rather low, but that’s attributable to a couple of things,  after further examination.  One, their winter cluster is in the very BACK of the hive this year, as I verified by opening up the observation window.   And two, they’ve almost completely shut down their hive entrance with propolis, so that there’s literally about a 2″ gap for bees to enter and exit on the West side of the opening.  I’m sure they’ve done that primarily because they get so much rain and weather coming in aimed at their front door that it helps keep the water out, but it also may help them with the yellow jackets and wasps that tend to frequent that side of the yard.   And though having somewhat fewer bees than at their peak, they are still basically stuffed to the gills, and will likely swarm in spring if I don’t do a split.

I should go over and check on my Langstroth hive if I get a chance, too, but it’s 30 minutes away in my parents’ backyard.  I have big plans for it this spring which will need to be put into action as soon as we are likely to only have days in the 40′s and 50′s.  First part of it involves inserting entirely new, foundationless deeps under the two ancient crusty deeps, and then removing the top nasty brood box as they vacate it for the new stuff.  Repeat to get rid of the second nasty brood box.   Then if we have time I’ll add a queen excluder and a super.  We’ll see.  Mostly I’m concerned with rehabilitating their yucky neglected home more than I am with getting honey out of them this year!

BEE CANDY

• 2 cups sugar (I use organic sugar, which is evaporated cane juice)
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 Tbls corn syrup (not HFCS)

Put the ingredients in a saucepan, and bring to a boil while stirring.  When all the sugar has dissolved and it boils, clip on a candy thermometer and cook without stirring to 235 degrees**.  If you cook too long, you get caramel, so watch it.   Allow to cool until it thickens and begins to turn white.  Line a small loaf pan with waxed paper, pour into the loaf pan.  Cut off a slice and feed to the bees by laying it on top of the bars/frames where they are balled up for the winter.

* I have been told by some keepers that “bees don’t recycle wax”.  Well, apparently they do.  I imagine that they prefer to build new stuff, especially when there is pollen and nectar to feed and sustain them, but they do reuse stuff.   The hunks I put in this hive didn’t magically walk away.  After a bit of research, I’ve found other keepers who say they’ve observed the same thing, bees recycling wax under certain circumstances.  In this case, it was pristine and beautiful, freshly built honeycomb, and it was inserted into the hive at a time of year when frankly, they don’t have much else to do.

** I have also been told by some keepers that you can’t boil the sugar water for bees, because it will “caramelize and kill them.” I’ve seen it repeated, but never any explanation as to how or why.  I can see the bees maybe not liking the burnt taste, but it’s still…sugar.  And carbon.  It doesn’t magically become something toxic by boiling it.   Also, all the bee candy recipes I’ve seen call for boiling and achieving 230-245 degrees.  I suspect an Old Wives Tale being passed around from keeper to keeper, here.  If someone knows differently, I’d love to hear the explanation.

On a similar note, one keeper also said that Karo Syrup would kill the bees, but in the same breath said it was fine to use corn syrup.  Um.  Karo is a brand of corn syrup.  I know, as I’m a cook and rather picky about my ingredients, and pay 4X as much for Karo as the store brand of “light corn syrup” *because* it’s corn syrup without HFCS.  It does contain vanilla, but I find it unlikely that would harm bees.  My guess is that person knows that HFCS isn’t good for bees, and is running off the old information from when Karo used to contain HFCS.

We’ve had a beautiful stretch of weather here in Battle Ground this October.  Since I was sick for the last stretch of decent weather, I hadn’t really had a chance to do the final fall check of the beehives before fall, so when the chance came to do a final sweep and harvest, I took it.

The first small hive is still small.  There are eight frames in one box full, and that’s it .  They haven’t built into the second box at all.  They were the swarm that was massive, and that I had such trouble getting to go into their box, and that stung both me and Todd.  Same swarm that had to be hived during a downpour in the dark.  They’ve never really recovered.

The middle and biggest hive had four boxes, all full.  They were a small swarm I got early in the season this spring, but boy, have they made up for it!  Must have a really robust queen.  The third and middle sized hive has three boxes, and seems to be somewhere between the other two in terms of production.

Since the biggest hive had four boxes and they’re unlikely to need all that honey or be able to reach it in the cold of winter, I took off one box.  Learned that the best, or perhaps only, way to harvest Warre hives is to remove and cut apart the entire box.  To this end, we lifted off the top box, set it on a board and removed it from the hives about 30 or 40 feet.  I then cleaned up the broken comb on the top of the hive, gave a large chunk of honeycomb to the smallest hive (inside the top empty box), and put the hive back together.

