Both the bees and I are starting to plan ahead to overwinter our three hives.  After harvesting honey this summer, I put all of the empty supers back on the hives to make it easy for the bees to clean out the precious juices left behind.  Many of those frames are now empty, so I consolidated all of the frames of honey and dehydrating nectar into one super per hive, removing the other supers for winter storage.

Each hive now sports two deep brood boxes and one super, a clue to my indecision.  Last winter, I overwintered each hive with one full super of honey atop a single brood box partly full of honey and pollen --- this is what our neighbors do.  But I've had good luck with a double brood box this spring and summer and have read that continuing the double deep through the winter helps bees find their honey during cold weather.  (Apparently, bees are British and "mind the gap.")  Anyone have thoughts on whether I should stick to double brood boxes or go back to one brood box and one super for the winter?

The bees aren't all that interested in my experimentation.  Instead, they're harvesting ragweed pollen as fast as they can so that the first spring hatchlings will have a high protein diet.  I like to tell visitors to the farm that the ten foot tall ragweed plants around our yard were intentionally left behind --- of course they didn't just spring up where we forgot to mow!  Good thing neither of us is prone to allergies.

After extracting four and a half gallons of honey from our hives, I proceeded to ignore them for over a month.  We had more pressing matters on our plate (like killing all of our broilers), and I figured, what could go wrong now that we've taken out a lot of honey and the hives are all built up to summer levels?  I should have known that I had more beginner mistakes ahead of me.

When I opened up the east hive on Tuesday, everything looked fine in the top super.  But the next level down was a disaster.  Every frame (most of them at least half full of honey) had collapsed under this summer's extreme heat, turning horizontal so that they blocked the flow of air out of the hive.  Small surprise that the next level down was completely collapsed as well.  Only the lowest brood box (thank goodness!) still had vertical frames of wax.

The honey was mostly uncapped, so I couldn't extract it.  Instead, I yanked out all of the trouble frames and carted them over to an out of the way spot in the forest garden, figuring the bees would clean out the honey and pack it away in the remaining, uncollapsed frames.  Granted, the strongest hive quickly found this bounty and joined in the feast, so I will probably have to equalize honey between the hives at a later date, adding a super of honey from elsewhere onto the east hive to make up for the collapsed frames I removed.

What did I learn from this beginner mistake?  First of all, I should have propped the hive lids up with small sticks to accelerate air flow as soon as I saw bees "bearding" (sitting on the side of the box and fanning their wings.)  I think I also should have left the supers at ten frames per box for a week or so after harvesting the honey so that the bees could firm back up the wax damaged by the extraction process before filling it up with so much honey.

Finally, I definitely should have checked on the hive a week or two after extraction.  I've read that collapses domino through the hive if left in place, since the horizontal frames from the first collapse make the hive heat up further.  If I'd caught the collapse in its early stages, chances are I could have prevented the large scale catastrophe.

I'm not sure why no one talks about planting sunflowers for their honeybees --- our bees adore them.  We put in two beds of oilseed sunflowers so that we could experiment with pressing our own oil this fall, but the flowers have already paid for themselves by feeding local pollinators.

During the day, it's not at all unusual to catch several honeybees on the same flower head, along with lots of smaller pollinators.  The action doesn't even stop when night falls --- yesterday, I snuck out at dusk and found a moth on every flower, each dipping its proboscis deep into the tiny florets opening around the circumference of the sunflower head.

On a semi-related note, if you're interested in native pollinators and have a bit of time on your hands, you might want to check out the Great Sunflower Project.  Just plant a Lemon Queen Sunflower seed, watch the pollinators flock to your flower for 15 minutes, and input your data to help scientists figure out how pollinator populations are doing in your area.  I suspect this project would be especially good for science-oriented kids.

Some people give their hives just one deep brood box apiece (plus several supers), but I've read that if you provide the bees a second deep brood box, you'll have a larger colony and can harvest more honey.  Last year I didn't know any better, but this spring I decided to give the double deep method a shot.

In the middle of May, I added a second brood box to our middle hive, checkerboarding the drawn brood frames with empty frames so that the bees were using both deep boxes to raise their young.  After extracting a bit more honey Tuesday, I added up how many frames I'd taken from each hive --- 2 frames from the east hive, 4 frames from the "mean" hive, and 20 frames from the double deep middle hive!

Since I've been extracting all of the capped frames of honey I see this summer, I figure these statistics are a pretty accurate assessment of how hard the hives have been working.  If anything, I think the middle hive has produced even more honey than it seems --- the second brood box has a lot of honey in it that I've just left alone.

Now all three hives are converted over to double deeps.  I don't expect it to do much good for this year, but now I'll be ready for the queens to lay like gangbusters next spring.  In fact, barring another serious honey flow (and both basswood and sourwood are now past), I think I'm going to let the bees save the rest of the year's honey for their own consumption.  Four and a half gallons of honey --- not a bad haul for three hives in year two!

Mark's friend Dennis looked at my first honey extraction post and gently asked Mark, "Do you all use nine frame supers or ten frame supers?"  The honest truth is that I'd read about nine frame supers, but hadn't quite wrapped my head around them.

A quick search of the internet explained that a nine frame super is quite simple --- you remove one frame from each honey super and space the remaining frames a little further apart.  The bees will extend the wax out further from the frame, making the frame much easier to uncap during extraction.  As an added bonus, some websites suggest that nine frame supers actually hold more honey than ten frame supers since you lose less room between frames.

When I was harvesting honey last week, I turned all of our ten frame supers into nine frame supers, which had the added bonus of providing me with an extra super full of frames to pop onto the third hive.  Some people buy special tools to let them space nine frames apart evenly, but I just spaced the frames by eye.  I guess we'll see how the nine frame supers do on our next honey harvest day.

I'm ashamed to admit that I've been bee-shy ever since the rout.  Sure, I got right back on the horse, but I felt like I flubbed the second honey harvest (though not as badly as the first.)  I was scared and grabbed two full supers, one of which had a bit of drone brood at the bottom edge.  In retrospect, I think it was stealing the drone brood that made the hive so angry.

No matter what the cause, I riled up the hive so much during honey harvest two that our bees have been mad at me ever since.  As I weed the garden, they chase me away from the poppies.  As I hang up the clothes, they buzz me, then get stuck in my hair, and I retreat to the house to frantically flick the worker free.  (It's a bit daunting to have a bee buzzing angrily an inch from your ear, even when you know that she's just trying to tease herself loose.)

Being bee-shy is a vicious cycle.  I'm leery of the bees, so I don't act calmly around them, and that makes them madder, which makes me act stranger.

Luckily, I have a thoughtful husband who knows the right times to overcome my resistance to spending money.  "That settles it," Mark said firmly.  "We're getting you a real bee jacket." 

Friday morning, I donned my new suit and the jitters faded away.  (Cleaning out the smoker so that it worked again was also helpful.)  When I opened up the first hive, bees rose up around me, but I felt safe in my fancy jacket and the bees soon shrugged and got back to work.

This time, I went slowly, picking through each super on all three hives to remove just the fully capped honey.  Then I loaded fourteen frames into the golf cart for the short ride to the edge of the forest garden.  (Last time, I carried heavy supers in my arms from the apiary, and the next day my back told me not to do that again.)

I had gently brushed off the frames of honey near each hive, but there were still plenty of bees clinging to their winter stores.  So I braked a good distance from the trailer and brushed the frames again, sending the last few workers up into the air somewhere other than around our front door.

Four hours later, I had extracted ten quarts of honey, returned the supers to the hives, and not been stung or scared a single time.  It sure tastes sweet to conquer my fear.

We have a huge basswood at the edge of the yard.  It shades part of the garden in the late afternoon, but pays for itself in the middle of June when the flowers open up and feed every insect within a few mile radius.  I'm not exaggerating here --- before we got our honeybees, the basswood attracted so many bees from our neighbor's hives that it hummed like a not-so-distant highway.

Like many nectar trees, basswood can't be depended on to bloom every year.  It often blooms heavily one year, skips the next year, then works back up to a heavy bloom over the next few years.  Our tree took last year off, and this year seems to be only blooming at about 50%.

But even 50% seems to be a lot of nectar, and our honeybees are going crazy.  I'll be harvesting more honey today since I suspect our bees will fill up their supers in short order with the current basswood flow.

I picked my beekeeping mentor's brains this weekend, and decided to go ahead and harvest a lot more honey out of the overflowing hive.  My mentor told me that when he harvests honey, he takes the super off the hive, closes the hive back up, turns the super on its side on top of the hive, and blasts the bees out with a leaf blower.  Wow!

I was a bit too scared to do that (and don't have a leaf blower), so I tried the same method I used last week, carrying the frames around to the other side of the trailer to confuse the guard bees, then brushing off the frames one at a time.  Since I took two whole supers off the hive this time, though, rather than just a couple of frames, the method didn't work so well.  There were gobs of bees present, and when I brushed them loose, they flew around the front door in a writhing (and not very amused) mass.

No major stings resulted, but I had once again riled up the hive.  They began to harass Mark in the garden so much that he had to come inside, and when my cousin-in-law stumbled in from the yurt, he was a bit surprised to be divebombed on his way through the door.

Apparently I'm still making basic beginner mistakes.  Next time, I'll try brushing the bees off near the hive so that they can head home quickly.  It also turned out that only five of the frames were fully capped, so I probably would have been better off picking frames out of the hive rather than disrupting so many workers' lives.  Still, no harm done, and we've now harvested about five and a half quarts of honey.

I still haven't even opened up the most productive hive, though.  Maybe in a few days once my poor cousin-in-law flees the farm.

Although I was running toward the trailer at top speed and swatting at my breasts, I still had the presence of mind to grab those two full frames of honey.  My beekeeping mentor (aka movie star neighbor) had admonished me that, at this time of year, the frames need to go back on the hive ASAP.  Within a couple of hours, he warned, bees will start building comb willie nillie to fill that empty space.  So, even though I mostly felt like crawling into bed, I needed to extract our honey and open the mean hive back up.

