Swarm Catching for Dummies

Well into my fifth summer of beekeeping, here's the report: I have become the person about whom I used to scratch my head.
Back in 2005, soon after we finished the beginner's "short course," our club sponsored a field day at an orchard apiary in Burtonsville. Just as a coupla dozen students and maybe 6 experienced beekeepers closed up the last hive, a swarm from somewhere else began to settle in one of the trees under which we were standing.
OK, so this is one heck of a coincidence! It was also quite a show.
Before any beginner hive-minders could say, "Um, what?" middle-aged beekeepers sprang into action! Some ran for ladders, some ran for hive parts, one grabbed (I kid you not) a small saw, a 50 foot rope, and a bedsheet from out of his car (just happens to keep them around: don't you?) Another started dinging two pieces of metal together: an old wives' tale says you can get a swarm to settle if you bang pans.
A father of three soon sprang 20-feet-plus up the side of that tree, from which he sawed off a limb with a large swarm on it. Compatriots caught the branch in the sheet, and then set the hive entrance near the swarm. David, the tree climber, was down in a flash, and picked the queen out of that mess of bees and saw her inside. Swarm hived!
Four years and a bit later, I still cannot pick out the queen from a loose mass of bees, but I nonetheless hardly recognize myself. I've caught three swarms this Spring: one mine (*sigh*), one at the White House, and this one.
I actually object to the title for this post, but it is hard to find a better way to put it. Compared to the story above, the craziest thing about my adventure was a 20-mile trip across metro Washington at rush hour, though the decision was based merely on a non-expert's assessment that a whole lot of bees were hanging out in a convenient bunch right at eye level.
The thing about swarm-catching is that non-beekeepers always say the same few things:

1. It's definitely bees;
2. There are an enormous number; and
3. The safety of the known universe is at stake

The usual case is that it is either yellowjackets, there are only a handful of bees, or they have disappeared by the time you arrive.
In spite of this track record, why did I drive to Reston on June 8 at 5 PM with two sets of bee catching gear (a nuc box for a small swarm, a deep hive body and all the trimmings in case the size was as-billed)? Three more things:

1. Karen, the woman who called me, did not seem like the freaky sort, and she had gone to the trouble of calling over to Colvin Run Mill, where my Virginia bees live, to find a beekeeper just because she remembered the apiary there;
2. Karen also asked her husband not to call an exterminator before she tried to find a beekeeper in order to give these critters a chance; and
3. She swore that the swarm, whatever it's size, was hanging on the lower limb of a really young Maple tree in her front yard, so no ladders, drywall removal, or other shenanigans were required.

The picture of me, above, shows my ungloved hand, near my unveiled head, featuring an uncensored smile, next to a honking huge swarm of bees that somebody out there must sorely miss! I was able to pull my car up within 6 feet of the swarm, which would be considered "shoulder length" if we were all at the hair salon!
Here you can see the whole set up: there I am with my bed sheet on the ground, my clippers in hand, my hive body at the ready. Yes, I had most of the stuff in the car before Karen even made the call. I was hoping that, since it was after 6 PM by now, that most of the bees had returned from the field. I sat around for a while making sure that everyone was heading into my hive body, but it turns out that another couple thousand bees returned later, and I came back the next day to get them, too.
Because my two new Monastery hives are not doing well, I thought about bringing these bees all the way into the city, but I decided that they belonged out at Colvin Run Mill, all things considered. When I got them there, I peeked inside to be sure all was well, and the bees were already festooning all over the place, beginning to draw comb and make themselves at home. When I brought their laggard sisters the next day, I also brought another hive body and some feeders to help them along with all that wax production.
All in all, I would have done better to leave my capture hive out there that first night, returning back during early early rush hour the next day to ensure that I got more of the bees all at once. I feel sorry for the scouts that got left behind, and hope they managed to wrangle their way back into their home hive, or some other.
And the back of the car in the picture above still houses a small saw, pruners, a bed sheet, and a transportation strap. Just in case, you know?

Public Beekeeping and Rainy Days

This is the second of two cold, rainy days in a row, and I must finally be catching up because this poor blog is getting some attention. You can see, in this picture, what Spring can bring when the only ways of working for the bees involve paint brushes, newspaper, and a fair amount of cursing.

This next note is probably only interesting to me, but over the past week or so this blog was visited by thousands of people, all of a sudden. That's because one of my friends, Charlie, is the beekeeper at the White House. But it is Spring for my bees, too, and it is time to stop being dazzled by the limelight and to get back to the sunshine of my own beeyard (once the Sun does come back again).

Basically, I've got a lot more apiaries to visit this year, though not the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW (Charlie might have me over at some point, if some skilled free labor is ever necessary).

This Spring, I've come out as a beekeeper to the Office of the Mayor and to my City Council representative, figuring this is the year to make beekeeping more legally welcome in the city. In response, the District of Columbia has invited me to place hives in two Parks Department-run youth gardens, and USDA has opened some doors at the National Arboretum. Two other beekeepers will take one of the DC gardens, a mentee and one of the staff at the Arboretum will (tentatively) have bees there, and I will cover the other D.C. park. We'll be placing hives and giving presentations to Summer camps. This is in addition to the sessions at Colvin Run Mill, where I am planning to put two new hives from packages.

All of this means that there will be lots of summmer camps, at four locations, plus whatever comes up along the way. So I finally bought my own Observation Hive, this one from Betterbee.

I have borrowed many observation hives in my day, and think that MaryEllen's Ulster hive has been the best so far. I wish it could show more than one frame, however, and I am not really looking for a hive where the bees can live all season, so I decided to try this format. Most observation hives require you to slip a frame of bees into the equivalent of glass envelope, and most of the time some bees get squished. Inevitably, the smartest, nicest kid you present to points this out, too.

This observation hive works more like a narrow glass closet, and shows two frames. Let's see how it goes. Right now I am cursing the fact that I have one more complicated thing to paint.

The hive bodies you see way above will house the nucs that will begin hives on the roof of the Fairmont Hotel here. Those girls are due on April 23rd.

