Opening Day

I have been reading that this was the worst winter yet for the honeybees. Which must mean I was lucky, because I only lost 1 of the 3 hives I wrapped for winter.

When I inspected the dead-out, I found the bees all together in the bottom box with no food. The second box was empty, but the top box was full of honey. The cluster was together below, with their little bodies jammed into the comb head-first, and a layer of bees on top of the ones in the comb, all dead but eerily waving in the wind like they were alive.

I was taught that a cluster of bees tucked head-first into the comb usually means they died of starvation. If so, it was my fault because I hadn’t properly arranged the bees and honey before winter. When it got terribly cold, they would not have been able to move up to the top. But they died in the autumn, so why hadn’t they moved up to the food? Puzzled and worried about my other colonies, I asked the state apiarist, Tony Jadczak, to inspect the hive when he spoke to our club in March. He told me the bees had died from a virus. The empty box between the bees and the honey was a factor, but with or without honey, he told me, they would not have survived the winter because they were all sick.

What Tony saw and I didn’t was that the bees’ abdomens were undersized, a symptom of bees that were infected by a virus before they pupated. All the bees looked the same in the hive, and without experience or other bees to compare them to (my other colonies were holed up for the winter) I missed what was obvious to the expert.

After Tony inspected it, I brought the hive into my house and spent a long time examining it. I compared the bees in the hive to other dead bees I had saved. The difference in size is striking when you see it.

By sheer luck, I had taken a picture of the queen when I first looked inside the dead hive, so I tried to find her again (you can tell her by her shiny back).

I wasn’t successful; she must have fallen out when I brought the hive to the club. I looked at every bee in my search, counting almost 3000 bees into a bowl. They were soft and wiggly and smelled like rotting honey. It was kind of gross, but a person needs to know what a dead colony of bees looks like, right? Here they are – really a pretty small pile.

I checked with a few people and they assured me that since I know the bees died of a virus last fall, I can feed the honey to my other bees. Which is good, because although I gave them candy boards in February, I thought they might have eaten them by now. Early spring is the time of year when bees starve most frequently, as the weather warms and they’re starting to forage but there’s no nectar yet.

I waited for a day when the temps were in the 50s, which came a couple of weeks ago. I thought I knew what I’d find in my hives; I expected to find the candy board mostly eaten. I wasn’t sure what to expect in the number of bees, because frankly I’m amazed they are still alive at all.

In Apartment B, the candy was only partially eaten and there wasn’t any honey in the frames I could see, so I swapped in 3 frames of honey. My visit was brief and uneventful, and the bees received my donation without comment. There were a fair amount of bees at the top and I couldn’t see how many more were below.

In Apartment C, I expected nurse bees to be tending brood at the top right corner, where they had spent the winter. For this reason, when I saw a lot of bees on the right, still plenty of candy board, and frames full of honey on the left, I thought all was well and closed the hive back up.

A week later, I worried I had been too hasty and I returned to the hive to give them more honey. Everything was going well when I opened the hive, so I tried something my teacher taught us in intermediate bee school. If you take a frame of brood, and hold it just right and smack it, the bees will fall off into the hive because nurse bees can’t fly. Here’s what she didn’t tell us: check for brood in the comb before doing this. If there’s no brood, they aren’t nurse bees and they can fly. When I smacked the frame, a cloud of bees shot up in the air, coming at my veil and my bare hands. It was an alarming moment for everyone.

I find myself less comfortable with the bees than I was last season. I spent so much of the summer recovering from bee stings that now I panic a little at the possibility of getting stung. This time, my gaff had no ill consequence, but I was glad no one was there to hear me yelp.

The queen in Apartment C is probably laying her eggs further down in the hive. At least, I assume there is brood down below where I saw a lot more bees scurrying around. I can’t say for certain, because it’s not warm enough for me to do a full inspection. If you pull out a frame of brood and it gets chilled, the baby bees die and the hive has no future. So I added two honey frames at the top – there weren’t any more frames without bees on them and I didn’t want to do any more stupid bee tricks -  and I closed things up.

The frames I took out of both hives have dysentery on them, and I have seen drops of it around both hives throughout the winter. So my next adventure will be treating nosema. I was looking forward to spring inspections and artificial swarming, which I learned about in class this winter, but dealing with bees often means dealing with disease before we can do the fun stuff. So as soon as I can feed them liquid, I’ll probably give them medicated sugar syrup. I hope there aren’t side effects this time.

In the meantime, I’m prepping and painting the new equipment I bought for artificial swarming -  a queen castle and a nuc box.

So much to do that’s so much more interesting than spring cleaning.

Feeding the family

I wrapped my hives just before Thanksgiving and one hive seems to have died rather quickly thereafter. I didn’t check for about a month after I wrapped the hives, because my mom passed away about the same time. By the time I checked, Apartment A was silent. The other two I can hear buzzing away inside, and I can find cappings on the bottom boards when I slide them out (meaning I see bits of wax that have been taken off honeycomb as bees eat their honey stores and otherwise mess around in there). I haven’t gone in yet to see why they died, but Apt. A swarmed at least twice during the summer; my guess right now is that they were too few to stay warm through the first cold snap. Until I can determine the cause of death, I am leaving the hive closed to all bee access; if they died of disease, I don’t want anyone to catch it.

Apartments B and C live on. I knew the girls in Apartment C were already at the top when I wrapped the hive, so I’ve been worried about their food supply. I was also never sure how bad the robbery was in the fall, so I wanted to feed both B and C before too long. I bought a couple of candy boards from Bee Pride last month and waited for a good day to put them in the hives.