I iced my wounds, but my head wasn't quite on straight when I got to work on the honey.  In fact, this post really should be called "how to do everything wrong while extracting honey."  I hope you'll learn by seeing the error of my ways.

Step 1: Remove the bees from the honey.  I actually managed to do this step well, moving the frames a good distance from the hives (which calmed the bees down), then gently brushing one frame at a time free of bees.

Step 2: Uncap the honey.  Here's where I failed miserably.  For future reference, a plain kitchen knife will mangle your comb so that it falls apart in the extractor.  A bread knife works great.

Step 3: Extract the comb honey.  Place the cappings in a collander on top of a bowl and mash the wax with a spoon to let the honey begin to drain out.

Step 4: Place a bowl under the spout at the bottom of the extractor.  With the state my head was in, I'm surprised I remembered this step.

Step 5: Extract.  Place the frames in the extractor opposite each other so that they are balanced.  With new comb like ours, it's best to gently spin the extractor a few times, then flip the frames around and fully empty out the other side of each frame, before flipping the frames a second time and giving the handle a few hard spins.  My beekeeping mentor explained this to me in great detail, but when I tried the gentle spin, I couldn't see honey coming out (even though it was), so I spun harder.  As a result, the comb on my mangled frame from step 2 fell apart, and even the other frame got a bit distorted.

Step 6: Cut out the mangled frame to join the cappings.  Oops.

Step 7: Put the frames back on the angry, angry hive, along with an extra super since the bees are clearly making honey faster than we can extract it.  Your hive won't be angry.  Mine was because I made a mistake.

Step 8: Pour the honey from under the collander and from under the extractor into canning jars for storage.  No need to can --- honey will keep indefinitely if harvested when fully capped and stored in an air-tight container.  Some people strain the honey first to remove the little bits of wax, but I didn't bother.

Step 9: Taste a bit of honey.  It was all worth it!

I'm actually glad I tried a couple of frames before embarking on a larger extracting expedition.  Now I'll know what I'm doing this week when we remove a gallon (!!!) from the hive.

I've been known to tell prospective apiarists that bee stings don't hurt.  "It's about like getting a shot," I tell them.  "You feel it for a minute, but pretty soon you've forgotten it even happened."  Friday, I learned that I was lying.

I've been going into the hives every week lately, trying to keep the brood boxes open while the bees try to fill them with honey in preparation for an eventual swarm that I'm determined won't happen.  Last week, I added a second brood box on one of the hives, checkerboarding empty frames and full frames so that the hive now had two half empty brood boxes rather than one mostly full one.  I wanted to see how that experiment was working out, but when I opened the hive all I saw was honey.

We've barely had any rain in the last few weeks, so I shouldn't have been too surprised to see that two supers were chock full of mostly or completely capped honey.  I carefully removed two frames for extraction, and paged through the other frames to make sure the queen hadn't moved up to lay in the supers.  So far so good --- all twenty frames were brood free.  But there was just so much honey that I accidentally nicked a couple of frames, and sweet, gooey honey dripped down through the hive.

Maybe the open honey got the bees' dander up, or more likely the bees sensed the first few clouds converging and the dropping barometric pressure that forecast a storm moving into our neighborhood.  All I know is that halfway through my inspection of the top brood box, a bee stung me on the arm.  Whatever --- no big deal.  But I know that when one bee stings, the other bees can smell it and I should close up the hive.  Unfortunately, a sting also jars me out of my "bee zone" --- a zen-like state where I move slowly and the bees barely know I'm there.  I started to close the hive too quickly and the second sting came, then the third.

Those of you who've been following along at home have probably noticed that I wear a pretty tight shirt when checking on the hive.  It shouldn't be that tight since having cloth appressed to skin makes it easy for a bee to sting through, but it's the only light-weight, non-button-up, long-sleeved shirt I own (a wardrobe choice that is soon to be remedied.)  Anyway, the bees were mad, and they made straight for the big things bulging out at them, which unfortunately happened to be a very sensitive portion of my anatomy.  Ten stings later, the hive was closed, and I was nearly in tears.

Once I calmed back down and did a bit of research, I discovered that --- as usual when I get stung --- I was doing several things wrong.  As soon as I noticed the first clouds gathering, I should have packed everything up and gone home.  Secondly, I should have stuck to either checking on the brood box or robbing honey, not both.  Finally, when I did get stung, I should have immediately left the hive, puffed a little smoke on the wound, and given both the bees and myself a couple of minutes to calm down.  I suspect if I'd taken that first sting as a warning, brought myself back to the bee zone, and closed up the hive slowly, all would have been well.  I certainly don't want to leave any potential beekeepers thinking that the hive is a dangerous place, but it is quite easy to get stupid, especially as a newbie.

One final note: Although the bees clearly won that round, as you'll see in my next post, the ending was sweet....

Our movie star neighbor had noticed a lot of bees hanging around on the front of the hive, which led him to believe they might be getting ready to swarm.  Since he had to leave town for the weekend, he asked if we could drop by and check on the apiary.  We were more than happy to oblige.

I didn't notice any swarm activity, although I did see some bees sitting around on the front wall of one hive.  I've seen this on my own hives in the past, and at first was terrified it meant I'd missed the boat and let a hive reach swarming stage.  But each time, the bees hanging out on the sidewall just turned out to be a new batch of worker bees, getting used to the great outdoors.  A day or so after the sitting stage, they reach the aimless flight stage, and the next day the hive is back to normal, just with yet more workers flying in and out.  I'm hopeful our neighbor will come home to happy, productive hives.

We headed to the hive Thursday to steal some honey, but ended up deciding to wait another week.  Although there's plenty of honey present, I couldn't find a single frame that was completely capped.

Capped honey can be stored indefinitely since it's so low in moisture that microorganisms can't get a foothold in the gooey goodness.  Uncapped honey, on the other hand, can host several yeasts that ferment the honey, slowly turning the precious sweetener into mead.  You can get away with extracting frames with a bit of uncapped honey, but I decided to play it safe.

The last week has been cool and wet, so I'm not really surprised our bees sat around playing poker instead of making and capping honey.  Hopefully next week we can take our borrowed extractor for a spin.

When we started our hives last year, we had to take a stand in the great excluder debate.  A queen excluder is basically a screen that you place between the brood box and the honey supers to ensure that the queen stays down where you want her and doesn't head up to lay eggs in the honey frames.  Some folks swear by excluders, but other people point out that excluders make your hive more likely to swarm since your brood box can get congested in the spring.  We opted to join the anti-excluder camp primarily because I knee-jerk in favor of anything that sounds more natural, and because I am too cheap to buy equipment we don't really need.

Last year, our lack of an excluder caused absolutely no problems.  Our bees were working hard to build up their hive, and the queen had no time or inclination to lay eggs in the honey supers.  This year, though, I noticed that two of our hives have a bit of drone brood at the bottom of the lowest honey super.  Which brings us to beekeeper debate number two: are drones a drain on the hive or an asset?

I won't go into bee biology too far, but you need to understand that there are three kinds of bees in a honeybee hive.  There's the queen --- one per hive, who lays all of the eggs and does nothing else.  There are the workers --- many, many per hive, who do all of the work from foraging for pollen and nectar to cleaning the hive and raising the babies (brood.)  Then there are the drones --- the only males in the hive, whose sole purpose is to head out every day in search of a mate.  Since the queen only has to copulate once in her life, you can see that keeping a bunch of drones on tap is wasteful --- they eat like crazy and don't pull their weight.  As a result, many beekeepers try to keep drone production to a minimum.

Drone management comes down to managing the cell size in the brood box since the queen decides whether to lay eggs that will become workers or drones based on the size of the cell.  Big cells are for drones; small cells are for workers.  When drones reach their pupal stage, they're too big to fit into even their extra large cells, so workers build a little domed cap to seal the drone pupa in rather than the flat caps they build over worker brood.  As a result, it's pretty easy for us to take a look at capped brood and know at a glance how much of it will turn into workers and how much into drones --- the photo here shows the domed caps of drone brood (along with some drone larvae too young to be capped.)  Beekeepers who want to limit drone production will cut out drone-sized comb and replace it with worker-sized comb so that the queen will lay the latter rather than the former.

Now we come back to the queen excluder.  Without the excluder, when the brood box starts filling up but the queen still feels like laying eggs, she'll move up into the first honey super to lay.  The problem is that honey cells are large, so the queen lays all drones up there --- a drain on the hive.  On the other hand, a fascinating article by Walt Wright makes the point that natural hives keep 20% of their brood area in drones and that the hive will build all kinds of jurry-rigged drone cells if we prevent them from laying that 20%.  He concludes that it's better to go ahead and let the hive produce drones rather than running the risk of lowering honey production with a queen excluder.

I'm still in the learning stages of bee management, so I'm taking a bit of a wait and see approach.  If there's a lot more drone brood at our next hive check, I'll probably put a super of foundationless frames beneath the brood box, letting the hive build more worker cells for the queen to lay in.  That way, the queen will get to keep expanding the worker population, which will mean more nectar brought in from the field and more honey for the winter.  On the other hand, if there's still just a bit of drone brood at the bottom of the first honey super, I'll figure the hive deserves their boy toys and leave it alone.

When I checked the bees at the beginning of May, I was a bit concerned about one colony.  The hive was chock full of brood, but had only one shallow frame of honey, a vast reduction in stores since the last time I checked.  Would the bees keep consuming honey and starve despite the nectar flow?

A few days later, I noticed a lot of aimless activity in front of that hive.  Usually, a busy hive is like an airport with lots of takeoffs and landings, but this hive had a bunch of circling workers just wandering around in the air.  I'm pretty sure I caught the orientation flight of new foraging workers getting their bearings so that they'd know which hive was their home.

Sure enough, a hive check on May 13 showed that my hungry hive was honeyless no longer.  The bees were drawing out comb and filling it with nectar just as fast as their sister hives, making me think that we may need to make plans for our first honey harvest soon.

