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.

I Believe in Living Sunlight

Today I checked my hives after days of hard wind and rain. A honeybee pulled out a young, deformed worker, and dropped her a few yards away. The sick bee moved a little, but had no hope to live. Her sister took no time for pity. I did, but couldn't know whether a short tap from my toe would end her misery or shorten her only moment of sunshine. So it is with bees.

I'm a hobbyist beekeeper, but my companions are a theme of my days. I speak to youth groups, summer camps, and festivals about the miracle and importance of honeybees — how they can plug a jaded urbanite into a world of sun, rain, and blossom. Kids and adults respond with wonder. The bees are the living embodiment of sunshine, dependent on plants and their blooms to flourish, a need which is returned by the wild plants — as well as crops — that depend on pollinators for another generation of seeds and flowers.

In the city, I live like a yuppie but think like a farmer. I know the temperatures of the past 6 months and the forecast for this week. I know how much rain we've had, and how much we need. Since the bees arrived, I've smelled the blanket of sweetness that the linden trees lay down in June. Have these been extra-fragrant years, or did I just never notice before?

The bees are Tinkerbell vegetarians, less than 1 inch long and hanging from borrowed-looking wings. You can see gold sunshine through their bodies, as if the sweetness of honey starts inside. Being a ham-handed mammal pawing through the delicate home of 50,000 bees has underscored the clumsy truth about power: it's impossible not to kill or injure on the way to staving off disease and starvation. I'm wrong from time to time about how to fight those foes. Size and strength are no help in fixing my mistakes, made by clumsy fingers 20 times the size of any bee, by limits on what I can see and understand about their lives.

Bees live in a tight family communities, something many of us crave. Workers that stow honey in May will never meet the December sisters who eat it. Yet the bees are ruthless: the ill are cast out, and the old try to die outside the hive. They can't change how they live, even with the new illnesses and parasites that humans brought. Paradoxically, they need us more, since they can't survive alone. We need them more, too, as other pollinators disappear with their habitats.

Living with honeybees, I see the life force of sunlight streaming through our lives, in sweetness and danger. I don't know if the bees and I are within the cascade of warmth, or if it is in us. But I know we are together just the same, and our very different worlds will have their stories written in the same light.

---

An explanation for this essay:

One of the public radio networks in the United States regularly runs a segment called "This I Believe," where listeners can contribute a personal statement of belief. The program hopes to get people thinking and talking about faith and belief, during these times when we are all so likely to tear each other apart over these subjects. Friends have suggested, from time to time, that the honeybees are an appropriate subject for such an essay from me, and I resisted until now. I've learned as much about what I don't believe as about where my faith resides, you see.

So I uploaded this essay, "500 words or less," and realize that it's a poor fit. Like a beekeeper with a particular way of looking after the hives, these folks have a unique project and a specific method in mind, and I did not follow the directions. But I am glad I did it, anyway.

Maybe the best part is this: after your no-more-than-500-word submission, they give you 800 words to reflect upon the exercise of writing your belief statement! This, my friends, may seem silly — but it is actually quite cool. This is what I wrote:

This is not the first time I have written about bees: they seem to provide the doorway to a deeper understanding of how to be a unique, living being in a nonetheless teeming world. I go back again and again to learn what I really think and feel and sometimes to change my mind.

Politically, I am a biased person, but the bees actually make me confront some of the principles I hold for convenience and comfort, rather than for the sake of truth. It splits apart the relationship with truth and false faith, where you cleave to a belief for reasons other than thinking that the force of life within you really supports it.

"This I Believe" was a necessary activity for me because it made me confront so many things about power and responsibility and limitations and life and death in this little community where my role is so important but not omnipotent. I cannot love the bees without accepting their brutality, I cannot understand the cruelty without the beauty. How else can a person understand themselves?

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!

