Spring update

R.I.P

Spring has finally arrived in southern Maine, but with it comes very bad news. Only two of our hives have survived the brutal winter - guess which ones - yes, you guessed it, Jamaica and Katherine the Great. These two were clearly our very strongest colonies and, of course, they are the two quirkiest queens that we have had.  

It's hard to know exactly why the others didn't make it through the winter.  We've discussed this with Peggy and Richard, but can't pinpoint one thing as a cause of their demise. We find lots of capped honey in the dead hives as we are cleaning them out, so food was available. Richard would say that the cluster was not large enough to allow them to access the food in different locations in the hive during the extreme cold. We lost 5 hives in mid-February and our nuc in the backyard in mid-March. 

Right now, we are in the process of cleaning out the dead hives - removing the dead bees, cleaning up lots of bee poop (they suffered from dysentery from not being able to get out for six weeks in Jan/Feb) and finally, freezing honey/pollen frames for future use and storing all the rest of the good comb. This is a huge undertaking (oops!) for six dead hives. Here's hoping the next posting contains happier news!

Banishing winter

We officially called an end to winter on March 8, 2014. The old Christmas wreaths were finally taken off the garage doors and any other winter decorations were replaced with spring things. The bees were happily flying about, once the temperature reached 50 degrees.  I observed many of them orienting to the hive, but a bunch of them were already flying off, scouting about for an early source of pollen.  They will need that to feed the growing number of larva in the hive. I'm sure the queens have already begun their spring build-up!  

Bees and the Polar Vortex

Getting honey bees through the long, cold Maine winter is never easy, but this year we had to deal with the polar vortex.  We were able to open the hives in the beginning of January to add sugar boards (extra food for the bees, if needed).  At that time, all of our hives seemed fine and the bees had been out for their cleansing flights.  After that, we were besieged by tons of snow and intense cold for nearly 6 weeks.  

Bees like to get out to relieve themselves about every three weeks, so being stuck inside for nearly 6 weeks created problems.  The photos below were taken on February 20.  You can see it was a crime scene. On that day, we found at least three of our hives showing no signs of life. We think they didn't make it. Thanks, polar vortex! 

Poop in the snow

Poop all over the front door

Beeneology

As our apiary grows, it gets harder to remember all the generations of bees.  So here is our beeneology.  Both of our original queens from Bob Egan were Carniolan (Apis mellifera carnica).  However, Rosie, the replacement queen we bought from Peggy and Richard in 2012 was a mix of several different subspecies.  So Rosalind and Rosemarie's bees have a slightly different make-up than the rest of our crew.

What are those bees doing during winter?

I found this great description of bees in their winter cluster online written by Shelley Stuart, who writes about beekeeping in the North East region for Examiner.com. She has also written for Weill Medical Magazine, and has articles published in the Cornell Chronicle Online and eCALS e-publications, both at Cornell University.

In the Northeast winter, honey bees need to accomplish two things: survive the cold and replenish the colony's population in time to forage for spring pollen and nectar.  As with most honeybee activities, they accomplish this as a collective.

The initial signal for the colony to shut down for the winter comes from the pollen they collect.  "Brood production stops when no net gain of pollen is introduced into the colony," explains Bucknell bee expert Dr. Elizabeth Capaldi Evans.   Evans notes that in her hives, some colonies have stopped raising brood (bee larvae) earlier in the fall than they did five years ago, thus prolonging the amount of time honey bees must rely on their winter stores.  While local beekeepers eye genetically modified crops as the potential culprit, Evans points out that the quality of the pollen, quantity of the pollen or the health of the colony's queen could all contribute to this phenomena. 

The lack of brood production, combined with decreasing outdoor temperatures, eventually cause the honey bees to huddle up in the "winter cluster" within the hive.  The hive itself is formed by sheets of honeycomb hanging 3/8" apart.  The cluster contains the queen, few (if any) male drone bees, and worker bees.    Bees will fill as much empty space within the cluster as necessary.   Some will fill the empty space between the honeycomb sheets, while others will dive headfirst into empty honeycomb cells.