Our beekeeping mentor (aka our movie star neighbor) called to remind me that the first major nectar flow of the year is about to begin.  "The Black Locusts and Tulip-trees are starting to bloom," he warned.  "Be sure to put an extra super on your hives!"

So I suited up and headed out to check on our honeybees.  Although the nectar trees are blooming at our mentor's nearby house, our shady farm is a bit behind and the bees were miffed at my intrusion into their lives.  Nevertheless, I was able to see that all three hive bodies were full of brood and pollen, and that one of the hives had filled the first super and started on the second.  I popped a third super on our strongest hive, remembering with a smile how one beekeeper I met told me that he likes to add plenty of supers to a hive.  "It can't hurt," he said, "And everyone passing by will think you must be an amazing beekeeper to need room for so much honey!"

At the other extreme, one of our hives was down to its last small frame of honey.  The queen in this hive started laying about a week later this spring than the queens did in the other two hives, and I suspect it's just taken the late queen longer to raise enough workers to sock away honey rather than consuming it.  I'll check on them again next week and give them a bit of spare honey if necessary.

Friday was my reward for a long week spent weeding and preparing the garden.  I finally put out the first of our tender vegetables, plants that can't bear the frost and that will be coming up around the time of our frost free date.  Reading straight off my spreadsheet, I ended up planting in alphabetical order --- basil, beans, cantaloupe, corn, cucumbers, garbanzos*, okra, peppers, quinoa, summer squash, urd beans, and watermelon.  Even tenderer plants will be hitting the dirt in a couple of weeks.

Even though the 80 plus degree heat wore us out fast, my Mexican sombrero let me keep moving long enough to slip some summer flowers into gaps in the forest garden.  Last year, I finally threw flower seeds in the ground in June, and was stunned by how they brightened my day in October.  Mark points out that with bees in our lives, it only makes sense to take a few minutes and plant flowers, so I raked back the mulch in a few sunny gaps and dropped in seeds of Mexican sunflower, pink and white cosmos, zinnias, marigolds, fennel, sunflowers of two varieties, a bumblebee habitat mix (thanks, Jennifer!), and asters (thanks, Mom!)  Except for the last two, these are tried and true flowers that bear my neglect admirably and bloom with no care from me.

*This is the first year we're growing garbanzos, and the seed packet confused me.  It told me that garbanzos are a cool season crop like peas, and then combined that with an admonition to plant them after the frost free date.  Um?  Has anyone grown them?  When did you plant them?

"I've started seeing a different kind of bee lately," Mark said as April rolled in.  "It's a bit smaller than a honeybee and...simpler."

I knew exactly what he was talking about since I'd noticed the same insect hovering in mid-air as I worked around the yard.  It looked like a child's drawing of a bee --- just one big hunk of fluff with wings.  But it wasn't a bee.

The Greater Bee Fly (Bombylius major) is a fly that mimics a bee both in appearance and in behavior.  Once our peach flowers opened up, about a tenth of the pollinators drawn to the abundance of nectar and pollen were bee flies.  The flies are easy to distinguish from true bees since they have a habit of hovering, hummingbird-like, in front of flowers, or landing and showing off their extra long legs.

Like many garden insects, bee flies aren't really good or bad.  They're a great pollinator, but the flies also parasitize solitary bees and wasps, thus cutting down on the population of other pollinators and predators.  Unlike other bee mimics that try to piggy-back on predators' aversion to stinging insects, bee flies probably mimic bees so that they can get close to the bees' burrows and fling their eggs inside.  When the bee fly eggs hatch out, the larval flies feed on the larval bees, killing the bees in the process.  Despite the death toll, I consider the presence of bee flies a good sign since it signals a healthy and varied insect population.  It's best not to put all of your pollinator eggs in one basket.

Miner bees (also called mining or digger bees, in the genus Andrena) seem to be custom made for fruit tree pollination.  The adults are present only during March and April, right when your trees are blooming, and the bees are seldom distracted by ground-flowering weeds.  (Our honeybees, in contrast, seem to be spending most of their time on dead nettles at the moment.)  Miner bees are also able to fly at chillier temperatures than many of the other pollinators I've discussed this week, so they're active during the morning and evening and on drippy days.

I found at least two species of miner bees on our peach tree, which is to be expected since 1,300 Andrena species exist worldwide.  The bees are similar in size to a honeybee --- one of my species is a bit smaller and one a bit larger --- but sparser hair on the bee's body gives the miner bee a mean look.  Luckily, they're not mean at all, and are even less likely than a honeybee to sting.  You can distinguish miner bees by their dark-tinted wings and extra-hairy back legs.  These pollen brushes seem to go, as one website put it, "seemingly in their 'armpits'".

Despite being custom-made for fruit-tree pollination, miner bees aren't all that common in large-scale orchards.  The bees won't fly very far to forage, so they require a wild nesting site close to the trees they feed from.  To encourage Andrena in your garden, provide them with some loose soil near or under shrubs, preferably on a warm, south-facing bank.  Your miner bees will dig a burrow in the soil and lay eggs in brood cells full of pollen and nectar, just like sweat bees do.  The adults will die in late spring soon after laying their eggs, and won't be seen again until your peach trees are once again in bloom.

Over half of the pollinators visiting our peach tree were miniscule and flighty, hard to catch a glimpse of let alone capture on film.  I did manage to snag a photo of this Small Carpenter Bee (Ceratina sp.), which might be better named Teeny-tiny Carpenter Bee.  Small Carpenter Bees are sometimes confused with sweat bees, but the carpenter bees have a club-shaped abdomen, a dull metallic color (versus the brilliant color of some sweat bees), inconspicuous hair, and a pale yellow patch on the face.

Small Carpenter Bees (Ceratina sp.) are related to the larger carpenter bees that drill holes in your porch and weaken the integrity of the wood, but their life cycle is a bit different.  Ceratina bees are much more likely to be found in wild areas, where they nest in the pith of broken plant stems.  We have all five of their favorite nesting species on our farm --- elderberry, box elder, sumac, blackberry, and sunflower --- and I have a sneaking suspicion the bees might also use the large, woody stems of wingstem which are so prevalent in our floodplain.

Small Carpenter Bees make good pollinators because they can be quite numerous and aren't picky about the flowers they visit.  To encourage them in your yard, leave some brushy, wild areas around for the bees to nest in, or plant sunflowers and leave the stems standing all winter.  You may be rewarded with a horde of tiny bees visiting your flowers in the spring.

Halictid bees, also known as sweat bees, make up a large family of insects with over 2,000 species.  Although some are drab colored, the common species that visited our peach (Augochlora pura) was a brilliant, metallic green, which is typical of many other types of halictids as well.

Halictids get their common name from their tendency to lick salt off our sweaty skin, making them one of the better known classes of insects despite their small size.  They're also easily startled, and I get stung by sweat bees more than by any other insect, but the pain fades quickly and is a small price to pay for their pollination expertise.

Like bumblebees, halictids are buzz pollinators, which means they're better than honeybees at pollinating blueberries and tomatoes.  They are also generalist pollinators who are glad to visit any flower full of pollen and nectar.  The combination adds up to a very useful pollinator species that should definitely be encouraged in your garden.

The best way to build a healthy population of wild pollinators is to understand their nesting and foraging requirements and then provide them with good habitat.  Sweat bees nest in bare patches of soil or in wood, packing brood cells full of pollen and nectar then laying an egg on top.  When the egg hatches out, the larval sweat bee feeds itself with no help from its parents, then makes its way out of the nest to live as an adult.  Give them a patch of bare ground and a steady flow of flowers throughout the year and sweat bees will be industrious pollinators in your garden.

Outside the kitchen window, our peach tree is buzzing with pollinators.  I can see hundreds of insects at a time, but they fly too quickly to really count.  Despite having three honeybee hives, our domesticated pollinators make up a scant 1% of the peach tree pollinator haze, and other gaudy pollinators like butterflies and bumblebees are also in the minority. 

I spent a few minutes last week snapping shot after shot of the vibrant insect population on the peach tree, then went inside to try to figure out who all of these wild pollinators were.  That's when I stumbled across Bug Guide, a website run by amateur entomologists who want to share their love of insects with you.  You can browse through their online guide, which is chock full of photos and fascinating information.  Then, when you get stumped, you can submit photos of your mystery insects and their experts will give you an ID, often within an hour or two.

This week's lunchtime series showcases four common pollinators that you've probably never heard of.  I hadn't heard of most of them either, and had to ask the experts at Bug Guide for a bit of identification help.  I make no promises that these are the most common pollinators out there --- in fact, the take home message I got from my time spent peering at peach blossoms is that there are dozens of species of native pollinators and no single insect is the silver bullet to make sure your plants produce fruit.  Rather than focusing on saving the honeybee, we'd be much better served to encourage a diversity of wild pollinator species by keeping our farms and gardens on the wild side.

In the last week and a half, our three beehives have been churning out the babies.  Last time I checked on them, two hives had a little bit of brood, but now all three hives have brood of all ages on several frames.  They're also packing away pollen like nobody's business, and are starting to dehydrate nectar into new honey.  None of them have started using the second super yet, though --- maybe once the fruit trees and dandelions really start blooming.

In other pleasant news, the raised brood cell that I thought might be an incipient queen cup in one hive earlier in March turned into a bit of drone brood (the few bumps in the photo above), which means I haven't crowded the hive too much.  I went ahead and opened all of the brood boxes up, though, to stave off any feelings of overcrowding in the near future.  "Opening up the brood box" sounds confusing, but it's actually quite simple --- just take the empty frames that naturally gravitate to the sides of the box and intersperse them between frames full of brood and pollen.  As you leaf through the opened brood box from one end to the other, it now reads "empty, full, empty, full, empty, full, empty, full, empty, full" rather than "empty, empty, full, full, full, full, full, empty, empty, empty."  The theory is that if the queen has empty frames near her, she won't think she's running out of space, so she won't instigate a swarm.  Hives that don't swarm produce a lot more honey, so swarm prevention is key to getting a good harvest.