Brian told me I should put the candy boards below rather than above the inner covers. The bees survive by clustering together in very cold weather, so you risk them not finding food if it is not in close proximity. Furthermore, whenever bees leave the cluster, they risk not being able to get back. When bees are very cold, at first they stop moving, and eventually they die; if they can get back to the cluster even as they get stiff, they can warm up and recover. So they don’t go wandering off looking for food, even within the hive, when it is very cold.

There was tar-paper stapled on the hives, though, so I had to figure out how to get inside without pulling everything apart. Brian suggested I slice the paper at the bottom of the inner cover and quickly slide in the candy boards. A candy board has a hole at the same place as the inner cover, which allows bees and dampness to escape at the top. In winter, damp will kill bees sooner than cold; moisture rises to the top of the hive on a warm day, and can drip back down, leaving the bees wet when the cold returns. I have placed a piece of homosote between the inner and upper covers to hold moisture; it keeps the water off the bees and provides them a place to get a drink too. So the trick was to get the food in between the top box and the inner cover with the least possible movement.

My job is crazy busy right now. I work for multiple projects at USM, each of which is supported by a different grant or government contract. I am the administrator for them, and since each is on a different calendar, managed by different supervisors and answering to different sponsors, there’s always at least one needing my immediate attention to keep it moving forward. The job that constitutes about a third of my salary is paid by the US EPA, and we have known for some time that we might lose funding because of pending federal budget cuts. Losing funding means a mid-year re-write of budgets reducing funds for things already underway (including our salaries and benefits, which make up over 80% of the budget). We got the word 2 weeks ago that we were being rescinded from $90 to $38 thousand in our fiscal year that began last October. You probably understand what I’m saying but may not be able to believe it; 5 months into the budget year, our budget was reduced to 42% of the original amount. What will happen to my benefits if I lose 30% of my paycheck? It’s not good, so the pressure to find new projects is intense.

Another one of my jobs is for a multi-year project that began when we were awarded a grant from 6 foundations. As we were in the first phase of the project, the sponsors told us they would probably keep funding us, but that we’d have to ask them through their individual grant applications, and they won’t be funding the full amount of the project as it moves forward. What this means is that before we can do the work they paid us to plan in Phase 1, we have to raise funds to do it. In the past month, we’ve submitted 5 grant applications and we have a fraction of the money we need. Applying for grants means working on overload with drop-dead deadlines.

The point is that I cannot take a day off from the office because the sun is shining and I need to get out to the apiary.

So I had a day that was warm enough when I had work I could do from home. I had no way of knowing when another  warm enough day with no rain or snow would come, so it had to be that day. The problem was the wind was blowing like mad. It was not a good day to go into the hives, but I thought I’d better do it while I could.

In the meantime, my daughter needed me to drive her to the mechanic to pick up her car so she could get to work, and a person I needed to work with for a grant was in the office for about 2 more hours. I had a one-hour window to accomplish a task in the hives that would take maybe 20 minutes on a lovely summer day. But it was 40 degrees and there was a gale out there.

First, I couldn’t get the smoker to light. I probably should have tried to start it inside the greenhouse, but thinking of that as a fire hazard, I had taken my bucket of pine needles, my smoker and my lighter, and I was trying to start the smoker outside. A gust of wind knocked my veil into my face and blew the bucket of pine needles over, the pine needles immediately started flying away, and I frantically grabbed what I could and yelled with rage, as I tried to get them back in the bucket while the veil flapped around in front of my eyes. My husband came running outside to see if I was OK, and yelled across the wind that I was crazy to try to use the smoker. I decided he was right.

I tied my veil back in place, tight, and brought all my tools out, carefully placing them and the candy boards where I could easily reach them. I have ratchet straps on all my hives to keep them from blowing over or being knocked down by bears, and two of the ratchets don’t work well. One of the bad ratchets was on Apt. B and would not release the strap. I decided that a ratchet strap that won’t open when I need it to is not worth having, so I cut it. The outer cover came off easily and there was the homosote, a bit damp at the end where I thought it should be ventilated. I considered that this might not be good, but it wasn’t the day’s objective, so I moved on. I could see some activity around the auger hole and bottom entry, and knew I was alarming bees and had no smoke, but I told myself I would hurry and it would be OK. I estimated where the top cover edge should be and sliced the tar-paper and pried open the lid to find the top seething with bees. The last time I was in there, the girls were living near the bottom, but they have moved up to the top of the hive as they have eaten their meager winter stores. Oh well, I told myself, they’ll be sure to know the candy board is there when I’m done. And it was probably a good thing I was feeding them.

With reasonable dexterity, I slide the candy board between the inner cover and the top box, but I confess a few people got crushed by the lid and a few were left outside when I was done. I hoped they would be able to walk or fly back inside in spite of the strong wind; every bee that dies is that much less insulation to help the cluster survive the cold, and there is still a lot of winter ahead of us. I quickly put the outer cover back on and placed a number of rocks on the top because I couldn’t replace the strap.

On to Apt. C, where I knew for sure the bees live at the top front right corner of the hive. They were there in the fall and there was nowhere else they were likely to have gone. This time the ratchet released the strap and I was able to slip it off the top to remove the outer cover. More confident of where to cut, I sliced the tar-paper and pried open the inner cover. Sure enough, there appeared to be as many bees as ever up, waiting to attack me. I slid the candy board in with more confidence, just as a bee (probably from the hive I had already pissed off) stung my thigh. Having no smoke to blow on the spot to mask the alarm pheromone, I pulled my jeans away from my leg to remove the stinger and continued my task as quickly as I could without screwing up. I closed Apt. C, strapped it, collected my tools, and left.