Happy Bee Day in the Land of Milk and Honey

We are in Israel, prompted to another adventure by a wedding invitation, and what is any trip without casting an eye about for bees? In this case, Sam found me a beekeeper who runs a visitors' center for busloads of children, with room for straggling adults like us on holidays and Saturdays (www.tour-galilee.co.il). We took a tour (in Hebrew) with a really good guide named Yasmin, and though we struggled to follow, it was absolutely clear that everyone always laughs at the same part of the presentation: the bit about (ahem) limited role of the drone...

After that, we got to spend some time with Yigal, who runs the place. He has spent much of his life touring the world: he taught shepherding in Iran, and they taught him how to raise silkworms. He was stuck in NYC on 9/11, and is (understandably) reluctant to return to the states, even to see my roof bees. And one other thing: the universal rule that beekeepers will always find something about which to disagree (in this case, the likely role of hybridization on the temperament of Africanized honeybees) is absolutely intact!

He keeps Italian and Australian bees, and they enjoy a much more comfortable life than my girls. There is almost no winter, and the nectar flows throughout the year (though more at some times than others). He's using chemicals for varroa control, but he agrees that making strong colonies is the best control of all. He and other beekeepers in Israel are engages in a planting campaign, adding pro-bee plants like eucalyptus trees wherever possible to increase the nectar flow at low times. When I told him that our flow was so limited, he suggested that we plant more varieties, too — anywhere space could be found. As he said: "They'll kill you for cutting down a tree, but planting one?"

I have an official Dvorat HaTavorah staff t-shirt now, and am engaged to provide three jars of Capital Buzz honey for his educational display. And MaryEllen will be pleased to learn that the gift shop sells propolis mouth wash!

So I was all abuzz, as they say, when we left and were driving through the gorgeous agricultural area of the Galilee. Yigal says that there are about 5,000 beekeepers in Israel, and that they are extremely important for much of the food produced there (think Jaffa oranges). I made Sam pull the car over (and drive it back about a kilometer) when we found this picture-perfect setting for honeybee pollination of a young fruit orchard.

As I took the picture, however, I realized that the yellow flowers all around me were buzzing. These wildflowers, which I'll try to identify for you later, line almost every roadside. In fact, incredible wildflowers of many sorts (including, I think, papaver somniferum) are on roadsides, empty lots, and mountainsides all around the country just now. I laughed to think that the girls had been placed there to work the fruit trees, but were wallowing in the sun-baked wildflowers instead. It's Spring, it's beautiful, and I guess we are all on a vacation of sorts!

You will not be surprised to learn that there are more pictures of the bee center, of honeybees in wildflowers, and bee colonies seen along the road (as well as a random box turtle, rescues from a highway suicide attempt). These will probably be put on a sidebar page when I get home. You know, in some cosmologies, Hell is an endless review of someone else's vacation pictures. Would I do that to you? :-)

Blue Signs of Spring

With apologies for the crummy, telephone - photographed image, here's a plant that I think the bees go to, blooming profusely in my neighborhood. No honeybees were here quite yet, but it's a glorious day and, and hope blooms, too. I believe this is "henbit" and that it *is* a bee plant, though I cannot check it just now. My husband and I are on the road again, this time to Israel. I hope to find some Galilee bees, and to see who is flying in the Negev.

In case you were wondering, it seems like the search queries that bring people here now are evenly split between "bee death" and "bee feeding," and I hope you all find what you need here. There are at least two "new" disorders this year, "colony collapse disorder" and a virulent nosema (bee dystentery) but I do not deal with them here, because I have not seen them myself. I can tell you an insight a more conservative beekeeper told me though, a kind of wisdom about this time of year in this type of climate.

The bees truly rely upon numbers, population numbers, to make their worlds work, and rightsizing the number of bees to tne environment they inhabit is a major bee proccupation. What do I mean by this? I mean that it takes a large number of bees to exercise control over the inside of hive -- to make sure everyone gets fed, that the temperature is warm enough, that disease and dirt are eliminated quickly, that new brood is covered, that the queen is tended, and so on. If the bees are in too much space, they may be overwhelmed with work. If they are in too little, they don't have enough resources to support them all or have enough room to get their work done.

