To The Bee Cave, Bee Boy!

DON'T FORGET: There is still time to get your entries in for the Swarovski Guest Blogging Contest. A chance for you to have a blog entry posted here for the day (and getting some of my readers a taste of your writing) and a cool prize while I'm birding in Guatemala!

Well, the weather has been above freezing and all of us just happened to be in town for a moment so Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill, Fabulous Lorraine and myself decided that it was time to do a winter bee inspection to determine how many bees and supplies to order for this spring.

Since we would be digging about inside the hive to check the food stores the hives had left, we decided to go with our bee suits on. With his hat and bee suit, NBB almost looked more like seaman from the movie The Life Aquatic than a member of a team of award winning beekeepers.

We have two hives that we are over wintering. Above is the Kelli hive. She is three deep brood boxes, wrapped in insulation, with two moisture boards (stuff they use in your bathroom walls to absorb moisture), and some newspaper. You worry more about your hives getting wet in winter than you do the cold. The bees can take the cold, but moisture in a hive just messes everything up. Kitty is two boxes without insulation and just newspaper for moisture. We were running a couple of experiments: for overwintering, do we want to do three boxes instead of two and do we want to use insulation or not. There are arguments for both. It's possible for bees to survive with only two boxes--fewer places to go and therefore the cluster won't be at risk of being too far from food. Insulation on the hive could fool the bees into thinking it's warmer outside than it really is and they fly out too soon and die.

Before we opened them, I put my ear up to each hive to see if I could hear them buzzing. I could! Kitty was not as loud as Kelli, but both hives were totally alive and had survived the harsh January temperatures so far! After we opened the Kelli hive, I held up my camera to the open frames so you could hear a hive buzzing in winter (you can see the green Kitty hive in the background):



We didn't dig too deep in Kelli, she was loud, just glancing at the top frames, she had plenty of food, and if we have learned anything, it's that the more you leave your bees alone to just bee, the better off they are.

We did make sure that bother bottom and top entrances were open for good ventilation. She was incredibly dry. Even her news paper was bone dry. The moisture board was working well and there weren't too many dead bees at the entrance and we could see a couple come in and out. The three box system, with insulation, and the moisture boards appeared to be working very, very well.

Kitty was a different story. She was alive, but her cluster was very small. If you look between NBB and Mr. Neil in the above photo, you can see part of it. Mr. Neil is holding a spray bottle, he sprayed some homemade bee nectar around them and we made sure that the frames closest to them were full of food, so if the cluster ran out of food where they were, they would not need to go far.

The cluster of bees stays together to stay warm. If it gets so cold that they cannot move far and they have eaten all the nearby food, they may starve before they can move to where there is food in the hive. As we moved the frames around, the hive was incredibly wet.

Even the newspaper on top was wet. There were thousands of dead bees on the inside. We took out a bunch of the dead wet bees. We have some concerns about this hive. Her cluster is small. If the rest of the winter is mild, she should survive. If we get some more subzero days, we're afraid that the remaining cluster of bees is so small it won't be able to stay warm enough. There's not much more we can do at this point.

So, I think two things to take from this are: 1. That white moisture absorbing material used for bathroom walls helps to keep a wintering hive dry. 2. That a two brood box hive probably could survive, but I don't know if we would do it again without insulation. We want to have six hives going this summer and we think what is going to happen is that we will split the healthy Kelli hive into two hives and that Kitty will most likely die and we will need to restart her.

Some good, some bad with the hive inspection, but it was fun to get a taste of our beekeeping operation. I really do miss it. I love birding and I love travel, but I think beekeeping is one of the coolest things you can ever try in life. It's more fun than I ever realized.

After we were finished we had to put the hives back together and put the bricks back on to make sure a strong winter wind didn't knock their covers off...and I can never resist working a Father Ted reference:

First Bee Post Of The New Year

We are hardy folk, we northern beekeepers! Mr. Neil and I pose around a snow surrounded Kitty beehive. We came out to make sure that the snow wasn't blocking key ventilation areas in the beehives and to see if they were alive.

Mr. Neil and Non Birding Bill also checked to see if our electric bear-proof (and skunk-proof) fence was still in working order. Not that we need to worry about bears at this exact moment, but better to find out now if there is a problem with the solar panel now than in the spring when a bear has breached the fence and made a mess of the hives.

The Kitty bees are in a smaller hive this winter (an experiment to see if we can overwinter bees in a two hive system instead of three). This time of year, the workers and queen are all clustered together to stay warm. We opened the roof and they were right at the top. A couple even flew out at us! Mr. Neil asked, should we go inside and see what's going on, maybe we could add a frame of honey for them."

NBB quickly said, "No!"

"But do we--"

"No!"

We didn't have a smoker and two of us were dressed in black--the color a bee is most likely to sting. So we didn't go much further. Her humming sounded very healthy. Here's a video I made just to pick up the sound of their buzzing in twenty degree temperatures:



Things over that the Kelli hive were just as happy:

We could hear them inside the hive. The snow had piled up over the bottom entrance and Mr. Neil shoveled the front. As soon as it was clear, a couple of bees came out--one even took out a dead be. Bless our OCD Minnesota Hygienic Bees--"Must be clean, must be clean," they chant in their little buzzy voices.

Both seem content and healthy. They still have a few months to go and we'll check them again. This reminds me that it's getting time for me to order our bees for the spring! I think we'll have a total of six hives this summer! We'll probably divide Kelli and order three new packages of bees.


On our way out to the hives NBB found some feathers scattered on the snow. Above is one of the clumps. We found them in the spot where we have seen a saw-whet owl in the past. We were trying to figure out what kind of bird the feathers came from. The coloring of this clump looked like morning dove.

But then we found these secondaries (with a little blood ), looks too small for mourning dove to me. I think this might be junco. Possible for a saw-whet to take out, but also prey for a sharp-shinned hawk which also hangs out in Mr. Neil's woods in winter. I didn't see any owl poop on the snow, but then again, find white on white is kinda hard. But a fun mystery to chew on.

That Darn Kitty Hive

I just got the current issue of WildBird Magazine in the mail and there's a photo of me at the beehives! I'm so proud, part of our award winning Kelli Hive is pictured in a birding magazine. I feel like I'm crossing some sort of border by getting bees in a birding magazine. Now sure what that border is exactly, but it's cool in my little brain. Incidentally, you can send in your own photo of yourself reading WildBird, you just need to make sure to take it someplace where you do a lot of birding. Which for me happens to be around my beehives. Check out this killer titmouse photo I got near the hives on Sunday:

Nothing like mixed nuts and brush pile to make a titmouse come in and give you his sexy side.

We went out to our two remaining beehives to prep them for winter (the lovely lady above is the Kitty namesake). We are running a couple of experiments. There are beekeepers of two camps: 1 is to insulate your hives in the winter and the other is to not insulate. In our neck of the woods where subzero is the norm in January and February, insulating your hive makes sense. However, some beekeepers feel that a strong hive can stay warm without the insulation and that the insulation gives the hive a false sense of how cold it really is outside. Foragers come out too soon and die, weakening the hive.

We decided to insulate the Kelli hive and this year, Non Birding Bill made sure the insulation was not going to come off like it did last year. He duct taped the crap out of it.

We decided to not insulate the Kitty hive and to take her down to two boxes instead of three. Mr. Neil has read that this will work in our neck of the woods and I was skeptical but he brought me around to his way of thinking. The idea is that the cluster of bees does not have to travel as far to get to the food storage. Last winter, the Kitty hive died because the cluster got stuck were there was no food and starved to death. So with lack of insulation and a small space to keep warm, she should be good to go.

Note how Mr. Neil and NBB are a good distance from the hive? We foolishly went out to the hives with no beesuits or smokers. As we checked inside the Kitty Hive (and true to her cranky nature) some bees flew out and one stung me through my winter glove. Everyone took a step back. Interestingly enough--the sting did not hurt nearly as much as my first sting. It is true, the more you get stung, the less painful the sting--although it has been rather itchy the last two days.

We were a tad worried about Kitty when we came out, her buzz was not as loud as Kelli's and when the hive was opened, I thought I heard that kind of dissonant buzz that you get when your hive has gone queenless. It may just be the winter low-key buzz. I'm not going to worry about it. Requeening just does not work out for us and I refuse to intervene on that any more.

We will check on our girls a bit in the winter. Mr. Neil suggested we go out with a spray bottle of sugar water to spray the cells if they look low on food. We are also trying to use some newspaper in the tops of the hive to absorb moisture and that will need to be replaced.

This bee season went by too fast.

Pine Siskins and Bonfires and Bees

Just a reminder:

The next Birds and Beers is this Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 6pm at Merlin's Rest.

This weekend was kind of a blur, I'm still trying to catch up. This early winter weather is just perfect for a one last hurrah before the hardcore cold temperatures force us inside. Non Birding Bill got Mr. Neil to host a bonfire gathering.

We had a great bonfire going and we burned some unusable beehive frames which made for some spectacular pyrotechnic effects with the old wood. Speaking of frames, we still have some frames full of honey to extract and a big fancy extractor. I thought that maybe we could do some extracting at the bonfire gathering--lots of friends over, "Hey, don't you want to be a junior beekeeper and extract some honey?" We could all take turns, running the crank. Alas, much like all the beekeeping equipment out there, NO INSTRUCTIONS (beekeeping equipment manufacturers--that sucks and makes me not like your products and is off putting to new beekeepers).

So, little was extracted and we now have a fancy extractor that we are not real clear on how to use. Lorraine has gone to the cheesecloth method for some of our frames.

This morning we woke up to a dusting of snow and LOTS of finches at the feeders. Non Birding Bill and I headed out to our remaining hives we are going to over winter--Kitty and Kelli. We were going to screw in the metal entrance reducers so the girls would have less area to defend and to also keep mice from moving inside.

When we arrived, we found paw prints which looked remarkably like skunk at the entrance of both hives. This snow fell in the early morning hours. That jerk skunk had just been there a mere few hours before NBB and myself. Skunks knock at the entrance of a hive. This makes the bees angry and they come out to attack, the skunk eats them, apparently unfazed by the stinging. We have carpet tacking around the entrances to prevent this (when the skunks come knocking, they get pricked by the nails), but it's gotten strewn around this past bee season. So NBB and I rearranged it to give that skunk a few good pricks if it comes back. Hanz (the guy who does yard maintenance) built our bees a wicked bad electric fence to keep bears out, Lorraine is going to ask him to add one more line of electricity, closer to the ground and closer to skunk height to encourage the b@stard to look for food elsewhere.

NBB and I put our ears to both hives and heard contented buzzing from within each hive. Love that!

Early plans for next season--six hives! We'll divide Kelli into 2 hives (cause she's gonna swarm and if we divide her, we can control the swarm), 3 new hives, and Kitty...well, that's our angriest hive and we're just gonna let her do whatever she wants to do. If she wants to swarm, then she can swarm. I'm not gonna argue that hive.