All in all, it went well; I got done in the time I had, I put an ice pack on my leg, and I drove my daughter to Gorham. The bee sting wasn’t too serious because the stinger barely got through my jeans, and the bees got their food. I went back a couple of days later and put duct tape around the cracks I had created, to reduce wind coming into the hives (you can see the red tape below the 2 outer covers in the picture).You don’t want to break the propolis seal the bees have made inside their hive to cut the wind in the winter, because they can’t replace it once it’s cold. But nor do you want them to starve to death. If I hadn’t known that Apt. C was already at the top of the hive, I might have waited until the weather was a little warmer. I had intended to add the candy board in spring, when they are more likely to be out of food, but I have learned a couple of things since I wrapped my hives that influenced my decision to do it now. First, I had put sugar inside the inner cover, but I found out that the bees might not access it in the very cold because they won’t break cluster. Second, bees burn more calories in very cold weather – and it was an exceptionally cold January.

Balancing the options to make this decision was tough enough for me as a hobbyist. If I made an error that causes the bees to die this winter – for example, if my foray into the hives chilled the brood that was coming along to replace the aging workers, which might lead to the colony freezing to death because they’d be too few to keep warm -  as sad as that is, it won’t hurt me or my family. I hope I didn’t do that, but it was a risk I took. I determined the benefits outweighed the risks and I opened the hives; you do the best you can with the knowledge you have.

______________________________

In one of the projects I manage at work, we’re trying to develop a strategy to strengthen the local food economy in the state of Maine. We’re planning to do a massive grassroots outreach across the state to get input from as many players as we can reach. We hope to learn what they think we need to do and how to do it and to get them on board to help – large & small farmers, fishermen, grocery-store owners, migrant workers, distributors, farm-stand operators, cooks, food pantries, etc. – anybody working in a field that’s involved in the food system. Plus, of course, the customers who eat the food. We firmly believe that the state can improve its economy and food security by building a stronger local food system. This includes not just growing and catching, but processing, preparing, and packaging food products here in the state rather than sending raw materials out of state and buying them back, stripped of their quality, safety, and value, at a big super-store.

We presented our project to an agriculture group in Augusta last week, where we heard – not for the first time – that our plan is weak on food producer input. We agree. And some of the farmers seemed pretty ornery about the whole thing. We have been told there’s a feeling that well-meaning planners and researchers gather insights from people who are trying to make a living in the food sector, get paid to write a report about what they learn, and then not much comes out at the other end to help the people who donated their time, energy, and insights, and whom the report was meant to benefit. In a sense, these folks feel like they themselves are being harvested.

Every day I work with my bees I see in new ways how complicated it is to be a food producer. When your livelihood depends on unpredictable, constantly changing factors (many but not all weather-based), your life fits into your work, not the other way around. You need to be ready to change your activities at any moment, depending on what’s going on outside.

Sure, we all have to deal with unforeseen roadblocks that undermine our good planning. But if something causes an animal to die, you cannot simply modify tomorrow’s plan; you have a loss that you may not be able to recover from – not to mention the heartache of losing a live creature. You have to start over from scratch, and you might not be able to in time for the next season. For example, if all my hives die this winter, I may or may not be able to replace them in the spring, and even if I do, I’ll be starting with hives that will produce less, if any, honey next season, compared to the mature colonies I have right now. If this were my livelihood, that could be devastating.

Even when they have a harvest to sell, family farmers and fishermen earn a fraction of every dollar the consumer pays. What they earn barely keeps them in business from season to season, so when people talk to these folks about the food system, their highest priority is to increase their share of that food dollar. They are and should be very selective about when and with whom they give away their precious time; and they most certainly have none to spare during the growing & fishing season. We can’t just invite them to our meetings and expect them to show up; we must be respectful about how and when we ask.

If we can raise the boat for food producers, we can increase the incentive for people to go into the business, which should increase our local food supply. If we can increase the volume of raw food available, we can increase the ability of mills, canneries, and other food-related businesses to be successful in Maine. It all means providing opportunities for people to make a living and feed their families. It also means having a fresher, safer food supply that won’t run out if we have a severe storm or other interruption of cross-country travel. Do you know that there is only a 3-day supply of fresh food on our grocery store shelves?

Thus, I learn again and again from my bees how much we owe to the people who grow our food. The work is hard, the risks are enormous, and we depend on them.

Time to unite

I am  frustrated. The robbing has compromised my hives and my ability to inspect them, and it continues despite all my efforts to shut it down. It has been significantly reduced, but I fear that the robbing will continue until cold weather makes the bees stay home.

For a while I thought it was my own bees  attacking each other in a frenzy that I had inadvertently begun by sloppy inspection practices, but that’s not the whole picture. I may have contributed to it, but I have not read about bees robbing while their own hives are being robbed, and all 4 of the hives have definitely been under attack.  I tossed some flour on a bunch of bees after I installed a robbing screen and watched some of them fly off over our pear trees and towards the woods. Since I know that my hives cast at least two swarms this summer (and probably more), I think there’s a good chance that the robbers are from one of my swarms.  I have neighbors with bees close enough that it could be theirs, but they don’t live in the direction where the robbers went, so it doesn’t seem likely. In a strange sort of way, I am mildly mollified to think that a strong hive living down in the woods is one of my swarms; at least it means that I have helped the overall honeybee population by bringing them here and taking good enough care of them that they could reproduce. I don’t need to think about the fact that the nucs I bought were so strong that they swarmed without any help from me, or that if I had been a more experienced beekeeper, I’d have been able to split my colony rather than let them swarm. It’s probably better that some bees are managed by humans while others are in the wild; it increases their chances of survival by offering a variety of living conditions.