I was going to get packages for the hotel, too, but my go-to-guy, Larry, ended up with a more successful nuc progam than predicted this Spring, and I thought they offered a better chance for early success, and a partial harvest, which seemed a big goal for the hotel. The chefs at the Fairmont (whom I will be teaching-by-doing) seem a little hesitant all of a sudden, but I am willing to take their bees and this cute-i-fied equipment if they bail out.

But let's hope they don't read this blog, right?

My bees have wintered well: I lost just the nuc which was an experiment. Six mature hives survived.It seems to be a trend here to try to winter nucs, and accomplished beekeepers do it, but I'm missing the point, I guess. And missing those lost bees.Three of my hives are monsters that need to be split, and there are three OK ones. I'm giving one split to Joe at the monastery, because he lost some girls this winter and he is a good beekeeper.

Everyone has their first supers on, there have been several hive operations this Spring, and I will post more details on a supporting page in a bit. With the order of three nucs and five packages to cover all this, I will have 10 hives in my own apiaries, two in a city park, and four being managed by mentees.

I believe I have lost my mind.

This is the year for urban beekeeping, though, and as fearful as I am of taking a public role, there has never been so much public support, interest from new beekeepers, emphasis on "greening" the city, and coverage in the press (even a sidebar on city beekeeping in Scientific American!) I might get shut down, at least downtown, but I have the chance to reach thousands of childrens (and their parents) before that happens, if it happens. My friends in the 'burbs will help me find a place to hide out, if necessary! Please keep my girls in your thoughts as we begin this new phase of adventure.

Please keep all of us, famous, shy, winged, walking, and looking forward to the Sun, in your thoughts as this important season arrives.

Nature Loves a Bee

OK, looking at this image, what is the reaction you expect? Horror? outrage? Morbid curiousity? Would you be terribly disillusioned if what I told you instead was "How cool is that?!"

Beyond the fact that you really should respect any bug that can turn its head and look you in the eye, both this type of mantis (Tenodera Sinensis) and the honeybee are not natives of North America. But they have both made their homes here, and nature continues on in her colorful, red-in-tooth-and-claw way. This hive is actually at MaryEllen's house, and she has a picture of a more succesful mantis, with a disappointed-seeming bee clutched in her claws. And so it goes: all living things take, all living things give, all living things pass...the tapestry of life weaves another row.

MaryEllen and I were supposed to be labelling the honey we pulled for the Mill apiary, but it was sunny outside, and you can see what really happened. In less than two weeks, we will have a presentation session there. The harvest was not huge this year: once again, we pulled the boxes in August, and then the weather (drought) caused the bees to burn through more of their stores than we bargained for.

I think we will have a few dozen jars in maybe 5 sizes for the Mill store, pretty good for hives started from packages this Spring. My hives were started on drawn comb, which was my rationale for harvesting at all. Once again, we will see how well our bets were placed. I can tell you this: we did not place enough labels on jars today!

Midsummer Bees

This is a geeky hive-management report, the kind of post that I cannot imagine someone else reading. Since it is also the sort of thing that has been preoccupying me lately, and you have not heard much (sorry), well, here goes. You know, I would welcome your feedback on this kind of subject matter, either in comments (below) or emails to me (phang@tonitoni.org). Questions are also welcome!

That being said, we are having a nice respite here: these are usually the hottest days of the year, but they are more like early September. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to visit all six hives and get a picture of how these colonies are doing. I've learned one thing, though: the best way to ensure a short, heavy rain during this period of drought is to be up on the roof with a colony open! It rained hard, but only for 10 minutes. Harrumph. Hardly any nectar will come from that!

So you know my six hives, right? Twain and Wilde on the roof (#1 and #2), Doug and MaryEllen at the Monastery (#3 and #4), and the Cockrills and the Mallards (#5 and #6, named respectively for the family that ran the General Store and the duck family on the mill pond — and a play on the name of the family that used to run the mill, the Millards).

There are a number of story lines about which you have been in the dark (sorry again). The most dramatic is the sighting of small hive beetles (or so I think) in the Doug colony over at the Franciscan Monastery. In 5 visits, I have seen them twice, but I am pretty sure it's them. It would be best to capture a specimen and put it under the microscope, but until then it seemed prudent to install West Small Beetle Traps — one of the few options that did not require any kind of pesticide (one of the most common treatments involves soaking the area around your bees with permethrin, a substance that kills bees, and many wild things. Seems like a bad idea to me, and hardly in the Franciscan tradition!)

The beetle lays its eggs in the hive, but its nasty larvae need to climb out and pupate in the ground. Therefore, on their way out they will now have to negotiate a tray on the bottom board covered with diatomaceous earth (wicked scratchy stuff with no chemical action). The tray is also covered by a screen with holes too small for the bees, so they won't get exfoliated. This is going to make taking Varroa mite counts harder, but I wonder if Varroa will be suppressed at all if they fall into diatomaceous earth? I'll try to let you know.

Monastery Round Up

Getting new gear on the bottom board means, of course, that a full voyage through each Monastery Hive was required. Here's what I found.

Doug had lots of bees, with a brood nest of three mediums and another medium full of honey. They had stored a lot of nectar in the brood nest, which made the discovery of swarm cells (!!) no surprise. But oddly, two of the queen cells, including one in the supercedure position, appeared to have released queens already. I thought, "Perhaps a swarm has already left?" but then I saw this Spring's queen, the yellow-dotted Minnesota hygienic. Do you think the bees changed their minds about swarming or superceding?

There were brood babies at all stages, maybe not as many eggs as I would like, but we are in a dearth now. I installed the West trap, put the box with the queen on the bottom, put the empty-ish old bottom box in the middle, and the former middle brood box on the top, then closed up. The bee boxes needed to be draped by the time I got into the second one: the bees are a bit antsy now.

I did Doug first because I worked the neighbors in MaryEllen more recently. I decided to stop feeding until I could get the extracted honey supers back on. Later I will do my usual going-berserk- with-syrup- ahead-of-winter. I bagged up the hive top feeder where I had seen beetles, replaced the screened inner cover, and closed 'em.

