Queen of the Sun

Thanks to my friend John for letting me know about this new documentary. From what I can tell, the film explores possible contributors to colony collapse disorder. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Bee Update

Several friends have asked me recently how our feral hive is doing. In one word- fantastic! Hive three (my feral hive) is by far the strongest of the three. When I take the inner cover off, the bees are literally brimming over the top- and that’s with two hive bodies and three honey supers- in other words, they have lots of room. And, they’ve produced lots and lots of honey.

At a recent San Mateo County Beekeeper’s Guild meeting, there was some “buzz” (sorry) in the group that everyone’s feral hives were their strongest hives. Many beekeepers think that this is because the feral bees are the best adapted to our particular climate. Interesting. We’ll see how hive three does with mite resistance over the next year or so.

Meanwhile, I had to re-queen hives one and two. The good news is that the colonies accepted both queens, and there’s lots of brood and honey as we start to wind down for autumn. All in all, things are going well.

Honey Flow and Extraction

We’re at the tail end of honey flow, so Charlie and I have been busy with the bees. We’ll go into the hives again this weekend to take honey out, and then depending on how the bees are doing, we’ll wind down for the autumn. I thought that you might be interested in learning just a bit about robbing and honey extraction.

There are different ways to rob the hives. Some people use a fume board and a stinky chemical to drive the bees down lower into the hive. Some people use a bee escape which allows the bees to fly lower in the hive, but it doesn’t let the bees back up. When you put a bee escape on the hive maybe 24 hours before you rob, it can significantly reduce the number of bees that are up in the honey supers (the boxes where the bees are storing honey). I use a method that many small scale beekeepers use. It’s called shake and brush- and that pretty much sums it up. You pick up each frame and give it a vigorous shake so that the bees fall down into the hive. Then, you brush off the remaining bees and put the frame in a box with a lid to prevent robbing. It’s actually fairly simple- except for the ticked bees.

Now for the sticky part . . .

Our friends Isaac and Wanjiru came over to help us with extraction. You use the uncapping knife and take the cappings off the frame. Then, use a scratcher to uncap any cells that the knife couldn’t reach. The cappings go into an uncapping tank. It’s got a vat in the top to hold the wax, and then the honey drains down into a lower compartment.

When the frames are uncapped, they go into the extractor. We borrowed an extractor from our friend Rusty. There are different kinds of extractors. This was a very nice stainless steel extractor that holds four frames at a time. Essentially, it’s a centrifuge, and you have to flip the frames to get all the honey out of both sides of the frames. Everyone wanted a turn with the crank. Here’s Elizabeth giving it her best shot:

You can see the honey flowing out of the honey gate at the bottom of the extractor. It then goes through a filter and into a honey bucket.

After the honey is filtered, it’s ready to be bottled. There is a honey gate at the bottom of the bucket to use with bottling. I use canning jars from the hardware store. A trip through the dishwasher is all that is needed for the jars to be ready. The kids help with the labels, and we’re done.

Except for the eating part- yum!

Drone News

Charlie and I went into the hives on Saturday. One of the first things that we noticed was that hive number two had lots and lots of drones at the entrance. It’s normal to see drones- but we were seeing way more drones than normal. You’ll be able to identify the drones below by their larger bodies and huge eyes.

More drones at the entrance than one would expect. Also notice the full pollen baskets on the workers.

Remember how I told you about a month ago about pulling drone comb as a way to control varroa mites without chemicals? I guess that I didn’t expect the empty frame that we put into the hive to actually work as a drone trap. Don’t even ask- I guess that I’m an experiential learner. Turns out that the drone trap did exactly what we wanted it to do- only we didn’t pull it out in time and all the drones hatched. Sheesh- so not only do we now have a large population of drones in our hive, but we also probably have an increased number of varroa mites. Beekeeper bone head error. Learned my lesson. Unfortunately, I saw three workers with deformed wings in our broccoli patch, which is adjacent to the hives. Deformed wing virus is one of the viruses which is carried by varroa mites. So, if you see bees with deformed wings, it means that you have a varroa issue. We’re going to be (a lot) more careful about pulling drone comb.

Here is a drone trap (made from an empty frame). Notice that the drone brood below is sort of bullet shaped or bumpy. This is different from worker brood, which has a smooth surface. It is also slightly larger than worker brood.

I did get some good pictures of hatching drones.

You’ll also recall that drones don’t have stingers. So, here’s a just-hatched drone walking on my son’s finger.

Coronation

We have a queen! Charlie and I went into the new hive today, and we were so excited to see beautiful worker brood (female capped larva). If you click on the image to see a close-up, you can also see the uncapped larva. The worker brood that we put into the hive when we installed the swarm would have hatched yesterday at the latest. So, all of the worker brood that we saw today was from a functioning queen. Wonderful news.

My colonies made from swarms have not always done this well- and it’s still too soon to be too confident. But, I’ll take the good news.

So, what does it look like if the hive isn’t doing well? There would be a dwindling population of bees. There is often also a good deal of drone (male bee) brood. Drones are made from unfertilized eggs. They can be laid selectively by the queen. But, when a hive is not queen-right, worker bees will start to lay eggs. The eggs are not fertile, so all of these eggs produce drones. You’ll remember that drones’ only function is mating- they contribute nothing to the maintenance of the hive. If you have laying workers in your hive, without swift intervention, the hive will die. Indeed, even with swift intervention, you may lose your colony.