The thing about the robbing is it caught me unprepared. I did not have the equipment I needed to stop it and I unwittingly did things that may have exacerbated it. First, I didn’t own robbing screens and I didn’t have access to the parts to make them as soon as I needed them. I didn’t rush to solve that problem; I kept thinking my other strategies would work. Second, I may have actually encouraged the robbers at the same time as I worked to stop them.

I was working on the unconscious assumption that if robbing screens were that essential, they would be part of how people are taught to set up hives in the first place, or they would be part of the sets you buy to start beekeeping. Dumb. My next mistake was that I didn’t go right out and find supplies to build them. Then, once I started to look, I discovered that it isn’t easy to find the right hardware cloth. Hardware cloth is wire screen. It’s generally sold in sizes where the spaces between the wires are so big that a honeybee can pass through the screen, which is exactly what you don’t want. Hardware stores only stock what they can sell quickly these days – they are no longer those great old dusty places where you dig around on shelves to find unusual items that they don’t often sell – so I couldn’t find it. I didn’t try to overcome that problem until I went to The Honey Exchange to buy an IPM bottom board for Apt E, a month after the robbing began. I got talking to Phil about my robbing, and he recommended robbing screens. He described a simple design to me, and said I’d be able to find the hardware cloth at a particular store in Portland. By then I had found out that my local hardware and feed stores don’t stock the small gauge hardware cloth, and I was still dawdling.

I still didn’t make time to shop for the hardware cloth; I kept telling myself it was going to stop. Geoff would look at the hives while I was at work and tell me they looked busy but not crazed. I was only home after dark and I had to be away from home for two weekends running. During one weekend, I was able to find some good wood, but not the hardware cloth. So I continued to postpone acting until my club meeting, when I found out that a member had asked our local hardware store to order hardware cloth in a small enough gauge, because she, too, needed to build robbing screens. I had no more reason not to build the screens, so I went to the store and they had the stuff.

In the meantime, I had closed up all my hives twice, in an effort to keep out new robbers and get the robbers in the hive to become defenders. I read that if you lock them in for 72 hours, whoever is in the hive will become members of the colony. So I tried that, and timed it so that when I opened the hives again there would be a robbing screen on Apartment E, which seemed to be the weakest and most under attack.  I hadn’t made the other screens yet, but hoped that under the circumstances, it would be alright.

I was wrong. It might have worked, had I not also chosen that time to introduce yummy-smelling food. At the Common Ground Fair in mid-September, I had heard a speaker talking about a recipe he uses for his bees. His theory is that you shouldn’t feed bees syrup unless they’re in danger of starving to death, because sugar syrup is not as good for them as real nectar or their own honey. He makes what he calls bee tea, a syrup made with camomile tea, some natural oils, and sea salt – a brew that he feels provides more nutrition. I made up a huge batch of the stuff and put it in all my hives before I locked everyone in, so they’d have food. What the lovely smell did, I think, was keep the robbers interested in my apiary as a food source. It defeated the purpose of my closing off the honey supply to diminish their interest. Three days later, I took off the screens and opened the hives back up for the waiting robbers.

At this point, I’ve got my home-made robbing screens on all 4 hives, I’m not feeding any more syrup, but I can still see the occasional little bee pairs rolling around in one-on-one struggles. It’s not the roiling clouds of bees that I saw last month, and I don’t see the dead bodies on the ground that I saw when Apt E first got attacked. I know my bees have a much better defense because I’ve closed off all the entrances except those protected by screens. Yet they still need to fend off robbers, which is stressful.

The next step I’m planning is to combine the two weakest hives to make them stronger together. I know that Apt E is the most weak, but I don’t know yet which of the others is weakest. I’m guessing it will be Apt C because it had as bad a mite load as Apt E before the mite treatment. The Api Life Var treatment was technically done yesterday, and I installed IPM boards under them on Sunday. In a couple of days, I’ll remove the IPM boards and count the mites again, to see how well the treatment worked.  I can do that in any weather because it’s just pulling boards out from below the hives, but I can’t open the hives to inspect them until I have an unseasonably warm day. And I’m afraid to do that because opening the hives up will subject them to more robbing. I’ve been told to cover the hive with a cloth and take out one frame at a time, which I could try. But I think that if I open the boxes and see enough bees crawling around on top, I’ll call it good. I’m most concerned about sheer volume of bees; they need to make a big enough cluster to surround the queen when it gets cold. I’ll combine the one that has the fewest bees with Apt E – which also, by the way, has a painfully heavy honey super – and I’ll wrap everyone up for winter.

Now all I can do is wait for a perfect day and hope I can stay home when it happens. In the meantime, I’m going to remind myself of the good ole’ days in July, when I first saw my Swarm Queen.

And I’m going to think about how, next season, I’m going to manage my beehives and a full-time job an hour away from home. You can’t manage bees if you can’t observe them regularly, and weekends aren’t good enough because you can’t count on the weather.

I need to incorporate more natural rhythm in my life. It shouldn’t be this hard to do.

