With no days warm and sunny enough to do anything, I am left waiting for warmer days to see how the girls are doing. The smallest of the three hives had passed. When cleaning it, I found the queen, pictured below. I'm not sure why this hive reduced so drastically in size before winter, as I had given them all the stores they needed, but it was most likely the small colony size that was the cause of their demise. We received some freezing nights in December and it has been a consistent stream of rain. I can't be too upset, as California more than needed the rain. I got a really nice book, The Bee Natural History, that has great photographs and descriptions of various types of pollinators. It reminded me to post this photograph I took from this past July of a beautiful turquoise sweat bee (Augochlorella aurata) on from buckwheat flowers in the Klamath Mountains. I can't wait for spring!
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Until a month ago, I never would have thought to look at the honey frames in the brood boxes to make sure that they are full. I always just leave them in, fully capped with honey, with no intention of removing brood box frames of resources from the bees so they can sustain our measly winters. It wasn't until a few weeks ago when there was a swarm reported across the street from my hive that I started considering what all the frames in the brood box look like. Before heading to the hive on my lunch break to inspect for swarm signs, I bragged to my coworkers, "I'm going to go steal the honey from my bees" thinking "they just don't appreciate what they have and continue again and again to swarm. This will give them something to work for." I get to the hive and start looking at what was once close to a completely full honey super and see several frames almost entirely empty. Frustrated, I thought "these bees stuffed themselves before they swarmed on me. Again. Jerks." Then I decided to look at the end frames in the brood boxes to see what was left there before taking the time to feather all the bees off of the honey frames. I was astonished. There was no honey left and barely any pollen. It turned out that these bees had their priorities straight and hadn't swarmed on me but were struggling to make due in this crazy drought year in California. The swarm across the street must have been a mere coincidence. With no real pollen or honey stores, these honey bees were barely getting by and would surely never survive a winter if the hopeful El Nino were to appear. Luckily, I had held onto 4 deep frames of honey without extracting them. Since that inspection, I have been giving these frames of honey back to the bees so that they have a shot of surviving with the food they worked so hard for in early spring. I've also dumped a bunch of my older jars of honey into pans with wine corks and chop sticks as little flotation rafts for the bees. They clean up 24 ounces of honey within a week without problem. Something to consider when feeding a hive so much delicious, highly nutritious, fragrant honey is protecting the hive even further. It's literally a bee-eat-bee world out there in these tough times and the gentlest insects have the most predators. If it's not aggressive yellow jackets picking my sweet darling bees out of the air and biting their fuzzy little heads off, it's worrying about an entire other hive in more dire conditions than my girls risking it all to steal my girls' honey. So, to protect the hive I've reduced the entrance to the smallest size possible and put a preventative robbing screen on. Maybe this is a little overkill with mommying them, but there's been a lot of robbing going on in Marin County recently. My other two hives were in a similar situation and have been slowly fed our older honey from the jar with little bee rafts, practically creating a bee resort inside the hive. I set the feeding pool, with many bee rafts on the inner cover and put an extra box around it, so they can feast from within their own home just like our Turkey day. All in all, they will need a lot of feeding to survive the winter. Once I go through all the honey that I have, I will likely have to resort to mixing them a thick simple syrup and if the temperatures ever drop, make them a little honey bee fondant, full of delicious sugars, fats, and essential oils. This infographic is brought to you by Lawnstarter My original hive is at it again. I don't know what those honey bees are thinking, raising swarm cells this late in the season! They're already swarmed at least once! GET OVER YOUR DESIRE TO SWARM ALREADY. It's been a month since I've seen them. Last time I checkerboarded one of the hive boxes with empty frames to open up the space in the hive, give the queen more laying room, and give the worker bees more space to hoard their pollen. This entails inserting empty frames every two frames, to allow the bees more space and alleviate congestion. The frames that I inserted didn't have drawn out comb on them yet, so I thought that would really help to reprioritize the needs of the honey bees. On the other hand, the areas of extra room are not available yet to use, so I think this might be why they still want to swarm. The only frame I pulled out today: That's a swarm cell hanging past the bottom of the frame on the left and at the bottom on the right is the queen! I'm not sure if queeny was murdering the swarm cell queen, but I did notice the hole on the side, pictured above.