So, hive three is doing well thus far. They took all of the sugar syrup that I fed them. They also took a good deal of the capped honey I had put in there. I will continue to feed them to help them draw out comb. Within a month, I should be able to stop feeding them. Again, I want them to draw out comb so that they’ll have a place to store honey, and so that the queen will have a place to lay eggs.

Varroa Mites and Top Bar Hives

A huge thank you to the women over at Bees and Chicks for allowing me to use their photos. They got some fantastic shots of varroa mites. Also notice that this is a different sort of hive. They are using a Kenyan top bar hive. It’s a type of hive that I would like to use at some point in the future. Click here if you want to read what they have to say about varroa and top bar hives.

Sally’s broody, and I got stung by a bee.

The New Hive

It sounds like a country western song, doesn’t it? I’ll just go with that theme and say “Dang! It hurt!”. I had forgotten how much it hurt to be stung. Not immediately- but within about five minutes. Ouch! There I was, mindin’ my own business, trying to get one of my last two beds double dug. I was about twenty feet from the hive- enough to feel comfortable. But, one of the workers kept buzzing me. I just ignored her, thinking that she was foraging and that she would leave me alone. Bees don’t typically sting you unless they’re threatened. All of a sudden she landed on my neck and stung me. A victim in my own back yard. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I swatted at her . . . hmmmm.

And then there’s Sally. She’s my only girl with a broody tendency. When hens go broody, they want to hatch a clutch of eggs. They stop laying and sit in the laying box all the time. They lose weight, and they don’t eat or drink enough. Their comb gets droopy. All in all, they get sort of pathetic. It’s a hormonal cycle that lasts roughly 21 days- long enough to hatch a clutch of eggs. There’s a lot of talk among chicken owners about how to break a broody hen. Some measures are pretty draconian. Some will put their hen in a cage by herself and suspend her from the roof of the hen house. Some withhold food and water for a day or two. I’m not really comfortable with any of those measures- so I just let her stay broody and do her thing. It is sort of a pain, though. Like I’ve said before, she gets nasty when she’s broody. She poofs out her feathers to look big and aggressive when you get close to her, and she growls at you when you reach underneath her to get eggs out. As much as a chicken is capable of cognition and emotion, I think that the other girls get sort of irritated with her. They all like to lay in the same nesting box, and when she’s broody, Sally monopolizes it for three weeks straight. It’s sort of funny, though, to see two big hens trying to cram into the same box.

That’s it for now. More adventures from the garden later.

Swarm Capture Video

I’ve had several people ask me how to capture a swarm.   This video shows a man capturing a swarm out of a low branch on a tree- truly an ideal situation.  This is the same video that I watched before I captured my first swarm last year.

I’ll tell a quick story on myself.  If you hung out with me by the tree with the swarm on Friday, you may have seen that I put swarm lure into the bait hive to try to attract the swarm into the hive.    It came in a small, brown manila envelope- and that’s exactly how I put it into the hive.  On Saturday, my husband was setting up a new bait hive in the back yard.  Just before he closed it up, he opened the swarm lure envelope, opened a little vial of fluid that was inside and dumped it on the hive.   When I saw that, I felt- well, stupid is the word that comes to mind.  I’m not usually the ditzy type, so this was a new low. Sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself. No wonder my bait hive didn’t work at the park.  I’ll just call it a learning experience and move on.

Testy Bees

I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the new hive. My husband and I went into the hive today to give them two frames of capped brood (eggs) from another hive. They were clearly agitated. When you’re in the hive and the bees are defensive, the pitch of the hum that you hear goes up. They will also fly at your face. Not that big of a deal if you’re veiled. In the last 24 hours, this colony has swarmed, been captured and re-hived. I don’t blame them for being defensive when we went back into their hive yet another time today. I know that I’m anthropomorpizing my bees- but they’ve got to be saying “Enough already!”.

In the back of our minds, though, we both have a nagging doubt about whether the queen is there or not. My husband captured them in the dark, and it’s possible that he didn’t get the queen, or that she got killed with the bee brush as he brushed them off the tree bark. When you have a functioning queen, your hive is said to be “queen-right”. One of the first things that a veteran beekeeper will ask you if you complain that your bees have gotten defensive is if your hive is queen-right. When the hive is not queen-right, the bees are more agitated and defensive than normal. Whether this colony was defensive today because we’ve messed with them a lot, or because they’re not queen-right remains to be seen. We’ll know in a week or two.

So, for now, I’ll keep the feeder full and leave them alone. We’ll go back into the hive in a week to ten days. If there’s worker brood, that means that we have a functioning queen. I’ll keep you posted.

Update on the Captured Swarm

Great news! My husband just went down to the hives. There are workers outside the new hive with their rear ends in the air. Remember how I said that one of the ways that bees communicate is through pheromones? When you see bees sticking their rear ends up at the entrance of a new hive, they are emitting an orienting pheromone. Its’ the “this is home” smell. Too soon to tell what’s going to happen, but it’s a good sign.

Make sure to click on the pheromone hyperlink above. It shows a honeybee with its fanny in the air.