Once I got over to the box, it was apparent I didn’t have very long to disassemble the comb before we’d be swarmed.  I cut out the comb and placed it in a large bowl, leaving the empty and uncapped comb on the table with the empty box and the top bars.

I took the comb over near the porch and with Todd’s help I managed to brush off the bees long enough to get all the comb into the house, which was an interesting prospect.  Once we got all the comb into the house bee-free, I stripped off my gloves, which were covered in honey, and left them on the porch with the sticky smoker, hive tool, and brush, for the bees to clean.

I went around to see where I’d left the hive box, and was very, very glad I had thought to move them away from the hives!  We are in a nectar dearth right now, even though there are some flowers available.  The bees seem to know it’s just about their last chance to get any nectar stored for the winter. So when they smelled the honey spilled all over the table, they went nuts.  We had a cloud of bees surrounding the honey, and little bee-fights breaking out all over.  Bees were pairing off and grappling, falling off the table onto the ground.  Later I came back to see that the table was littered with dozens of corpses of bees, and I felt rather bad about it.  The only other option though really would have been to not return the honey to the bees, and that wouldn’t have made much sense either.  I did note that most of the dead bees were extremely small, smaller than most of the ones I’ve seen in my hives, and I wondered if perhaps they were “outsider” bees from outside my honey yard.

The next day, the yellow jackets were the next wave of the honey cleanup.  They were out there literally cutting the bee corpses apart into manageable chunks and carrying them away to their lairs.  Ew.  There were legs, and random heads and thoraxes and antennae and abdomens all over the table, but it was obvious that there were fewer than half of the dead bees left.  Nice to have some critter to clean up all stages for me!

This is my first fall with more than one hive, so I’ve had to be more aware of the strength of my hives and watch for robbing as well.  I’m hoping that by opening the small hive and feeding them “internally”, I’ll be able to baby them through the winter without attracting bees from the other hives.  We’ll see!  I might have to feed them some fondant patties, but I did save a quart of honey just for them as well.

Lots going on with the bees around the place!  A week or 10 days ago, I noticed that my first Top Bar hive (Laure, for lack of a better name) was surprisingly quiet.  That was the hive that swarmed weirdly this spring, and has been my most assertive, full hive, so it was a bit strange.  Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it was also very, very drone-heavy.  As in one in four of the bees I could see coming and going was a drone, with his giant fuzzy cuddly body and that “OMG, I’m ALL EYES” head.  That’s not normal, especially not at this time of year.  I peeked into the hive both through the view window and by pulling a few bars, and noticed that they had brood comb in front and back, and that there seemed to be a lot of spotty drone cells on various bars, and that there was very little in the way of capped honey.  (I blame the drones.  Honey-sucking couch surfers!)  So I got to doing a little research.

From what I turned up, the primary suspects when you have an explosion of drones and a dwindling of general population are 1) an infertile queen or 2) no queen and a laying worker.  Drat.  Neither of those situations boded well for the hive, and I wasn’t really sure how to go about fixing it.  Or how to tell which was the case, if either.

I have great confidence in the bees’ ability to fix problems with the dynamics of their hive, but if their queen had died without leaving any brood of sufficient youth to create an “emergency” queen, there would be nothing they could do, really, beyond a worker starting to lay in a vain attempt to fill the void.  Unfortunately, worker bees are never fertile, and the unfertilized eggs become drones.  (Drones are a haploid creature, with only half the complement of chromosomes that a worker or queen has, because they result from only the female’s genetic material, as they are the result of unfertilized eggs laid by queens or, less commonly, workers.)

So on Sunday, we took my daughter to the Clark County Fair, and there I made sure to stop by the Bee Barn and chat with the folks there.  First up was the 2010 American Honey Queen,  Lisa Schluttenhofer,  a charming young woman from Indiana.  She’s 20, and has been keeping bees for 8 years.  She suggested either requeening, or removing the laying worker, and told me how to tell which was going on.  Apparently laying workers often lay more than one egg per cell, and generally have a spotty laying pattern, whereas infertile queens usually lay in a normal pattern but all drone cells and one egg per cell.  Didn’t know that.   She also told me how to get rid of a laying worker, if I have one.

Take the hive, frame by frame, and be sure there’s no queen.  That’s no easy task, finding a queen, but in this case you’d be pretty sure there wasn’t one.  Even if by chance there were, she can fly and has been out of the hive at least once for a mating flight, so it won’t be a problem.  Take the hive body or frames away from the hive, out of line of sight, and then shake all the bees out onto the ground.  All of them.  Reassemble the hive and leave it alone for a while.  The foraging bees and guard bees and all will find their way back shortly, but the nurse bees, who have never been outside the hive, won’t.  The laying worker is a nurse bee whose ovaries have been wrongly stimulated to operate, so she won’t get back.  I’m told they can’t actually fly due to the ovarian stimulation, but I haven’t verified that.   Then, after the laying worker is gone, requeen with a new queen.

