Love Potion

Love Potion

I have two new hives of bees, one Italian, one Russian. Teachers often recommend having two, so you can compare them, learn more over one season by so doing, and if one hive’s in trouble, use frames from the stronger hive to bail out the weaker.

I’m examining the hives more or less every week as they get established, and I couldn’t help noticing that the Russians are building up really fast. They’ve almost filled one hive body and happily moved into the new one I added last week, and started laying in honey.

In contrast, the Italians didn’t have any capped brood. I couldn’t even see newly laid eggs, evidence that the queen is doing her job. There was uncured honey--cells of uncapped honey that had yet to be evaporated to the correct density to cap and store. There were also lots of bees, but that was sort of it.

Luckily we have a local bee expert, Denny, who agreed to come by with an extra queen and see what was happening in my hive. There is nothing, in my opinion, as useful as looking at your own frames with someone who can tell you what you’re seeing: the queen, excellent; laying workers, terrible.

It was the latter we saw today, in the Italian hive, with no evidence of the former. When I first emailed Denny with my suspicions, he told me to take a frame of open brood from the Russian hive, brush off the bees, and put the naked frame into the Italian hive. The brood would give off a pheromone that would retard the development of laying workers.

Laying workers are, Denny announced, the worst thing that can happen to a hive. Besides, maybe, bears and RAID. When the queen isn’t laying, or has died, workers begin laying unfertilized eggs. Those eggs hatch into drones, boy bees whose only enthusiasms in life are eating and mating with the virgin queen. Since virgin queens are in relatively short supply, that means eating, not putting up honey, or producing more girl bees who do all the work--and that spells death for the hive.

People have been extrapolating from their knowledge of bees for centuries, anthropomorphizing like crazy, using the hive as a metaphor to kiss up to whatever monarchs or political systems happen to be in power. So I will resist belaboring the obvious feminist parallels that may suggest themselves, and leave those to my gentle readers.

Anyway, you do not want laying workers. And once they start, you can’t just introduce some fragrant uncapped brood in the hopes that the workers will desist. Nor can you introduce a new queen, because these laying workers are not going to revert. They’ll kill her, no matter how good she smells.

Denny, bless him, had an idea. It seems that laying workers do not fly very well. We could take the Italian hive off into a field, shake off the bees. The laying workers would not be able to fly back to the hive’s original location (where we’ve helpfully left some empty frames); the regular field bees will beat us back there.

We tried it. I, of course, was suited up. Denny wore a short sleeved shirt, no gloves or veil. He took out a frame, gave its edge a smart smack on the ground, and a thousand shocked and possibly quite angry bees fell onto the grass. I couldn’t help recalling the repeated advice I’d heard just last week at a Bee-a-thon at UMass, about moving slowly and gently, lest you rile the bees and turn your hive into a permanently aggressive sting-fest. I asked him if these bees would ever be calm again. He assured me that wouldn’t be a problem, so I started whacking frames, and brushing off the stragglers with the bee brush. We carried the frames back to the hive and reinserted them, along with a frame of open brood (carefully crushed off) from the Russian hive.

He worried about introducing his queen into this roaring hive. A queenless hive really does roar. He thought he’d bring her back home, do some research, then be back in touch with the next steps. But when he went to his truck, he discovered the queen’s attendants had escaped. He picked them off the side of his truck one by one, (again, fearlessly) put them back in the box holding the queen cage. Then he had another idea.

He took the queen cage in its little box, with its few recaptured attendants, over to the bee dumps, where plenty of bees were flying around. They flew to her like she was a new soft serve stand. When Denny ran his finger over the cage, the bees didn’t cling aggressively to the cage, but climbed up over his finger and down to see her again. This was a very good sign-- they seemed curious, even fascinated. possibly (we hope) falling in love, rather than plotting her demise.

So we introduced the queen cage into the Italian hive, suspending it next to the frame of open brood, the cork stopper still firmly guarding the candy plug the bees will eventually eat through to free the queen.

I go back on July 4th to pry out the cork and allow her by then besotted subjects to get to her. Keep your fingers crossed.

The New Bees

The New Bees

Sunday I picked up two packages of bees from Warm Colors Apiary in South Deerfield, Mass. Each “package” consists of a few thousand bees in a wire cage, with the queen in her own special cage, suspended within it, and a can of sugar syrup, at which they’ve sipped for the past few days on their journey from Georgia to Massachusetts.

Although a few bees clung to the outside of the packages as I put them in the back of the car, they didn’t bother the five human passengers, they were so intent on the bees within the cage, or perhaps the queen.

I had the choice of Italian bees, which I’ve always had, and Russian. I chose one package of each.

This will be interesting. Russians are reputed to swarm more easily, but they survive cold weather better. They even need fewer bees to cluster up and keep the queen warm. They may not be as gentle natured as Italians, either. But after the Amazons, my semi-wild hive, they seem pretty tame.