There was a constant flow of goldfinches all morning. None of them were banded, so it was just a steady stream of hundreds visiting. The day before, I had noticed a couple of pine siskins and the more I watched the goldfinches...

...the more I would see streaky pine siskins mingle in among the flock. Which is right on target according to the Winter Finch Forecast: "A conifer seed specialist in winter, most siskins should leave the province this fall because the spruce cone crop is poor in the boreal forest. It is uncertain whether the huge white pine seed crop will keep some siskins in central and northern Ontario this winter."

I put some fine ground sunflower hearts and thistle on the tree stump. Goldfinches flew in for it, as did juncos and (of course) pine siskins. In the above photo, you can see some of that yellow edging on the wing feathers of the siskins. If you have goldfinches in your yard and you've never noticed a pine siskin before, take a closer look at your finches. Pine siskins can be easily mistaken for goldfinches in winter plumage. But look at the breast. If it's clear, it's a goldfinch, if it's super streaky, it's a pine siskin.

Once two or three siskins were on the stump, more moved in. It wasn't too long before the siskins outnumbered the goldfinches! I didn't get a photo of it, but we did have one crazy pine siskin going to the no melt peanut butter suet. I'd never seen a siskin on suet before, I thought they were strick seed eaters.

My Hive Has Been Robbed!

The MimiKo hive has failed in a big way. I thought maybe last summer, I messed with the hives too much and that perhaps being a bit more hands off would be better this summer. Apparently, I was too hands off.

Lorraine took the Magnetic Fields out to our hives the day before and mentioned that the MimiKo hive was quiet...too quiet. We headed out today and she did seem quiet, but what caught my attention were odd looking drones. They were small, having trouble walking and totally out numbered the workers. The odd drones brought one thing to my mind--egg laying workers. Only queens are supposed to be able to lay eggs. Fertilized eggs become workers and on a occasion a queen, unfertilized eggs become drones. Workers are not supposed to lay eggs, but if a hive is queenless, workers will lay eggs and because they are all infertile, they will all be drones (who do not build comb or gather honey). A queenless colony with egg laying workers is a hive that is as good as dead.

There were dead workers on the roof and so we opened her up. It was quiet and the buzzing that we heard was that dissonant buzzing that you get from a queenless colony. More and more drones were moving all over the hive and I noticed a few non honeybees entering the front entrance. The drones moved as though drunk--another suspicion that they were the result of egg laying workers. Here's a video:



That is just so sad! Further inspection of the colony brought worse news:

Every cell had been ripped open. The colony had been robbed, most likely by the nearby Kelli Hive. All would take is one or two Kelli workers coming to the hive and noticing how weak it was. They fly back and let the other Kelli foragers know and the siege of the MimiKo would be underway.

With few workers, no queen, and lots of blundering drones, the colony didn't stand a chance. Flakes from shredded cappings that covered cells of honey were everywhere. There were even a few other species coming in to take what little honey was left. Notice the two non honeybees in the above photo.

Here's another look at ripped open cells. There were even flakes on the inside. I suddenly remembered that one of the signs of American Foulbrood is scales in empty cells. I'm panicking a little because American Foulbrood is a serious bee disease that would require some drastic measures. I tested a couple of what little remaining sealed brood was left (you poke it with a toothpick and if it's foulbrood, the contents comes out brown and ropey). Nothing I poked came out brown and ropey, the contents of the cells looked like an almost formed bee.

Here's another view of a ripped apart cell. To me, all this looks like bits of capping but if there are any experienced beekeepers seeing this and feel that this is American Foulbrood, feel free to let me know. I'm hoping it's not. American Foulbrood is a big fat downside to beekeeping. We'd have to burn the remains of the MimiKo hive and treat the Kelli hive with some serious drugs since she would have been exposed by robbing the MimiKo hive.

I found a dead worker that appeared to have died while trying to lay an egg in a cell. How long had this hive been queenless?? It has to have been a long time for things to be as bad and as empty as this hive is. How did it happen? Is this American Foulbrood? Did we crush the queen on one of the few inspections? When we took a frame of brood from the MimiKo hive to help the failing Olga hive this summer, did we accidentally brush the queen onto the ground and kill her? Was she just a bad queen?

Here was a sad little drone that died as it was trying to crawl out of its cell. Without any nurse bees around to help it along and the fact that it's a drone that grew in too small of a cell, it got wedged.

We took the hive completely apart and found lots of dead bees but not the huge amount that I expected. I looked over all the dead bees (and a few wasps) that were on the bottom, trying to work out what had happened. What caused things to go this wrong, why didn't I catch it sooner. I've come to a couple of conclusions--if the queen had failed and we caught it early enough, I would not have tried to requeen the colony--we've tried that more than once and it just doesn't seem to work for us. Both hives we've done that too have ultimately failed. We probably would have left this one alone to try and grow a new queen. I wonder why they didn't grow a new queen? Did they not realize they were queenless until it was too late to grow a new one?

So we left MimiKo in pieces so all the bees that were robbing it already could finish the job. I'm not sure what we're going to do next. I have a beekeeping meeting on Tuesday, I'll see what I can learn there. Non Birding Bill suggested I take a frame with me to show, but on the off chance it is American Foulbrood, I think bringing a frame full of it would make me the least welcome member of the club.

I love beekeeping, I love my girls, I love that I get to do it, but a discovery like this is a challenge. My goodness, we started this spring with four hives. We're now down to two and we have to move one of them into the bear proof fence. Will that hive make it?

After all of this, I had to do some digiscoping to try and clear my system. The fall colors made for a perfect backdrop. Usually, taking photos of birds is relaxing and satisfying but I was having trouble getting my focus down or predicting the perch the birds would use. I was getting frustrated, so my dear NBB offered to help...

Clever Bill. We did go for a walk in the woods and I got some cleansing that way...more on that tomorrow.

MPR At The Honey Harvest

It was time to do some honey harvesting at our three hives. We had a rather large posse going out: Me, Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill, Lorraine, Kitty, and Euan Kerr from Minnesota Public Radio.

We had so many people coming, that we were short on bee suits. NBB wore long pants, with a red shirt (the color red doesn't bother bees), just a helmet with a net and gloves--go NBB. Euan was there to interview Mr. Neil about his latest book, The Graveyard Book. What a brave man, you're scheduled to do an interview and told, "Hey, why don't don't you come out with us to our hives!" And he comes along in full bee suit to record part of the interview. What a good sport.

And then we put him to work! The honey supers (boxes where bees store excess honey and no brood) are incredibly heavy and you sometimes need two people to take them out. Now, last year, I used something called Bee Quick to get the bees out of the hive. It didn't work as well this year. I suspect that the bottle I purchased last year lost some of its potency because the bees did not vacate the supers quite like they should have. I think we'll just have to get a fresh bottle every year. Here's a video of Mr. Neil and Lorraine trying to shake out the last few bees from the honey super...and notice the irritated bee buzz:



Don't you just love the maniacal Lorraine giggle?

We checked the MimiKo hive first--no honey production--but the bees are so incredibly friendly, did some hand feeding. Next we checked the county-fair-blue-ribbon-winning Kelli hive next--three supers with honey in all (she made both comb honey and regular honey), but not willing to give up the supers, she got a little angry. We were talking about the differences between the two hives. How Mimi doesn't make much excess but she is so, so friendly and how Kelli works hard and made a terrific amount of honey her first year. Mr. Neil told me that the two women who painted the hives have been following their progress on the blog and discussed this as well. Kelli said, "When I painted my hive, I put in the message, 'Be productive.'" To which Mimi replied, "That's funny, I told my hive to 'Be friendly.'"

And that's what the hives are.

Then we checked the combined Kitty/Olga hive (and we actually had the Kitty namesake with us). We warned Kitty and Euan that we needed to be ready for this hive. Someone asked if she's a mean hive. This hive isn't a mean or angry hive, it's just that she's older and doesn't tolerate any shit. There really is no other way to explain it. We had the smoker at the ready, we took off the top lid--bam! Mr. Neil got stung through his sock near the ankle! It's one of those rare areas where a bee could breach the bee suit. Some beekeepers wear boots (Mr. Neil often does) others duct tape the bee suit pants over the shoes to prevent the breach, but we didn't and he got stung very quickly. Kitty/Olga was living up to her hype. We went back to work--bam! Euan got stung--right through the bee suit, a complete breach of the beesuit.

It was at this point we decided to put the fume board on top of the hive and leave it for 20 minutes to a half hour to really let the essential oils do their work--bees do not like the aroma of the Bee Quick and it pushes them deeper into the hive, leaving all the honey supers bee-less and allows es to harvest the honey relatively pain free. Also, leaving the hive for awhile meant Euan could continue his interview, the boys could also treat their stings and the rest of us could get a much needed break and have a snack.

I took a moment to take the Ross Rounds out of their frames--the easiest way to harvest honey if you can talk your bees into making comb honey (instructions for how to extract from Ross Rounds can be found here). It was weird having Euan along. He's a terrifically nice guy, and again, I must say that he was a very good sport to come out to our hives and still keep a genial nature after being stung. But the weird thing is that you hear him all the time on MPR (he's the dude with a hint of a Scottish brogue) and so it kind of felt like we were taking the radio out with us. I made sure that when he went home, that he got some fresh comb honey. We take a lot of people out to the hives and sometimes we just give them the smoker. It keeps them busy and if they get nervous at the hives, they have something to hold on to and most of the time we can work with minimal smoke. Euan went right in there, lifting the heavy supers, taking one for the team and getting stung, all while he was just trying to get an interview. When the interview is up, I'll post a link.

Here's Lorraine's account of the day...oh dear, and a photo of Kitty and I wrestling in the bee suits.

Kitty also has her own perspective here.

And here is a video of the Kelli hive entrance--note the drone hanging out in the front:

My Bees Are Makin' Some Honey

The summer has been quite busy and I haven't had too much quality time with my girls. I love this time of year and could literally spend hours watching the girls coming and going from the hive entrance, noting all the colors on their pollen baskets.

I was out this week with Lorraine just to check on honey production. I've noticed that there is a definite difference with boy beekeeping and girl beekeeping. When the girls are out checking the hives it's, "May I have the hive tool please? Thank you?" or "Could you puff a little smoke on my hand? Awesome, thank you."

With boys involved at the hive...it's different. It's more of "We need smoke here, now!" or "You're standing in the worst possible place." Not that we don't appreciate the boys at the hive, we love the boys, they are an important part of our beekeeping operating, but it's fun to note the dynamics.

The bees are in serious honey gathering mode. The Bickman hive (the award winning hive) has an almost full honey super and is about halfway through filling a comb honey super.

As we were checking the supers, Bickman had made some cells between the two supers and they were ripped apart when we moved them. All the girls came in right away to clean the mess.

Word soon spread to the hive that more tongues were needed and many workers came up to eat the spilled honey--those pheromone work great for mass communication--gotta love it. One super was almost full, the other was halfway and I wasn't sure when we'd be back, but we thought we would add a third just for the heck of it. We walked back to the house to grab a super and when we came back (which couldn't have been more than 15 minutes)...