Of course, right after this successful operation (only one sting, and my fault for pinching her!) I dropped my camera, telescoping lens down, and destroyed it. So that's it for photos today...

MaryEllen was its usual picture of health, but I spent less time poking around because by then I was starting to smell like the alarm pheromone from the hive next door. MaryEllen is a little tight for space: they only have a deep and a medium for brood space, and a medium super pretty full of honey. So I gave them a medium full of foundation last week, but it is not much help. I need to give them back a box of extracted frames, space they can use! Right now, they have more stores than brood, so I need to sort that out.

Even so, there were no swarm cells (I have been reversing regularly). I got to the bottom, installed the West trap, collected three stings for my trouble (not completely my fault this time!) There was a huge beard on the hive as I left, and a guard bee hassled me for quite a long time. I put the now-unused feeders in the car, and went home to do roof duty.

Roof Bee News

The Twain hive has been mighty quiet lately, so it seemed prudent to start there. It also seemed prudent to first wash my veil after that Monastery guard bee pheromone-d all over it, so I washed and waited.

When I finally got to the roof, toting all that gear up the spiral staircase, it quickly became clear that there is something odd about Twain (the hive that was strongest last year!) There was not a single cell of brood, but there was a good population and appropriate mix of workers and drones. I looked for a queen, and could not find one. I wonder if they threw a swarm, and the virgin queen left behind either failed to mate or failed to come back from her mating flight? But there was no laying worker, and the bees were in a good mood. That seems to indicate that a queen is in there somewhere. I'm going to ask Larry what he thinks, but my friend Jane is giving me a queen to put in there tomorrow anyway.

But oh! Wilde is a different picture indeed! There are two more supers of honey to gather, ample brood at every stage, and lots of activity out the front door! I will probably use some of that strength to bolster Twain during the queen introduction — a reversal of my first year! Wilde was the hive that was supposed to swarm in May, but I just don't think it happened. Don't ask me why: I showed you the pictures of the swarm cells, after all!

Two boxes up from the bottom in Wilde, the rain came, and I closed up. I would have liked to reverse those two boxes, and maybe had a look at the queen if she was evident, but that was not to be. I'll be back in a couple of days for sure, anyway.

Since I have not been feeding them (yet), it is clear that both colonies have found a decent source of nectar in the neighborhood — do you think a few pumpkin plants could provide so much? There is also a lot of Russian sage, and some other neighborhood garden plants that make me raise my heart in thanks (truly: I am considering whether or not to leave a jar of honey at certain very garden-y doors, but fear possible outing of my apiary to the authorities).

And tomorrow: Mill Bee Day!

5 then 4 then 7 then 6

It has been a while, so grab a drink and a comfy chair. I'll try to keep this interesting (not, as I told someone recently, "and then they did this, and then I did that, after which they did this, causing me to decide to do the other...") because it has been another interesting and challenging year. Yet, things are changing— including how I'm handling the honeybees — and it is by turns mind-opening and a bit frightening to see what stays and what goes as we travel along this life together. But there is not much poetry in playing catch-up here, and I promise to do better later.

If there is a way to make this a short story, it is in the title of this post: last year ended with 5 hives, and 2007 started with only 4, when the mill hive died. For one reason or another (winning a package of bees at the club holiday party, deciding it made no sense to keep just one hive at the historic mill) by the end of April I had 7 hives in three locations. The monastery hives had trouble, though, and I had to fight to keep them alive, ending up uniting one of the struggling hives with the bodacious packaged bees (who just took off like crazy! Rock on girls!). So that makes six hives, all buzzing along quite nicely now, with almost no thanks due to me. It's a bit overwhelming, and I have been forced to take up a different kind of relationship with the bees: less "personal" if you will, but more respectful of them.

Excuses, Excuses

I have a lot to tell you even so, and therefore there are lots of small pictures on the left: if you click them they will pop up to the larger shots you might be used to here. This first one shows you one thing that has taken up alot of the past two months: assembling woodenware. The stuff at left is just the last batch of over 10 boxes (and associated frames) that joined our inventory this year. In previous years, I bought completely assembled hive parts, paying the extra money and banking the time. However, last year I read an article that said honeybees do better when given pure beeswax frames, and you can't get those shipped to you. Also, I felt a bit like a fraudulent beekeeping mentor when newbees ask me how to put their hives together, and I have been basically clueless.

Which brings me to my next great excuse for prolonged absence: I've been out trying to give what guidance I can to even newer beekeepers! The picture at left is my friend Jane in her apiary. I've been out there a couple of times (mostly because she worries too much!) and she has helped out at the mill, too. But I have also helped two new beekeepers set up at the Monastery (Joe and Joseph, with 2 and one hives respectively) and had a look into the hives of Bill, Andrea, and Jill. Mostly, new beekeepers just need a more experienced set of eyes to say "that's drone brood" or "this is a 3-day old egg) or "there's your queen" while they educate their own visual databanks. Sometimes there is an issue (like a crowded brood chamber) so I show them a few easy steps to sort things out. It's the kind of help I needed and got, and it is my duty to get out there myself.

Excuse number three boils down to even more doings in the world of humans, rather than bees, though it is the girls' fault to some extent. This picture shows my non-beekeeper cousin holding a frame of monastery bees (note this people: NO GLOVES!) We were on the road together for a week, celebrating her completion of another year of college on her way to becoming the teacher we all wish we had. She also helped me out with a surprisingly stressful commitment to volunteer in three different capacities (am I a moron, or what?) at the bicentennial of a historic site where I walk my dogs. This is the same place where we had the yellowjacket adventure last year, so the bees are really responsible for my rise to prominence (and exhaustion :-) ) over there.

Which brings me to the last figleaf of this post, but it is one to which you new beekeepers might want to pay attention: if you start looking out for bees and flowers, you are not very far off from butterflies and bats, and maybe snapping turtles and birds and ladybugs. Just after I began keeping honeybees, the world suddenly seemed to contain astoundingly more flowers and smells. This year, the yard seems to contain a remarkable selection of butterflies, birds, and native plants (which might have been simple weeds just a couple of years ago). When you open a door in your life, it's amazing the company you start to keep.

