After Long Silence

Hi all, it's me, the "secret" beekeeper who has a problem with actually remaining quiet. Except for the past two months (or more), when I have had a hard time figuring out what to tell you. But there are a few things I can clear up right away, and we can all relax.

First of all, here at the dawn of true winter, all six hives appear to be fine. Everyone in this area is a little light on stores for the cold days ahead, but we've been feeding, feeding, feeding, and don't intend to stop.

Second, as I sit here today I am hoping that the girls have gulped down their last serving of pre-freeze bee medicine. The only "unnatural" medication I apply is Fumidil, an antibiotic that helps the girls deal with Nosema (a digestive ailment that you might get, too, if you had to hold your poop for as long as the outside temp hovers below 50degrees F (10 degrees C)! I might have skipped it this year, but the roof girls are still suffering the after effects of the mighty mite battle of over a year ago (some deformed abdomens) and I want to give them the help I can.

Third, my blog life and my face to face life have become hopelessly muddled, and I am not sure what to do about it (Hi everybody! Yes, I could be referring to you...) The clipping you see above is from the October 2007 issue of Bee Culture, an honor my whole club knows about. I'm one of a distinguished company of bee bloggers, most of them much better beekeepers. And I could be very dramatic about being found out, etc., except I have been telling so many people about my blogly efforts for so long, it's hardly a surprise that SOMEONE would stop by!

But you know, this whole beekeeping thing is deeply personal and concerning, and to stand in front of someone you barely know discussing your deepest worries and failings and foolishness is, well, harder than telling folks on the other side of the world. Also, I cannot gossip effectively...

You know what, it is also very hard to stand in front of people I know *very well* and feel my heart out there on my sleeve, potentially receiving the odd bruise.

Suffice it to say that enough is enough, you have heard enough about my crowing and my cowardice, and that I promise to catch you up on stuff. I'm going to try to fill in a few entries from earlier dates (I have been taking pictures and thinking of you all, you know) and I apologize for any resulting confusion.

To say something final (and it does somehow seem required), I still love the sight, smell, and sound of a humming hive, and I care deeply for the bees. It was easier when it was a more private passion, but perhaps there comes a time to announce one's love out loud.

Mighty Miteless Joseph

Perhaps you know this already, but the brothers at the Monastery were kind enough to welcome three beekeepers this year: me, Joe (the president of the Monastery Garden Guild), and Joseph (a hapless dogwalker I snagged with bee tales last year). Both Joe and Joseph have been my "mentees" this year (a.k.a. I am their beekeeping mentor), but I have not been on top of them about their mite treatments.

So even though it is a little late, I have showed Joseph how to perform a sugar shake. This is a way to non-destructively (mostly) test your bee colony for the presence of mites. You can get pretty clear, short directions from Betterbee, but the upshot is that you cover a couple of hundred bees with powdered sugar, shake 'em until the varroa mites fall off, then count the mites. If you get a lot of mites, you have to treat, if you don't, you get to worry about whether you should treat.

Except for Joseph. We shook and shook, not one mite! So we pulled his bottom board. It had been in for WEEKS: maybe 2 mites.

Joseph does not have to treat for mites. Next year, however, Joseph does have to give me a daughter of the most hygienic queen I have ever seen.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Unexpected Bee Death

Soon after the new roof was installed, I noticed bee bodies piling up, mostly around Twain. It was hard to avoid the question: "Is the new roof killing the bees?" It was even harder to figure what the solution would be if I have an apicidal roof.

This is going to be one of those posts with lots of questions and muttering and head scratching, just so you are warned.

Initially, the first issue that hit me was that mostly Twain was affected. There were some dead bees around Wilde, but only in numbers that I associate with end-of-the-season dwindling. If the roof were killing bees, wouldn't both hives be affected similarly?

I remembered that Twain, being heavier, took a few extra shots while being moved for the construction, and also that with its larger population, that colony would show dwindling more obviously. However, this was very out of proportion. Was it robbing? David, the pumpkin-farming beekeeper for whom I am doing a web site, says it is always his strongest, largest hives that have the hardest transition to winter, often getting robbed in the process. Whenever I see robbers, I always wonder whether old Queen Eleanor and the girls are still around nearby, somehow surviving wild.

Finally, I remembered that at this time last year came the Time of the Creeping, when hundreds of sick, mite-bitten bees came crawling out of Twain. I "saved" them then by knocking down the mites, but the virus that caused the illness is still in there, mixed in the wax and the propolis and the bees' bodies themselves. With their increased cold weather confinement, was there an epidemic of Paralytic Mite Syndrome (PMS)?