I'm not sure what can really be done with these bees at this point. They're crazy if they really want more room. Since the yellow jackets were all over the place today and aggressively starting fights with the bees once I opened up the hive , I closed things up right away and decided to just continue to wait and see how things pan out. Fingers crossed that they know what they're doing. From no queens to a mob of queens, many, many things are happening in the bee yard these days. For starters, my original hive that swarmed and raised dozens of queens back in early May is still raising baby queens. The story goes that after a month of waiting, I looked for signs of a laying queen, which I should have been seeing at that point according to the books. Alas, no signs were observed and I panicked and ordered a queen to be shipped overnight via USPS. That queen cost me $24 + $20 S&H and arrived in a screened cage the size of a matchbox with attendant worker bees to take care of her. What an interest thing to receive in the mail at work. When I went to install her immediately upon receipt, which was about two days after inspecting the hive and seeing no eggs, I saw eggs! This meant the the hive had raised a queen on its own after all. I've never had a marked queen before and her royal blue dot is a relief on her bodacious bod, since she's much more similar to other worker bees in size and color than what I'm used to. I caught her below "piping" or making queeny noises (heard at the very end of the video). There's a lot of information out there about why queens pipe, but for queens introduced into an existing colony it can mean that she's trying to communicate her worth and willingness to fight for her honor. Because I didn't want to waste such a fearless leader, I made the spur of the moment decision to use her and remove some frames from the swarm hive that I captured in May (that is doing phenomenally) and start a nucleus hive! Of course, I got carried away and gave this baby bee colony more room than what is typical for a nuc, and now I have more of less 2.5 hives. Getting back to the original hive, I went in a week or so ago and saw the queen that the bees raised, pictured below! She's going to be really easy to spot and looks Italian! After inspecting some of the frames in that hive, I came across a few swarm cells and removed them and noticed that there generally wasn't any laying room for her given that the bees previously backfilled all of the frames with pollen. Today when I went in to replace some pollen frames with empty frames to create more brood room, I saw swarm cells abound! Seven baby queens to remove - I feel horrible removing them all (but I did). Those darn bees - they raise numerous baby queens and backfill frames with pollen to reduce the size of the brood nest, perpetuating problems when their new queen mates and doesn't have anywhere to lay! Ugh. My next goal is to start a queen bank that will rest nicely on top of a hive to keep some spare queens in case of emergency. I think I will prepare to go in for the next hive inspection and snag some of the frames with the swarm cells to create several 2-frame nucs. You never know when you'll need to supplement a hive with royalty.
I should have split my hive when I was planning on it! When I last suspected I was seeing a swarm cell, I inspected it several days after spotting it and could not find any cells fully built out into swarm cells. This made me question whether they were actually planning to swarm. But now my queen and half of my bees have left me. I was out of town a week ago and received a call that a cloud of bees was overtop of the house that they are stationed next to. Their swarming was confirmed when I went into the hive to find:
I was kicking myself: shoulda, coulda, woulda. Little did I know that the bees back filling the brood frames with pollen was a telltale sign that they're planning on swarming. They apparently do this to reduce the number of brood the queen can lay so that after they split with her, the honey bees left behind will be able to adequately care for their young. Now I know. Losing my queen was a huge bummer... until I got a pick-me-up and received a call about a feral swarm in East Bay! With help, I dropped these gentle bees into two medium hive boxes and relocated them to a lovely, spacious beeyard in San Anselmo! I checked on them yesterday to make a quick temporary solution to ant-proofing the hive and they seemed to be very active. I'm feeling better about my apiaries not that I have two hives to leave alone for a little while until they get their acts together.