But right now, too low a population is the threat. If there is enough family in there, they can stay warm, they can balance their hive tasks among workers, they can avoid frenzy, exhaustion, and disease. There is less stress, there is less disease.

This same beekeeper told me how, a year ago, he found three dwindling colonies in temperatures that were far too cold. He took those colonies, only three or four frames of bees a piece at that point, and popped them (queens and all) into one hive box. Two months later, in much warmer days, he opened up the hive to find all the bees in there, as well as all three queens. To the honeybees, the numbers were everything in the game to survive: joining forces, all the queens laying, god only knows what kind of pheromonal cocktail animating the place. Normally, the queens would hunt and kill each other until only one remains. In this case, perhaps the workers kept them apart. So much for "one hive, one queen" By season's end, it was a normal hive, but not a very strong one. They had all been through too much, and cracked foundations make unsteady buildings.

As the weather warms, some beekeepers make see piles of dead bees like this near the entrance to the hive. This is right after a cold cold time, and the bees have a lot of dead sisters to get out of the hive all of a sudden. They usually carry their sisters farther away, but in this case they have to push 'em out quick. This is frightening to find, but not unusual. I hate to show you this picture, but the numbers of people worried about be death make me think you need to see it. I have been in this hive, and monitored its progress over a few more good days, and the death has not continued at least up to now). They are still in there, taking sugar.

Outside my hive that died, the signs of death went on for quite awhile, and much less dramatically. There were few bees around at all when it life ended there. So please baby your bees, feed them fondant and sugar, and look forward to Spring. I hope we al find the flowers that make us hum.

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.

The Difference Between Up and Down

As much as I like to show you bees, on January 23, this is what I like to see.

These are bees on the down-low, clustered Carniolans in the Wilde hive who still have enough food in the hive to remain below the top level. Oh sure, I stop by and refill these feeders as necessary (if they will take sugar syrup, I will surely give it), but the weather has finally turned cold and they are not drinking much. Today it was 39 degrees F (about 4 degrees C) while I was on the roof, and these girls were all cuddled down inside, not a bee in sight. The little marks you see are dirty bits of much-travelled beeswax.

Now offered for your consideration: honeybees up top. This is the Twain family, big and bustling in the Fall, and perhaps too numerous for its own good now. They have burned through just about all the honey they had stored, but scarily have only taken two quarts of sugar syrup since the last time I came by. It's so cold, they may not be able to access enough of the food to keep from starving.

Interestingly, their behaviour is reminiscent of the dearth days of August: around here, there is almost nothing for the bees to collect during the absolutely-crazy- hottest time of the year, and the bees get ornery. It's certainly not hot now, but some of that risibility is certainly present. I got a January sting last week from these girls (luckily it was on the ankle of the foot where I seem to have tendonitis, and it seems to have helped).

I decided to refill the two empty feeders in Twain, and to use the two feeder bases left over to hold dry dugar. The bases are stuck with propolis to the frames below, and I do not like knocking frames around when bees are clustered all over them.

The bees kept jumping in while I poured in sugar, so I would stop occasionally to root around with my finger and uncover them. You can see a couple of bee heads emerging in the picture, I think. The trouble with reaching into the hive is that dearth-y bees react more to everything, and some would try to take flight to defend their hive each time I reached in. It was cold enough that they would probably not be able to fly back, so I stopped reaching in, and tried to pick up and put back the bees I could find.

Apparently I had some stowaways on my veil and my tool bag, because I found bees inside, buzzing the windows, after I went back to the house. I opened the door and let them out, confident that a few minutes at room temperature allowed them to warm those wing muscles enough to fly back home.

