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.