To come up with any answer at all, it was necessary to get more data. The first thing was to sweep away all the existing bee bodies, and determine whether the die-off was continuing. This turned out to be hard to manage, because just enough rain fell at just the wrong time to make it hard for me to sweep around the hives. I needed to sweep in the twilight because waving big sticks around beehives is considered QUITE the provocation during business hours, and any later I would be unable to see a thing. I needed the roof to be dry, or I would just sweep wide swathes of mashed bee around the place – very disconcerting and sad.

My chance came about a week ago, and I swept the dead girls off to the other side. When dealing with dead bees, I try to toss their bodies up into the air, toward the sun, a kind of last flight and a thank you for all their hard work in their short lives. Sweeping them into a dust pan was a heartsore thing.

As of now, it appears that the bee death has stopped. If the roof was off-gassing, either temperature or time has caused that to diminish. If PMS was killing the bees, this month's oxalic acid application has perhaps curtailed its spread. There is still a daunting mite drop. If the dead are actually robbers, the thieving colony has either clustered now or lost too many bees to continue. Our weather has been awfully warm, too, with sudden cool-downs, and it is possible that the bees got caught outside at the wrong time. We had one afternoon when the temperature dropped 40 degrees F in two hours.

I keep wishing that it was more clear what a "normal" year would look like: to have an expectation of when dwindling would occur and what it would look like, to understand how heavy with stores the hives should be, and how much activity I should be seeing. But there is no such thing as a normal year, and urban rooftops are not often factored into your "normal" beekeeping expectations. These weird warm days are actually horrid for the bees in a light honey year like this, too, because they keep flying (and, potentially, trying to rear young) when there is almost nothing for them to forage.

But it must be said that the news is good, though answers are scarce. Whatever killed bees seems to have stopped, and there are still enough girls to make the winter. I will have a job of knocking down mites and topping off stores, but I like having something to do for them.

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.

Bad News at the Mill Apiary

Last Thursday, MaryEllen called to say that she had seen bees with deformed wings in front of the hive at the historic mill, so I went out and placed a sticky board, in order to get count of dropped Varroa mites.

There should not have been a large number of diseased bees, because there should not have been very many mites left after the sucrocide treatment we did in August. Just to remind, three times we went into that hive, and sprayed both sides of every frame with a solution that is supposed to crack the shells of the mites, causing them to dry out and die out.

Well, it did not work. Apparently, not even a little. I pulled the board, and there were more than a thousand mites. This is a red-light, sirens-blazing, hugely dangerous infestation. I decided, immediately, that this was a bad re-run of last January on the roof, and the only answer was oxalic acid.

Of course, I'd really hoped not to see such a thing, and had reason not to expect it (having been so proactive the month before), so I had absolutely nothing with me that I could use to take action. So I ran home, called (actually, bleated at) MaryEllen, and she met me back there directly with a hazmat mask and a helping hand.

Of course, I forgot to bring a board for the screened bottom (you have to block off all the openings during treatment) so we scampered down the street to find an election sign to fit the purpose. They work really well because the size is close and the material is designed to be water resistant. On a busy highway median, we found a place where 4 illegal signs (for a Republican) had been placed in close proximity, so we lifted one. (Before anyone screams at me, know that a state highway crew had removed all the others by the end of the day).

So now I don't know what will be with these bees. But wait, there's more!

MaryEllen found out, same day, that some bees she had placed at the mill temporarily were confirmed with a case of American Foul Brood (AFB), a powerful bacterial disease which (in some states) incurs a mandatory order to destroy the colony and fumigate any gear that came in contact with it. So there is a danger of AFB in the remaining colonies at the Mill (including mine) and,if I was not careful, I might have carried it elsewhere as well! This could be just terrible, but more information is needed.

The state bee inspector is coming to look at the Mill colonies next week, and he will let us know if they are infected. My plan, going forward, is to have all the gear that is not currently in use fumigated within the next few weeks, swap out the unfumigated stuff after that, and then fumigate the balance in the Spring. Suits and tools are going into washing machines (with bleach) and dishwashers as is approapriate.

Finally, we were asked to contribute an article to the Mill newsletter, and this is the downhearted gem I sent along.