Drying Bees for Fun and Profit

Few things in daily life hurt my heart like the cold, wet body of a honeybee victim of winter. There seem to be many more of them these days, in part because all of the beekeepers around here have to work hard now to keep putting sugar syrup out. The bees are running through their stores this winter because it is warm(er), they are more active, but there are no more flowers.

Warm as it is, the nighttime temps usually get pretty low even without a frost, generally 40 degrees F (4 degrees C). I learned from MaryEllen that at 46 degrees F (8 degrees C) bees go into something called a "chill coma." They cannot move, they cannot fly, and they can sit there in the middle of a pool of golden honey and still die. All that sugar syrup gets as cold as the surroundings, and sometimes I think, when a bee drinks up too fast, her temperature falls below coma level, and she is in trouble.

But, the important lesson *I* have learned is this: honeybees are rarely as dead as they look. And my husband now has another of my behaviour quirks to live with.

I've taken to collecting (Careful! They are small and fragile!) and reviving the sodden bees around and in those pools of winter syrup. Here's how you can, too.

Start with a roll of paper towels. The unbleached ones are best, because the dioxin in the white ones seems to poison bees with extended exposure (I cannot always find the brown ones). Expose a couple of full sheets (I like to keep them attached to the roll), and gather as many bees as you can, placing them gently into the middle.

Place the towels carefully over a heating register or other gentle source of heat (a blow dryer would be too rough). I hold down the edges with heavy books.

Get your husband equivalent to turn up the thermostat or crack a door or something to get the heat to kick on. The prepare for a wonderful, up close experience in bee-watching.

As the bees dry and warm, they begin to buzz and walk around. They will spend alot of time running their front legs over their antennae and wings, cleaning and drying. Their butts will go up as they start rubbing their hind legs together. The buzzes come at first in little bursts, as they get back control of their wings and warm those muscles up.

The bees come online gradually, and not all on the same timeline. I use the register nearest my back door, because as each individual achieves critical warmth, she will rise up and fly. I can see the sun through her translucent body. Then I just pop the door open, and off she goes.

At first, the bees come online in one-sies and two-sies. But the rate is like an air popper for popcorn. You get one or two right away, then there is the great crowd, then the last couple of laggards, and then one or two that never fly again.

The good news is that I have done 18 bees at a time, and had them all fly. I've also picked up 6, and found that one or two awakened with damaged wings...I had done them no favors. I might think I am fooling with raising the dead, but my limitations in helping them are humbling. Still, I wonder if bees return to the hive with the equivalent of an old-time prophet's testimony: "And then did the pudgy brunette make the winds blow warm..."

Refilling Feeders, More Bee Death, and Unseasonable Drones

This is one very, very warm winter, apparently the warmest in over a century so far. The bees fly every day, so I fret over whether or not I can keep them fed until the flowers bloom (unless they bloom early, and risk death by frost when, or if, the winter arrives). I last fed the roof bees 6 days ago, so I trooped up there to see what they had eaten and refill the feeders.

All sorts of uncomfortable sites awaite, including the one in the picture above: a great big fat hairy drone. Don't get me wrong — I'm kind of fond of the lazy bugs — but he should have been dead by November. As near as I can tell, the only reason this dude has been kicked out of the hive is that he is missing an antenna. The girls have probably continued raising brood throughout this mild winter, further stressing a food supply that was light to start with. As it stands, Twain took almost a gallon of 2:1 sugar syrup in 6 days, which I replaced. Though Wilde still seems heavy, I gave those girls three quarts.

The second, but more heartbreaking sight was the return of dead bees around the Twain hive. The picture here is of dead bees in front of the Mill hive out in the 'burbs, though. Why is it here? Because I think that the two hives have a lot in common, including difficult-to-manage varroa infestations and signs of Paralytic Mite Syndrome (PMS). The varroa have probably been knocked down by now, which means their larval habit of crippling baby bee wings is less obvious. But the virus they have already imparted to the bees may be shortening lives. Both hives share the unique characteristic of major K-wings earlier in the season. I think it's PMS.