In February, I got concerned that our two weaker hives might be running low on honey, so I stole three frames from the strongest hive to give them backup.  When I checked this week, though, the strongest hive had eaten nearly every drop of its copious honey, presumably fueling the huge egg-laying campaign it has embarked on.  So I moved two small frames of honey back from one of the weaker hives to the strongest hive.  This type of maneuver is a sure sign of a far-too-hands-on beekeeper, but I can't help being a nervous nellie about our livestock.

When the sun came out Thursday morning, so did the honeybees.  For the first time this year, they seemed to be deep into a pollen or nectar flow of some sort --- there were aerial traffic jams as the bees piled up, trying to make it through the little hole in the entrance reducer.  Honestly, I'm not sure what their primary food is right now, since I've seen them on the crocuses (more in the embedded video) and on the tiny speedwell, dead nettle, and chickweed flowers in the yard.  I suspect there may be something much larger blooming out in the woods to account for this much traffic --- maybe those swollen elm or hazel buds have burst open?

So much for the outside of the hive --- what's going on inside?  Once the day was thoroughly warm, I went ahead and opened up the hives to see how the end of winter was treating the colonies.  I found tiny white eggs, grub-liked larvae, and capped cells of pupae in two of the hives, along with scads of leftover honey.  I took out the entrance reducers and popped a new super on each hive just in case the bees get really industrious before I check back.

The queens are clearly just starting to lay their eggs, but I saw a troublesome sign in one hive.  The bees had extended three of the larvae's cells out beyond the comb's normal face --- it looks to my untrained eye like they're thinking of building queen cells.  That would mean that I let the hive get too congested with honey and the bees are thinking of swarming.  I'll check on them again next week and, if necessary, split the hive in two to keep all of the bees under domestication.

I also found a tiny cluster of eleven starved bees.  The poor things were face down in adjacent cells, searching for honey.  I've read that little starvation clusters like this happen when a sudden cold snap strands some of the bees outside the main cluster.  They can't find the frames of honey, even though food can be quite nearby.  Still, a death toll of less than a dozen bees is not bad since most beekeepers lose a third of their hives over the winter.  Our chemical-free hives are still happy and healthy.

I can easily imagine how a beehive would be an essential part of a cottager's garden since they probably had no other source of concentrated sugar.  Due to the ubiquity of bees in the cottage garden, Christopher Lloyd's The Cottage Garden contains a whole section on bee-attracting plants.

Christopher Lloyd recites the common wisdom that the mint and aster families are bee favorites, but goes on to add several other species that are a must for bee habitat.  Crocuses and willows are on his list as good sources of early spring pollen, allowing the hive to quickly build up their numbers so that they'll be ready for the summer rush.  Speaking of the summer rush, Hydrangea villosa, basswood, borage, fennel, thyme, sage, clematis, and white clover are all given pride of place as bee-friendly summer flowers.  Finally, Christopher Lloyd notes that fall-blooming Sedums are important nectar-providers.

I tend to overlook flowers in the garden, but will have to consider adding some of these top bee plants to nooks and crannies over the next few years.

I should have given our honeybees credit for more good sense this weekend.  I thought the bees were out scouting the woods for witch-hazel, but now I suspect they were instead out for the first real spring flowers.

Monday, I stumbled across this speedwell blooming in the yard.  Even though it's an alien invasive species, I was pleased as punch --- this blog post had about fifty exclamation marks in it before I toned the punctuation down.

The little blue flowers were closed up from the cold rain, but had clearly been in full bloom over the weekend.  Since blue is one of the honeybees' favorite colors, I think it's highly likely that our workers found the patch and sucked it dry.  No wonder they were so visible on Sunday --- our bees probably found spring's first flowers long before I did.

When I last checked on our honeybees, a little over a month ago, I was a bit concerned that one hive might not have enough honey to make it through the winter.  The one I worried about was a healthy hive, but I'd made the mistake of combining a very weak hive with the stronger hive that fall, and I think the double dose of workers ate through their honey stores very rapidly.  I knew that our strongest hive had honey to spare, but I decided to wait until February to do anything about it.

February came in like a lion, and just kept roaring for most of the month.  The weather was far too chilly to get into that hive, and I started worrying (and having nightmares about starving bees.)  So when Friday warmed up, the bees were at the top of my agenda.

I opened up the hives, and was shocked to see that all three seemed to have nearly as much honey as had been there a month ago!  I can't quite figure out why they ate masses of honey in December, but very little in January --- maybe they finally killed off their summer workers in the interim and had fewer mouths to feed?  Maybe the sugar water they were still evaporating from my late fall feedings had been turned into honey?  No matter --- I needn't have been concerned.  Just to keep the nightmares at bay, I moved a few frames of honey from the strongest hives to the other two hives, even though now I didn't think they would need it.

Meanwhile, the bees were so pleased by the weekend's balmy weather that they went out foraging.  They kept coming by and visiting with me as I played in the woods --- one buzzed around me at the ford (a fourth of a mile from the hives) and another landed on my notebook as I read in the woods Saturday (maybe even a little further away, on the top of a tall hill.)  Granted, my visitors could have been wild bees, but they seemed extraordinarily tame, and almost interested in me.  Or maybe it was the smell of recently peeled orange on my hands....  I wonder if they found the witch hazel blooming on the north side of the property and had a winter snack?

Did you know that checking on your honeybees in the winter can be dangerous?

I tossed together this video of Friday's events to prove it.

Winter is the season that makes or breaks bee hives.  Our goal is to be such good bee stewards that our fuzzy little friends have no problem with the cold weather.

Although the hives look abandoned during most of the winter, during warm spells we can see the bees fly out on "cleansing flights" --- this is a euphemism for the fact that honey bees won't use the bathroom in the hive.  Luckily, bees are able to hold it and only need one warm day a month for their cleansing flights.  While they're out, I've also seen them poking around on the ground, seeming to lap up water from melting snow.

During the rest of the winter, the bees huddle together around the queen (and the honey.)  They slowly rotate from the outside to the center so that no one gets too cold.  At the core of this cluster of bees, workers shiver their bodies and raise the temperature of the cluster as high as 95 Fahrenheit, but just outside the cluster, the unheated portion of the hive may drop below freezing.

Our job as winter beekeepers is quite simple --- make sure that the bees have enough honey to keep shivering.  We took advantage of a day above 50 on Friday to quickly open up the hives and count the frames of honey.  All three still have good stores, though one has significantly less than the others.  If that hive is still low on honey during the February check, I'll give them a few frames of sweet stuff from our strongest hive, which has plenty to spare.

Apple trees can take up to a decade to bloom and produce their first fruit, so the rest of the book presents information I can only consider theoretically.  It sure is nice to dream about white apple blossoms and growing fruits, though.

I was stunned to read that an apple flower requires an average of 68 bee visits to ensure proper pollination!  It turns out that the multiple seeds inside an apple need to be individually pollinated, and that a fruit with only one or two seeds is likely to be dropped by the tree before it is mature.  Michael Phillips borrows honeybees to put in his orchard at the critical period and sometimes even cuts his dandelion flowers down to make sure the bees concentrate on apple blossoms.  He also encourages wild flowering plants at other times of the year to build up his bumblebee and orchard bee population.

Then, after carefully getting as many of his flowers pollinated as possible (usually 1 in 8 will make fruit), he goes back to the orchard and manually thins the tiny fruits to one apple per cluster.  He also picks off fruits until they are no closer together than four inches along the branch.  Thinning the apples about 35 days after full bloom helps make sure his trees bear every year rather than lapsing into biennial fruiting.  He ends up with about the same weight of fruit as he would without thinning, but the resulting apples are much larger.

I took advantage of temperatures above 50 to check on our hives Tuesday.  We've been feeding sugar water pretty much continuously for the last six weeks, stopping only when winter set in and started freezing our feeders.  My hive check showed that the girls have been dehydrating the sugar water and packing it away very nicely --- we're now up to 46, 64, and 69 pounds of honey in our three hives, which should carry them all through the winter.  I'm a little concerned at the apparent lack of pollen in the hives, but hopefully our early blooming hazels will provide pollen just as brood-rearing begins in the spring.

Outside the hive, dozens of dead bees litter the ground.  Although it looks like a massacre took place, this is perfectly normal.  Every hive cuts down its numbers in early winter, first kicking out the drones then letting the older worker bees die as well.  I guess that's one way to control your population so you don't run out of food!

 

Anna installed these entrance reducers in all three hives today. Without this you run the risk of a mouse making its way into your hive and making a sweet feast of all that delicious honey.

We're still feeding our honeybees, helping them sock away some extra honey to make it through the winter.  I've been giving them really strong sugar water (half sugar, half water) to make it easier for them to dehydrate the liquid into honey in the cool weather, but that seems to make the bees exceptionally thirsty.  At the same time, I poured out our kiddie pool of water since it's too late in the year to be soaking mushrooms.  The combination of factors sent the bees searching for other water sources, and we started finding drowned bees in every standing body of water around the farm.

Guilt-stricken, I set up a water feeder by filling a pie pan with marbles and then water.  The marbles give the bees a spot to land so that they don't drown when they come to drink, and the bees were suitably impressed.  No more drowned bees!

How much honey does a hive need to survive the winter?  50 to 60 pounds in Virginia (equal to 7 full depth frames.) 

How much honey is in each of our hives?  25 pounds in two and 35 in the third.  Yikes!  Time to drop my snobbery and feed the bees.

On the bright side, each hive is still evaporating nectar into honey in uncapped cells near the top of the hive.  Presumably this must be aster nectar from the surrounding woods, since every other flower is long gone.

As a budding beekeeper, I've learned that most stinging insects aren't so bad.  Honeybee stings stop hurting in minutes, the wasps that move into our trailer in search of ladybugs rarely sting, and bumblebees generally mind their own business.  But I have a hard spot in my heart for yellowjackets.