The Roof Bees

But you are probably more interested in bees than excuses, so perhaps you would like to know what is happening up on the roof. After losing the mill bees to mite-borne illness (or so I think today: ask me again in a few months...) I decided to get serious about Spring varroa mite treatment. Around here, the weather does not cooperate with the methods I like the best: I won't use the neurotoxin pesticides, and the essential oil and formic acid treatments have exacting temperature requirements. The roof bees were most similar to the colony that died in terms of persistent mite loads and the type of treatment they received last year, so I was VERY worried. I did not want to use oxalic acid again, and the confectioner's sugar treatment (more on that below) would result in a layer of frosting on my roof.

My solution was this: formic acid pads —"Mite Away II," in fact. As treatments go, it is pretty convenient and non-toxic. The temperature has to stay above 50 degrees F, and below 79 degrees F (at least during the first week), though. Around here, Spring is a bumpy time, and nights in the 50s quickly turn into days in the 80s. The pads have to be on for 21 days, and you have to get them out of there before the honey flow (in other words, May) so you can see that timing is everything. The heavy dose of formic acid which is release in the first week also hurts uncapped brood, which can put a hole in the workforce just before the honey flow here. The pads went on April 26 and came off on May 17. I've never tried a Spring mite treatment before, and truly hope this will make a major contribution to the health of the girls this season. They need every break they can get.

With apologies for the smear on the lens, here is the latest rooftop plot twist. These are supercedure cells in Wilde, my crazy Carniolan tribe. There were also THREE capped queen cells in the swarm position at the same time. We found them just as my cousin and I had to leave for our trip, so the next morning in the car, I sat there wondering whether they had left, and whether the formic acid treatment gave them a better chance of surviving if they did set up shop on their own. MaryEllen told me that the swarming impulse was considerably muted during the honeyflow, so maybe they would not go at all. As of today, it appears that they did not go. Perhaps they superceded, though their mom (a supercedure queen herself) is doing a great job.

The workers may have blamed her for the brood break that came with the formic, or they may have called it all off later. I am not sure, but I can tell you that there are three medium supers of honey on that colony, and probably 60,000 bees, so it is nonetheless a good year so far.

But what about Twain, you might ask? That hive superceded last year, too, and is still standing. The colony has fewer bees and less honey than Wilde, but it is definitely happy and strong. I was just in there today, giving another honey super to them. Even though most beekeepers here think that the main nectar flow is over, we have lots of linden trees planted along the streets, bursting with blooms. I hope that they will continue collecting actively for at least another week. While in the hive, I saw the darkest honey ever: tulip poplar, probably. There was no evidence of swarm cells, and lots of new eggs. While not as dramatic as the Carnies, Twain's Italian honeybees are buzzing along just fine.

The Monastery Bees

The Franciscan bees have presented the biggest scare and largest challenge of the year, so far. Sometime in late Winter, both queens became drone layers, and I had to pull all sorts of drone brood and requeen. Unfortunately, the Minnesota Hygienic queens that were available so early turned out to have problems. MaryEllen had several, none of which worked out, and one of mine ended up dying at my hand.

When the package bees I won arrived, I installed them in a nuc box at the Monastery as well. You can see the box at the left, with another upside down nuc box on top (to function as a feeder box). Those bees took off at once, with the queen laying wall-to-wall and happy bees flying to and fro all day long.

For several weeks, I went to the Monastery to monitor how the Minnesota queens were doing, from being released through initial laying. The queen in the Doug colony (furthest right in all of these pictures) came online relatively well, but the MaryEllen-the-Hive queen produced just a very few brood cells, then would stop, then would start, and I could never find eggs. For a month, I would go every few days, planning that "today is the day" I would kill the weak queen and unite the remaining bees with the nuc. You can see from this picture that the package had grown so big that they had been expanded into a full hive body. Then, in the next picture, you can see that they actually grew larger than MaryEllen-the-Hive.

Finally, I opened up the colony, and found that wax moths had started to breed, and that the bees had been too weak to fight them off. The time had come, as much as I hated to kill a poor, innocent creature who had earned no blame. To let her live, all her children would die, and a hive that could give life to thousands of wild plants (and the creatures that depend on them) would cease to exist. It was my responsibility, and I did it, but I wish she had not seemed so terrified and confused. It was not her fault.

But let me try to explain what I saw. Here's a shot of a really great brood pattern. Do you see how there are very few open cells? The edges of the frame hold nectar and pollen for the nurse bees to use in taking care of the brood. The queen began laying in the center of this frame, and little by little, cell by cell, spiraled outward, laying. The cells in the middle will hatch first: some of the empties near the edges may actually be brood that has not been capped yet. The queen will come back later and lay again in these cells, once they are cleaned and ready to go again.

This is a not-so-great pattern. If you click on this picture, you will get a bigger-than-normal photo, an attempt to show you something which is a little hard to see. This is a medium frame, but it is not even filled out top-to-bottom. There are more empties than filled holes. Finally, do you see the queen cups on the bottom? These workers know that they need a new mom, and are trying to get one. The cups are actually in a swarm position, but the hive is so low on population that there is no way they will swarm. I think they are just trying to get a new queen any way they can, and they are not succeeding.

So in early May I united the nuc and MaryEllen-the-Hive, and they seem to be doing really well now. I still need to watch Doug, because that hive still has a hygienic queen, the last among all the queens that MaryEllen and I installed from that shipment that still appears to be reigning over a hive. Therefore, there is reason to worry that she will peter out. But so far, so good.

You might wonder why I am not talking about varroa treatments at the Monastery, and you would be a smartie if you did. The reason that I did not do a Spring treatment is this: the drone laying and drone larvae removal was one massive IPM-style varroa treatment. The mites are attracted to drone larvae preferentially, and when you remove the boys, you generally whallop the varroa population. Also, requeening caused a big disruption in the hives' brood cycles, also depressing the varroa population. Therefore, I am holding off until Fall, trying not to interfere too much in these very messed-with hives.