And there is a rub to that: I should probably stop reinforcing those hives, and try to reduce virus levels by shaking them out onto clean foundation in the Spring. The virus gets into the wood and the wax and the bees' bodies, and cannot truly be eradicated. By setting them up clean, I can reduce the levels and perhaps give them a chance to develop some resistance. More logical people might let the colonies pass on naturally.

But back to the out-of-season drone. Here's what his underside looks like. Can you see how lovely and fuzzy he is, particularly around his front legs? I'm kind of wowed by the scalloped pattern of his exoskeleton under there, so pretty. Do you notice that the base of his abdomen has a little golden cone-shaped outcropping rather than a stinger? That's why I could be so free in photographing him: he can only buzz at me. But I have a kind of freaky curiousity to show you, too.

While working in one of her hives over a month ago, MaryEllen discovered this dead drone on the bottom board. As you can see, his wedding tackle is fully deployed, something neither she nor I had ever seen before. You can see why, when mating in flight, there is no way that retraction is an option, and the drone dies. And this drone is a little dried out by now (MaryEllen originally gave him to me to try to photograph under my microscope, but the object was actually so big that I could not get good depth of field. In the course of my manipulations, the poor guy's head came off, sorry). If you click this picture, you can get another view of the same thing (it seemed morbid to post more than one here).

I need to run away now and try to get some more food on the Monastery bees, if they need it. It will rain and rain (and be over 60 degrees each day) tomorrow and the day after. At least those girls don't seem to have so many dead sisters on their doorstep.

Sugar and Fondant

You've seen me going on and one about the two main winter beekeeping issues around here: food stores and mites. This is the most interesting picture I could show you about how I've been trying to look after both.

This is a peek through the inner cover of the Wilde colony on my roof. The bees inside are covered in powdered sugar, and the cover itself is holding about 4 pounds of granulated cane sugar. The powdered sugar is a non-toxic mite control method: the varroa mites seem to be unable to hang onto powdered bees, and they fall off (hopefully leaving the lives of the bees altogether). The bees soon clean themselves off, and get a bit of a snack in the bargain. MaryEllen (the beekeeper, not the colony) points out that this method is kind of like flossing your teeth, though: you need to do it over and over to get much benefit.

Very soon after sugaring up the bees, white-covered bees began emerging from the hive entrances, though this is just a close up from the top of a hive. To properly apply the sugar, you should remove each box, powder the top, place the next box on top, powder it, and so on. I am afraid to manipulate the bees much in cold weather: I could break the cluster, or expose the queen, or do some other typically awkward thing at a time when the bees have few options. So, for the sake of doing something, I put on the powder and then made another oxalic acid application.

The granulated sugar is a winter feeding method suggested by a beekeeper at the state meeting last month. Bees often stop taking sugar syrup when the temperature reaches freezing, but they will (apparently) creep up on the inner cover and grab some dry sugar when the need arises. You can put a shim on top of the cover, and then place the telescoping cover. I'm a little unsure of whether this is worthwhile, for a couple of reasons. The first is that I don't personally know any beekeeper who does this, and the second is that the bees will need some source of liquid water in order to access the sugar as a food source. This latter is also a concern when offering them fondant (bee candy), however, and I know that they take fondant just fine.

As an example, here are two pictures of fondant. The first is a flower-shaped (broken) brick of bee candy newly placed on the Cockrill hive at the mill. The second is a picture of a brick of fondant MaryEllen put on the neighboring Millard hive a week or so before. Chew chew chew!




At the state meeting, the most experienced beekeepers agreed about one thing, as winter approaches: after 100 million years, bees don't freeze to death during winter, they starve. We've had warm temperatures, and I have seen bees flying almost every day and only the rarest of flowers in bloom. Though applying the oxalic acid to save the bees from mites will require 15 unique applications, it appears that far more of my time will be spent this year dishing out the sugar.