Last year was the worst year ever for yellowjackets --- it seemed like every time I mowed the yard, I got stung.  This year, we only seem to have one nest within our cultivated perimeter (and another along the driveway).  Since I've marked the locations and give them a wide berth, stings have been relatively minor.

I've been stung by pretty much everything out there, and I have to say that yellowjacket stings are the most painful.  All summer, I've considering finding a way to kill the colony living between my rhubarb and asparagus, but I can't wrap my mind around poison.  Turns out I've waited long enough that winter will soon do it for me.  Unlike honeybees where most of the colony survives the winter, only the queen yellowjacket overwinters, starting a new colony in the spring.  Sure is nice to be able to put off one more problem until next year....

 

I was walking by the bee hives today and noticed this crowding by the entrance. No doubt it's due to it being cold this morning, but a steady flow of bees were going and coming which makes me wonder how they decide who gets to stay home on a cold day like this one?

Conventional wisdom has it that honeybees are attracted to asters and goldenrod at this time of year.  The chilly, cloudy weather we've had lately hasn't been conducive to much bee activity at all, but when the sun does tempt our bees out, they go straight to the smartweed instead.  Tiny, pink smartweed flowers seem to be just my bees' speed, especially since the "lawn" right outside their hive is chock full of it.

I have a difficult time identifying smartweeds.  All of them belong to the genus Polygonum, half of them are invasive species, and most areas have about two dozen look-alike species to choose from.  My best guess is that my smartweed is Oriental Lady's Thumb (Polygonum caespitosum), a native of Asia that is common in damp areas.

Mark suggested collecting seeds of the smartweed and expanding its territory since the flowers seem to be so popular with the bees.  I'm not comfortable encouraging invasive plants too much, but I think I will make a habit of skipping the last grass mowing in the fall to give our bees some late nectar right by the hive.

We checked up on our remaining 3 bee hives today and were happy to discover evidence of  well functioning colonies in all of them.

The home made frame perch tool seems to have warped a bit since the last upgrade, which means I should have allowed more distance between the arms.

An easy fix once I finish fixing a few other things around here.

Soon after we united our two weakest hives, the weather turned cool and wet --- bad bee-checking conditions.  Finally, I got impatient and went out to inspect the bees between showers.

Outside the hive, a fringe of newspaper was clearly evident between the merged hive sections, so I figured I'd need to remove the paper divider.  But when I took off the super from the weak hive, I saw that the industrious bees had carefully eaten away the entire newspaper up to the wooden hive walls! 

The hive merge is complete and very successful.  While our other two, formerly strongest hives are still filling up their first super apiece, our newly merged hive is starting to store honey between hatching brood in the big top super!  I can only assume this means that the queen from the weak hive has been assassinated and her workers assimilated into the population.  Although I probably wouldn't repeat my frame swap experiment, the hive merge is going to be added to my toolkit.

Note: Mark hasn't been posting because he's a bit under the weather.  I expect him to be back online in short order, but until then you'll just have to put up with me.  If you miss his ingenuity, go visit his homemade chicken waterer site and his homemade deer deterrent site.  There, don't you feel better?

 

I was describing my new home made frame perch tool design to a friend and he furrowed his brow when I mentioned how I used wood instead of metal. He was concerned about a full frame of honey being too much weight for such a "light duty" structure.

That possible problem was fixed easily with the next size down L bracket being secured in each corner. You might need to chisel out a groove for the bracket depending on how much wiggle room your frames have to move back and forth while still staying snug.

As long as I can remember, I've hopped from obsession to obsession --- Robin Hood, water gardening, identifying native plants.  This year's obsessions are permaculture and forest gardening, topics that will probably take me decades to truly mull over.  In the last year, we have started two forest gardens around young fruit trees in the yard and a more traditional forest garden in existing young woods, all of which are in early stages.

One of the biggest things I've learned about permaculture is that comfrey is unstoppable.  We started off the year with one large, two-year old plant.  All summer, I hacked off pieces and spread them around our new forest gardens.  Now we have dozens of thriving comfrey plants that don't seem to mind being mown to the ground once a week.

I'm also starting to feel the homestead turn into a closed food web.  Mulching with grass clippings has turned our grassy areas into working elements of the forest garden.  Nitrogen flows from chickens to grass to my garden beds, and I get pure joy out of seeing my plants thrive.  Meanwhile, our honeybees pollinate garden plants and will eventually feed us honey.  Around and around the permaculture wheel rolls.

 

We decided to merge the weak hive with a stronger one today using the newspaper trick. You place a layer of newspaper between the two hives and cut a few slits here and there. It takes the bees a few days to eat through the paper...giving them time to acclimate to a new frequency of the same hive mentality.

We've learned a lot about animals this year too.  Strider joined our menagerie and has since become an indispensible purrer.  Now that our pet count has reached three, we've gotten a bit more serious about bad behavior.  Last year, it seemed like Lucy picked a couple of garden beds and lay on them every day or so, crushing all of the vegetables there.  Huckleberry would also pick favorite beds and tear up young seedlings in the loose soil.

This year, we've pretty much nipped that behavior in the bud.  When I see the first signs of pet damage in the garden, I loosely stack branches on the bed to keep all animals out.  The branch technique seems to be 100% effective, and branches can be safely removed once the veggies get tall enough to make a scratchy bed.

We've also added two new types of livestock to our farm this year --- earthworms and honeybees.  We're still learning how to make the best use of them, but I'm thrilled to learn that both are relatively easy and that honeybees aren't scary.  Probably by this time next year, I'll have something more to say about bees and worms.

Although small backyard beekeepers like us traditionally feed bees a mixture of sugar and water when their colonies need help, commercial beekeepers largely use high fructose corn syrup.  The corn syrup is cheap and easy to get in the U.S...but now scientists are starting to suspect that feeding bees corn syrup could be one cause of colony collapse disorder.  Maybe that's why commerical operations seemed to be a lot harder hit than folks with one or two hives?

When heated to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a substance called hydroxymethylfurfural is formed from high fructose corn syrup.  In the scientific article that the popular article linked to above is based on, nearly all bees fed hydroxymethylfurfural died within 25 days.

Even if you don't keep bees, you should be concerend about hydroxymethylfurfural.  Our much larger bodies probably aren't as easily affected by the chemical as bees are, but scientists are beginning to wonder if the high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks and other processed food may be bad for us.

At first, I thought my weak hive had remarkably grown stronger.  Then I realized I was watching a full scale battle --- a stronger hive had decided to rob the weaker hive.

Robbing is a honeybee behavior most prevalent among Italian bees during a nectar dearth.  Our strong hives have hundreds (thousands?) of worker bees who just a few days ago were out collecting pollen and nectar from the late summer flowers.  Suddenly, the ragweed stopped blooming and nothing else filled in the gap.  Who can blame these out of work bees for stealing honey from their weaker neighbors?

At first, Mark and I were just going to let nature take its course.  That weak hive has been on its last legs for a month, and I don't think they're worth babying through the winter.  (In fact, I'm a little surprised they had any honey to be robbed!)  But then the robbing swarm moved on to our second weakest hive, which I actually consider a pretty strong hive.  I slapped on gloves and a veil and smashed entrance reducers in all four hives. 

Now, only a bee at a time can go in and out of our hives.  This makes it a lot easier for the robbed hives to fight off the marauders, but I'll have to be vigilant and take the reducers out if we get another honeyflow.

Shame-faced plug: Check out the automatic chicken waterer that funds this blog.

 

I almost bought one of those fancy metal frame perch tools the other day at the bee keeping supply store. What stopped me was my cheapness. I thought there might be a less expensive way to make one with a couple of L brackets, some scrap wood, and no welding.

 

I made a slight improvement to the home made frame perch tool by drilling an additional hole on the L brackets for another screw. It's more solid and has less wiggle room between the frame box and the tool.

It did the job with no problems today during its first field test.

Like many aspects of homesteading life, beekeeping is a long term endeavor.  A new package of honeybees is a very small colony, and they spend a lot of their energy in the first year beefing up into a regular size colony.  If you do everything right, they'll put away enough honey to get through the winter, but they won't have much to spare.  So, we don't plan to harvest any honey until next fall.

Many American beekeepers harvest a lot of honey immediately, planning to feed their bees sugar water or corn syrup to keep them going through the late winter and early spring.  We did feed our new package bees sugar water, but I consider sugar water feeding a last ditch effort afterwards.  My gut reaction is that sugar water for honeybees is a lot like corn chips for humans --- tasty, but not fulfilling all of their nutritional needs.  Instead, I want to overcompensate and make sure they have plenty of honey to last them until the first nectar flow next spring.

I read on one website that the modern tradition of harvesting honey in late summer or early autumn is a recent invention.  Supposedly, beekeepers traditionally harvested honey in mid spring after the first nectar flow began so that the beekeeper could be sure that the honey they were taking was truly excess.  Of course, you can't do this if you use chemical mite control over the winter, but otherwise this option seems to make a lot of sense.

Shame-faced plug: Check out the chicken waterer that funds this blog.

 

Time to put together the 4 supers I picked up yesterday.

I wonder if some Gorilla glue might work as a quicker substitute to the old fashioned tiny nails that sometimes cause a crack in the wood when being hammered in?

I was picking up some bee hive supplies today and heard a weird tale of some unusual honey bee activity from the owner Ken.

He's got a group of 7 hives that seem healthy but have not produced any honey this year. They have over 6 acres of clover to work with along with their neighboring hives which seem to be doing fine. The local inspector was giving him a visit just before I got there and the mystery had him stumped as well.

Maybe it's the quality of the clover, and maybe it's connected to the reason why hay fields around here only got one good cutting this year?

A couple of weeks ago, my mom came to visit.  As I took her on the grand tour of the garden, she looked toward the back of the trailer where tall annuals had grown up over the roof.  "What are those beautiful plants?" she asked in awe.

"That's ragweed," I answered, and hurried her on by, to a more manicured area of the yard.  The truth is that we have patches of ragweed growing all around, wherever it's hard to mow.  I'd been meaning to pull them out...until yesterday when I noticed that they are our honeybees' new favorite plant!