The Historic Mill Bees

In a way, I've saved the simplest, most rewarding story for last. Here is the Mill apiary, with 4 hives and a nuc (the small colony with a red strap around it). MaryEllen-the-Beekeeper is having her swarmiest year ever, so she keeps having to stash a nuc of captured wanderers at the Mill while she plans her next move. Since last year, a big old tree that overshadowed the apiary had to be removed (or it would fall down) and you can see me in the background in front of our new privacy fence. The extra sunlight seems to have done wonders for the girls, because we are all doing really well so far.

Here are my two colonies. I am trying to replace all the green boxes with white to get away from the stripey look and to keep better track of my gear inventory, but you see how it is. These two big colonies were actually started from packages just two months ago, and they took off like a rocket. The packages were installed onto comb that the girls who died left behind, somethig that worried me. But there is no evidence of disease so far, and a general vibe of health and happiness seems to spread from those boxes. There were three medium supers of not-yet-capped honey on each hive when I visited a couple of days ago, really wonderful for colonies started from packages this year!

This is just a gratuitous art shot of bees through the inner cover on the day I replaced it with a screened cover (for better ventilation and heat reduction). I just love to look at them.

And also a bit unnecessarily, here is a picture of some mill nurse bees taking care of new eggs. It is more important to see eggs than to track down the queen, and these hives have made it very easy for me this year. They have grown fabulously and happily, and I just hope to stay ahead of them in meeting their needs, including varroa management. The mites killed their predecessors, and I want to do better this year.

After going to a state beekeeping meeting where the role of all kinds of chemicals was a concern in the recent Colony Collapse Disorder crisis, I became convinced that I should try a completely non-toxic, non-chemical approach to control at the Mill. Here you see two cups of confectioners' sugar ladled onto the screened top of a hive.

By brushing the powdered sugar into the hive, I can cause the varroa mites to lose their footing and fall off the bees. The powdered sugar literally clogs up the little hooks and hairs they use to grab bees, and the motes fall down to the waiting ants. The bees can actually eat any extra sugar, and the grooming behavior they use to remove it also helps in mite control.

The only problem with this treatment is that it needs to be repeated regularly and many many times besides. I know a beekeeper who used this treatment exclusively, and nonetheless lost her bees. Therefore, I need to watch for any signs of an infestation, and have another plan just in case one erupts. I have formic pads set aside as a fall treatment even now, but my jury is out on what to do if an infestation erupts during hot weather.

It can actually be a little entertaining to apply this treatment. The bees change their buzz as soon as you drop the sugar, and they begin flying around in a somewhat disoriented fashion, looking like little ghost bees. Here's a whitened bee lifting her nasanoff gland, followed by another grooming herself on a fencepost. Notice the little white spot she left when she landed!

The bees probably do not see so well with sugar in their eyes, and in the left picture you can see a bee that drifted into the hive next door during the mere 10 minutes between when I opened the first one and then the second to apply the treatment. The right picture shows a hapless bee that has been captured by a "Daring Jumping Spider," kind of a cool looking beastie itself. I know this may sound odd or wrong to you, but I am actually glad to see the bees become a part of ALL portions of the cycle of life where they are located. Honeybees are not native to North America, but if they can slip into an integrated role in a balanced ecology, they can provide tremendous benefit. I am sorry to kill bees, but not sorry to see life be succeeded by death and renewed life in the natural order of things.

Finally, while there I actually saw one of the Mill queens cruising around, measuring a cell, and laying an egg. Unfortunately, I smeared my lens again, so this is the best I could do. It was a treat to see an utterly unbothered queen, healthily going about her regal business, supporting a family that is doing well.

The Bumpy Launch of Spring 2007

Sorry that it has been a while folks, but as a local apiary inspector told me in a (late) email this week, it's the time of year when beekeepers tend to be digging in beehives, not tickling mice!

So, you all might be keeping score already, but let me sum up where we landed in March 2007:

• five colonies went into the winter: two on the roof, two at the monastery, and one at the historic mill park;


• one colony, at the historic mill, died. The apiary inspector (mentioned above) has given his opinion — which happened to agree with MaryEllen's and BWrangler's — that they dwindled due to mite-vectored disease, and that the frames and all can be reused;


• there was evidence of life in all the remaining hives; but;


• no one had been down inside any living hive since Fall to see the state of the colonies inside.

We returned from travel on March 17 (sometime, perhaps you can ask about the charm of being in Newark Airport during an ice closure, and how you can end up returning from Israel on the train!) By March 25, all four surviving hives had been surveyed (as well as a couple belonging to my friend Jane, who was worried about hers). MaryEllen, Doug and I had installed four new packages each at the mill. To clarify, I am a godmother of 6 honeybee families now: 2 on the roof, two at the monastery, two at the mill.

On March 20, the roof bees were simply marvelous. The year had truly begun, with both queens laying and abundant new brood. The picture above shows nurses covering new brood (no close ups, sorry: the camera ran out of gas). It seems that my constant desire to feed them left them very well stocked for the Spring, too: there was almost a medium super's worth of honey throughout each hive. I saw no bees with deformed wings, and lots of bees flying in and out. * Happiness *

On March 25, we did a simple thing that should not be overrated: we installed 4 packages of bees! Jane (another club member, who worries way too much about how she handles her bees) came along to help and to get more experience. Watch the sidebar for a detailed run-down of how we did it: I messed up a lot less than I did two years ago! My girls went onto drawn comb left by the deceased colony: this should help them get a much quicker start because the queen can begin to lay right away, and there is already honey in the hive for nurses to feed the young. MaryEllen checked a couple of days later, and said it all looked like a living apiary again. I will name one of the hives "Cockrill" again (hey, no superstition here) but am currently stumped for the other hive's name. I'm thinking about perhaps the current miller on the site...