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The Bee Battle for Survival Comes to [the] Mill

By Toni and MaryEllen

For the past two decades, the numbers of beehives and beekeepers has been in decline, and most think this is for two reasons: disease, and the increasing difficulty of preserving the bees against the pests that prey on them. The apiary at [the] Mill is not immune to these forces, and we are fighting to keep the bees strong and healthy enough to winter over.

The main pest that beekeepers think about is the Varroa mite, Varroa destructor, a tiny arachnid that afflicts bees in a way similar to the way a tick can hurt people and dogs (but worse). The Varroa mite jumped to the honeybee from a Southeast Asian bee species that had better defenses: the bee colonies all of us see here now are almost inevitably destroyed if they are left untreated for Varroa.

How does this happen? The mites attach themselves to adult bees, and drink their bee blood (which is bad, a way to spread disease); they also lay their eggs in bee brood cells, and their offspring feed off and maim the young bees (which may be worse). Before long, the adults are weakened, the babies are crippled, and the colony dies.

Earlier in the summer, we applied a newer treatment against Varroa, a product called "Sucrocide," which comes from a tobacco leaf extract . Sucrocide damages the shells of the mites and causes them to dehydrate. It does not damage the bees or leave a chemical residue in the honey, however. For reasons we don't quite understand yet, this treatment does not appear to have worked, and the Cockrill colony (on the right as you face the hill) now has a dangerous infestation. We will therefore be applying at least one more type of treatment over the next few weeks to try to save these bees. We also expect a visit next week from the [...] State Bee Inspector, and he may be able to help us figure out more.

We won't consider using any of the nasty organophosphate chemicals, classic pesticides, in our colonies. Varroa are increasingly resistant to them anyway, and they present the danger of leaving residues in honey and wax,. We use both products in making food and soap, and would not want to expose our families (or anyone else) to them.

As you can see, all the monitoring and treatments that come with the Varroa threat place a lot of stress upon beekeepers, and many of the latter have left this pursuit because it got very hard. At [the Mill], we are lucky to be able to work together when the going gets tough, and we can put our heads together to work out solutions. Neither the bees or the beekeepers can truly go it on their own in this challenging world.

Drought or Drown

While working here today, the rain gauge on the roof informed me that today, September first, we have just received twice as much rain as we did during the entire month of August. Far from using this as an (admittedly tempting) opportunity to kvetch about the weather, I'd like to thank you intrepid urban gardeners out there...the ones who planted salvia, chives, lavender, Russian sage, crepe myrtle, augustache, Japanese Pagoda trees, and those few other late-summer bloomers that offer up nectar and life to the bees. And even more, who water them more per acre than any farmer could.

The wind has been whipping fiercely, too (over 30 MPH around 3 PM), so I went up to look at the girls, and this is where today's pictures come from. You may remember that I drilled extra entrance/exit and ventilation holes in many of my hive boxes to spare the girls extra work in coming, going, and cooling the hive. When I went up to peer into the holes on the windward side today, I saw no bees, and could not even arouse a guard bee's interest by sticking in a finger. This was worrying. Checking the wall-ward side of the hive, there were the girls, mighty crowded, too. The wind was affecting them badly, and they were trying to get far from it.

So I searched around the roof to find something with which to temporarily block the holes, and found wind-blown maple and sycamore leaves. The first couple of attempts, using somewhat limp leaves, resulted in near immediate removal. Then some crisper specimens arrived with a blast of rain, and the deed was done. The last picture is the leaf protecting the box with the brood nest.

However, there was still the matter of the screened bottom boards — the foundation of the hive, which features a screened area in the middle to allow even more ventilation and mite drop, to boot.

One of my major beekeeping shortcomings is taking counts of varroa mites on a regular basis. The reason for this is not laziness (or so I think). There are two main ways to count mites, one is a mite drop onto a board slid beneath a screen bottom board, and the other is a "sugar shake," where you trap a coupla hundred bees in a mason jar with a screened lid, put in a quarter cup or so of confectioners sugar, and shake it out over a bowl of water. The sugar knocks mites off of the bees, and the water makes it easy to count them as they drop. On a board, you just put it in, wait three days, pull it out, count mites, and divide by three.

The sugar shake always kills a few bees, and I hate that. It is easier on them than the old "ether roll" method used to be, and it can be done in hot weather, however. The bottom boards kill no bees at all, but they reduce hive ventilation, and in hot weather that just seems mean.