The bees ultimately form a football-sized mass in the center of the bee hive, and use their wing muscles to shiver.  The vibrating muscles release heat, which warms the cluster.  Most of the bees in the cluster congregate in an outer shell, which help insulate the inner mass.  The temperature on the outside edge of the cluster will hover at about 40 degrees F.  The inner layer of the cluster's shell will reach about 75 degrees F.  The less dense center of the cluster allows bees to move around, and allows the queen to lay the eggs that will become the spring foragers.  Once the queen starts laying eggs, temperatures in the center of the cluster approach 100 degrees F.

The colder it gets during the winter, the more compact this winter cluster will become.  But when the temperature in the hive rises sufficiently, the bees are able to move around.  The bees can get to the outer  edges of the hive  and use the honey stored there.  How they use it remains a mystery, according to Evans.  One likely scenario is that bees in the outer edge of the cluster's shell tank up on honey, then return to the cluster and pass the honey around in a sweet mouth-to-mouth sharing of resources.

From December through March, the colony will gradually move from the bottom of the hive to the top, as it consumes the honey stores.  If conditions were right, in the spring the colony will emerge strong, healthy and primed to start another season. 

Something we made with our honey...

Yummy!

Our First Honey Harvest

Final Product

Our first honey harvest occurred in late September 2013.  We harvested 15 frames of nearly 100% capped cells mainly from Jamaica, Orla, and Katherine's hives and also found one or two frames in several of the other hives. By far, most of the capped honey was very dark, composed of a mixture of nectar from goldenrod and knotweed in our area, that the bees harvested starting in late August.


We set-up our rented extractor early on Sunday, October 6th and cranked up the heat in our sunspace as high as it would go. (Helps to keep the honey flowing.) Then we started to cut off the wax cappings on the frames with a hot knife - a very messy process. You catch the cappings in a large plastic container and try really hard not to get honey and wax all over everything.

Once you have removed most of the wax from both sides of the frame, you place 3 of them in the extractor (we had an electric one) and slowly the extractor spins the frames and the honey comes off by centrifugal force.  The honey drips down the sides of the extractor and runs into the spigot at the bottom.  It then seeps through two filters, fine and finer, and, voila! the honey is ready to be bottled. 

We had purchased several different sizes and types of jars for our honey, since it was our first time and we didn't really know what the heck we  were doing.  We ended up with 35 lbs. of incredibly tasty, rich, dark fall honey - an early Christmas present to us from the bees!

Melting off cappings

Collection bin

Nearly 100% capped

Extractor

The yield

june update

we managed to get through swarm season and we hope that we're done for this year!  we went from four hives to eight.  we have several new queens. 
the first is sheba, who is the daughter of jamaica and granddaughter of astoria. she has the hive that astoria lived in. 

sheba is lovely and dark like her mother and is already on the job, trying to rebuild the population of her hive, which was severely decreased when astoria passed away early this spring. 

the next new queen is orla, now head of the hive jamaica swarmed from. she is jamaica's daughter. she hatched after a secondary swarm from jamaica's hive happened on may 28th. the secondary swarm took off with the little black virgin queen we spotted previously. we weren't home to catch the swarm, however, even if we had been, they clustered 30' up in a tree behind the hive, so we wouldn't have been able to capture them.  

anyways, we found orla in the hive during our inspection on june 5th. she is golden!

we saw the third new queen in our four-frame nuc. she is also jamaica's daughter.  she's already got all kinds of eggs, larva and brood in her little home. we used one of jamaica's extra swarm cells to get her. she is striped! we decided to call her dido.

finally, on a very sad note, we have to report that we were unable to see rosie in her hive last wednesday, but found the hive full of emergency cells. we can only surmise that something happened to her during the previous inspection we did - either we lost her or squished her. it is incredibly sad, she was really beautiful and a very good queen. this was our first attempt at an artificial swarm. i must say everything went terribly wrong.  we culled nearly a dozen excess cells from the hive on the 6th, and we're waiting for rosie's daughter with great anticipation - she's due on the 12th or 13th. 