All of that pollen which makes ragweed the bane of allergy sufferers also means that honeybees can load up on winter protein with ease.  I was first alerted to their activity when the bees' buzzing broke into my weeding trance Wednesday morning.  I stopped to watch as the worker bees brushed their hind legs together, pushing pollen into the bright yellow sacs at the base of their legs.  I even noticed other insects visiting the ragweed, like the little fly in the skinny photo to the right.

The picture on the far right is an example of what our three strong hives look like during sunny days when there's a good nectar or pollen flow.  The first time I noticed this, I thought something was wrong, but the truth is that it's merely a bee version of rush hour congestion.  I guess I'll have to leave some ragweed around after this --- good thing neither Mark nor I has allergies!

Shame-faced plug: Check out the chicken waterers which fund this blog.

Eventually, every homesteader will be faced with the thorny issue of livestock.  Chances are that your homesteading dreams included lots of animals giving you fresh milk, eggs, and meat.  The reality, though, is that animals can use up your time so quickly that you're working for them instead of vice versa.

My first piece of advice for new homesteaders is to make a distinction between pets and livestock.  Use your own judgement on the pet front --- we love our cats and dog and believe that the time we put into them is totally worth it for our own mental stability.  We don't even pretend that our pets pull their weight on the farm with their limited mouse-catching and deer-chasing abilities.  But we also know that having more than our current two cats and one dog would be too much for us to handle.

In the world of livestock, as I mentioned earlier I do recommend that all homesteaders start out with a worm bin.  Most homesteaders will also be able to handle a few chickens either their first or second year, especially if they are careful to start small.  If you are big honey eaters the way we are, I would recommend getting honeybees around year two or three, once you're established and have a bit of time to devote to their care.

What about bigger animals?  We divide larger livestock into three main categories --- draft animals, dairy animals, and meat animals.  Due to our own failed experience with mules, I recommend that unless you've had experience with draft animals in the past and have at least an hour a day to devote to them, you save draft animals for later (if ever.)  To me, dairy animals are in the same boat --- you need to be willing to be tied down twice a day for the rest of your life.  (With just our pets, chickens, bees, and worms, we can go out of town for a few days without needing to find a farm-sitter.)

If you want to branch out beyond worms, bees, and chickens, I would start with meat animals.  Even so, I wouldn't consider embarking on the project unless I had a good pasture and a place to store hay for the winter.  Small meat animals like poultry and rabbits might fit into year three or four of your ten year plan, but I suspect that larger animals would be closer to year nine or ten.

Of course, as with all parts of your homesteading plan, you should decide what's most important for you.  If all you've ever dreamed about is having a milk cow, then by all means move it up to year two and put off the garden until year four.  After all, the best part of a homestead is the way it allows you to choose your own adventure.  Don't forget to have fun!

We took advantage of a brilliantly sunny day on Thursday to peek into two of the hives.  The weak hive was still just as weak --- the photo to the left shows how they still haven't finished building on all of the frames in their brood box.  Worker populations in that hive are distressingly low, which means they're not saving much honey and may not survive the winter.

So I popped out an empty frame from the weak hive and swapped it with a frame of capped brood from one of our strong hives.  The capped brood will hatch out into hundreds of workers who will build up the weak hive's population, and I suspect the strong hive won't miss the new workers that much.

I hadn't thought ahead to realize that the frame of capped brood would be covered with nurse bees tending to the brood, so I got a little bit worried as I carried this buzzing frame to the new hive.  I needn't have been concerned --- I've now read that the nurse bees will be assimilated into the weak hive with no problems.

The strong hive was not thrilled at having their lives interrupted during such a big honey flow, so I made my inspection as fast as possible and got out.  No stings this time, though --- I'm so glad not to have to be inspecting on a cloudy day when the hive is crowded!

Shame-faced plug: The Avian Aqua Miser poultry waterer works great for turkeys and ducks as well as chickens.

The fall flowers are starting to bloom, so I wandered outside to see which plants are attracting the honeybees.  Our worker bees seemed to be flying right past ironweed and wingstem and making a bee line directly toward the Virgin's Bower.

These pretty white flowers are relatives of the cultivated Clematis you might grow in your flower bed, but around here Virgin's Bower grows wild in open, weedy areas.  The vine is currently twined around several spots which I plan to "clean up" this winter --- knocking down the wild plants to make way for some extra berries.  Given Virgin's Bower's attractiveness to the bees, though, I wonder if I should move some into the forest garden to act as a nectary.

We hadn't dug into our hives in quite a while, so Thursday we went out to check on the bees.  The last couple of times we checked, the bees had barely made any progress and hadn't yet started to build on their supers.  This time was different.

The recent flow of sourwood nectar jumpstarted three of the four hives.  Take a gander at the capped honey on the frame to the left below.  I had been worried that the bees didn't like the foundationless frames on the supers, but now the brood box frames are totally full on three hives, and two of those hives had started filling in the frames on the supers.

One hive, though, is lingering behind.  The picture to the right below is one of the edge frames from the brood box --- still barely built on.  I'm concerned that these girls might not survive the winter if they don't start working harder.  I'll have to do some research and see if there's any remedy.

Remember how we're experimenting with foundationless frames to control varroa mites in our honeybee hives?  Traditional beekeepers put chemicals in the hive every fall to control the mites, but even the chemicals seem to be failing.

The USDA Agricultural Research Service has discovered what may become a solution to the varroa mite problem.  Since varroa mites find their hosts by smell, the scientists impregnated sticky paper with bee odors.*  35 to 50% of mites in a hive with this sticky paper let go of their host bees and head to the paper, where the mites get stuck and die.  The product is still in the testing stages, though so far the honeybees seem unconcerned by the impregnated paper.

To read more about the study, check out this quick summary in Scientific American or this longer version on the ARS's website.

*I'm simplifying here.  The "smells" are not necessarily smells --- they might be more like pheremones.  The scientists call them semiochemicals, which just means a chemical that carries a message.

             
This week's honey bee inspection revealed plenty of stored pollen and healthy activity. It might take a few days to notice any increase in production related to the new sourwood in bloom.

Our bees have been in a bit of a honey flow lull, so I was surprised to see serious activity around the hives Sunday despite drippy weather.  A quick jaunt through the woods, though, turned up the culprit --- Sourwood.  Tiny white bells scattered on the forest floor were the only indicator that the trees were in bloom.

We don't plan to harvest any honey this year, but if we did it might be worth trying to taste some sourwood honey.  Slow Food USA has an entire page about the honey, including this tantilizing quote:

Most honey is made by bees. But sourwood is made by bees and angels. 

The page also answers a question I've always wondered about --- how can beekeepers sell you "clover honey" or "sourwood honey" when bees are constantly checking out alternative food sources?  Honestly, I can't see myself ever jumping through the hoops necessary to get pure sourwood honey, but you never know....

The latest honey bee inspection showed healthy signs of activity, just not as much building compared to a few weeks ago.

We suspect all the rain we've had lately has decreased the pollen and nectar harvesting.

The closer I watch our honey bees the more I'm impressed with their fancy flying. This video is 15 seconds of heavy return flight traffic as they time each landing with a certain grace that's a joy to observe.

Like honeybees, bumblebees have been declining in recent years.  We messed up pretty badly when we started raising bumblebees commercially to use in greenhouses.  These imported bees brought along a bunch of diseases and pests which have spilled out into the wild, harming native bees.

Pesticides and habitat loss also seem to be part of the problem.  Huge farms don't provide the protected, unplowed areas where bumblebees can nest, and conventional farmers also tend to spray chemicals which kill the bees.  Lack of plant diversity is another problem some some bumblebee species have long tongues and need tube-shaped flowers to feed on.

The video linked from the widget to the above gives an excellent rundown on the issues and the solution.  Basically, we're going to have to make our farms a little wilder if we want bumblebees to keep pollinating our crops.

So what do you do if you want bumblebees in your garden?  You need to provide three types of habitat --- foraging, nesting, and hibernating.

Like honeybees, bumblebees can be encouraged by having some steady nectar-producing plants around.  Clover is a top choice since it blooms all summer long, and I can report that our bumblebees are definitely thrilled by our clover-filled lawn.  It helps to mow the lawn in sections, too, so that there are always bits in bloom.

As for nesting and hibernating --- some folks buy special bumblebee boxes like the one shown here, but that seems like a waste of cash to me.  Instead, you can turn a flower pot upside down in an out of the way spot and cover it with a lid.  The bees use the pot as a protected entrance to the underground burrow where they live.  It goes without saying that you shouldn't rototill near the bumblebee nest site so that you won't disturb their home.  Of course, the easiest solution is just to leave some areas of your yard completely alone to grow into native plants and provide a natural nesting and hibernating ground.

Once I learned that there are about 24 species of bumblebees in eastern North America, I wanted to know exactly which kind I had in my garden.  Identification seems like it should be pretty simple --- keys like this one break it down to a matter of color pattern.  Unfortunately, once I plugged in all of my choices, the key still said it didn't have enough data to decide between nine species.

A little more browsing narrowed down the choices.  Chances are my bees are the Common Eastern Bumblebee.  The species is pretty well named since it's the most common eastern bumblebee.

Bumblebees are a lot like big honeybees in terms of behavior.  The major differences are that bumblebees have smaller colonies which start from scratch each spring since only the queen overwinters.  Bumblebee.org has a nice rundown on their life cycle and foraging behavior, for those who are interested.

Like honeybees, bumblebees are generalists which pollinate a long list of plant species.  But bumblebees are especially important for a few species of plants --- notably tomatoes and blueberries --- which require buzz pollination.  These plants have pollen which doesn't easily brush off the anthers of the flowers.  Instead, bumblebees have to land on the flowers and vibrate their flight muscles, causing a buzz which knocks the pollen loose.