Apartment E

The wife of a friend at work has been battling brain cancer. She was diagnosed about the same time that my friend Rand was told his brain cancer had returned after 4 years. Rand died almost a year ago (in my January blog entry I talked about it) and Winnie hung on for a long time, using every weapon the doctors could offer her to fight the thing. For a time, her symptoms were similar to Alzheimer’s, as the cancer began to affect parts of her brain. I could understand these symptoms because of my parents. So my friend and I have talked about what our loved ones were going through, and when he started to see that Winnie’s bees would need a new home, he asked if I would take them.

Taking care of Winnie’s bees runs much deeper than taking a new beehive home. I feel so connected to what she’s been through that I feel a redemptive need to do my best for her bees. So last month I had them inspected and last week I went and took them home. The inspection was later than planned, because the first time we scheduled it – on September 6 – Winnie passed away that morning.

The evening I went to get the hive was warm and gentle, and I sat next to the hive as the sun was setting, watching the foragers come home in little groups. I had intended to pack them up quickly, but I found I could not shut the door on the foragers as they returned from their work, so I waited for almost an hour.

At one point, I heard a strange blowing sort of blast behind me, and I stood up to see a deer running off into the woods. Behind it were another 4 does and fawns, all watching me. One of the does made the blowing sound again, but more gently, and they did not leave. They looked at me, grazed a bit of grass, and then looked up at me again. After a few minutes, the lead doe seemed to decide it was time to go; she blew the sound loudly, and they all half-walked, half-ran into the woods.

The bees just kept gently flying in. As I watched them on the landing board, trying to decide when to attach the screen that would lock some in and leave some behind, I noticed a few bees leaving the hive. One was pushed out, grabbed, and carried off by another. I watched them land on the grass and realized that the one being kicked out had deformed wings and could not fly. This made me look more closely at the other two that were leaving, and they had deformed wings too. This is a virus. I know the hive has mites, but the inspector had felt that they looked reasonably healthy and strong, and judged that as long as I was treating the hive for mites this fall, all would be well. So I decided to not let the discovery of this virus hamper my decision to bring the bees home that night. Besides, the season is turning, and if I didn’t take them then I didn’t know when I’d have another chance.

I finally packed up the hive, and with my daughter’s help, got it in the back of my car, safe and secure. I brought it home and put it on a stand in my yard. I opened the auger hole at the top, but did not open the screen at the bottom because I wanted them to come out slowly. The next morning, I pulled off the screen, watched the bees seethe out and take to the air, and went off to work.

It was a busy week and I didn’t get back to the hive until Thursday evening. I wouldn’t even have checked them then because it was raining, but my husband asked me if there should be so many dead bees outside the new hive. I went out and found that there had evidently been another robbing war. There were dead bees on the ground around the new hive and dead bees at the entrance of every one of my other hives.

There hasn’t been much food since the bamboo washed away. I had fed the bees, but I had not checked to see if they needed refills. I had added a new hive that I knew was weak and I had not kept my eyes on the situation. I felt like I had been a terrible beekeeper.

I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, and I have been wronged by others. In short, I’ve had a lot of experiences where I found myself – whether through my own fault or others’ – with a nasty mess on my hands and no one to fix it but me. I cannot say that I don’t revisit the self-doubt, the anger and the ash-eating feeling of regret, but I have learned at least that I need to think clearly in these moments.

It had been raining since the morning I brought home Apartment E and it was raining still. I could not inspect the hives, so I put my ear against each one and listened. They all sounded alive. I don’t have enough experience to know what sounds like a strong or weak hive, but I know a living one, and they were all hunkered into their homes, buzzing. I opened the top of the hives that I had fed and checked on the syrup. Two hives had syrup they were not taking and one was more active. I took out all 3 containers and brought them in to make a batch of bee tea, the recipe for which I had learned at the Common Ground Fair last weekend. I was really disturbed that 2 of my 3 hives weren’t drawing syrup. They’re robbing each other but they’re not eating the food I made them? What is wrong with my bees? They had consumed a gallon of syrup a week when I was feeding them before the bamboo blossomed, but suddenly all they seemed to want to do was steal each other’s honey. I had read that robbing can change a hive’s personality and I started to panic that I’d created an apiary full of bee assholes; they only want stolen honey to eat and they’ll never be able to live together in peace again.

As I began to prepare a new batch of syrup, I realized that I was thinking backwards about the 2/1 sugar to water ratio. And then I realized that the last batch of syrup I made had probably been the backwards ratio. Which would probably be why the bees didn’t want it. Which means my bees are perfectly reasonable creatures doing what makes sense. The change in temperature has made it so they need much less water in their hive. In fact, whereas water is a much-needed coolant in summer, it’s a nasty dampener in autumn. I screwed up again!

The good news is that I figured it out and made them a good batch of bee tea, which I fed to all 4 hives. Now we’ll see if they reject this recipe because it has sea salt in it. When I added salty beach rocks to their beloved water supply a few weeks ago, they suddenly stopped drinking the water, so I’m thinking they don’t like the flavor of salt. But a really good beekeeper gave us the recipe, so I’m giving it a try.

There was a period in late August when it seemed like we had a really great thing going. I had a watering can the girls were loving, everyone was queenright and growing, and there was enough nectar that the bees were living together happily. It happened once and I have to believe it can happen again. But in the meantime, I find myself covering my bees with wet sheets to confuse them from getting into each other’s hives.

I’m not convinced it’s doing much good.

Serious business

I’m finding it hard to stay on top of things… like this blog, for example. Even this entry was begun in September and finished in October.

The summer ended all of a sudden. I thought I had everything ready for the bees for fall, but now it’s almost October and I haven’t done the mite treatment yet and they haven’t made enough food for winter. Both of these things, although bad, can and will be addressed. But I don’t understand where the time went.