Really?

Erin Forbes, master bee-keeper from Portland, Maine, tongue-in-cheek declared may 17th to be the official opening day for swarm season here. well, she wasn't far off at all. on wednesday, may 15th at 11:00a.m., Jamaica swarmed and all of a sudden, our backyard was full of bees in the air. since we had seen some indication of swarming on our last inspection, we had decided to pull Jamaica from the hive and do an artificial swarm at the beginning of the week, however, the weather was very cool and windy and Lawrence didn't like the idea of exposing the brood.  of course, with the first halfway-decent weather on wednesday morning, she was "outta there".  the swarm landed in one of our hemlock trees in the backyard and after lots of discussion, we ended up topping the tree and shaking the clump into the waiting, baited hive.  the operation seemed successful, since everyone stayed in there. the moment we were done we went up to the nursery and performed a preemptive maneuver, removing Rosie from her hive to begin the artificial swarm process, although her hive wasn't nearly as ready to swarm, as Jamaica's had been. the following day, Peggy and Lawrence went through Jamaica's old hive and found 20 (yes!) queen cells in various stages of development. they removed four for our two nucs and left two really lovely ones in the hive and culled the rest. with that the swarm episode concluded and now our backyard apiary looks like this -

plus we have two more at the nursery. never a dull moment with bees.

Spring Has Sprung

the girls are back and so the beekeepers' work has resumed.  we made our first inspection of our hives on April 24th.  Jamaica's and Rosie's hives were 

           

          Jamaica

Rosie

going gangbusters. we saw many frames of eggs, larva and brood in each. With both of them doing so well, we decided to put them on a swarm watch, with the idea of preventing a swarm if possible. 

we carefully inspected Astoria's hive and alas, we saw no eggs, larva or brood, no sign of Astoria and a greatly reduced number of bees in the hive.  after consulting with Peggy and Richard (our bee-mentors) we guess that Astoria probably passed away sometime earlier in the spring.  she was one of our original queens from Bob Egan and we figured that she had been born in the summer of 2010, which would have made her nearly 3 years old. she was an amazing queen and wonderful egg-layer.  after she swarmed last year, she repopulated her new hive in record time. many of the pictures of perfect brood frames in this blog were from her hive last year. of course, we were very sad to lose her, however, Peggy and Richard suggested that we insert frames of eggs, larva and brood from Jamaica's hive (Astoria's daughter) so that the remaining bees could make a new queen for themselves.  we did that and are now eagerly awaiting Astoria's granddaughter!

finally, we took a look through crazy Katherine's hive and saw some brood, larva and eggs, although not nearly as much as we would have liked to see.  we're not sure if Katherine was able to mate well in the autumn last year. we did see her, but, I have to confess that she looked rather thin and small - not at all plump and rotund like a well-mated queen should look.  we added a couple of frames of brood from Rosie's hive to help out Katherine's colony, and we will give her some more time to get laying before we make any decisions about her. 

Auf Wiedersehen

auf wiedersehen, meine biene-mädchen!  i think that when you have bees and care for them throughout the summer, it is very hard to say goodbye in the fall. we've been so involved in their lives and activities since the early spring, that it is hard to imagine being without them for five months or so.  alas, that is what beekeepers must face - straight out bee-withdrawal.  it is painful.  today, we checked Catherine's hive just a wee bit, to make sure that their honey frames in box 3 were right in the center.  it was sad and happy to see them one last time! we especially hope that this hive will survive our nasty maine winter. i will rejoice in april when i see that they have wintered through. auf wiedersehen, meine biene-mädchen!  stay clustered and warm!

