The Mysterious Ways of Bees

this is an update to the situation in bianca's hive - despite our efforts to intercede and provide a mated queen to the hive, when we inspected the hive on 9/14, we found a wild queen, not the yellow-marked queen we had purchased, in control of the hive. as usual, the bees were as quiet and contented as we had ever seen them. we spotted her in the third deep, running around.  she is very big, and rotund - signs pointing to her having mated successfully, in spite of the lateness of the season.  we thought we had  also seen a few eggs in cells and some milky substance in the bottom of cells. a week later, 9/21, we inspected the hive again and saw two frames of brood with eggs and larva in the second deep. we spotted the queen again and she looked very fit and happy, obviously laying eggs and doing her best to boost the population of this hive for winter.  it is really a miracle that she was able to mate at all, given how late in the season it was. so, for now, we have a new queen and we have decided to name her Catherine the Great, since the Russian Catheine also had to overcome great obstacles on her way to becoming one of the greatest rulers of that country. the next hurdle for this hive is to repeat a mite treatment.  we did a mite drop on a board in that hive a week ago, and found that there were nearly 60 mites on the board in a 48-hour period. this is a rate that requires treatment, especially before winter, when all the bees will be housebound and very susceptible to mite infestation. we've decided to treat them with apilifevar, a product that is not associated with extensive bee mortality. the population of this hive has dwindled, due to their issues with queens, and we would like to be sure to knock down the mites, but leave as many bees alive in the process.  we will update our main page with a picture of Catherine asap!

Autumn nectar

when we looked into Jamiaca's hive on 9/1 we found the entire third deep filled with this reddish nectar.  at the time, we worried that there might be something wrong with this nectar (usually nectar is clear or yellowish).  peggy informed us that our bees have been busy harvesting nectar from the knotweed plant.  this tall bush is actually an invasive type of bamboo from japan.

apparently, knotweed nectar makes a delicious honey similar to buckwheat honey.  we are very lucky that they have this autumn nectar source in our neighborhood.  unfortunately, our bees are still not storing anything in their honey supers because the frames are not drawn out with comb.  so only the bees themselves will enjoy delicious honey all winter, not us.  we will need to sort out our honey super disfunction next year. we think we have a plan. 

Varroa Mites - The Scourge

varroa mites in american bee colonies were first reported in 1986, and is now one of the major killers of bees. adult female mites are found on bees - they attach themselves to the soft tissue between abdominal segments or behind the head. the mites breed in the drone brood, but will also invade worker brood. the result of mite breeding in the pupae is a disfigured, stunted adult bees, with deformed legs or wings or both.  lawrence and i did a drop test for mites in july.  we have a white, plasticized piece of cardboard which is lined for a grid, which fits below the bottom screen of the hive. it is greased  with vaseline.  you leave it under the hive for several days and then remove it to make a visual count of mites that have dropped down.  the picture below shows two mites.

the beekeeper can spot bees with mites attached with the naked eye.  you can even remove them with a toothpick, but that is a bit of a challenge for hundreds of bees.  the mites attach themselves on the upper back of the bee because that is the spot that the bee can't reach to dislodge them.  bees will also groom each other, so some beekeepers dust the bees with powdered sugar throughout the summer to encourage grooming. 

mites in hives can cause damage to the developing bee, either by feeding on them or by an associated virus, which deforms their wings (deformed wing syndrome).  these poor little things can't really do any work in the hive and you will see them being flown away by the undertaker bees.  in the hive, you can see them hiding in cells (head down).  

needless to say, controlling and treatment of mite infestation is an important task for the beekeeper.  there are various products available to knock down the mite population in the hive. one is called apivar, which is a slow-release miticide that is effective, but requires that you remove honey supers to avoid contamination.  another product are mite-away strips which use formic acid as a fumigant and miticide.  lawrence and i used the mite-away strips to treat all of our hives this weekend, but made a mistake in application, which resulted in a fair number of dead bees in our home hives.  we really hope that both jamaica and astoria are not affected and that they will suffer through the nasty treatment and bounce back in about 5 days. right now (third day of treatment) the bees are very, very unhappy with us. lawrence was stung on the ear, just walking around the hive yesterday. eeks! 

The never-ending saga of Bianca

sometimes beekeepers get a peek into the mysterious ways of bees.  on august 17th, lawrence and i found a happy, plump Bianca in her hive laying eggs surrounded by milk brood and capped brood.  everything looked fantastic! during our next inspection (august 30th) we were seeing very little brood and scattered in the bottom box and found the following surprise in the second deep.

as you can see this frame was loaded with emergency/supercedure cells.  some had been hatched out, most were intact and some were being chewed out on the sides by the workers.  something had gone terribly wrong with Bianca. we saw no sign of her.  we did find this little virgin queen running around on the frame.

i also saw a little darker queen running about that afternoon.  there were nearly a dozen queen cells with some that had hatched.  we had dropped in on the killing of the other unneeded queens.  lawrence and i packed up the hive leaving everything as it was.  we needed to consult with peggy and richard. after speaking with them, we had two options - requeening with a laying queen or merging the hive with Rosie's.  we asked peggy to have a look at the hive on friday.  we captured the little virgin queen that i had seen the day before and found nearly all of the other dead queens. peggy also noticed many bees with deformed wing syndrome, which is disease associated with varroa mites. the extent of disease in the colony was a big concern so we wanted to treat the hive immediately and not wait a week or so to introduce a mated queen.  we were able to buy a queen on friday from a beekeeper in Yarmouth and she suggested putting her in a nuke with bees from the hive and at the same time, treating the main hive for mites.  the following video shows a little parade of bees traveling to the nuke from the main hive only 20 minutes after we had set it up and placed the new queen in her cage in it.  apparently, the bees were so desperate for a queen, word spread quickly about the new one and they all came running out, cramming into the little nuke.