The question at the monastery was more complicated. Both colonies were still there, but something had gone wrong with the queens. Both were laying only drones, which means that the queens had either run out of sperm or that their reproductive organs were not functioning right, and the colonies were going to collapse if a fertile queen were not introduces soon. But there were no queens to be bought, and Larry, the most experienced beekeeper I know, said I would be lucky to find queens by April.

While I was in the MaryEllen hive, I even saw the failed queen: she looked fat and beautiful, but she was not the marked beauty that was there in the Fall. Her daughters may have superceded here due to some hardship during this weird winter. If so, she did not mate. Could this have happened to BOTH hives? Larry said it was truly strange. Could it be an affect of the oxalic treatment in the fall? The roof bees got the same, and came back strong. Oh mysteries, and second guessing, and so little to do about it anyway.

But, as usual, I was saved by MaryEllen. She had ordered (WAY ahead of anyone else) queens for spring requeening of her hives, and she still had two left. And said I could have them, if I replaced them when queens became available.

Like before, I found the queen of the MaryEllen hive right away, and (quite terribly) had to kill her. I hesitated to do it, and set her aside in a box, but when I turned back to her, she was trying pathetically to climb back home. So then I did her in, and buried her near her hive. There is something heartwrenching about this task of killing a helpless being, who bore no fault for her state. Yet a healthy colony would do the same to one of its own. This is little comfort, and maybe comfort should not be had.

I placed the new queen, who came in a plastic cage that was way odd to me, and the girls freed her in three days. I will be visiting this week to see how she is doing. She has a yellow dot, and I am trying to work out a saintly name for her. Suggestions welcome!

The Doug colony was hard, hard, hard by comparison. The first time I went in there (and discovered all the drone brood) I had dropped a frame, and throughout that visit — and the next two! — I failed to find the queen, looking at each side of each frame, going in and going out. I began to freak, since I needed to be sure that there was no queen if those girls would ever accept a new one, but I had no way to make certain of the fact!

MaryEllen rescued me again. She suggested that I make a little nuc in a super with my new queen (still caged) and some bees and frames from one of my strong roof hives. They would free the queen, she would lay down her fertile-mamma mojo, and MaryEllen and I would visit on the next good day to see if we could find a queen below, and if not, to unite the two groups. She is quite the smarty, that one.

Of course, the weather has turned cold again, so I probably cannot get in again until Monday (5 days from now, and 12 since my last visit: much longer than planned) but I have hope for both colonies.

And more news: at least one other beekeeper will be joining me at the monastery, a direct result of the girls' presence there this year. Let us all praise Spring, the renewal of life and friendships, and time in the sun for people and bees!

Four Hives of Golden Girls (and Some Fat Drones, Too)

Let's confess this up front: I did not want to visit my hives today, because it seemed inevitable that the news would not be good. MaryEllen lost a hive yesterday, and she found out that 10 of the 12 hives at the University of Delaware had also perished. This truly bent me out of shape, because I went to a talk by the UDel head apiarist last Fall, and he appeared to be doing everything right as he tucked his bees in for the Winter. I know I did not do as much, so I feared that Twain and MaryEllen-the-Beehive might be dead.

But, my dear friends, I cannot tell you what it does to my heart to see all those thousands of golden girls still buzzing! The bees were clearly in flight this morning, because my yard was full of scouts, looking for blooms. That meant one of the roof colonies was certainly alive, but could I hope for both? Well, the photo on the left shows the top of the cluster still peeking out at the Twain hive, and there were not very many new dead bees around (I have not been showing you the pictures, but since the worst of the cold snap ended, I have removed thousands of bees from in front of Twain, and have taken photos at one day intervals to see if a crash — like the one at the Mill — might be taking place).

The Wilde hive has finally risen up to the top box, and those girls are nibbling sugar, too. I had taken away all the feeders with 2:1 sugar syrup a week ago in order to better monitor bee death around the hive, but the bees found those feeders (at the other end of the roof) and were thronging them today. I set out some sugar water downstairs in the yard, too.

At the Monastery, I had grave fears for the MaryEllen colony. Their hive entrance had been almost stopped up with dead bees when I visited there last week. I cleared it, opened the entrance reducer a bit more, and gave them additional dry cane sugar (they had eaten a bit). Then I officially began to worry. It's hard to know exactly when worrying is warranted, especially since I do so much of it here. I tried to remember that, during the cold snap, the bees could not clean their home: they would have had to leave the cluster of warm bees to do it, and would have died themselves. Therefore a few weeks of deceased bees had piled up. What is too much? Only Spring can tell.

But today, I took the picture (way) above of the bees in the Doug colony, munching sugar for all they are worth, as well as this shot of the MaryEllen bees lining up for landing (like jets following I-95 to Newark...) packing pollen in three colors (one willow-grey, one maple-yellow, and one mystery-neon-orange). The Doug hive is clearly stronger, but I think there is reason to hope they both will make it.

And let us take a moment here to say "All hale the fuzzy male!" Why? Because every few minutes, a fat and furry drone would make his way to the hive entrance, and fly off to cruise queens. Somewhere out there is a Drone Congregating Area (a DCA), literally a great 7-11 in the sky, where willing males with not a whole lot of impulse control seek female joy. I'm going to read up on DCAs, and see if I can find any in the city.

There certainly are a lot of pictures today, but I just want to show you how the Doug hive got more sugar today. You saw above that the bees were thronging, and just pouring sugar on them could bury the poor buzzers. So I sprinkled sugar over them to make them retreat, then I filled in the empty areas with more sugar. The final picture shows you bees eating sugar at the MaryEllen colony. It looks like ice and snow, but it is bee-bitten sugar lace.







We are not in the clear, but now hope seems like a much more plausible, and pleasurable, way to pass the late Winter.

Death by Dwindling

When some people arrive at this page via search engines, I can sometimes see the query which brought them here (sorry if that freaks anyone out). Lately, several poor souls have arrived here on the the heels of the search term, "bee death." I am sorry to welcome you, fellow beekeepers, to a woebegone club.