In treating for mites in July, I killed my only queen and I was without a single queen in any of my 3 hives for a period. Or so I thought, to my horror. I was advised to buy a new queen for at least one hive, but I held off as long as I could. I had given Apt. C and A some eggs to grow a new queen before the mite treatment. Apt. B started its own new queens immediately after (or maybe even during) the mite treatment. So everyone had a chance,  although I thought I’d run out of time. A week after I thought there was no more possibility, Apt. C suddenly had babies. We were back in business. Late in the season, severely weak, but we had time to recover. I hoped.

Doesn’t she look happy?

I went off the the Eastern Apiculture Society’s annual conference in August, thinking that I had a hive with a queen and the possibility of a new queen coming back to one of the others; if one hive could surprise me, I thought, why couldn’t another? I learned a lot at the conference about getting ready for winter, not the least of which being that if you have weak hives, you can combine them to have bigger populations and thereby a better shot at surviving the winter. Since I thought I had one hive with a stockpile of honey and two that might be queenright, I started making plans for which hives I’d combine and how I’d use some of the excess honey in the one hive to feed the others. I came home with great plans, ready to take action.

What I found was that making plans is stupid. In my next inspection, there was evidence of a queen in every hive.  I had successfully helped them re-queen; the new queens had to have come from the milk brood I’d offered them at various times when each was queenless. Although I knew I had helped them along, the lesson I learned was to trust that once I gave them the necessary conditions, the bees would take care of themselves. I am gradually becoming more convinced that the Hippocratic Oath applies to beekeeping; above all do no harm, or, when in doubt, trust the bees. Except, of course, there was no excess honey anywhere.

And I am still up against my own ignorance. My intentions are the best, but as a first-year beekeeper, every time I think I’ve figured it out, a new issue presents itself and stumbles me. The current issue is robbing, and it is scary.

In the first weekend of September, I was inspecting Apt. C and thinking about how I was going to push the colony down into as condensed an area of brood and food as I could.  I had learned at EAS that this is how to get ready for winter – make sure the colony is strong, and get all the food and brood down as low and as tight as possible. When the weather gets cold, the bees will cluster together around their queen, and need to be able to reach food supplies nearby. They will work their way up as the food gets used; the beekeeper’s goal is to assure that food will be available throughout this winter feeding pattern. (In top bar hives, they need to begin at one end and work  towards the other end for food).

What I did not realize was that the night before my inspection, the abundant bamboo plants in my yard suddenly and completely ceased providing nectar; a heavy rain had knocked off all the flowers, changing the conditions from honey flow to dearth literally overnight. When I opened up Apt. C for inspection after the rain, I did not notice until it was well underway that a battle had begun. As I was carefully looking over where there was honey and pollen, where the babies were, etc, the boxes I had set aside were being attacked by other bees. I had been taught that you need to cover full supers when you inspect a hive to prevent robbing, but since the super wasn’t full and I had never had a robbing situation before, I had not thought to prepare for one. The bees in the boxes I had set in the grass were not enough to defend the honey; most of the colony was in the area I was inspecting. By the time I noticed the grappling bees on top of the boxes, the battle was in full swing.

At that point, I put my limited knowledge into action. I quickly put the hive back together, making sure that the feeding box on top had no exterior entrance (something I had just learned at EAS), and I corked the top auger hole to further reduce marauder access. I had intended to inspect more hives that day, but realized that all I could do was reduce the robbing conditions as much as possible, and leave everyone alone to calm down. I reduced entrances with twisted bunches of grass because I couldn’t actually adjust them without upsetting people, and I closed off food supplies wherever I could. Then I left for a while. A bit later I returned with my veil on and took away the smoker, my toolbox, and the other things I had out there; there was still enough activity around the hives that I decided not to do any more that day.

A half hour or more later, I went to a chair that’s about 10 feet from the hives and sat down to watch from a distance. The chair is beyond the distance any guard bee has ever followed me and it did not occur to me to put on my veil. I could see from where I was that the bees were still fighting. One bee came over to me and flew around my head a time or two, which my bees occasionally do, and I thought nothing of it. Then suddenly, the bee flew right at my eye, from the side to avoid my glasses lens, and stung me right on the eyelid. I ran inside and got my sister to scrape off the stinger, but it was hard to get off as easily as you scrape a hand or arm.

I’m not going to say that sting didn’t make me less comfortable around my bees; it has done. I have since then read about robbing. It’s pretty apparent that I created the situation myself, first by causing the robbing and then by not stopping it. So I can’t blame the guard bee for attacking me, and I should be able to believe that I can come close to my bees again without being attacked in future. But I will definitely be more careful about wearing my veil.

With lots of Benedryl and ice, the swelling took almost 2 weeks to come down. Taking a large dose of Benedryl knocks me out for a day, and it occurred to me that one of the reasons my long weekends all summer didn’t feel like I had extra time was because a number of my weekend days were spent in a Benedryl fog.

These thoughts made me think about the fact that this may be a hobby, but it’s serious too. I’ve invested a great deal of time and money, and – more importantly – I’ve taken on the responsibility of impacting the lives of tens of thousands of living creatures. My teacher in bee school talked about new beekeepers killing bees, but I told myself it would not apply to me, because I would be more careful than others. Careful as I try to be, I keep stepping into trouble. They sting me, I kill them, I cause them to kill each other. It’s not pretty.