Honeybees don't buzz, so buzz pollinated plants pretty much depend on bumblebees.  Greenhouse tomato growers have experimented with using vibrators to pollinate their tomatoes, but finally settled on bumblebees as the easier and cheaper solution.

I like honeybees as much as the next farmer, but I have to admit that I roll my eyes a bit when the media reports that the decline of the honeybee could cause us all to starve to death.  How do those reporters think that American plants got pollinated before we introduced the honeybee from Europe?

We've got scads of wild pollinators, but the one I see most often in my garden is the bumblebee.  In fact, despite having four hives of honeybees, I tend to see more bumblebees than honeybees.  I figured this intrepid pollinator deserves a lunchtime series all her own!

I got my first honeybee sting of the season yesterday while checking on our hives.  First of all, let me assure you that it barely hurt --- having spent all last summer getting mobbed by yellowjackets, I had forgotten that honeybee stings are nearly painless.  That said, after I came inside, I did a bit of research to prevent it from happening again.

My first and worst mistake was to open the hive on a cloudy day.  It had rained all morning, but by lunchtime the sun was peeking out.  The bees were just beginning to head out to forage, though, and the hive was extremely crowded.  No wonder one wandered up my sleeve (which should have been tucked in) and stung my arm.  I'm just glad the bee didn't sting while wandering over more sensitive areas looking for a way out.  Luckily, Mark didn't get a shot of me ripping off my shirt and running half naked toward the trailer.

I found a very useful pdf with two pages of pointers on how to act while inspecting a hive.  I'll be more careful next time.

Our bee colonies continue to thrive and grow. Today was the day to install additional supers for the 3 new hives.

We decided to put the new containers on the bottom in an effort to encourage upward building.

If honey bees feel like they're running out of space they might be tempted to swarm, which would be a bad thing at this stage in their development. We need the hive to stay whole and grow even stronger so they can make it through the upcoming winter.

Want some honeybees but don't have $200 to start a hive?  Everett wrote in a few weeks ago to give us some pointers on catching swarms.

Every spring, crowded bee colonies decide to split up.  The old queen makes a new queen to take over her old hive, then she and a bunch of workers fly the coop.  The mass of bees --- a swarm --- heads off in search of a new hive.  If you play your cards right, that new hive can end up in your backyard, a source of honey for years to come.

Smart beekeepers put up fliers and contact the local police and fire departments, alerting them that they're ready to capture swarms.  Everett wrote about his experience catching swarms on his blog.  If we hadn't gotten in on the extension service grant, we'd definitely give swarm hunting a shot!

   

I've heard people say bee keeping is easier than a cat and harder than a dog. Whoever started that saying probably never had a cat tear a hole in their kitchen screen.

  

We found our first wax moth cocoon today in one of the hives.

That means the larvae has been burrowing into the beeswax comb looking for impurities, which they live on. They don't eat any wax, but their little caves can cause honey to spill out, making more work for the colony to repair.

I wonder if a small wax moth population might have benefits for the colony by having impurities removed?

Birds drink...bees buzz....and I admire their work from afar with an ice cold glass of sweet tea. How could a Sunday be any better than this?

Black Locust wasn't listed as a major honeybee pollen and nectar plant on the webpage I linked to yesterday, but the species came highly recommended during the bee workshop we attended last month.  So I poked around a bit more on the internet and stumbled across NASA's HoneyBeeNet.  The site includes a very comprehensive forage map which divides the entire U.S. into regions and lists the primary pollen and nectar producing plants for each region.  Black Locust is among the top seven plants listed for our region.

So, a couple of a weeks ago, I asked Mom if she had any Black Locust seedlings under her trees that I could transplant to our farm.  "Are you sure you don't have one in your woods already?" she responded.

"Our forest is too old to have Black Locusts in it," I huffed, thinking unkind thoughts about silly parents who don't understand forest succession.

So she saved a seedling for me, and last Wednesday I brought it home.  Now, where to put it?  I wandered around looking for a good spot, then decided to plant it in some very young woods at the edge of our yard.  "A few of those little trees will need to come down to give it light," I thought.  I peered up into the canopy --- and discovered half a dozen little Black Locusts growing above my head.  They weren't blooming because Japanese Honeysuckle had them nearly smothered, but I pried them free and have high hopes they'll bloom next year.  Now I just have to apologize to Mom....

Every beekeeper I talk to seems to think that a different plant is the be all and end all when it comes to pollen and nectar production.  I finally tracked down some hard data --- Some Ohio Nectar and Pollen Producing Plants from the Ohio Extension Service --- which laid all the guesswork to rest.

Based on their table of major nectar and pollen producers, I've discovered that May and June will be the major honey production months on our farm.  It sounds like we're going to get a summer lull if we don't come up with some more extensive White Sweet Clover patches.  Or discover some other summer-producers....

  

All four colonies are thriving and doing everything they should be doing. The sugar water free ride is coming to an end as we've decided it's time to stop feeding and let them get all their nutrition from the local ecosystem.

Remember how I was worried two weeks ago about a bad queen bee?  I think we've experienced a successful supersedure since then!

What's a supersedure, you say?  If a hive isn't happy with its queen, they'll try to make a new one.  A young larva can be moved from the worker track to the queen track by feeding her different food and building her a bigger cup.  When the new queen reaches adulthood, the workers kill the old queen by surrounding her and causing her to overheat, then the new queen takes over the hive.

Two weeks ago, we saw two queen cups in the problem hive.  Yesterday, there were no queen cups but I saw plenty of eggs and young larvae.  It sounds like a successful supersedure, though I won't know for sure until I see some capped larvae.

In other news, as you can see in these pictures, we've whacked the upper garden back into shape!  I'm constantly amazed at how much Mark and I can get done when we work together.

I'm starting to get a handle on foundationless bee frames.  I've tried three methods, a good one, a mediocre one, and a bad one.

The mediocre one was the one I started with, which you can see to the right.  I cut each sheet of foundation into five pieces, sandwiched one foundation piece between the wooden strip and the rest of the frame, and nailed the wooden strip into place with vertical nails.  The bees built down from the foundation piece just fine, but the foundation tended to slip loose before they started building on it.  I had to reattach about a third of the foundation pieces in the first week, after which all was well.

Read more about my experiments with foundationless honeybee frames....

It's been a few days since the new bees have been installed, so today was inspection day. Only 1 out of the 3 new queens had been freed by the workers. A friend recommended a small nail hole in the remaining candy to help the escape along. The candy barrier is there to give the colony time to get accustomed to the new queen's scent. The workers eat their way through it because they know the queen's on the other side.

This is just over 2 and a half minutes of our fourth bee package install yesterday. The frames in this box have no foundation material. Instead they have a beveled edge for the bees to begin building on. The way I understand it the artificial foundation prompts the bees to make bigger cells, which provide more honey. Building without this mechanism may yield less honey, but a stronger colony. Experimenting is a big part of the fun.

I wonder if people who keep bees tend to be more experimental?

After three inches of rain in a week, the creek finally rose.  Now, I want you to imagine us carrying three boxes of buzzing bees (screened boxes, not cardboard boxes) across this footbridge.  Then hopping across those stepping stones and scrambling up a muddy bank.  It was quite an adventure!

Three more packages of bees are safely tucked away in their new boxes. We paid 2 dollars extra and had the queens marked with a little green dot on this batch, which seems to be worth it for the peace of mind you get knowing for sure she's alive and kicking.

I'm an amateur beekeeper and a reforming worrywort, which is a bad combination.  As Mark posted yesterday, our hive check showed no eggs or larvae on Tuesday.  In addition, as you can see to the left, a lot of the capped brood is drones, which could mean our queen didn't get properly fertilized during her mating flight.  (Drones --- male bees --- come from unfertilized eggs.  You can tell drones at the pupal stage because they're bigger, so the cells are capped with a dome raised above the surface of the comb.)

We also found two queen cups, which means the hive is probably not happy with the queen and is trying to replace her.  At first, I was worried sick, but now I'm a bit intrigued.  Challenges are what make life interesting!

Today was a good day to check on our first bee hive.

Anna is a bit troubled because we were unable to see any eggs, which might mean the queen had some "issues" during her mating flight.

Some folks might order a replacement queen which will cost you about 40 bucks, or you can hope the colony corrects itself by making a new queen.

We've got 3 more packages of bees to pick up later this week, so we're going to take a wait and see approach for now and hold off on ordering a new queen.

See the yellow stuff in the photo?  That's pollen, which our bees are busily socking away, along with lots of nectar/sugar water.  They also have capped brood already, which means we'll have new adults popping out pretty soon!  With such positive signs in the hive, I tossed another super on Monday to give our bees room to expand their egg-laying and food-storing.

Our sugar water feeder is seeing less use as the bees find natural nectar sources around us.  Bees in the garden kept me company as I planted the first tender crops of the year --- corn, beans, peppers, and basil.  We have five beds planted and a dozen more to go in before the end of the week!

A propane torch has thousands of uses in the world of a do it yourselfer. The tank is usually about 2 bucks and the nozzle should be in the 10 to 15 dollar range.

The picture shows Anna sterilizing some old bee equipment with the power of fire. Someone at our bee class brought up the possibility of boiling such things in large containers of Lye and our instructor's brow actually furrowed. I think a propane torch might save hours of labor in comparison to the boiling method?

I hear from a lot of people that they're leery of trying to keep bees because of Colony Collapse Disorder, so I was intrigued when our teacher yesterday explained that only about 10% of hive death in Virginia is due to CCD.  On the other hand, he says that about 30% of new hives don't survive their first winter, due to factors including disease and lack of food reserves.  (That makes CCD responsible for the death of a measly 3% of Virginia's new hives each year, in case you're having trouble with the math.)

Of course, you can counteract some of the non-CCD factors....

Today was our mandatory bee workshop class in Abingdon.

We were both concerned that it might be a long day of sterile instructions in a boring class.

I'm happy to report that the day whizzed by with an energetic and funny expert who is also head of the entomology department at Virginia Tech.

His enthusiasm for bees was contagious, and I highly recommend a program like this for the aspiring bee keepers out there.