They had licked the spilled honey dry! I think this is one of the many parts of beekeeping that is so enjoyable. You read about what bees are capable of, but as a beekeeper, you get the chance to actually witness this miraculous insect. I love beekeeping.

Here is a little video of the bees licking the honey. As usual, if you go to the actual YouTube page, you can click on "watch in high quality" button so the bees in full beauty:



Lorraine and I had to put the hives back together and with all the massive honey gathering and our short statures, it's a tad tricky (did miss the boys' help with that today. Lorraine and I struggled to put the hive back and when finished, I had a slight problem:

My beesuit got caught in the hive and mashed with some sticky propolis for good measure. It took some pulling and wedging, but I finally managed to get free.

Ants In My Hive & Propolis Trap

So, we thought we would try a propolis trap for our beehives. Propolis is a sticky, resinous substance that bees collect from trees, I think sap. They use it as a sealant for holes in the hive, or they cover anything they don't like from stray leaves to dead mice. Humans like propolis because there claims of medicinal properties. I don't know about that, but I like the texture of a little propolis in the hive. We have a couple of propolis traps, so we thought we'd give them a try on a couple of hives. True to beekeeping equipment, the trap came with no instructions at first the bees ignored it until a blog reader told me that I need to keep the roof ajar. The bees see light coming in seal off the trap to block the light.

So, we gave it a try on the MimiKo and Bickman hives. We left the roof ajar and set the propolis trap on top of the inner cover.

There's a little hole in the inner cover that the bees can use to access the roof. Bless the bees hearts, they only filled the propolis right where the hole was on the inner cover--doing the least amount of work necessary and keeping the hive efficiently dark.

There was one tiny disturbing thing around the trap in the MimiKo Hive--ants. Large ants. They were between the inner cover and the roof and not into the rest of the hive. There are some dead bees on the ceiling and the ants were taking those apart, but I hope they don't decided to make themselves too welcome. I did some checking on google and found this from Go Beekeeping:

"Ants are a nuisance in the bee hive. They often build nest under the top cover and above the inner cover where the bees don't bother them. They seem to cause very little damage to the bees except be a curse to the beekeeper who wants to control them.

Treatment: Any chemical used to destroy ants will also kill bees. One could set the bee hive on a stand supported by four legs. Each leg would fit into a can filled with oil preventing ants from climbing up the side of the hive. Don't spend too much time worrying about them."

We looked down inside and the MimiKo bees were pretty chill. One ant came down and even ran into a couple of bees but there were no severe altercations. As long as the ants don't mess with the insides I won't stress too much, but I don't like that riff raff hanging out with my girls.

A Tiny Bit Of Bee Blogging

I was talking with Mr. Neil the other day about bee blogging. Periodically, I get emails from people asking "Hey, it's been awhile since you blogged bees, can we get another post please?" Or something to that effect. But since I've started working on the bee book in earnest, I've lost the desire to blog the bees. He could relate. The book is not a reprinting of the blog, some of the same stories will be there, but with more and different details and you just can't write a book the same way you write a blog--hyperlinking just does not translate.

I did have a minor bit of panic in the MimiKo hive recently. When we opened the roof, we found webbing in the corner. I worried that it may be wax moths. Wax moths lay eggs in gaps in your hive and when the larvae hatches, they crawl into your comb and eat the wax, making webs all over the place. Incidentally, if you have been purchasing the wax worms this summer for birds during the mealworm shortage--that's the same thing. Those buggers can really mess up a hive. However, if you have a strong, healthy colony, they can stop the moth larvae before they get too bad. I looked closely at the webbing and then suddenly realized that the small dots I thought was frass left from the larvae--were moving...with eight legs. These were baby spiders. Something else I don't care to have in the hive. I grabbed my handy dandy hive tool and evicted the spiders. I hated to do it, I respect what spiders do in the food chain, but I'd rather they didn't do it in the beehives.

Award Winning Honey Bees

So, we interrupt the shorebirding I was about to blog about to do a beekeeping update. I think when I last wrote about our humble beekeeping operation, we had combined the queenless Olga hive with the strong Kitty hive using the newspaper method. We took the remaining brood box with bees from Olga and placed it in Kitty, separating the box with a thin layer of newspaper. The bees would chew through the newspaper, giving the Olga bees a chance to absorb the pheromones of Queen Kitty and not start any fights.

When we check on them a week later, the newspaper on the bottom was completely eaten away.


They were still working their way through the top, but all seems to be going well and we are now a three hive operation. Not bad for our second year, not bad at all.

Meanwhile, the Bickman Bees have really set the tone for this summer--their honey won the blue ribbon at the county fair! It started as a wacky idea, I told Mr. Neil, Lorraine, and Non Birding Bill that we should enter our honey in the local fair. Having scoped out the rules and figuring we could afford the fifty cent entry fee, we gave it a go. I must say, Lorraine did the bulk of the work (apart from the bees): she extracted the honey and dealt with the slumgum, read up on what makes for an award winning entry, and walked it to the fair.

I was going to try and go out, but I was too swamped after my tv segment today--I still have not unpacked from last week! I got a phone call this afternoon Mr. Neil and Lorraine reported that the honey from our bees got the blue ribbon. Above is Lorraine posing with the entries.

It's beautiful too--a very pale color. I've had a couple of bites of feral comb from the hive, but have not tasted the official entry. Apparently, it tastes much different than Olga's honey last year.

I can't believe the overwhelming sense of pride I have in my hard workin' girls right now. This has been a pretty good year--I've got steady work that I enjoy, my second book came out, I've traveled to some fabulous places, but...I think seeing our bees take the blue ribbon has to top it. Not only because beekeeping is one of the most awesome things a person can do in life (aside from birding and living with a pet rabbit) but it's been a team effort with my husband and two really good friends.

...and now I have the A-Team Theme running through my head. Great.

HOLY CRAP!

Mr. Neil just called. Lorraine entered our honey in the county fair. Our honey won. We are now officially award winning beekeepers.

Photos soon.

Holy Crap!

Kitty and Olga and The Newspaper Method

Well, there have been some changes in the beekeeping operation. But first, let's start with the fun.

Can I say how grateful I am for the sweet natured temperament of the MimiKo bees? They are just a joy to visit and are still so friendly and easy going...which as you will read later, is much needed this summer. I love it when I open the lid of a hive and all is calm and a few bees that are at the top of the frames just kind of poke their heads up to see what is going on. They just hang there as if to ask, "Hey, how's it going? Did you see the dance about that aster patch on the south side of the fallow field--that's some good nectar." They're so fuzzy up close, you almost want to pet them.

My buddy Jody the Librarian came out with me for some of the hive inspections and I had her do some hand feeding. That is the cool thing to do this summer: come out to the hives and feed bees bare handed. Once you've had bee tongue on your finger, you never go back to life as it was before.

Above is a Bickman hive frame with some out of control comb construction. In a beehive, you have deep brood boxes with longer frames that bees put their brood and food stores. Then there are smaller boxes called honey supers that bees building excess honey in and you get to eat. We've been having a tough time convincing some of the bees to get out of their brood boxes and go build up inside the honey supers. So, I put a smaller honey super frame inside a deep brood box of the Bickman hive. The plan was to have her start to draw out comb on the frame and then I would put it back up in the honey super and encourage the girls to build up there. I left the frame in just a little to long and the bottom of the frame was covered in soon to be drone cells. I scraped those off and put the frame back in the honey super...honey should be packed in there by the end of this month. Whoot.

I will say this, the Bickman hive has low tolerance for shenanigans. While scraping off the drones cells, a worker tried to sting my glove. I didn't feel it, but I saw her stuck on the finger tip. I had Jody smoke my glove. When a worker bee stings you, she releases a pheromone that tells her sisters, "Hey! Something bad, right here, come sting too!" And soon more bees arrive. Sometimes it's instantaneous. You'll see the one sting you and three seconds later, five bees fly to the spot. If you use your smoker and puff it over the sting, that will mask the pheromone and prevent more bees from coming to join in the stinging fun. Jody smoked my glove, but this one bee pictured above was furiously trying to find the spot to sting. She kept angrily buzzing the glove, but couldn't find the exact spot to sting. Her stinger kept popping in and out of her body, but my camera was not fast enough to catch it.

Jody and I also checked the Kitty and Olga hives. Kitty is still going strong. Above is a frame with some early drawn out comb. Kitty is strong. We looked in on Olga, neither of the new queens had hatched yet. Damn. They should have hatched by now and it was clear that they just weren't going to. Olga was dying. The workers were in a slow death. What could I do? Well, there's the dump method where you take a brood box and dump in front of other hives and hope for the best that some of the workers will make it past the guard bees of other hives and start a new life there. We opted for the news paper method. I went back to consult an under the weather Mr. Neil. He agreed, it was time to combine the weak hive with a strong hive. I waited until later in the afternoon when more foragers would be back and could take Non Birding Bill with me.

NBB opened up Olga. She was quiet, not the robust busting of activity that she had been in the past. Even though we had two brood boxes on Olga, half the frames in each box were empty, so we took frames full of bees and combined them into one brood box.

We then went over to the Kitty hive, opened the roof and ceiling, placed down a layer of newspaper and set the Olga box on that. Since some Kitty bees were still coming back from foraging and using the top of the hive, we put another piece of newspaper on top of the Olga box, and then put Kitty's honey supers on top. The bees will chew through the newspaper in the next 24 hours and hopefully by that time, the workers will have absorbed the new queen's pheromone and acclimate to the hive. Mr. Neil wisely pointed out that pointed Kitty was simply Olga's daughter hive anyway (we divided Olga this spring to create the Kitty hive), so Olga was transforming back to herself..

I went back to where Olga had been. We missed some bees. Foragers were still coming back and landing on the bottom board of where their hive had been. I looked at the frame with the two queen cells that didn't hatch. Did I do this too soon? Was there any chance that the queens might hatch really late. I needed to open them to know...but what would I find. I couldn't open them. NBB took the frame and offered to open the queen cells and tell me. I was a coward and agreed. He said that the larvae in both cells was shriveled and dried up. Something had gone wrong.

I watched former Olga foragers landing on the board and furiously running around. Guilt knotted up in my stomach. A lump formed in my throat. The sound was awful and full of panic:



It was early evening, it was cool, and it would be dark soon. Where would these bees go?

I took all the frames out of a brood box but set it up with an entrance and roof so they would have someplace to hang out in at night, some sort of shelter. Maybe some of them would fly over to the Kitty hive and the guards would let them through. Otherwise, what else would they do? NBB had to drive the vehicle with the remains of the Olga hive back to the house, I opted to walk. I felt terrible. As took the path, I saw a honey bee foraging on some clover. I wondered to myself if it was an Olga bee, and tears filled my eyes, she's gathering pollen and nectar only to head back to hive that no long exists. I thought back to all the lessons in beekeeping the Olga hive had taught me: how I freaked out big time because she was my first time putting new bees in; she gave my only sting thus far, we got comb honey from her last year, we listened to her in winter.