So great.  Where do I get a queen in August, anyway?  Ruhl’s is out by now.  I happened to ask another beekeeper there, and he had some queen cells that were almost ready to hatch, at crazy reasonable prices.  I took his card, just in case.

Yesterday was both too busy for me in terms of work and too gray in terms of weather for me to crack the hive.  Today, however, I had the good luck to have a lull in work, a break in the weather, and my husband home all at the same time, so I took advantage of it and opened the hive in question.  The very back bar had a bit of honeycomb on it, unfilled.  Not surprising, as that was the bar I harvested not long ago.  I broke that back off because I wanted to keep the back empty for easy of removal.   But to my surprise, the next bar forward was heavy with beautifully capped brood in a solid laying pattern, and I could actually see one worker chewing her way out.  Sweet!  Backside of the same bar, same thing.  Next bar forward, same thing.  Arc of capped honey at the top, arc of empty cells (where pollen and bee bread should go), then the brood.  Next bar forward, same thing.  Well huh.  Yay!  Not a drone cell in sight anywhere.

I went around to the front bar of the hive, and it was half capped honey, half empty comb which was dark, indicating it was probably old brood comb.  Next bar back, same thing.  Next bar back, a brood bar.  Well okey dokey there too.  At that point, I decided the bees must have rectified the situation themselves, and shut the hive back up.

I did note that they had narrowed the entrance to their hive with tons of propolis.  Their propolis is a very dark reddish brown, and they have stalactites of it in the front of the hive, narrowing down the entrance to a few channels on the right and a wide lane on the left.  Okay.  Whatever they want.

Then I happened to really pay attention to the bees outside the hive, and realized we had a lot of orienting flights going on.  A lot.  Like many new forager bees were headed out for the first time ever, which is good.  In my part of the country, bees will have forage for much of the year, actually, without the dearth of flowers that many places have in late fall and winter.  Only in the very dead of winter does it get completely impossible to find, and that’s largely a factor of snow or ice, if we have any.  People around here plant winter-flowering plants, so there’s always something.

Anyway, I watched for a few minutes, and many girls were bringing in fully-laden pollen baskets of many colors.  I’m guessing that they were indeed without a queen for a while, and they’re just now getting back into the swing of things with new brood babies.  I will be opening up the hive again in a week to check the hatching pattern and make sure more eggs are getting laid, but I think all is well.
Since I was suited up and had time, I went over and popped open the shortest of my three Warre hives.   It is the one containing the GIANT swarm that was an epic failure in terms of catching and transferring, and that was transferred in a rainstorm.   It has been struggling ever since then, and I’ve been watching to see how it will eventually do.  It’s only got two boxes on the hive, and only the bottom one is being used.  Last time I opened the hive, I accidentally broke the comb off the back bar of the bottom box, but it was empty comb, so I just took it with me.  It had a queen cell on it, which is kind of cool, but it was totally empty of both contents and bees.  The bees in the hive at the time fit on maybe four bars’ worth of comb, towards the front.  I’d been considering that they might just dwindle and die.

Today when I opened the hive, the entire bottom box was completely full, of both bees and comb.  I picked a bar and tried to remove it, but ended up breaking the bar and about 1″ of honey off the top of the comb.  Oops.  The girls immediately and placidly moved into place, licking up the spills I made in my klutziness.  (One of the drawbacks of a Warre style hive is that the frame is only connected at the top, and if you aren’t careful, it can break.  Like that.)   I set a new, empty bar across the top of the broken area, and the girls will eventually rejoin the comb to the top of the bar.  They’re sweet little engineers that way.

I carefully pulled out another bar, and it was full of brood, with one lone drone cell in evidence.  I pointed out the drone cell to my husband, and checked over the population of the hive.  Very, very few drones.  Took a while to even find one.  That’s more normal.  I replaced the bar and closed up the hive.  Their propolis is bright yellow, incidentally, despite being only a couple hundred feet at most from the other hive.

I took the bar I’d broken off with me, and took it over to our dry birdbath.  I dribbled honey on the birdbath by mistake, but the bees found it quickly.  I brushed the remainder of the girls off the bar, and they really didn’t even notice much, congregating around the spilled honey and lapping it up.

Once inside, I cut the comb free of the bar and added it to my small stash of honey from my girls.  I tasted it, and it is fantastic.  Light amber, fluid and thin but not watery, and flowery.  Very good.  My daughter doesn’t like it, declaring it “too sweet”.  More for me!

There’s an old saying…

A swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly.