Today we investigated the death of the colony I keep, alongside one of my friend MaryEllen's, at a historic mill site. It's important to do this in order to determine whether a disease was present that could affect others; to learn what mistakes might have been made that could result in the death of other colonies managed in the same way; to decide whether any of the equipment or comb can be used again or rather should it be sanitized or discarded; to secure the site against possible robbing out by healthy bees; and to clean up the dead.

To see a more extensive explanation of what we found, you can look at a bunch of photos and a narrative on the sidebar at right. But here's the short version.

My bees froze to death. They need each other, in the thousands, during this cold, hard time of year in order that each individual flex her tiny muscles and contribute that warmth to the whole. When we popped the top, I expected to see thousands of dead bees, because I am seeing many many many dead bees at two other hives, and fear the worst there. I expected to see those thousands with their heads stuck into the bottoms of empty cells, starving because I failed to feed them enough, or ensure that their stores were close enough by — a mere 2 inches in the coldest weather.

However, what we found was a clean hive, with just a few dozen dead bees on the bottom board, and just a few hundred clustered around each other, not able to hold off the cold.

We looked for signs of disease, and some were there. There was an instance of chalk brood, but that is a disease of weakened colonies, not one that brings them to their knees. There was no AFB, but there were dead larvae in cells with no wings. There were thousands of dead mites on the bottom of the hive, and they were stuck like fleas to dogs on the poor last bees standing.

The picture here is not a good example of what the remnant cluster looks like — you can see better on the sidebar — but it does show the limit of what I could do for them. Those bees are on a frame full of nectar, and the last thing they saw on this Earth was each other.

Varroa mites seek a symbiotic relationship with the bees, but they kill their would-be partners with their vigor. And then they, too, die. It's hard for me not to think of humans and our demands on the planet, as well as the limits on what we can do for other creatures once balance is gone.

When confronting the death of these bees, I approached with too much of a sense of being at the center of responsibility and blame, because I never had that much control and power. Knowing what I do now about the mites, and about the almost sure death of the Mill bees, I think I should have considered other alternatives, including the use of pesticides. But those are blunt tools in clumsy hands, too, and such violently lively mites might best be escorted out of the picture at the cost of one colony of bees. But I will never know, or at least need much more time to learn, before I have the kind of wisdom that will tell what should live or die, and whether I should make it so.

One Down

Bernd Heinrich, a famous naturalist, once spent part of a winter standing in front of beehives, trying to figure out how the honeybees knew that it was safe to fly. In a parallel of the story of Noah (who released doves to see if his particular time of stress was over, until one came back with an olive leaf), it turns out that the bees send out an emissary from time to time, as well. In the case of the bees, though, the adventurous workers fly out in singles and groups, and if the weather is wrong they do not come back. Nature sacrifices a bunch of bees, one or two at a time, in order to find Spring.

Nature also sacrifices entire colonies, which is what has happened at the Mill. Today was check-on-bee-feed day, and MaryEllen helped me out by checking out the bees out in the 'burbs. Hers are not doing well, and mine are dead, or so I learned on the phone. She was terribly sorry to tell me, and is not sure what happened, other than a population crash. She says that the cluster of bees is still there, inside the boxes, and that there is still lots of honey in there, but that they are all dead (oh what a beautiful, fantastic Queen to go so young). I know they were there two weeks ago, before this cold snap, but I also know that there were probably ten thousand mites by now, too. And now all are dead, a result of a would-be symbiotic relationship (between mite and bee) gone terribly wrong. Or so I think. The hive is now sealed, and after a bit more melting, we will go in to learn more.

You cannot be a beekeeper without losing a hive, or so I am told, and have repeated to myself a bunch. The state beekeepers meeting last weekend included a talk by a government apiary inspector, who estimates that 40-60% of the hives around here will die this winter (see, I wasn't just whining all these months!)

Oh man, I feel bad. So bad I am not even working out how much. It's not the money for equipment, the hours spent to-and-from, or even those spent sweating in a bee suit several times in the August heat, spraying sucrocide on 80,000 bees (every box, every frame, both sides, in the sun, three times). Or kneeling at the hive entrance in November, attempting a last-ditch application of oxalic acid. It's how little I can help, how little I know. It is, as well, the part that I do know, which is that Nature places its bets across most possibilities (in cold and hot weather, in rain and drought), but that I made the gamble to put those bees in that apiary at that time, in my care. And they needed me to do it, and I surely wanted to, but it did not work.

The picture above is of the monastery bees, which are still alive, a picture I took while making my own rounds. They look so resolute-yet-vulnerable, there at the edge of the woods. None of the colonies are truly out of the woods, you know, and if you have any pull with the authorities, I hope you will put in a good word for the girls.

Light in the Winter

Surprise, surprise: the bees are the lens through which I see the midwinter festivities now, and our celebrations are brightened (even literally) by the bees' presence and presents.

While rolling dozens of candles (pillars, votives, pagan trees...) to hand out to friends and family, it suddenly hit me that I could make Hannukah candles! We usually miss a night or two, so we had enough left over candles to cover about half of the nights this year. It only took about 20 minutes to roll up another coupla dozen more!

But we have an equal opportunity attitude to holidays around here, so I was also noodling around with bee-based gift baskets, and figured out an interesting way to present the three different colors of honey produced by the roof, monastery, and mill apiaries this year. MaryEllen gave me some special pastry plastic, and I taped together "flights" of honey: the lightest from the monastery, the medium from the roof, and the darkest from the mill. I also labeled some single-source jars for people whom might just like to have a usable amount of a single honey (rather than three somewhat impractical samples).

With apologies for the blown-out quality of these pictures, here's our final result. The menorah looked homey and glorious with the beeswax candles, though they did not burn as long as expected. The gift baskets included honey, candles, soaps, and a bag of Honey Pecan "Crackerjack," a first-time thing for me that seems to have come out OK. The recipe is below (with instructions about embellishments in parentheses).

All this craftiness was intended to simplify and refocus this special time, though it must be said that gift baskets are way more time consuming and kitchen-destroying than a trip to the mall. It's hard not to hope rather TOO hard that people will particularly like the effort, and perhaps to get too personally wrapped up in it all. After all, even when the goodies come from the girls, it is not about the stuff.