And now she is gone. She's very much a part of the Kitty hive and perhaps it's appropriate that the two hives we started with last year are combined into one hive this year. I didn't think I would feel this bad. I tearily met up with NBB and he patted my back and agreed that he too felt bad, but really at the end of the day, they are just insects. I tried to listen, but found that my typical anti anthropomorphic resolve was failing. These are just bees, they only live for like 21 days anyway.

So, days when you make the decision to end a hive, it's good to have a friendly hand feeding hive as a back up.

No, I'm not too attached to my bees. I can quit beekeeping at any time. Really, I can. It's not a habit. So what if I broke down in my hair stylist's chair yesterday as I related the story? I'm not in too deep, really. I can totally handle this.

Actually, I've had a few days to chew on this since it happened, so I am over the loss of the Olga hive and can chuckle at myself for being so wrapped up in my bees (and looking at the calendar, I'm sure hormones had something to do with it too). Meanwhile, there have been other happy and cool things related to beekeeping on:

MimiKo (hive namesake) sent me a kickin' shirt for my birthday--it's an Eddie Izzard shirt and much like his routine, I'm a beekeeper who is happy to be covered in bees. And, unlike a majority of bird shirts out there, this is actually designed for a woman's body and looks cute--bird manufacturers, please take note--you don't have to sell only men's sizes or the unisex sizes.

And another artist has been inspired by our bees (some may remember the Lisa Snellings art). Well, this really cool photographer named Kimberly Butler made a series of photos based on our beekeeping adventures--that's one above them. She gave us a signed copy. I was speechless when she showed it to us, it was so weird and reminded me of calm, happy bees poking their heads over frames to see what you are doing. So, in many ways, old hives do live on in really weird and wonderful ways.

Hand Feeding The Bees

Here's a video of a honey bee licking my finger:



You can watch it in high resolution here. There's a similar video here.

Robber Bees

Do you ever have days where you feel like no one can make a mistake as big as you can, or quite so publicly, and taking several people down with you in the process? That you are perhaps the antithesis of tact? That perhaps the place for you to reside for the next month or so would be under a rock? I was having that kind of day earlier this week.

Then I got a somewhat panicked call from Lorraine. She said that there were several bees in the garage and they were going for the bee equipment and hive boxes. Could this be a swarm? If it was a swarm, was it from one of our hives or was it from a neighbor or even a passing truck? Was is something else? Did Lorraine have a camera?

Lorraine didn't have a camera to document this and she didn't see a large clump of bees that could mean a swarm but assured me a large quantity of bees was in the garage. I decided to head out regardless, I needed the company, someone needed to get photos, and even if it wasn't a swarm, something blogable was happening.

By the time I arrived, the amount of bees had diminished but it was still enough to make me want to put on a bee suit. Many bees were crowded on the windows and surrounding some old frames, but there was no telltale clump that would mean a swarm.

What we had were robber bees. In the above photo, are the old frames from the Kitty Hive that died out this winter--they were covered in bees. Lorraine had left the garage door open and a worker bee found them, went back to a hive, did a little dance that said to other workers, "Holy crap, there's a trashed hive with some frames with honey! We don't even have to gather nectar and convert it to honey, we can just take the honey! Watch me dance!"

And soon several thousand bees followed suit to the garage. We stood outside the garage to watch where they were coming from because we have the Olga and Kitty Hive in one area and Bickman and MimiKo in another area. The traffic flow appeared to head towards Kitty and Olga and my guess is that these are Kitty bees. Lorraine and I decided to head out to do some late afternoon bee inspections. Not the best idea, most of your foragers are back at the hive at that time and they are most likely to sting you, however, we were just going to check the tops of the hives and not dig too deep.

We did dig deep into the queenless Olga hive to check her progress. We found queen cells on June 22 and we were checking the hive on July 8. The queen should emerge in 15 - 17 days after being laid. Hopefully, a queen will emerge by this weekend, kill off the other queen cell, go on a nuptial flight and replenish this hive. Maybe this queen cell was emerging on Tuesday? Note the little notch in the capping at the top? Fingers crossed for this queenless hive.


Kitty seemed well and contented. She's a little behind in production compared to the MimiKo and Bickman hives, but seems well on her way to filling the hive in time for winter.

The MimiKo hive was super calm for so late in the afternoon. We didn't use the smoker on her. Everyone was mellow while we checked honey supers that had been placed on top recently. I told Lorraine that this would be the perfect time to hand feed the bees.

So we took off our gloves and dabbed a tiny bit of honey on our hands and tried to find a taker for our sweet finger tips. Low and behold, we found a taker. Above is Lorraine, without a glove, hand feeding a honeybee. Here is a close up:

The little bee tongue reached right out for her sweet fingers. This was a truly amazing moment if you knew Lorraine before we stared the whole beekeeping operation--she was the most opposed to the idea from the beginning, I seem to recall her shouting several times "Bees are NOT in my job description!" And now she not only goes out to the hives and does maintenance, she's out at the hive during the busiest time, with minimal smoke, bare-handedly feeding worker bees. A testament to how chill the MimiKo bees are and how much Lorraine has mellowed out in regards to beekeeping.

We checked the Bickman hive, she's sorta friendly but not nearly as laid back as the MimiKo hive. Mr. Neil had called while I was in Utah and said that he put a honey super on her and I wasn't sure she was ready, but looking at her third brood box, she was totally full and ready--he was right to add the honey super. Above is a photo inside our Ross Round Comb Honey Super and none of the bees had started drawing out comb. There looked to be a couple of half hearted attempts, but Lorraine and I decided to take a frame from the super and replace it with a honey frame in the top brood box. We did this last year with Olga. Once the bees draw out honey on the frame, we put back in the honey super and they go up and continue the work. Since all of Bickman's frames were full, Lorraine and I had to take back a frame of honey and got to sample and eat it--now we were the robber bees! Truly, there is nothing in the world like taking a bite of honey comb fresh from the hive, it's warm, chewy and sweet.

We also switched out a frame with MimiKo and put in a honey super frame in Kitty so we can put those up in the honey supers. I'm not sure about Kitty, but I'm confident that we will get honey from MimiKo and Bickman by the end of the summer.

Lorraine and I went out to dinner and I was feeling better--working with bees eased the burn of my unfortunate mistake I had been brooding about for the last twenty-four hours. I've been traveling so much this summer that I have not been out at the hives nearly as much as last summer. Unless you have to do something big like search a colony for a failing queen, beekeeping can be a very soothing hobby. I periodically get emails from people contemplating beekeeping and they are not sure. I say that if you have ever remotely contemplated it--do it. Yes, there's work, but it's the most amazing thing.

Here is Lorraine's version of our day...including what honeybees might be journaling about.

The Olga Plan

Well, after all the heartbreak of the failed requeening of Olga, we decided to give her some eggs and see if she will queen herself. We checked her on Sunday and found 2 queen cells--those are the two yellow things pointing down on the comb. When workers sense the need for a queen, they will pick a fertilized egg and feed it nothing but royal jelly, place it in a larger cell to grow (workers only get royal jelly for three days, then switch to regular food). One of these queens should hatch sometime next week, kill off the other queen cell, go on a mating flight and hopefully will find a drone congregation area consisting of drones from the MimiKo and Bickman hives, mate and kill about 12 - 15 of them, come back and commence to layin' some eggs for this troubled colony...hopefully the queen will do this without being eaten by a great-crested flycatcher or swallow. I have no idea if this will work, but if there's one thing that beekeeping is teaching me, it's that the more I mess with the hives, the more likely they are to fail, so I'm gonna let the bees do their thing. If she's too weak going into the winter, we may combine her with Kitty.

Sunday night, a friend named Sabrina stopped by for an oh so tasty lamb dinner prepared by Mr. Neil. Afterwards she asked if I would mind showing her the hives. Would I mind? I love showing off the girls! I didn't really want to start up the smoker again because it takes so long to get going and asked Sabrina, "How much do you want to see, do you want to just walk by them or do you want to see the inside?"

"You mean I could actually look inside the hive?!?" Sabrina asked excitedly.

Non Birding Bill and I decided to take her to the more docile MimiKo and Bickman hives. They are still so new, so young, so friendly. Sabrina has an allergy to bee stings, so we made sure that her bee suit was fully secure and took her out. Both hives were INCREDIBLY docile, considering we were out there in the evening when all the foragers are back and we had no smoker. Some of the bees were even lapping up spilled honey off of our gloves. Their buzzing was so soft, so content. I really, really love beekeeping. I love birding, but I never really knew how much bees were going to take over my life and how much I would just fall in love with our fuzzy little stinging insects.

The best part of the day, was that both MimiKo and Bickman are in overdrive producing honey and comb. There's a bit of feral building going on that we need to scrape it away to make inspections easier. We all got to have our first bite of honey comb straight from the hive to your tongue. Honestly, there is nothing quite like soft, chewy comb, warmed from the summer sun in the hive. You bite into it and get these little bursts of sweetness of all the flowers within two miles having a party in your mouth. The wax is soft, similar to a taffy consistency. It's just the best. The honey tastes a bit different from Bickman and MimiKo which kind of makes sense, they are in a different area than Olga and Kitty--those have a more clover, fruit blossom flavor. MimiKo and Bickman still have a wild sweetness, but not the same delicacy. It's a bit more woodsy, perhaps because there's so much giant hemlock nearby?

Anyway, it was on this evening inspection that we found that weird jumping spider. It really did look like some strange demon man. See:

Can't you just see him shaking his tiny little fist in anger? I'm not too worried about a spider on the hive. Should it be foolish enough to try and go inside, the bees will ball it in short order.

Olga's Down, MimiKo and Bickman Are Up

My friends, I'm sad to report that the outlook of the Olga hive is not good. Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill and I headed out to do a quick bee inspection...Olga has no eggs, no brood, nothing. And the overall buzzing sound is just sad--dissonant. The new queen didn't take. We're not sure what happened. We purchased a new queen to replace the one missing in action, and Lorraine made sure to release her and it didn't work. There could be several reasons: was the new queen not fertile (doubtful) or did she get released and not all the bees in the hive accepted her and at some point killed her? Is there democratic movement going on and the workers have decided to ditch the monarchy system?

We decided to make one last ditch effort by putting in a frame with some eggs from the Kitty hive to see of the Olga bees will grow a queen, but that's going to take another 16 days and then if they get that far, she has to go on a "maiden voyage" and will she find drones to mate with? Will she get eaten by a great-crested flycatcher or purple martin? It's just time to let go and let bee--see if they can sort it out themselves, we've done all we can.