We drove home, and my son’s girlfriend, the good sport, read me the directions as I quickly hived the bees from their cages.

Lacking a mister to spray them down with pacifying sugar water, I poured sugar water on them through the mesh. Then I pried off the lid, and gently pulled out the queen cage. There she was, pacing within it, attended by her Workers In Waiting. Her cage was covered in bees already getting whiffs of her pheromones. I carefully prized out the cork that covered the wad of candy in her doorway, and lowered the queen cage into the hive, hanging it between two frames. Over the next few days, she will be eating the candy from her side, and her soon-to-be-devoted hive mates will eat the candy from the other side. If everything works out, and the workers accept her as their own, she will eventually be freed to roam around the hive laying eggs. The next step required a deep breath-- I just shook the soccer ball sized mass of bees onto the frames after her. They were so intent on getting near the queen and setting up house, they didn’t even mind, let alone try to sting me.

That will undoubtedly change, when they get to know their territory. Not everyone left the wire box, so I just laid in on the ground next to the hive, put on the inner cover, positioned the sugar water feeder over the hole in its top and went on to the other hive.

I’m supposed to leave the hives alone for a few days so the bees will bond with their respective queens, free them and begin the business of the season: laying eggs, rearing young, gathering nectar to cure into honey, thereby pollinating my garden.

Although this spring I’ve noticed a marked uptick in non-honeybee pollinators--there are, for instance, loads of bumblebees around-- I’ve still missed my girls. The farm seemed sort of empty without them. On Monday morning, when I went out to the back porch to water some hanging plants, I saw a honeybee cruising around looking for nectar sources. I was overjoyed.

Images: The bee package (3 times, I don't know why), the hive with the bees happily scampering about, and an empty queen cage, which is what I hope to see when I next look!

Bee Post-mortem

It starts with February Fretting. This is when I start worrying in earnest about the winter survival of my bees. I scan the weather predictions obsessively, check the thermometer for the magic number, 55 degrees, at which you can safely open the hive and not chill the bees. They need their pollen patties, which provide the hive with much needed protein to jumpstart the queen's laying.

On a balmy day in early March, I was looking around for the cordless drill. I planned to take off the screwed in lath that held the insulation on our beehives. Once that came off, I could take off the top hive body, which only held the syrup jars, and give the girls the pollen patties right on top of their frames.

I made my way gingerly through the pass we cut in the snow to the shop. I looked over at the garage that held the wood splitter and heard-- I was quite sure of this--a bee buzzing.

My heart leapt. It could be one of the hive bees. After almost five feet of snow in late February, they could be, against all odds, alive.

I found the drill, rushed out the the chain-link enclosure, dug open the door, tromped in and beheld two hive almost buried in snow. That's a bad sign, because usually, even if I haven’t shoveled around the hives, they are warm enough to have melted off some of the snow around them. Also, there were no bees in evidence crawling around the entrance. I knocked on each hive. Usually a few guard bees will come out in all but the worst weather to check out the visitor. Nothing.

Even when I went out yesterday to perform the bee post-mortem, I still harbored a tiny bit of hope that I’d been wrong, and would find a few bees doing their merry circle dance in front of their respective entrances. But the only living inhabitants were two portly mice, who waddled away when I opened up the Amazons’ hive.

What went wrong? I was afraid it was mites that had weakened and killed off the hive. There was a strange pollen like residue on some of the bees’ bodies. There also didn’t seem to be many bees.

There was a lot of honey left, which sadly, does not preclude the bees starving. It’s all a matter of how far they can move out of their cluster to feed.They have to maintain the queen at 90 degrees, so form a basketball sized cluster, which they keep warm by flexing their wings in a kind of shiver. Bees are constantly rotating from the warm inside of the cluster to the more frigid outside, and back again. Sometimes, though, with honey just inches beyond the bees’ reach, they die.

There were several small clusters of bees, heads thrust in cells, and a few bees on those bees’ backs-- for warmth? This is the saddest sight, that these charming, assiduous creatures starve/freeze so near to their stores.

A lot of people lost hives this year, many of them better, more experienced beekeepers than I. The only thing I can do is to keep trying, avail myself of the collective wisdom of bee associations, suit up and go stick my nose in bee business more often so that I can trouble shoot a little better. I’m going to a Q&A session Wednesday to see if I can find out what went wrong.

And back in December, I ordered two packages of bees, with queens, just in case.

Images: the top image with the red is where mice have eaten the wax and honey, and added little bits of leaves for a nest.

The one in the middle is a top-down view of a frames, onto which I had poured some sugar as a desperate hold-over for the bees. Then the one on right-- bees head-down in the cells, with mold, since they've been dead awhile. I've have prettier images next time!