A friend suggested I should “get rid of those menaces!” after the eye sting, and there’s a part of me that fears I’ve taken on more than I can handle. But I don’t want to quit. It’s not because I’ve invested so much. It’s because what’s the point of doing things if you’re going to quit when they get challenging? And what does that teach my children? Having thought it over, I re-committed in my mind.

Then I screwed up some more.

I read about robbing before the next time I inspected a hive. I was careful about covering the hive bodies I set aside, I had a good full smoker, and I was being selective about what I was inspecting so I could get done quickly. But it didn’t matter; the bees started robbing again and, although I was well-covered this time, I found myself reactive whenever a guard came at me. I was ready with a cover to put over the hive to stop the frenzy, but I felt so frustrated that it had started again. How am I going to get the bees ready for winter if I can’t get in there and inspect all the hives? What kind of beekeeper am if I can’t manage this?

But I will not despair and I will keep you posted as I keep at it.

Not a Fun Mystery

July 15, 2012

I put mite treatment in all three hives on Friday, because I had determined that I had a fairly serious mite infestation. Earlier in the week, I put a plastic board covered with petroleum jelly below each hive , and left it for two days. There is a special kind of base you can buy for your hive that has this “IPM” board that slides in and out; our beekeeping teacher told us all to get these.

After the IPM board is in place for a few days, you take it out and count how many mites fell and got stuck in the jelly. Divide that by the number of days the board was there, and you have your “mite count.” My worst hive, Apt. C, had a count of 15. Although it’s not the most definitive method for a mite count, it was a serious number. The other two hives, the one that swarmed and the swarm, were lower but still had more mites than you want; I had actually seen them on a drone walking around in Apt. A, which is bad news. Swarming actually can help control mites, because mites breed inside the capped cells of baby bees, and swarming breaks the brood cycle for a period of time, thus interrupting the mites’ reproduction cycle.

Be that as it may, if you treat one hive in an apiary, you need to treat them all. In fact, if you treat your apiary and your neighboring apiaries are within flight distance of yours, they need to treat too. I worked it out with the two closest neighbors who are in my club; they both treated at about the same time.

My relationship with these neighbors has changed now, because here we are  -  strangers before I started beekeeping – and we’re suddenly sharing a significant risk; we all have hundreds of dollars tied up in our bees and we may have different ideas about how best to manage them. How do we handle this? Do we all demand that nearby beekeepers manage their bees the same way we manage our own? I would not feel right doing that, so all I can do is what I think is right with my own bees. It’s not an easy decision either; killing the mites killed a bunch of bees as well.

Furthermore, I still have two hives without queens.

Apt. C looks wrong. I didn’t fully inspect it today, except to check on the emergency queen situation went I removed the mite poison. I found a few supercedure cells and left them, in hopes that there could be a new queen soon. The last time I was in there, there was brood all over the place in random places, and there didn’t seem to be any honey capping going on, which there ought to be by now. I am nervous about this hive.

Apartment A is worse. It seems to still have capped brood, but the last time a queen was laying eggs was too long ago for them to not have been born by now. Did I count wrong? Did I miss the queen before she was gone? Are there a bunch of dead pupae in there? Why? I found some dead baby bees, seeming like they started to emerge and then they just died. That was alarming, but since I had read that the mite poison especially kills babies and queens, I want to believe that’s why they’re dead. The really concerning thing about this hive is that the girls seem listless. They aren’t cleaning out the dead bodies and they aren’t collecting a lot of pollen. They have a bunch of liquid in the comb, but I think it’s just the sugar water I’m feeding them; if it were nectar, they’d be making it into honey and capping it off. It could also be water, which they bring in and fan to create a sort of air conditioner in the hot weather. There’s one pupa in there whose head got eaten, I think, but the rest of her is just sort of hanging out of the cell. This is very disturbing.

As I get discouraged, reading books to try to figure out what is going on and not finding clear answers, I am struck once again by the helplessness one feels when attempting to assert control over a natural process. It is no wonder that people thought that making agriculture more like industry was a great idea. Reduce the backbreaking labor, reduce the variables that can ruin the outcome, use the least expensive means to produce more, more easily. How can that be anything but wonderful? Unfortunately, growing food is a natural process no matter how much we don’t want it to be; it is subject to nature no matter what we do. When we increase the chemicals that kill the pests and control the genetics of the plants and animals we grow, natural selection enables the pests to grow beyond what we invent. When we produce fruit that won’t rot if you transport it across the globe, you can’t let it ripen naturally and it loses its taste and nutritional value. You cannot outsmart Nature; you must learn to speak its language and improve your skills working in concert with it.

This is the case with mites and bees. Mites came to the states in the late 1980′s, and our honey bees have not had time to evolve to adapt to them, so we use pesticides.  We were taught in Bee School that we should use pesitcides sparingly, as part of what is called Integrated Pest Management (hence, the “IPM” board); you can’t count on poisoning the mites that get in your hive and be done with it, so you need to manage the situation on multiple fronts. You check for mites; you treat early with benign treatments like powdered sugar; you can put in drone foundation in hopes that the bees will put most of their drones in one place and then you can kill them (mites much prefer to reproduce in drone cells because they take longer to emerge, so the mites have longer to reproduce); etc, etc. You learn more tricks as you talk to more beekeepers. You integrate as many methods of pest management as you can and use pesticides only when you must.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of The Botany of Desire, by Micheal Pollen. In a chapter about apples, he explains that the apple trees in orchards are not grown from seed but are grafted onto other trees. In all my years picking apples in our local orchard, I never suspected that they are all clones of each other. Because apples have not evolved, Pollen says, they actually require the most pesticides of any fruit, since the pests have evolved and the apples haven’t; chemists have to keep reinventing pesticides to keep up with the pests’ adaptations.