After we checked Olga, I began to understand why so many people I meet and find out that I keep bees say, "Oh yeah, I did that once." Last summer was so fun, something new to discover every week, bees mostly following the books and doing some cool things on their own. I was feeling down and getting irritated with my junior beekeepers. When NBB and Mr. Neil went to retrieve a frame of eggs from Kitty for the Olga hive, Mr. Neil dutifully came over with a frame full of eggs...and Kitty bees. "NO!" I shouted. "We can't have bees, and the queen could be on there, you can't put Kitty workers in with Olga workers! The Kitty Queen could be on there!"

NBB insisted that they both had checked for the queen and would brush the Kitty bees back into their hives. I was feeling the pressure and felt bad for snapping at them. Two hives not doing super great. The unhappy buzzing of Olga just made me question the whole beekeeping operation. Sure, even if Olga dies, we'll still get her honey, but what went wrong? Was it something we could have prevented? Is this spot too shady for the bees? We had to move Olga over a little bit this spring, did we move her too close to a tree trunk? Also, like last summer, I found that we were trying all sorts of things to try and save her and it seems to be postponing the inevitable.

Then we left the Kitty and Olga hives and went over to the new Bickman and MimiKo hives and the world shifted. These were happy, healthy hives! And MimiKo was getting creative with her comb. Mr. Neil and NBB took off the top brood box and we found this:

They drew out some funky comb! Go MimiKo. One side had eggs and the other side did not, so we decided to smoosh it onto another frame without eggs. The buzzing at these hives was much happier, much more in harmony. Despite the fact that a couple of weeks earlier when I stole a frame of brood from this hive and angered them, they were still pretty cool with us and we barely needed the smoker.

The Bickman hive was just as happy and friendly. Here is the sound of a happy Bickman bee with full pollen baskets waiting for another worker to help her unload. Watch her little butt bouncing in expectancy:



Hear that happy buzzing in the background?

Another worker approached and started to get the pollen. Check out the bee with the pollen baskets. Notice anything strange in that photo? It looks like she has not wings. I think she was moving them so quickly that my camera couldn't pick them up at that setting. The happy buzzing sounds, the friendly bees, the industrious drawing out of comb, the healthy harmonious sounds--now I remembered why I love beekeeping. I looked at NBB and Mr. Neil and was overcome with joy. Though Olga might be failing, Kitty isn't doing so bad and MimiKo and Bickman are going like gang busters. The beekeeping life is good.

Mr. Neil and I have made the leap from newbie to true beekeepers. The one thing that is a constant among all beekeepers is disagreement. You ask 5 beekeepers a question, you'll get 5 different answers, all thought out and with reasons (good or bad) for the madness. I learned from the Beekeeping Short Course that in northern climates like Minnesota, you should do a three deep brood box systems so your bees will overwinter. The bottom two boxes have brood and honey, the top is all honey. Mr. Neil has been reading online about a two deep brood box system that some people in Wisconsin have tried and think that it helps to keep your bees clustered and warm. We were "discussing this" and in the middle we suddenly stopped and realized--"Hey, we sound like beekeepers! We're arguing over method! Sweet!"

Now I think we can truly call ourselves beekeepers and not "I'm a new beekeeper."

I'm So Proud Of My Junior Beekeeper

I don't know what it is...maybe it's the Canon Rebel they've been playing with...but both Non Birding Bill and Mr. Neil are showing more of an interest in birds lately. While I was away livin' large in North Dakota, I was sent some oh-so-cool pileated woodpecker photo from Mr. Neil. It's a fun shot and that is such a classy bird. We've been putting some cashew suet in that particular feeder. It's been cool enough that it's not melting and the peckers are loving it.

It sounds like things are going well at the hives. This May and June have been insanely busy and Lorraine has been checking the bees and so has Mr. Neil when he is in town. I feel as though I've hardly been all up in them this year and I'm really missing them. I'm going to try and eek out a bit with them this weekend. Everyone else has been taking such great care of them that they are well in hand, but I do miss just sitting at their entrance, watching them coming and going. Here is the report:

Kellli & MimiKo Hives now have a third deep brood box to build into. If they keep going at the pace they have been, we could very well get honey from them.

Kitty 2 is buiding away and growing...and the Olga Report (my favorite report of all):

Olga: "Took a cursory glance at Olga -- saw larvae but no eggs anywhere. Decided not to worry and that if they didn't have a queen they could damned well grow a new one."

I hope the queen is really laying and they just didn't see any eggs at that time. And hopefully, we will get honey from her, but bees will be bees. I should also report that Mr. Neil has discovered that we may have some bees with extra long stingers--he got stung through the leather glove! Alas, he did not have a dramatic retelling to with it. I'm not sure if that's because his Britishness gives him a natural dignity when stung, or that one of the ways he keeps his cool factor is that unlike me, he keeps embarrassing moments of flailing and ponytail stomping to himself rather than put them in the blog.

Lisa Snellings Bee Art & Honey For Sale

I am not an artist. Sometimes, I don't understand artists, I'm more of a natural history girl, but I know lots of artists and I'm learning.

One of my favorite artists named Lisa Snellings-Clark has created some art out of our Kitty Beehive that died over this past winter. Not only that, you can bid on this piece and it even comes with honey from the actual hive, which I must say is some of the tastiest honey out there--it truly tastes like the wildflowers and fruit tree blossoms smell in spring.

It's nice to know that Queen Kitty lives in on in art.

Speaking of hives, I have it on good authority from Lorraine that the new Olga queen is out of her cage and appears to be accepted by the hive. Hopefully she's laying eggs and lots of new larvae is underway.

I Needed A Bee Moment...I needed lots of them

Okay, the next time a hive goes queenless, I think I'm gonna leave it that way and let it go. It's just too much stress to requeen. Maybe I need some sleep to process what happened today, but the beekeeping today was not so much fun. We noticed on Sunday that there was no new eggs and larvae in the Olga hive and that was a sign that the queen had died or was failing. After consulting some beekeepers, I bought a new queen Monday morning and decided to try and requeen the colony. The queen comes in a cage with a candy door (and a few attendants). The idea is to put the cage in the colony, the new bees generally don't care for a new queen and want to attack her--the cage protects the new queen. The workers start to chew on the candy door to get to the queen and kill her. As they are chewing, the queen releases her pheromones and the workers start to think that this new queen isn't so bad after all. In about three to five days, they chew their way through the candy and in all that time, her pheromone has worked its way the colony and everyone has worked out their differences and loves the queen and hopefully, they show her around and she gets to some egg laying.

For this brilliant plan to truly come together, the old queen must be dead, or she will fight the new queen and possibly kill her and you are left with your old failing queen and soon to be dead hive. So, Fabulous Lorraine and I had to go through the whole colony, frame by frame to see if we could find the old failing Olga queen...and kill her. We were not thrilled with this task and were hoping against hope that we would not find her and not have to kill her. The colony did not sound happy as we started going through each frame, they seemed confused and their buzzing was a little off, I felt certain the queen was totally gone.

We made it all the way down to the bottom an I checked the contents of the varroa mite trap and was surprised at the amount of discarded bee pollen baskets--all colors. It never occurred to me that they baskets could be dropped and forgotten. There were mites mixed in there too--ew. The bottom box had a very small amount of unhatched brood and the Olga bees vehemently defended the hive at this point. Usually we get bonked on our hoods a couple of times in warning, this time, it was a steady pelting of bonks. Because we were out so long, our smoker stopped smoking (which is used to try and keep the bees calm and less focused on stinging us) and we periodically had to step away and relight it, all the while dodging angry and queenless bees.

Poor Cabal learned that hard way that he's not fatally allergic to bee stings. Since Mr. Neil wasn't around, Cabal's been lonely and clinging close to his pack. He came over to us while we were at the Olga hive and got stung by one angry bee (when bees sting, they release a pheromone that tells the other workers something bad is here and needs to be stung) and more soon surrounded him. Cabal did what comes natural to a dog--he started whipping his head around to eat the bees coming to attack him--which is the equivalent to humans flailing which just makes bees want to sting you all the more. I gave Lorraine the smoker and she dashed over and covered him with smoke to mask the angry stinging bee pheromone and make sure he didn't have any bees still attacking him. We think he got at least two stings, one on a back leg and one on a neck, but was otherwise okay.

For some reason, when Lorraine walked back to me at the hives, Cabal decided to follow. We're not sure if he was needing reassurance after being stung or if he was trying to warn us about the danger. As soon as he came over, the bees started attacking him again and he tried to eat them. We had to put him in the truck to protect him.

Have you ever been doing some spring cleaning and you suddenly look around after three hours of work and notice that everything is messier than when you started? That's kind of the way I felt when the above photo was taken. As the bees kept attacking and trying to sting us, Lorraine announced, "I need a moment to de-bee." She sensibly walked away to get away from the buzzing and wipe some bees off. About that time, I felt a tickle on my neck--holy crap, did a bee work its way into my suit? I decided to take a bee moment like Lorraine and confirm bees were not in my suit. Fortunately, it was just my hair brushing my neck. Whew!

After that we went back to work. Lorraine suddenly shouted, "Oh no! Is it on the inside or outside?!" I looked up and noticed that the hood of her beesuit was half unzipped and there were angry Olga bees on the screen in front of her face and a sort of collar of bees working their way to the open zipper. She scampered off and I followed, helpfully shouting, "I'll smoke you! I'll smoke you!"

We go the bees off of her, zipped her up tight and went back to finish our grueling beekeeping task.

We noticed that most of the brood was almost hatched out in the Olga hive and no new brood behind it. Since the other hives were going like gangbusters, I decided we should take a a frame of brood from one of the other hives. The MimiKo hive appeared to have the most brood and so I took a frame from them. We ended up feeling terrible about it. Because MimiKo and Bickman are new hives, they are fairly friendly right now, we can work in them pretty easily. When I took the frame out, I had to take off all the MimiKo workers, the easiest way seemed to be using a bee brush. Boy, bees don't like the bee brush very much. The sweet, docile MimiKo bees suddenly became incredibly angry--even the ones who didn't get caught in the bee brush bristles.

We went through the whole Olga hive with the frame of brood. After going through each and every frame in the hive, we did not find a life queen. We did find one small, very black, shriveled up bee which I wondered was the dead queen--Olga I was very dark.

We put in the new queen cage and the workers looked in and went straight for the candy. We slowly put the hive back together, our backs sore from lifting the heavy boxes and being bent over searching each frame for the nonexistent queen. Lorraine pointed out that if we had found the failing queen alive it would have been easier to kill her after being pelted by angry bees all afternoon.

We tried to wipe off all the bees on or suits, gathered our equipment, and loaded up the truck to drive back to the house. A couple of tenacious bees were still following us and we thought it best to keep the full bee suits on in case a bee was still in the vehicle. As I sat down, I felt a tickling on the middle of my chest. I told myself that it was just my hair and to not worry about it. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I no longer have long hair and that could not be the source of the tickling on my chest...something was crawling there. I was still sealed in my bee suit and assumed it was a tick and I pressed it a bit. The tickling got a little faster.