Times are a changin'. Since my last post, I have confirmed that there was not buildout of what looked like queen cells (queen cups) into swarm cells. I've found several queen cups during hive inspections every other weekend but have not seen any larva in them. Usually when I see these built out cells designed to potentially support future queens, they are along the bottoms of frames and I've been removing them to buy myself some time. If I saw any with eggs or larvae in them, I would leave them alone. Today, however, I saw a few supersedure cells, as pictured below. This large cell pictured is what a "queen cup" looks like, but because it occurs within the upper two-thirds of a frame, it is indicative of the colony overthrowing the existing queen and is not a swarm cell. Apparently the honey bees know something about their queen that I can't detect, since I saw the queen today and thought that she has been doing a fine job at laying. I took a short video of her: Her laying pattern seemed pretty tight on frames that had laying room for her. Maybe her pheromones aren't as strong as they once were and she is no longer considered suitable to the girls. I hope that if they do decide to proceed that they will be smart about overthrowing her and wait until her successor has proven well-mated and is laying properly. I'm going to let them continue to build out the supersedure cells, if that's what they choose to do, and monitor the colony closely to make sure that they don't end up queenless. I will miss this queen though - she has good genes and produces a very gentle, motivated fleet. All of the capped drone (male bee) comb that I removed from the edges of regular frames this weekend contained mites. Below is a closeup of what the developing drones versus the capped drone comb looks like on a drone trap frame. Drone cells protrude from the frame significantly in comparison to worker bee cells. Several weeks ago, I installed a drone trap frame for integrative pest management of the varroa mites and am really glad that I did. This week the drone trap frame was fully capped on one side, so I removed it and fed it to the chickens. As I watched them snack, I noticed mites in with the drone pupae. Drone trap frames explained - why would I murder baby bees?
Honey bees require a very specific cell size of wax comb to raise worker bees. When comb is warped, damaged, or too large, they will more often use it to raise drones. Because varroa mites have relatively the same developmental timeframe as drones, mites typically sneak in right before the cells are capped to reproduce with the larvae of drones. The emergence of a drone from one cell can yield up to six mites, contributing to a disastrous mite load in the hive. Drone trap frames are plastic, wax-coated frames that have the beginnings of larger cells for the bees to draw wax from and consequently raise only drones in. Putting this in a hive encourages all of the mites in the hive to crawl into the comb on this frame to reproduce, with the goal to remove it before the bees fully develop and emerge. It's a small sacrifice to help reduce the mite load in the hive. Alternatively or in conjunction, I could use an organic treatment, but I try to reserve that as a last resort. I visited the golden girls today and I can't believe it - there's almost an entire deep box full of mostly capped honey that will be ready for the taking within a couple of weeks. That's just about five gallons of honey already! When I work in the hive, I remove all of the top boxes first, stacking them on top of one another perpendicularly. This gives me the chance to clean the burr comb from the top of the frames. The first frame I pulled out of the bottom box had her majesty on it! A couple frames over had the beginnings of a swarm cell. Swarm cells are what honey bees create when they decide that they're going to raise new queens before half of them leave with the current queen. The worker bees use a fertilized egg that the current queen has laid and draw out the comb around the cell to fit a developing queen. Nurse bees feed this larva "royal jelly," a more protein-dense version of the concoction that they feed normal worker bees with a zest of a chemical secreted from the head of the nurse bee, and this dietary change transforms what would be a worker bee (with a six week lifespan) into a queen (with a five year lifespan). Voila! It's not until she successfully mates with over a dozen male bees that she has earned the title and the worker bees accept her as their queen. So yes, I saw a swarm cell, meaning my honey bees are planning on leaving me. Where there is one swarm cell, there will be more. They leave me with no choice: I am going to split the hive. This will entail me attempting to trick the colony into thinking that it has already swarmed by separating the existing queen bee from all of the frames with swarm cells. This will result in two separate colonies if all goes as planned. It's a tricky situation and I have a lot of reading to do to make sure I get the proportions of capped and uncapped brood, worker bees of varying responsibilities, and food resources correct for each hive during a split. More to come on the art of hive-splitting!