IPM applies to all aspects of agriculture (and to medical care too; antibiotics are people’s pesticides). We have interrupted the natural process with all the clever chemicals we’ve invented, and farmers and apiarists (and doctors and others) are finally figuring it out. You need to find a balance of permitting plants and creatures to co-evolve with their pests, and at the same time keep the pests from killing them. So, I treated the mites because they got bad, but next I’ll be learning how to treat them with powdered sugar and maybe I’ll do that once a month as a benign prophylactic.

It’s more work to use IPM, and that’s the sticky point. Growing food with methods that will work for the long run means figuring out how to use natural processes, not sidetrack them. If I brush my bees with powdered sugar, the mites fall off and the bees get to clean the sugar off each other. I won’t have poisoned anyone, and the bees will be encouraged to remove the mites themselves – or, in beekeeping language, “it promotes hygenic behavior.” As a beekeeper, I have to have a pile of books and an email list of mentors, because I can’t just go to the store and buy a solution to the problems that come up. Imagine that – I can’t buy the solution – I have to work to solve it? I was going to say it’s downright un-American, but actually hard work and ingenuity came before shopping malls, so it’s totally American.

What I learned at my first Open Hives

Open Hives in Cornish, July 7, 2012.

Once again, the weather snarled my life last week. We planned to have Open Hives on Friday, but on Friday morning, the skies were threatening and the day looked questionable. So, even though we had 10 RSVP’s for the event, we decided to call a rain date. About 5 minutes after we announced this decision, the clouds opened up and the day was gorgeous.

Open Hives are a way for beekeepers to share their beekeeping experiences, and if they are lucky, they have an instructor there to teach them all sorts of hands-on skills that are difficult to teach in a classroom. It’s customary for clubs to have a few throughout the summer, and although our club is very new and many of us are newbees, we thought it would be fun. Besides, we have a great mentor in Larry Peiffer and we wanted him to teach us about our hives.

Unfortunately, when we rescheduled it to yesterday, very few of the people who had said they would come last week were able to come. So we had 4 beekeepers and an instructor – all the better for us! We began at the home of Bob and Colleen Tims, beekeepers who live down the hill from me. Joining us were our newest club members, Mark Bickford and Christine Hensley. Larry went through the Tims’ hives and talked at length about more topics than I’d have expected to understand a scant few months ago. He found some bees with separated wings – which means they’re probably sick – and “pinched” them. That means he squeezed them to death in his fingers and tossed them aside. You don’t want them to spread whatever disease they have to the others in the hive.

  

What I found remarkable about Larry’s handling of the bees was the casual and yet deliberate way he handled the frames and bees, didn’t move a muscle when a bee stung him, and got stung remarkably only twice throughout the day. He didn’t even get stung after he did a sugar roll, which is a process where you collect a cup of bees (yes, they are measured by volume), roll them gently in a jar with powdered sugar, and then shake out the sugar as gently as you can. You are trying to get mites off the bees to get a sense of how many are in there. The mites slide off  some bees from the corn starch and other bees clean the off (by removing their favorite food from each other). My sense of the sugar roll was that it just really pissed off the bees. When Larry was done, he shook the bees out of the jar back onto an open box of frames and they immediately took to the air and started dive-bombing us. I say “us” although at the time it felt like only me. Or I may just have been the only one who had a reaction. I found them bashing themselves on my camera and I could feel them bashing on my veil and head, and I couldn’t resist waving at them. Which gets them more furious, so then they really started to come at me. Someone suggested I walk away slowly (and stop waving my arms around), so I did. One girl really kept after me until I was 15 or 20 feet away. I looked down at my camera, and it had 2 or 3 circles of powdered sugar where the bees were hitting it, and when I took off my hat later, I found another 3 good bangs of sugar that I got on the head. Nobody else seemed to react the way I did. I was a little embarrassed, but I am the newest beekeeper in the crowd; you can add up the number of times I’ve handled bees on your fingers and toes.

The week before, Brian Pride had showed me the same sugar roll on his bees at his apiary, Bee Pride. The thing that’s amazing about it is that you roll the jar down the backs of the bees so they fall in – you don’t scrape up, as you might expect; this causes them less potential injury. Most importantly, you make absolutely certain the queen isn’t on the frame you’re rolling them from; it’s not supposed to hurt the bees, but you don’t take that chance with the queen. Anyway, Brian had more time for the roll, and the bees had more time between being caught and getting released, and they seemed more inclined to be so glad they were out and back in the hive that they didn’t fly up and at us. Larry said he hadn’t had that happen before. With bees, it’s all about moving slowly, and Larry was trying to demonstrate the sugar roll without enough time.

Beekeeping is something you have to learn how to be cool to do. What I found out yesterday is that I’m not as cool as I need to be. I was at first, but since I’ve been stung a few times and have had a week of serious swelling at the site each time, I have started to have that visceral reaction I had with my first sting. However, I have begun to develop a strategy for treating them. I can’t just let it be or it will gradually swell up and the swelling itself becomes painful; a couple of times, my skin started to bubble up and seep fluid from the inflammation rather than the sting. I think it’s hard not to have that at the back of my mind when I’m around the bees, so I’m starting to react too much. I know now, though, that if I put ice on it right away and keep icing it the first night, and if I take Benadryl right away, it’s really not bad.

I make a lot of fun of my husband for panicking. I found out yesterday that I panic too.  Another beekeeping lesson: you should not be cocky about having a handle on your unconscious mind.