Lorraine had already started the vehicle and was driving through the field (chock full of dandelions) back towards the road. I shouted, "I NEED A BEE MOMENT! I NEED A BEE MOMENT!" and leaped out of the slow moving truck. Lorraine slammed on the brakes and was in hot pursuit. Trying desperately to have an out of body experience I said, "There's something crawling on my chest." We carefully unzipped my hood and took it off. Lorraine slowly unzipped the front of my bee suit--there, crawling from my chest to the inside of the suit was a bee.

Now, I always thought that when it came to the fight or flight response that I was more of a fight kinda girl. My goodness, was I wrong. I totally took flight. Without a word, I took off running, although, it was hard to run since Lorraine had hold of the arms of the suit and my legs were still in the bottom of the suit. I pushed through the suit and the rest of the zipper ripped open and I tried desperately to keep running while Lorraine pulled on the suit from behind. "I'm trying to save you!" Lorraine shouted. I said nothing but continued to try my awkward run. We got the bee suit off of my legs, along with my shoes. Lorraine, still thinking the bee was in my shirt, helpfully tried to take it off. Overcome with anxiety and and humor of the situation, we just started laughing maniacally.

It's points like this where I'm really grateful that our beekeeping operation is in a remote area and the chances that anyone actually witnessed this strange little tug of war and personal bee removal striptease are incredibly slim.

We took a moment to breathe and then realized that we were still surrounded by bees foraging on the dandelions surrounding us--and I was out of the bee suit and not wearing shoes. We eventually made it back to the house, spent and emotionally drained. Up until this point, the beekeeping had been a fun discovery of cool natural history. Today, it was just hard, messy work.

When we got back to the house, I said, "You know, someone is going to have to check the cage in about three days to make sure the queen is released."

"I like how you said 'someone' like you're not going to be here to do it," she said. We decided it would be best to get some sleep and find our love of beekeeping again before deciding who would check to see if the queen were released.

I am about to collapse from exhaustion myself as I type this. When I came home, I did crawl under a blanket for about five minutes and was a tad weepy. Non Birding Bill came into the bedroom and asked what was the matter and I started recounting the day: we squished bees, we lost the old queen, will the new queen make it, and worst of all, I broke the MimiKo Hive's trust when I took their frame of brood away and used the bee brush on some of them.

NBB started laughing. "You realize that you are upset about breaking the trust of some insects?" NBB asked.

Well, when it's put that way, it does sound kind of silly and I had to chuckle at my self pity.

You can read Lorraine's version here.

Plotting Some Regicide

I went out and did a hive inspection with Non Birding Bill and Fabulous Lorraine today. Afterwards, we sat down to a cup of tea and talked some treason. I suddenly regret being the head beekeeper.

There's trouble afoot in the Olga Hive. She is now a parent colony, as we split her recently to make a second hive. When we opened Olga up to see if she was ready to add some honey supers, we found no new eggs or larvae in the top box. We down deeper into the second box and still no eggs, a tiny bit of sealed brood that is mostly emerged, but nothing new. We went into the bottom box where I found fresh larvae the day we did the divide and there was nothing but sealed brood...not good.

After consulting some bee books and putting a call for help on the blog, I got in touch with some helpful local beekeepers and the consensus is that Queen Olga has either died (perhaps accidentally crushed during the divide) or was "mated poorly" (maybe only hooked up with a few drones instead of 15 or so) and has run out of fertile eggs. Either way, something needs to be done and now.

Once again, Nature's Nectar is saving my beekeeping butt. Non Birding Bill and I are heading to his place tomorrow morning to pick up a replacement queen...but here's the hard part: I have to totally inspect the hive and if I find the old queen alive, I have to kill her in order for the hive to accept the new queen. I don't know if I can do this. I have to, but wow, this not crushing an ordinary bug, this is the queen who brought forth all the workers. As much as I hate to admit it, I'm attached to my bees and it's not like when a pet is ill and it's time to take it to the vet to be put down (boy, would love to see the face of my vet if I brought in a failing queen bee asking to euthanize her, I know my file is full of odd stuff as it is, this wouldn't help). I have to do this for the good of the hive...as Spock would say, "The needs of the many, out weigh the needs of the one."

On to happier hive news:

Kitty, the daughter of the Olga Hive is doing well. The workers have accepted the new queen and she is putting eggs in any available cell. Above is a frame with some sealed brood that was from the Olga hive, some new larvae from the new queen, and LOTS of pollen.

The new hives that we installed this year are rarin' to go. Queen MimiKo seems to have little patience for the workers, she's even laying eggs in half constructed cells. I spoke with BeeGirl today about the Olga situation and mentioned MimiKo's impatience. She recommended adding in a frame of drawn out comb without any brood from another hive to give the workers a chance to catch up and a place for the queen to lay eggs. I'll do that when I go out to put in the new Olga queen.

The Bickman Hive was full of fresh eggs and larvae too. I really love hanging out at the new hives. The workers are so docile and friendly, you barely need to smoke the hive to work in it. Ah, young colonies with no preconceived notions of humans and have been untouched by pesky skunks. They are so young, so industrious, so friendly. A perfect antidote for the puzzling Olga.

Olga Hive Has No Eggs Or Larvae!!!!

Okay, any beekeepers with any kind of advice, I could use it now. Our Olga Hive that we overwintered and just divided about a week and a half ago appears to be in trouble. When we took away the box with brood for the divide, we left behind the box that had some fresh larvae in it. We just checked her today and there is absolutely no new brood, no larvae, no eggs. There is some sealed brood but it is all about to hatch. The hive has several workers, but is this a sign that the queen has died or can no longer produce eggs? Should I get a new queen for Olga?

Any advice appreciated, I'm now going to sequester myself into some bee books.

The Blog That Kept A Hive

Or, the queen was not getting released from her cage:

The really cool part about blogging the bees is that sometimes readers save our beekeeping operation from potential disaster. When I mentioned this morning that Fabulous Lorraine and Mr. Neil had found a queen cell in the newly divided hive and that the queen had not been eaten out of the cage yet, Bee Girl emailed this:

"At this point, the queen should have been out and laying eggs. It only takes 3 days for the workers to acclimate to a new queen, but the presence of a queen cell means they may have given up on her because they hate eating that nasty dried up sugar plug. I'd get her out of there today!

To give the new queen the greatest chance of succeeding (which will allow you to get the benefits of the purchased queen's breeding, ensure you have a well-mated queen and ensure you get the earliest possible start to the brood rearing season), plan to destroy the queen cell. I would release the queen before destroying the queen cell. If your assistant kills the queen in the process of releasing her, then you will have the self-started queen to replace her. If the self-started queen emerges first, then when your new expensive purchased queen gets out, she'll be killed by the other queen or the workers.

Those candy plugs are notorious for keeping the queens in far too long. I normally poke a large (penny nail) size hole in it to speed the process. The plugs are usually dried out, and there is nothing in the bee's innate programming to direct it to gnaw through something to release a queen. If the bees are slow in figuring this out, its a big problem - the presence of a queen cell indicates that something has gone wrong with the release process."

So, I contacted the Bee Team and they went out to unleash the queen get the Kitty Hive back on track. The queen came out and all appeared to be well. The hive is already Four Queen Kitty, I really don't want to nickname her Five Queen Kitty. You can read Fabulous Lorraine's account here.

Nature's Nectar Saved My Beekeeping Butt

Well, I don't know if you anyone noticed in my Twitter Status Updates or over at Lorraine's blog, but our queen for dividing the Olga hive (who arrived a week earlier than expected) died suddenly on Monday. Arrrgh! I had a back up ordered, but wasn't sure with my travel schedule and plan to divide on Wednesday would be able to fly. I'm not sure I can take the stress of timing spring beehive divides and warbler migration. I think it's going to make my tiny little brain explode!

Fortunately, Jim from Nature's Nectar was at the MN Hobby Beekeeper's Association meeting on Tuesday night and sold me a queen he just happened to have in his vehicle for desperate beekeepers like myself--totally saving my butt. He comes highly recommended from Minnesota beekeepers, I have a feeling he will be getting more bee business from us in the future. For those interested, Jim also has a beekeeping blog, you should check it out and see his grand scale operation.

So, thanks to all the prep work done by my Personal Beekeeping Assistant (Lorraine) and Junior Beekeepers (Non Birding Bill & Mr. Neil), we went out to Olga to look for fresh eggs (that would be the box that had the queen and would stay). The other box with no fresh bee eggs would be used to restart the Kitty Hive. And wouldn't you know it, the queen and eggs ended up being on the bottom box, so that one stayed and we removed the top box with just sealed brood to start Kitty.

We took the new box off and let it sit queenless for a few hours and then took the queen cage and wedged it into one of the frames. Hopefully, if all goes well, her pheromones will permeate the hive and those bees will accept her. She has a piece of sugar candy blocking the entrance to her cage. The first day, all the workers will want to kill her (hey, that's not our queen) and eat at the candy to get at her. However, all the while they chew at the candy and absorb the pheromone and suddenly, she seems like the best queen ever. This will now be the fourth queen for the Kitty hive. Let's hope this one takes.

We had to make the decision when we did the divide to either immediately start exploiting the Olga hive for honey or let her grow into a third brood box and overwinter her again. She's been such a great hive and one our first, we've decided to try and winter her again. Ah, Olga. She's grown up now. As of the divide, she is now considered a "parent colony". Our little girl has matured. I am so proud.

We also did a check of our two new hives. The one on the left was origionally called Kelli hive, but I'm getting Kelli and Kitty confused, so she is now Queen Bickman (which is just fun to say, in my book). Either way, she's named after her artist Kelli Bickman.

Someone emailed and mentioned that I never blogged about the art on the Mimi Hive, I just have an overload of subjects sometimes. But this hive was painted by photographer MimiKo...which I may just end up calling Queen MimiKo because I love to say MimiKo. It has this kind of cool bubble/planetary thing going on.

I'll say one thing, the bees look really cool when they are up against dark blues of the MimiKo Hive.

We went to check on the strange cells that Non Birding Bill found last weekend. He thought it was unregulated honeybee comb construction, but Mr. Neil and I both felt that this was the naughty work for mud wasps and quickly dispatched the freeloaders from the Bickman Hive.

We're using some different comb foundation in these hives this year. Last year it was white, this year, it's black, which makes the freshly constructed honey comb really pop with color on the frame. But that's not even the best part:

The eggs and larvae are ten times easier to see up against the black as opposed to the white! The Bickman hive seems to be a few days ahead of the MimiKo hive--Bickman has sealed brood, MimiKo does not, but both are full of industrious workers constructing new comb and lots of eggs.

I wonder if we will get honey from either of these girls like we did last year?