But it is hot no more, and the wind today is no friend, so I placed clean boards below the screens. Then I jeopardized the family Nikon by taking snaps in the rain, and I came down to talk to you. If you are an urban gardener, please know that lots of buzzing somebodies out there are awfully glad when you wield the hose. And if you don't mind the odd chive plant blooming in your lawn, they don't either.

Sucrocide, Then Split... Sort Of

Back on June 28, we found a bee with a mite on it at the historic mill apiary, which raised an alarm about whether those colonies were seriously afflicted with the vicious varroa mites you have heard so much about here.

The poor mite-bearing worker bee told us, in effect, that we have to treat sooner rather than later. Usually, I'd be waiting until the temperatures began to fall in September, and I would use a treatment that diffused a concentrated essential oil or formic acid (none of which are organophosphate pesticides, or leave toxic residues). However, it's far too hot for that, and we can't afford to wait. It's bad enough that we all could not find a suitable date to work together before this!

Why do I say "we?" MaryEllen has bees there, too, and it's safest to assume that what is living in one hive has also reached out to the neighbors. MaryEllen's presence in this post is important for another reason, too. She and her husband, Doug, used a treatment called "sucrocide" to treat some of their colonies last year, and those colonies registered not one single mite when tested. Not one! So we decided to try sucrocide at the Mill. It's a bit tricky unless you have done it before, so I wanted their help.

The sucrocide treatment meets our standard for keeping poisons out of the hives. It is made up of a tobacco leaf extract and sugar, and it works by drowning the mites, and then disappearing from our lives. It really stuns the bees at first, too, but they are larger and shake it off as they dry. The mites are much smaller, and evaporation comes too late for them. Another bonus: it's really unlikely that the mites will ever develop resistance to this treatment, unless they can evolve beyond a need for oxygen.

The picture up top shows bees recovering from what I am doing in this picture: spraying sucrocide from a pump sprayer onto each side of every single frame in the hive, as well as the sides. We try not to spray Queen Maud or any open brood. By the way, this exercse has to be repeated 3 times, at one week (or so) intervals. Hard work.

The bees cling to my hands in a sort of drunken, but insistent, way. They really hang on, holding my skin with the hooks on the end of their legs that they also use when hanging together to drawn honeycomb. You cannot shake them off easily. It kind of feels like the "pins and needles" effect when you cut off circulation to a foot or hand. I like holding the clingy bees, but it freaks out MaryEllen and Doug. I just thought about how they were very wet and sort of cold, and how my hands were warm and in the sun.

When applying the sucrocide, though, we found ourselves disassembling hives full of bees in hot weather, and reassembling them into hives of sodden bees who just wanted to climb up out of the box to catch some rays and dry off. Kind of a bee-cano, since my colony out there is just brimming with bees, easily a peak sort of population for a hive around here. This picture is actually MaryEllen's colony, though. Those boxes get heavy at midsummer, and they are very heavy to settle down gently, one on top of the other, while trying to gently convince wet bees to move along. Thank goodness we did this together!

Though actually, I will be away for the final treatment. MaryEllen, Doug and I did the first treatment together on July 30, a week ago. MaryEllen and I did it today, and Doug has agreed to complete the process next week, when I go off to a wedding in Ireland (can you believe it?)

I am getting seriously bent out of shape about having to leave on Tuesday. This has been a trend in recent years: I like to travel, but hate to leave home. Adding the bees to my life has not made this easier, but not, perhaps, for the reason you would think. Sure, there is extra preparation before leaving, but I think the real issue is how connected I feel to the pile of dogs, cat, fish, bees, bird feeders, friends, neighbors, plants, and even squirrels about the place. Departing my eco-system for someone else's is good for the mind and for the soul, but it can be kind of hard on the heart.

The Spaghetti Method

And on the fifth day (which would have been Friday), she counted. And what did she count? Nasty little pin-head sized mites, my dears. By the hundreds.

There is only one way to find out if a treatment for varroa mites is working (or isn't working, or whether you should be working on putting together a treatment): you count mites. In my case, I count the mites that fall down from the hive onto a greased up bottom board below it.

I felt sorry for myself three weeks ago (before it was clear that there was a problem): the bottom boards came out, and there were about 150 mites to count on the worst one. It's a very nit picky business (to mix buggy metaphors), because the mites are so tiny and the bees tend to drop a bunch of other stuff, too, like pollen grains, wax flakes, ex-bee body parts, and unidentified beekeeping objects.