Honey Pecan "Crackerjack"

Ingredients:

• Stick of butter
• 1/2 cup of honey (you can almost double this for extra sweetness)
• batch of air-popped popcorn (about 3 quarts)
• 1 cup of pecan pieces (or even 1 1/2 cups)
• two cookie sheets (the ones with raised sides are best)
• Optional: ziplock bags for packaging

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F

Melt butter in a saucepan with a thick bottom (burning is the enemy here). Stir in honey until blended, and keep it warm but NOT boiling.

Spread the plain popcorn on the cookie sheets (which I lined with silicone baking sheets, a help at clean up time). Sprinkle the pecan pieces over the popcorn.

Using a ladle, dribble the hot butter and honey mixture as evenly as you can over the popcorn and nuts. Use a plastic or wooden spoon to mix the nuts, popcorn, and sauce until everything is coated.

Place cookie sheets in oven for ten to fifteen minutes, depending. You want the mix in long enough to carmelize as much as possible, but not to burn.

Take crackerjack out of oven and pour into a bowl to stop cooking. When cool enough, begin spooning into ziplock bags, squeezing out extra air and sealing. Tie a ribbon around the bag and you are done!

Makes between 20 and 24 ounces of sweet stuff, depending on how free you were with the nuts and honey.

Last Presentation of the Year

Here's a confession: this is a "pre-dated" post: as we are coming into the cold days, I seem to be slowing down, too (this post seems to be all up in my head, sorry). But here's a late update on our last presentation of the year out at the historic mill.

On this Sunday, the folks at the Mill asked us to participate in a day of activities at the mill, where residents of that suburban county were invited to stop by and take a look at the visiting blacksmith, to tour the mill itself (which needs repair after awful floods this Spring), to talk to we-the-beekeepers, and to sample some corn bread made with grain ground at the mill and topped with the girls' honey.

Apparently, the bees are still a kind of magic draw. Fifteen minutes ahead of time, the staff said that folks were up at the general store, asking where the bees might be. We probably had 75 people move through (or so the site manager said), more than usual for an autumn event. There's so much to do around here at this time of year, it's hard to get on family schedules.

MaryEllen made a brilliant display of hive products, an observation hive, and pieces of hive equipment, once again doing all of the heavy lifting. I supplied the handout above (you can click on the picture to download a full sized copy). The mill staff had apparently not really seen us in action before, and were pretty impressed. I think we may have made a couple of beekeepers, or at least friends of bees, and it was a good way to close the outreach year.

All around the mill, signs of the holidays ahead were beginning to creep in. A professional photographer was setting up on the grounds, and we wondered why, until family after family in "weekend best" arrived and began posing for their 2006 holiday greeting cards. It is a beautiful site. Inside, every once in a while the bees would go all buzzy in the observation colony, and we got to wondering whether there was some sound, vibration, or puff of smoke from the blacksmith working just outside that they could sense and we could not.

We were on from 2 to 4, and after two hours of talking we closed up and put away as the day got dark so soon. The leaves were still on the trees, but they were heading for sundown, too.

We both agreed that a load lifted off of our minds, with no more presentations ahead until next April at the earliest, and with almost everything we could do for the bees already in the past. I still want to shake some confectioners' sugar on those mite-infested mill yard bees, but have a nagging sense that my cards really have been played.

It's just sundown around here folks, a time to sort through what you think of what's just passed, and decide what to do with the quiet.

Quick Record Keeping, With ApiGuard

First of all, I want to tell you that the State Bee Inspector came by the historic mill on Tuesday, and he gave us the all-clear on American Foul Brood. In other words, we don't have it, or at least don't have it yet. He pointed out the big mite infestation in my hive there, though, and made various suggestions, including the use of Food Grade Mineral Oil (FGMO) to make those mites go slip-sliding away. I'll probably give it a whirl (there's no harm in it) but I have already completed two oxalic acid fumigations, and will make the third one on Monday. I think I am going to study up on how to double up on mite treatments, without unintentionally poisoning the girls with too much of a good thing.

So Sucrocide failed at the Mill. What did I do elsewhere? Well, two weeks ago, I placed "ApiGuard" on the rooftop hives, and followed up a few days later by placing it on the monastery girls (Saturday). ApiGuard is a 50 gram dose of concentrated Thymol, the same stuff that makes your Listerine potent. The idea is that you place the paste on the top bars of your hives, allow space for the bees to be able to move over it, and let their hygienic instincts ("Get this the heck out of there!") stimulate them to grab it, and move it among themselves to remove it from their home. In doing so, they expose the mites among them to a fatal dose (or so we hope). You put it on, wait two weeks, then put it on again.

The picture here is a ziplock bag filled with the paste. My friend (and mentor) Larry bought the bulk bucket, and he carefully measured out the correct doses for 4 of my hives, eight baggies in all. He instructed me in how I should put on gloves, carefully push the paste away from sides with the bag closed, cut off the edges, and then open the bag on top of the hive.

This picture shows such a bag two weeks later, The girls have cleaned it off, and actually started chewing the bag. The yellow stuff is propolis (no Carniolan party is ever complete without propolis). As of today, they got a chance to start over on a second and final dose.

According to the studies, this treatment is anything from 75% to 85% effective against Varroa mites, and does a number on the tracheal mites, too. I placed menthol on these hives at the same time as the ApiGuard, so the tracheal mites should have really taken a pounding at this point. After the Sucrocide experience, however, I absolutely intend to continue taking mite counts and to follow up with addition (maybe FGMO) treatments. I think oxalic acid is probably in the cards for January.

The whole experience at the Mill has made me more conscious of the importance of record keeping, and managing the tools, etc., from each apiary separately. If we had received a positive diagnosis at the Mill, all of my hives could be potentially infected. As it is, I plan on fumigating gear, washing bunches of tools and veils in bleach, keeping better records, and watching myself in future. Oh, and there may be more boring posts like this, and I apologize in advance.