All the bulbs that I planed around the woods for our girls were just bursting out all over and it was fun to see bees here and there. As we were finishing up and climbing the hill back into the yard, my nose was suddenly hit with a wall of plum blossom aroma--it was intense. If you looked at the top of the tree, you could see a steady line of honey bees (and a few other insects and butterflies) furiously tackling and pollinating the blossoms. I tried to get a video of it, but I'm not sure how well bees translate onto YouTube:

Oriole In The Bee Equipment

Ug, I'm getting a backlog of blogging and I'm leaving for another festival tomorrow...prepare for a blogging explosion next week. I was supposed to go out and get to dividing Olga into a second beehive, but was WAY too distracted by birds. There were six, count 'em six, indigo buntings on Mr. Neil's feeders--among all the rose-breasted grosbeaks. Not to mention yellow-rumped warblers jockeying for position on the suet feeder. I was trying desperately to concentrate and focus on bees, not digiscoping birds. I went to the garage to the bee equipment shelves.

I heard a rustling and then looked up. There on the top shelf was a male Baltimore oriole. How can I focus on bees when the birds are forcing me to watch them? I opened up the garage doors figuring that he would fly out. Instead, he ran behind the equipment and hid.

Yo, dude, that's not the best hiding spot. The oriole eventually came out from hiding, but instead of flying out the wide open doors, kept flying into closed windows. I took one of the nets from one of our bee hats and tossed it on the not so bright oriole and grabbed it.

Boy, that bander's grip does come in handy. I gave him a look over and he was fiesty--that was good, he didn't hit the windows too hard. He had bent the tip of his beak a tiny bit, but was otherwise okay. He started whistling in my hand--man, could you feel the power of that song--that's a lotta whistle coming from a tiny bird.

I gave him to Lorraine to release and he was off. He preened a bit, roused, and then flew down to the grape jelly. A side door was open on the garage, so he must have flown in that way, probably going after what few insects are out and about.

A Simple Plan

Hello, all, NBB here again.

First off, big ups to my fabulous wife and her kick-ass team from Swarovski for winning first place in digiscoping at the World Series of Birding.

As for myself, having successfully made the backyard safe for brown birds, I trudged off to feed and inspect our two new hives. Both Kelli and Mimi were very active, and in Kelli's case, perhaps a little too active...


I found this after opening the lid of the hive to change the pail of nectar we give the bees to give them a head-start on the season. These cells had been constructed between the outer wall of the hive and the lip of the room. I'm assuming this is the work of the bees, but Sharon will know for sure. I wondered how far Kelli had gone in constructing comb inside the hive, but decided not to investigate further, as the weather was turning dark and cloudy, so I was keen to get moving.


As I say, both hives were very active, chomping down the pollen patties we gave them and sweet, sweet sugar water. There was a lot of activity outside the hives as well, in fact, here you can see a Mimi bee coming back into the hive with pollen baskets on her legs! This is great news and shows that even in this early, cold spring, the bees are hard at work, gathering pollen on their own, even when it's being provided for them. Again, I didn't open the hive to see if Mimi was doing any cell construction.

Mimi and Kelli taken care of, it was time for the main mission: Olga. Next week Sharon will be splitting the Olga hive, taking one of the boxes and putting in a new queen: Kitty III. To do this, we have to get a box of brood (eggs) and make sure that Queen Olga isn't in that box, otherwise she and Kitty III will fight to the death. In bees, like the great films that have crummy sequels, there can be only one.


Neil, though just back from a trip to Australia, joined me for the pre-split, and got this really cool picture while I ran back to get a frame holder. I'm not sure if this bee is dancing (which they do to communicate), but it sure looks neat.

So, the long and the short of the plan is this: inspect the top two boxes and make sure they each have at least 5-7 frames of brood. Then, place a queen excluder between the top two boxes. When Sharon comes out next week, whichever box has new larvae in it must be the box with the queen, thereby saving us the trouble of having to find her. Simple, right?

Small problem: the top box had no brood in it. Nothing. Not a sausage. Just honey and miffed bees. I was already in enough trouble for letting a colorful bird come to a feeder. How was I going to explain this?


We inspected the second box and found 5 frames of brood. Now, at this point I could have called Sharon, who was in the middle of about 14 hours of digiscoping. But we could see down into the bottom box and what seemed to be brood, so Neil and I decided to Deviate From The Plan.

In what I mentally dubbing Operation: Honey, It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time, We placed the bottom box on top, the empty box in the middle, and the middle box on the bottom, placing the Queen Excluder between the top two boxes.

This would, we hoped, accomplish what we were trying to do before: making sure that a) the queen would be in one of the two segments and unable to get into the other brood box, and b) since bees build up when making brood, if the queen was in the bottom box, the empty middle would give her room to grow.


And that was that. Part of what I find fascinating working with bees is that on one hand, they're like little machines, working industrially, each one doing her job, a cog. On the other hand, they're living creatures--both as individuals and as a hive--and act in unexplainable ways. Olga bees have a propensity for building feral comb that folds out from the hive frame, whereas Kitty didn't. It's especially odd to me that you can walk out in the middle of the day and literally take their home apart, when they live and work in darkness, and most of them will ignore you completely. Such odd little things.

Sharon will be out next week to survey the hives and figure out what needs to be done. Having explained what we did, she said she probably would have left the hive as it was, but that the best thing to do was not to reverse our work, but to leave the bees alone. And she's right; the work we do with reversals and such helps them in terms of what we want them to do (make honey), but really, the girls can work things out on their own. As long as the idiot drones don't get in the way.

The Queen Came Too Soon

When my phone sounds like an oddly mixed flock of birds, I know someone is trying very hard to get hold of me. I was busy being a park ranger this morning and was unable to answer my phone so I heard the following. First, the bobolink song (that means a general phone call). Second, I hear a flock a flock of gadwall (that means someone left a voicemail). Third, a goshawk is screaming (Non Birding Bill is calling from his office phone). Fourth, a pileated woodpecker sings (NBB is now trying to reach me on his cell phone). Fifth, a veery warbles (someone is leaving a text message). All of this in the span of three minutes. Something must have been up.

And it was. When I finally got to listen to the messages, Lorraine said the post office left a message that our queens arrived and needed to be picked up. Queens? Plural? I had only ordered one...why did I have more than one and more importantly, what would I do with an excess of queen bees? Yikes!

We are planning on dividing the Olga hive and starting a new colony (Kitty 2). To do this, you take a box from the strong Olga colony that is full of workers and brood (and make darn sure that Queen Olga isn't in that box) and you place a new queen in a cage in that box and gradually introduce everybody and hopefully in about five days you have a new hive started. The old hive continues growing and if it's strong enough, doesn't miss the box you used for the divide. I only need one queen for this, so having additional queens was a tad alarming.

Well, it turns out that the post office was a tad confused. We did in fact only get one queen and she has a few workers to attend her while in her cage. To the uninitiated, this would seem like a small box of queens. Whew, on only getting one queen. There is still some concern, the queen is a whole week early and Olga is not ready for a divide. Heck, I'm not even ready for the divide. According to my Beekeeping In Northern Climates book, if we keep the queen in a cool, dark place and feed her one drop of sugar water a day, she can live like this for "several days"...does that seven days? Well, we'll find out. I'm leaving town on Thursday and Olga still needs to be prepped before we can do the divide, the queen will have to wait.

So, after plying NBB with some liquor, I think I have a plan. He'll go out this weekend and on Saturday (perhaps with Lorraine and Mr. Neil's help) prep Olga for the divide. He'll need to open Olga up, check and see that there are five to seven frames of brood in the top two boxes of the Olga Hive, if one has more than the other, he'll need to even it out. Then he'll put in a queen excluder between the top two boxes. When I go out next Wednesday to remove one of the boxes, all I'll have to do is look for eggs. Whichever box has fresh bee eggs will be the box that has the Olga queen and that box will stay put. The box without eggs will go to start the new Kitty 2 hive with the queen we just received in the mail today.

How did spring go from the delightful time of watching warblers and playing with bees to holy-crap-how-will-I-survive-this-season?

Bee Movies

Non Birding Bill filmed us installing our three pound packages of bees yesterday since Mr. Neil wasn't in town and this way he could get an idea of the hiving experience. It's in two parts:



Oh, it's a cliff hanger!

Hiving The New Packages

It's that special time of year when we install new packages of bees.

I have to say that after last year's complete and utter panic when hiving switching to relief and enjoyment was not relived this year. In some ways this year seemed anticlimactic, but that may be due to the fact that I have some sort of cold. Part of me is incredibly irritated and full of self pity (it's spring, warblers are coming darn it and I'm sick) but the other part of me is grateful that if I'm going to have a cold, that I have it this week and not next week when I'm doing the World Series of Birding.

We had a larger posse out at the hives this time. Above is Lorraine going over the instructions along with Non Birding Bill (who filmed it and hopefully will be able to get it up on YouTube soon) and Mary, a friend.

This is Queen Mimi. She arrived in this cage which was in a larger box with about three pounds worth of bees (please don't ask how many bees are in a pound--I have no idea). As my bee instructor says, she was placed in the crate in this cage with three pounds of workers from a different hive. The cage gives the queen and new workers a chance "to work out their differences" or rather, give the queen a chance to use her pheromones to work their mojo on the workers and everybody gets along. First we poured all the workers into the empty hive and once we had those in, we release the queen.

When I opened the cage, she half tumbled out but soon mixed in with all the workers. We filled the box up with frames, put on a feeder pail and a pollen patty--key ingredients to help the hives get to work drawing out comb so the queen can lay eggs and we can get the next generation growing. Some flowers were blooming. Near the location of these two hives we found some wood anemone and bloodroot blooming. The anemone already had a bee foraging on it, but I think it was an Olga bee.

So, here is the Mimi Hive all set up and ready to grow. We added a new type of bottom, it's a screen that will trap varroa mites when they fall off the bees and prevent the mites from crawling back up to reattach themselves to a bee. It's not going to totally get rid of the mites, but every little bit helps and we can use this as a measure of our mite situation as opposed to rolling our bees in powdered sugar. By the way, TO BEE EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURERS AND SUPPLIERS: Is it too much to ask that you include some sort of instructions with the equipment? Really, just a one sheet, maybe with an illustration? Please? It's so frustrating to get these items in the mail and I don't know which way us up or how to put things together.

Next we put in Queen Kelli. I think she's going to be a tricky thing--she's really, really tiny. She not much larger than a worker. As a matter of fact, once we released her, we could not find her.


She's mixed in there somewhere swimming through a sea of worker bees.

So that is the Kelli hive. You will note that we've added a small luxury this year--see the table in back? It's to help us keep our equipment up off the ground and keep us from bending over so much. Whoot.

We also checked on Olga. We had to do a reversal--switch her top box with her bottom box to help brood production and prevent swarming before we do the divide later this month. We also had to move the hive two feet over. Above, NBB is using a Frame Spacing Tool to try and get all the frames spaced to prevent the Olga girls from making oddly shaped comb that makes bee inspections difficult.