Taking photographs during hive inspections has been helpful for me to study frames later and see warning signs that I missed during a hive inspection. It's hard to spot the occasional honey bee with a handicap when I'm looking at an entire frame full of bees moving quickly in all directions. Also, I try to keep my hive inspections as short as possible, for the honey bees' sake. Luckily, when I was reviewing pictures of the queen bee from two weeks ago, I was able to spot a couple bees with "K-wings," which is when the individual wings in each wing-set become disjointed and extend at odd angles, looking like a "K." K-wings can be a sign two things: nosema (which is essentially bee dysentery) or tracheal mites. Bees suffering from nosema usually have splattered bee poo on the front of and inside the hive, which usually occurs in winter or with weaker colonies. Tracheal mites are very common microscopic pests that can only be detected by eye through observing symptoms. They live in and clog the bee's trachea, preventing our sweet honey bees from being able to breath, and are transmitted between honey bees in close quarters. Symptoms other than K-wings include:
Bottom line: my honey bees have tracheal mites. The good news is that there are easy solutions to helping honey bees fight off tracheal mites! Some treatments can only be done when honey intended for human consumption is removed from the hive (e.g., adding menthol crystals) and others can be done with honey left on the hive (e.g., organic treatments [acids] or grease patties). I opted with feeding the girls grease patties to inhibit tracheal mite movement between infected bees and non-infected bees. Grease patties are fine to have on the hive during honey flows, as long as they only contain vegetable shortening and sugar (salt optional). If it were winter or a flow-dearth with no honey supers on the hive, wintergreen essential oils can also be used in the patties to improve bee health and repel varroa and tracheal mites. The grease patties I used contain Crisco, raw honey from my bees, and salt. I flattened my patty out pretty flat in between parchment paper to make sure that I don't squish bees during installation. I put this thin grease patty on the top-most brood box and shimmied it back and forth a little before laying it down so that I didn't smother anyone. After removing all the extra parchment paper from the sides, the honey bees immediately took to the patty. They are such adorable, good honey bees. In other news, I still haven't caught a swarm via my hive trap or through actually catching a clustered swarm. I'm hoping that I get one soon!! I'm told that locally adapted honey bees have a much higher survival rate than packaged bees (approximately 30% vs. 50%). It would also be nice to have two colonies to compare. There are some great videos out there of what it's like to catch a swarm and I idealize it to be a pretty incredible experience! Before discussing HoneyFlow, I listened to Dr. Christina Grozinger, a professor from Penn State, present her research and summarize the research of her colleagues last week. Paraphrased, of course, she discussed how honey bees in rural Pennsylvania are exposed to, on average, six different toxic chemicals (be it pesticides or fungicides). The honey bees ability to clear these toxins from its body are influenced by diet. Honey bees that are proximate to a diverse assortment of flowers have a better diet, full of complex proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, that enable the bee not only to clear toxins, but also fight off pests and viruses. Bees can detect and prefer flowers growing on high-quality soils or soils composted with worms. Honey bees start off their days going to their favorite foraging sources to deplete those sources first before going to their second or third choice meals. Also, unrelated, but I used a feather to brush my bees during the last hive inspection and they definitely prefer this to a bristly brush! They don't get caught and panic with feathers. So let's get down to it: HoneyFlow. This new hype for beekeeping is all the talk and has raised crazy amounts of monies (over $5.3M raised, see: HoneyFlow). Here are just some of my thoughts and the collective thoughts of others, broken down into basic pros/cons:
I think the biggest thing to note for non-beekeepers is that this does not eliminate the need to go into the hive on a somewhat regular basis!
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AuthorPennyslvania-native California apiarist, biologist, & DIYer. Archives
January 2016
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