Well, it’s July 6th, and the bees, they are a-swarmin’.  Got a call last night about picking up a swarm in Salmon Creek.  Unfortunately I couldn’t ever get a hold of the man before it got too dark, but I hope he got them captured!

And this morning…my own girls finally swarmed.  I’ve been certain all season that they would swarm, and the finally, finally did.  On July 6th.  In their defense, it’s been such a cold, yucky, wet spring that this is really the first decent streak of weather they’ve had to induce them to leave the hive en masse.   And they may just be a late-swarming bunch; they’re the girls I got last year on June 30th, so they’re only a week off.

The bad news is, while we did capture them, they abandoned their new cardboard hive and took off again.  And the worse news is, I think they went straight back to their old hive.  D’oh.   If they did, so much for going into a newly-roomy hive tomorrow and looking for excess honey!  Gah.

I kind of think this might confirm my suspicion that they re-queened sometime last fall, as the original swarm was really mellow, and the later bees in the hive were a little more assertive, if not aggressive.   I don’t know if the same queen would have swarmed twice, but it seems unlikely.  (Remembering that it’s the old queen that goes off with the swarm, and the hive then has a new queen born to take over.)

My daughter, who is five, went running over to Daddy early this morning.  “Daddy, why are our bees mad?”   Todd went over to investigate exactly what “mad” might entail.  He knew then what it meant, and sent our daughter inside to tell me, “Mommy, our bees are swarming!”  I peeked out the window, and indeed.  Swarming.  It’s pretty unmistakeable once you see it.  Giant cloud of more-or-less randomly flying bees.

I hustled to finish getting dressed, threw on a cap to cover my hair, and went outside to see if I could determine where they’d settle.  At that point, I also grabbed my camera and got a video of the action.  It’s more of an inaction video, as really it’s hard to see anything, but it does demonstrate how mellow a swarm is when it’s newly issued.

I determined that they’d chosen the tiny little almond tree out front as their gathering point, and they’d chosen a low-hanging branch with a single point of attachment.  How convenient!  I went back and got my suit on, got my smoker (which was mostly unnecessary, they were VERY very gentle), and got my Giant Cardboard Box of Bee Capturing +2.   The box had housed the giant swarm from my parents’ house a few months ago, and has a little bit of bee residue as well as some beeswax in it, so it smells like home.

Trimming the excess foliage before capture.

Managed to get the bees into the box with extremely little fuss.  Slid the box under them, had Todd nip with his super-sharp pruning shears, and “flop”.  Into the box.  A couple of shakes of the remainder of the branch, and voila.

Almost all in the box.

The swarm didn’t stay in the box, sadly.  I think part of the problem was that it was really early in the day, and they weren’t ready to “find a home”.   I have Todd out building another Top Bar hive anyway, in case they re-swarm out of the old hive tomorrow.

The makeshift hive

My parents sent me a photo of the swarm I captured in their back yard a few weeks ago.  Big glob o’ bees!  This is what a swarm looks like, in case anyone wondered. 

Went out to check the hives today, as I was giving a “tour” of the yard.  The newest swarm and the Tragic Messy Awful swarm seem to be doing very well.  The small swarm I got as my first swarm capture seems…sad.  Lonely.  Not many bees.   They’re still kicking, but just barely.    I’m pulling for them!

Honeybee Swarm

Okay, so never mind about having to coax the bees into their new home.  I think they’re my new favorite swarm (don’t tell the others!)   They are industrious, and had built about 3″ of comb in 36 hours in their box.  They are hardy, and I counted only maybe 6 or 7 dead bees left after installing the swarm.  They are mellow, if a bit easily confused and prone to circling about WAY up in the air trying to figure out what’s going on.   And apparently they read the How To Swarm manual before they started –

Tonight we “installed” the new swarm.  It’s even bigger than the last one, clearly the biggest by far we’ve gotten of all four wild swarms we have living here.  The install wasn’t nearly as big a fail as the last one, as it’s not raining and it’s not cold, but the bees are not at all sure they want to be in the Warre hive, and are apparently more interested in living in the Home Depot box.  When it gets a little cooler out tonight, I”ll go back out and do round two of coaxing them into their new house.  They are mellow and sweet, but easily confused.  By that I mean that they don’t target me or Todd, and they aren’t loud or aggressive, but they do cloud WAY up into the air when I dump them out of the box or disturb them, which is different behavior than in previous swarms.  These girls also made a LOT of comb in the last 36-ish hours in the box.  Busy girls!  Hopefully they’ll get it figured out, as they’re a lovely bunch.  At least I don’t have to worry about the rain tonight on them, in case they do retreat to the box instead of the hive.

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