Bees are one of our newest adventures. We started with four hives of honeybees in spring 2009 and are still very much in the learning stages. Start from the bottom of the page to read about our adventure in order.
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.
Don't make a beginner mistake
and let your hens die of heat exhaustion when their water spills on a
hot summer day. Our homemade chicken
waterer never spills
even on uneven terrain.
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.
Our movie star neighbor is
also the one who got us started on chickens leading to our homemade chicken
waterer.
Thanks, Frankie!
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.
Moisture's bad in honey, but
good in the chicken coop. Promote your chickens' health with a homemade chicken
waterer.
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.
Our homemade chicken
waterer was
highlighted on a local radio station this week! I'll keep you
posted and give a link when the show is up on their website for remote
listening.
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?
With hot weather on the
horizon, now's the time to give your chickens an automatic chicken waterer and make sure they never run
out of water.
"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.
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This post is part of our Native Pollinators lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
Check out our microbusiness ebook and learn to make a living
in just a few hours a week.
This post is part of our Native Pollinators lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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farm adventures? Check out our microbusiness ebook.
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.
We're writing about chicken
breeds over on our chicken blog this week. I hope
you'll drop by and put in your two cents!
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.
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?
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.
Need a Christmas present for
yourself? Check out our automatic chicken waterer that will keep your birds'
water poop-free.
This post is part of our Growing Organic Apples lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
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.
This post is part of our Third Year of Homesteading lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Third Year of Homesteading lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
When will
you start getting honey from your hives?
--- various
people including my mother and friends
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!
This post is part of our Starting Out on the Homestead lunchtime
series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
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.
*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.
Read other posts about foundationless frames and varroa mites:
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.
---
Carson Brewer
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 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.
This post is part of our Bumblebee lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Bumblebee lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Bumblebee lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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.
This post is part of our Bumblebee lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
This post is part of our Bumblebee lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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!
This post is part of our Readers' Tips lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries:
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?
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....
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.
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.)
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?
Read other posts about foundationless frames and varroa mites:
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.
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.
enjoyed reading about your bees
my husband really wants them but i'm hesitant because i have small kids and don't want bites
its sounds pretty uncomplicated
thanks again j
Comment by
Anonymous
— early Tuesday morning, June 16th, 2009
Our honeybees are surprisingly tame --- as long as your kids don't open up the hives, you'd probably be fine. You should figure on about an hour of work a week to keep them happy. I highly recommend them!
Comment by
anna
— mid-morning Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
enjoyed reading about your bees my husband really wants them but i'm hesitant because i have small kids and don't want bites its sounds pretty uncomplicated thanks again j