To my earlier self, I now say "Hah!" If you have a good treatment going, you will get hundreds to fall every day, at least at the beginning. After four days exposure, the board from Wilde pictured above contained 814 dead varroa mites (by my count). The board from Twain, surprise surprise, totalled 1514! This is a lot of mites by anyone's calculus, and kinda hard on a poor aging beekeeper's eyes.

The boards are about 2 feet by 18 inches, and I kept getting lost ("Have I counted this mite before? Where did I stop last time?"), and needed a way to mark out territory. Therefore, I have developed the Spaghetti Method (TM) for counting Dropped Varroa Mites. You, however, are hereby licensed to use this technology for your own apiary endeavors if you think nice things about my bees while you use it.

It works like this: the stuff on the bottom boards tends to fall in a way that shadows the frames of bees hanging in the boxes above. Basically, there are rows of assorted crud that overlap a bit. Grab some dry spaghetti (use the straightest ones you can find) and use it to mark off the spaces between rows, pushing the odd mite to one side or the other if you need to. Make sure you count any mites that end up stuck to the spaghetti (there is absolutely not a single cooperative feature of a varroa mite, I assure you). Take a little broken bit of pasta to use as a pointer, and begin working your way along each row, poking around in little blobs that might conceal a mite. Write down your count for each row, then total all the rows when you finish.

By the way, I could go all legal on you and tell you not to eat the pasta afterward, but it's probably safe if you did not use some kinda funky oil on your bottom board. Buon appetito.

The folks on the Beesource bulletin boards seem to think my daily mite counts were in line with an ongoing treatment (203 and 379 for Wilde and Twain respectively), but some thought perhaps a fourth application would be in order. I just completed the third, and possibly final, treatment today, and kind of want to know if this is "too much of a good thing" territory. Therefore, you can guess what's coming next week: another mite count.

So Tuesday, otherwise known as Valentine's Day, I'll be up on the roof, placing clean sticky boards. It's just as well that I lurk up there, because that Animal Planet show for which we (the girls and I) were interviewed is airing that day.

Battling the Midwinter Mite Menace, Part 2

On Sunday, my husband helped me apply the second round of oxalic acid treatments to my varroa-mite infested colonies of honeybees. We were actually a couple of days overdue, because the whole idea is to time at least 3 different treatments to catch every cell in the bees' brood nest at least once while it is open. This is an actual real-life picture of me with my genuine propane torch doing the deed. You can see a movie which demonstrates the low flame and positioning in either Quicktime (.MOV, 5.5 MB) or generic (.AVI, 2.7 MB) formats.

In case you are wondering what the copper thingum in my hand really looks like, this is the version I whipped up from bwrangler's specs. It has been used a few times, and I am a little bent out of shape about fumes, so I put extra teflon on the outside of the joints. This was whipped up from less than $5 worth of pipe scraps and caps from the hardware store, and $5.88 for a pound of oxalic acid, more than I will need in a life time.

Why repeat all this treatment stuff?

Whipping up a batch of baby bees usually takes about 21 days, and the whole first part of the beekeeping short course seemed to be all about these stages. Unfortunately, I sat there hearing "blah blah blah," thinking the important stuff was coming later. Um, this was the important stuff though.

You see, I can only treat bees that are either already hatched, or in the first phase of being hatched, when the bee egg's comb cell is still open. The order of operations is that the queen comes around, drops in an egg, the nurses feed it lots for a while, and after about 8 days they come by and seal up the cell for the "cocoon and pupa" stage. And varroa LOVE it in there. None of the medications for varroa can get through the beeswax capping, though.

So, to ensure that the whole colony gets treated, you end up doing a bit of bee biology math. We know that it takes about 3 weeks to bake the average bee. We know that each bee only spends about a week developing in the open. Therefore, each bee spends about 2/3 of the hatching cycle, or two weeks, unavailable to me. So on any given day, only 1/3 of the cells receive my ministrations. So the calculator says, if you are giving a treatment, you need to repeat it 3 times at one week intervals to even hope to cover all the bees.

After treating the bees this time, I slid in clean sticky boards at the bottom of the hives, and will count three days' worth of dropped mites tonight. I'm not sure what to expect, because there might be lots of dead mites because of the treatments, but there might be fewer because many have already been sent to the great pestilential arachnid playground in the sky. Probably, the best approach is to take a count after each treatment, and then a little later. If there is one thing that beekeeping teaches, it's to try to get a longer term, more integrated view of the goings on, rather than trying to read the truth from adrenalin-producing snap shots.