Fall Bees

the days and nights have been a lot cooler here in maine in the last two weeks.  there is no more nectar outside for the bees to collect. the bees know that winter is coming and they need to prepare for the long, cold season.  that is why they are cranky, very cranky!  gone are our happy-go-lucky, calm, peaceful summer bee-girls.  now, they've turned into nasty girls (but only because they are so cranky!)  

lawrence got stung three times in one of our last inspections of  Astoria's hive.  (perhaps the fact that he sort of dropped two different frames of bees had a bit to do with that.)  we've been feeding the bees a 2 to 1 dilution of sugar syrup to enable them to really stuff their hive full of nectar (and eventually, honey) for the winter. sometimes, even opening the roof of the hive a crack to check their supply can lead to disaster. 

last week, i checked Astoria's hive, just cracking the lid up two inches or so to peek in.  there was syrup left in the feeder tray, so i wanted to let the roof down, but two bees had popped up on the edge of the feeder.  wanting to get them back down into the box, i foolishly blew at them.  within a millisecond, one of them stung me on the wrist.  of course, i hadn't even thought of putting on any of my bee attire just to peek in the top of the hive. i dropped the top and took off, racing through the back yard with the second bee dive-bombing me.  i reached the side porch and raced into the mudroom and slammed the door.  i could still hear slight buzzing, but i saw no bee inside the room. i cracked open the door and the buzzing increased, so i knew she was lurking on the porch, looking for me. just then, a friend came by to drop something off, so i had to go back outside to meet him.  no problem with the bee, but as soon as i got back on the porch, she smelled the "banana oil" alarm scent on me and was all over me again. i panicked and ran off the porch, tripped on the stairs and landed flat on the walkway.  my friend thought i was deranged.  in desperation, i ripped off my pullover and threw it on the grass.  fortunately, this trapped the bee in the fabric. my friend, however, insisted on picking up the shirt, and despite my warning not to, he began to turn the garment inside out.  when he got to the second sleeve, out popped the enraged bee, who promptly went after him. he left batting his head, running to his car.  i ended up with a lovely sting and scrapes and bruises from my fall. 

today, we had to go into catherine's hive to treat it for mites with apilifevar.  even with my full-combat gear on (hat, gloves, shirt, tied-down pant legs), there were a bunch of guard bees trying their best to breach the defenses.  where have our lovely bee-girls gone?

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. 

Bianca's happy ending

lawrence and i checked our problem hive on friday, august 17th, and found eggs, larva and even a bit of capped brood.  we saw bianca II and she is very blond and plumpy.  she is the spitting image of her mom.  we stole a frame of capped brood from jamaica's hive and placed it in bianca's so that they are sure to have young bees sooner than later.  there is an over-abundance of honey in this hive, so there are no worries about having enough for the winter. for right now, they are all set.  

August Maintenance

we wanted to show you a perfect frame in regards to laying pattern. (see post of 7/26 for reference to laying pattern).  as you can see, the entire middle oval is filled with capped brood and there are top corners that are filled with capped honey.  there are a few cells on the right bottom that are not used, but they are probably filled with either nectar or eggs. beautiful job, jamaica!

Problems with Bianca's Hive

we inspected bianca's hive on 7/13 and found everything normal.  we saw her and lots of capped brood, larva and eggs. when we went into the hive on 7/23 (ten days later) we did not see her, we found at least six queen cups about halfway through their development (which we destroyed).  we consulted with peggy and richard about the situation in this hive and they instructed us to check again on 7/25, to see if we could spot the queen and eggs.  lawrence found a queen, but she was so small that i could not be sure it was bianca, so we argued about it. we asked peggy to inspect the hive with us on 7/30 and we all spotted a young, blond queen. peggy thinks this a successor to bianca, but very young and probably not even properly mated yet.  we think that the hive swarmed in mid-July, but went unnoticed by the nursery staff.  peggy recommends that we give her another week or so to see if she's started laying eggs. fine. we went into the hive on 7/9 and saw no sign of eggs, larva or anything, but did make this video of bianca II in action.  what she is doing is a mystery to all of us.  totally backwards for a queen, or as some might say, un-ladylike. we will check on her again in a week to see if we can spot any eggs. if not, it's time to re-queen. urrrgghh! sometimes, beekeeping is a conundrum!

miscellaneous bee activities

these bees were lined up in a cute little row with only their heads peeking out

over the edge of the deep. we have no idea what they were up to.

the bees are helping out our cucumbers.