The book instructed us to feed our bees for the first few months to help them get established in their hive, so I've been dutifully mixing sugar with water and they've been lapping it up.  Yesterday, I pulled the feeder out into the open (it usually sticks into the entrance) because it seemed to be leaking and I wanted to keep an eye on it.  Now I'm not so sure about leakage --- even out in the open the bees consumed a couple of cups of sugar water yesterday.

I notice that the workers who go out on forays beyond the feeder all seem to come back with full pollen sacs (like the one on the right), which I guess means the sugar water is fulfilling their other needs pretty well.  That's the goal --- to give them a jump start as they build up their colony.

I continue to be impressed by how tame our bees are --- I had the lens nearly touching the bee above when I took her picture and I sat a few inches from the hive for several minutes without wearing a veil, and in both cases no one bothered me.  Such good little bees!

Since I've started learning about bees I find myself paying closer attention to what's in bloom and wondering if it's enough to keep our hive of worker bees busy.

You can barely see it in the picture, but the yellow wild flowers to the right are Golden Ragwort, which started blooming last week around here, and can be expected to produce pollen for about 3 weeks.

See that tiny grain of rice on the left?  That's a bee egg --- proof positive that our queen is still in business.

On Monday morning, I walked Lucy, then carried that calm to the bee hive for our second hive check.  The bees were a bit chilly (55 F outside), so I kept the visit quick, sliding each frame up for a look before letting it drop gently back into place.

This time, I felt like I was dancing with the bees.  I didn't squash anybody, and I felt like I could have left all of the protective equipment in the trailer.  I was proud of their hard work --- eight frames were being built on, all straight down despite our lack of full frame foundation.  Pictures after the cut...

Yesterday was the big day --- time to open up the hive and see how our new friends are doing.  Mark's still fighting off the plague, so I decided to leave him in bed and open up the hive myself.  I have to admit, I was intimidated by the idea of hundreds of stinging insects whizzing around my head, so by the time I finished up my computer work and headed outside my stomach was in knots.

I got the smoker lit and popped off the hive lids, bees flying in every direction.  After I finally took a deep breath, though, I realized the bees weren't really all that concerned about me.  I puffed on a little smoke, but it didn't seem to be necessary.

All is well in our new hive.  The queen has eaten her way out of her traveling cage, and her workers are already building comb in three or four of the frames.  The foundation strips had fallen out of two other frames, so I fumbled around for a while, brushed the bees off the frames, and replaced the foundation.  I also took out the entrance reducer and moved the sugar syrup feeder to the front of the hive so that I could remove the extra brood box (and see how full the feeder is without disturbing the hive.)

I was a bit too intimidated to really poke at the newly drawn comb and see whether there were any eggs visible --- which would be proof positive that the queen hasn't flown the coop.  I'll check the hive again this weekend, by which point I hope to have built up a bit more courage.  Because, really, I had nothing to worry about.  Our bees continue to be exceedingly gentle.  I'm very glad we chose the gentle Italians, even though they're not as disease resistant as some other varieties.

Befuddled bees hover as I clip lettuce, read in the sun.

Our new winged livestock seem unready to sip nectar, fill their hive with honey.  Instead, they push the grass aside and slip in and out of the tiny hole in their wooden box.

They test the air around my body, smelling the sugar syrup I sprayed on their travel crate to calm them.  Maybe they catch the scent of the queen whom I momentarily slipped into my front pocket to protect and keep warm.

I can see the bees sniffing, tasting.  Is it captivity if you choose to live in a painted blue box?  If you choose to accept the ministrations and thieveries of a warm-blooded mammal?  Or is it friendship?

The shipment of honey bees arrived early today. They were shipped from Kentucky on Saturday.

We were a bit alarmed to see our separately packed queen was not alone. There were several other worker type bees inside her little cage.

The book never mentions this fact, and we were a bit concerned something was wrong.

Turns out the queen can't live that long without having one of the other bees feed her, and we just assumed she got fed through the holes in her little cage...not true. She comes shipped with enough help to get her through the early days of travel and home building.

Varroa mites are the worst pests affecting honeybees in our area.  In fact, most beekeepers around here will tell you that you can't keep hives without using chemical treatment for mites --- they put in chemical strips religiously every fall to kill off the arachnids.

Of course, telling me I can't do something is like waving a red flag in front of a bull*, so I'm bound and determined to prove my friends wrong.  If you need a more scientific reason to forego the chemicals, you should also be aware that beekeepers are overtreating and the mites are developing a tolerance to the chemical.

One of the causes of our varroa mite epidemic is the foundation most beekeepers fill their frames with.  Foundation is a thin sheet of beeswax imprinted with hexagons to show the bees where to build their comb.  The foundation does a good job of keeping the bees from building crooked combs, but the width of the store-bought hexagons is significantly larger than the width of hexagons bees would build by themselves with no foundation.  The larger cells give the varroa mites lots of room to slip down into the cells with bee larvae and suck them dry, but beekeepers put up with it because the larvae that do survive tend to be bigger and are able to produce more honey.  So what's the solution?

The guy we bought the bee hive supplies from had some good advice about painting bee boxes.

He recommends the big box stores of Lowes and Home Depot because they usually have a few cans of mixed latex paint that didn't quite turn out to be the right shade of a color they were going for. These cans are a fraction of what they usually charge.

Most people paint their boxes white, but he points out how they stand out from a distance, and a more appropriate color might discourage the random bee box thief. Luckily we don't have that problem here due to being tucked so far back in the woods.

Nail placement on bee frames seems to be a bit of a thorny issue --- either that or it's just difficult to explain.  The best description I came across is here, but even that one gave me fits.

These photos show my best guess of nail placement.  I put eight nails in each frame --- two in each side of the bottom bar (see below), and four through the side panels into the top bar (see right.)

Note that the top bar is asymmetrical due to removing the foundation-retaining wedge, so the nails which go into the top bar are placed asymmetrically.  Although many websites recommend putting nails through the middle of the top bar, I was sold on horizontal nails for two reasons.  First, nailing vertically through the top bar doesn't give the frame any structural support against the weight of the honey pulling the frame apart vertically.  Second, one website mentioned that nailing into the top of the top bar makes it difficult to scrape the frame clean.

Frame nailing has definitely been the most tricky part of the hive assembly process.  I hope I did it right!  Meanwhile, if you want a bit more procrastination before you begin your work day, you should totally check out this blog entry about the new White House bees.

We finally got around to putting the new bee boxes together this afternoon.

I'm really glad we went the extra mile when we bought the standard hive tool pictured here. I guess we could get by without it, but after using it for scraping the excess wood from the new frames and comparing that process with a knife, I'm convinced this tool was worth the money.

I thought I would end my little series on colony collapse disorder with some conclusions that Sheila's friend shared with me.

"The current consensus is that CCD does not exist by itself.  There is no one cause.  Rather, hive vitality is compromised by all kinds of insults, with chemicals, physical stress, and environment being the main categories.  So the thrust of research now is aimed at teasing out the various contributors. Synthetic neoniccotinoid-based pesticides are getting a lot of attention and that work looks promising."

I got some interesting feedback from a friend of a friend today regarding yesterday's post on CCD. Thanks, Shelia.

Shelia's friend has been working with bees for years and is up to date on the latest research.

He points to the fact that CCD has affected beehives as far away as Alberta, Canada, which is pretty rural and presumably out of reach of the GWEN warning system.

On a slightly different subject, he shared with me some fascinating lab work he was doing for the State Department to investigate the effects of microwave radiation on rats. The grant was awarded because the Russians were bombarding the US embassy with microwaves back during the Cold War. They zapped pregnant rats with 100 times the dose measured at the embassy and tested the offspring. Turns out the zapped rats were able to learn to navigate through mazes faster than the normal rats. Insert rat race joke here.

We got into the free bees program!  It's almost too late to order bees for this year, but we'll have three more groups of bees ("packages") arriving May 7 to join our previously ordered package arriving in mid April.

Meanwhile, we picked up all of the parts we'll need to get four new hives going.  Rather than ordering online, we found a local father-son operation an hour and a half down the road and spent a very pleasant 45 minutes bantering with the duo and soaking up their combined knowledge.

I'm so excited to have all of this new equipment.  Partly, it lays my mind at rest because now I won't have to worry that whatever killed the bees in our old equipment will kill our new bees.  Mostly, though, I think my joy stems from a childhood of hand-me-downs --- lunchboxes with cartoon characters I didn't care for and discarded library books under the Christmas tree.  I've grown up to believe in frugality and reusing, but something about the hand-me-down bee boxes hit an old nerve.  I wanted a fancy modern box with a screened bottom board so that I could monitor varroa mite populations!  Now that I have it, maybe I should paint Papa Smurf on it and lay all of those old anguishs to rest?

There's no shortage of speculation on the internet about colony collapse disorder, which is the name given to the recent decrease in honey bee populations.

I'll share with you two things I've discovered that may or may not be connected --- you be the judge.

In the May, 1988 Journal of Comparative Physiology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology a group of German scientist confirmed that magnetic field bursts at a frequency of 250 Hz induced unequivocal "jumps" of misdirection in honey bee navigation of up to 10 degrees.

The Ground Wave Emergency Network (GWEN) is an array of 300 transceivers distributed across the continental United States with a spacing of about 250 miles. GWEN was designed to transmit critical warning and response messages that would be immune to the effects of electromagnetic pulses, which would be generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion. The system was supposedly replaced by the Milstar satellite system, but it seems to me a satellite might be vulnerable and they might want to keep GWEN on the back burner. The Wikipedia entry on GWEN proves the system has a wide range of frequencies and might be capable of producing signals within the 250 Hz range.

Every year we add some kind of new gadgetry to make cell phones work better and internet's to run faster, all the while polluting the air with electromagnetic frequencies. It's not such a bad thing to live in a hilly area that seems to be mostly blocked from cell phone signals and TV stations. Maybe our bees will avoid this problem thanks to our unique geography.