Much of the comb on the bottom was empty and ready for eggs. The Olga girls have been doing a tremendous job of gathering pollen, you can see some of it in the cells. Bees build up towards the top of the hive. Once the top is full, they start to think that maybe they are crowded and swarming is a good idea. So, when the top has sealed brood, you switch it with the bottom box--it should be empty as all the brood as hatched. The workers go up and see the empty cells and think, "Hey, we got more room, get the queen up here to start layin' some eggs."

Many forager bees were returning while we reversed the hive boxes. Even though we've been providing them with a pollen patty, they are doing just fine on their own.

Check out all these forages coming back with loads of pollen! We're dealing with new workers this spring. These are not the girls from last fall. These workers have no basis for comparison as for what humans are all about. In the past when we would open up the Olga hive, she would be friendly for about five or ten minutes and then suddenly have enough of us and commence with bonking us and stinging. This batch of workers stayed calm, cool, and collected while we rearranged the boxes, added a mite tray and a separate tray to improve air circulation. We'll see how long this honeymoon phase will last.

And now if all goes well, we'll be dividing Olga in a few weeks to restart Kitty giving us a total of four hives.

Odds and Ends

Gary Reuter has combined two of my passions: a bird house painted to look like a beehive! He used the wren house nest box plans from Woodworking for Wildlife and then just painted it to look like a hive.

Speaking of nesting, if you have noticed any nesting in your yard, consider participating in NestWatch--a new, free citizen science project developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in collaboration with the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and funded by the National Science Foundation. Participants visit nests during spring and summer to collect simple information about location, habitat, species, number of eggs, and number of young in the nest. Then they submit their observations online.

“NestWatch introduces birding and simple methods of scientific inquiry to families, children, retired adults people of all ages and skills,” says project leader Tina Phillips. “It’s easy and fun. It helps people reconnect with nature in their own yard, nearby park, or nature preserve.”

In other words, this is easy for anyone of just about any ability and would especially be a great idea for kids to get an interest in nature.

While you're checking out the NestWatch site, don't forget to visit all the NestCams Cornell has going on too.

Also Karen Sowizral emailed me this photo she took of a two headed gull (insert sinister music here). I think it's two herring gulls (thanks Nicki ;) side by side, but it does look like something Godzilla might fight.

I'm So Proud Of The Olga Bees!

After we banded the birds on Sunday, Amber and Reier asked if I would mind showing them the bees. Would I mind? Pish-sha! (That's Reier holding a frame above) I love to show off the bees. Non Birding Bill, Mr. Niel, and Lorraine went with me to the Olga hive to give her some nectar and a pollen patty the day before--we need to help feed the hive until more trees and flowers bloom. I thought I would just show Amber and Reier the top of the hive.

NBB had walked past the hive while we were banding and warned she was active in the warm weather. When we got there we found a ton of foragers coming back loaded with pollen. Even though I had given them a pollen patty, they were still out there looking and successfully finding it on their own. Look at all those yellow pollen baskets on their legs!

I know they are getting pollen from blooming tree buds, but I think they are also taking advantage of crocuses that are starting to bloom. There are some around the house, some around neighboring homes and I planted several in the surrounding woods.

Amber got the above shot of Reier and I opening the hive and looking at the frames on the inside--we were covered in bees, but they were not stinging us. The hive sounded happy and thriving. Curiosity got the better of me, so I thought we would take the top off and look at a couple of frames and see if any new eggs had been laid since we switched the top box last weekend. We didn't find eggs, we found larvae:

There's larvae all over in the above frame, but to make it easier, I put some blue arrows next to a few cells with bee larvae in them. See the tiny little curled up things in the bottom of the cells? In a couple of weeks, those will be new worker bees! I'm so proud of our girls, they are finding pollen on their own, the queen is laying lots of eggs for fresh strong workers for the spring, and we even found several frames still heavy with honey that they built up last fall. I think Olga is going to provide us with lots of honey this summer.

I'm just swelling with pride for my girls. I think spring has officially begun for me.

Spring Bee Inspection

On Sunday, we did our first big inspection with the Olga hive after having sealed her up for winter and my goodness was she active! With the sun and balmy forty something degree temperatures, we expected some activity, but they were buzzing around like crazy. I didn't realize how much I missed them, missed the smell of the smoker, the smell of the wax and hive, the buzz and hum of happy bees.

Here's my faithful bee assistant poking the bees during the inspection. Actually, Mr. Neil is not poking the bees, he's doing them a great service of removing a layer of dead bees that have built up at the bottom of the hive. There were so many that they were blocking the bottom entrance.

Look at that pile of dead bees. That's really just the tip of the iceberg. We decided to lift the whole hive off the bottom board...

Ewww - a whole layer of dead, wet bees. We were a little alarmed to find that in the corner was a frozen puddle of bees. After Mr. Neil scraped out the bees, we decided to turn the hive around so that future moisture would be able to roll out, rather than collect in the hive. We did leave a hole open on the other side so that workers who were out foraging could find a way back in without too much confusion.

Part of the inspection included checking their food reserves. I had put in a pollen patty a couple of weeks ago (that's how bees get their protein). Last time, there was half of the one I left them last fall and I put in a fresh one for good measure. Sunday, there was only half of the fresh one left. I have a feeling that next weekend I will need to put in a new one. We checked for signs of brood. If there were three to six frames with brood, I was to switch the top box with the center box. I found three frames of brood, not a huge amount, but brood none the less. We went ahead and switched them.

Olga still had some good honey stores left--I think she's going to be busting out all over with honey this summer. She already provided us with extra honey her first year. I'm betting this summer will be intense. We noticed a weakness in the corner of the hive that had let in some moisture, probably from the last snow storm (the wind blew off the insulation and since it had been fairly warm we left it off). You can see it in the corner--the mold is the black stuff. The bees were probably soon going to cover the fungus with propolis, but we scraped it off.

While we were getting all of this done, the workers came out and completely covered us. Above is Non Birding Bill (say it like Eddie Izzard with me) "Covered In Bees!" Even though they covered us, they didn't really seem all that angry, they were more curious (I'd like to say, happy to see us, but that would be anthropomorphic now, wouldn't it).

We kept smoking our suits, but they would just come right back. Above, NBB is smoking Mr. Neil. For some reason, Mr. Neil decided to start our bee-venture by forgoing the sensible hood on his suit and putting on our spare pith helmet with bee net. It looked good, but left a space on his neck for bees to crawl in, so after much smoking and removal of bees, he put on his helmet.

The bees were really, really interested in the tops of our hoods. I noted this on Mr. Neil and NBB and tried to get them to pose bent over side by side because, together they looked like an odd pair of boobs with nipples made of bees, but when they realized what I was doing, they stood up.

After we finished, I stood by them for a few more minutes, just watching them come and go. I love the above shot, a few girl hanging at the corner of the hive and another flying in.

Bee season has officially begun.

Whoot!

And to give you an idea of how loud our girls are on a forty degree spring day, here's a video. NBB says that if you listen to it with your eyes closed, it sounds like we're doing something naughty.

Unwrapped Bees

Olga's busting out all over! I went out to check the Olga hive today and her winter insulation was gone. I started mumbling to myself something along the lines of, "Now, why did Mr. Neil go ahead and take the insulation off the hive without telling me? Is it too soon? What was he thinking?" Then I found the insulation in a pile in the woods. There must have been some strong winds in the last week that blew it off.

Couple of the girls were out and about. I did notice that there appears to be some type of weird damage on one of the boxes. It looks like damage done by paper wasps when they take bits of wood and chew it up to make their nests. I don't know if the Olga bees got bored this winter and decided to start chewing paint or if it was something else. I'm also not sure if I should put the insulation back on. It's the end of March and the temps are currently thirties and a few forties...although there is a winter storm advisory for tomorrow and we're supposed to get about six inches...

Checking The Olga Hive In Winter

Hey, I did end up getting a photo of Mr. Neil's common redpoll. I wonder how much longer this bird will stick around. It has been the only redpoll in his yard--separated from a flock further north. I'll be curious to see how long it stays.

Non Birding Bill went out with me to the beehives last weekend. There he is with a worker climbing up his fleece. We had the following conversation before we went out to the hives:
NBB: Aren't we going to put on bee suits?

BC: Nah. We won't need it.

NBB: What about the smoker, shouldn't we take the smoker?

BC: Nah. They'll be calm enough, we shouldn't need it. We're just going to put in a pollen patty for some extra protein.

When we got to the hive, NBB held his ear next to the hive to see if he could hear them buzzing inside the hive. We could see that the bees had been out in some of the warmer weather--pooping like crazy. Not all the little spots on the black insulation--that's bee poop! Bees don't go potty while they are in the hive to help keep it clean. That's fine in warm weather, but takes remarkable self control in winter. Then in spring when the weather is warm enough, the fly out to release all that they have been holding during the winter, these are called cleansing flight. Can you imagine having to hold it all winter long--and I'm not talking one of those southern winters, I'm talking a serious and long northern winter! Ah, bees, you never cease to amaze me!

As we were taking the hive apart to put in the pollen patty, we noticed that it was sealed with propolis and I regretted not bringing along the hive tool to pry it open. We did some knocking and that kind of alerted the girls. To hear NBB tell it, when a few flew out at us, I ran off squealing "Don't flail!" while running like a two year old and flapping my arms. I think I more dashed back cautiously. The few bees that flew soon fell to the ground and we tried our best to pick them up and put them back on the hive. Bill had one on his gloves and she tried to sting him. Fortunately, her stinger didn't get stuck in his glove so he put her back on the hive alive and intact.

The bees were in a loose cluster and when I was at the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers meeting was told that they could even have brood inside! Whoot. We put the Olga hive back together and I felt a pang of excitement that in a month or so I would be installing two new packages of bees. When I was at the meeting, I learned that lots of keepers up here lost hives over the winter, some to the cold temps like we did and some to possible Colony Collapse. I met one woman who said that she lost five of her six hives. I was incredibly grateful that we still had Olga--and SO grateful that we started our beekeeping adventure with two hives instead of one. It gave us a much better frame of reference. NBB and I also took home a couple of jars of the now defunct Kitty hive that Mr. Neil had extracted. My goodness did it taste good!

On our way back to the house, I found a hawk pellet. I'm pretty sure this is from a large red-tail that has been keeping watch over the fields at the front of the driveway. I can tell that this is a hawk pellet and not an owl pellet by the lack of bones--owl pellets are fun to take apart because they tend to swallow prey whole and and have weaker digestive acids than hawks so you find bones in the pellets. Hawks tend to rip and shred prey and when they do swallow bones, their stronger digestive acids dissolve small bones.

I walked by the bluebird house to see if any early returning bluebirds had left a calling card.

A calling card was left--but not from a bluebird. It looks like a downy woodpecker has been in here and pecking the floor. I'm thinking the woodpecker has been using this as a winter roosting box and not a potential nest site, but I'm going to leave it alone and see what happens in the coming weeks.

I went to check some of the bushes and trees we planted last fall and found that some unauthorized pruning was going on. Gee I wonder who did this?

Or this?

Well, speaking of calling cards, I find that a bunny left one around the dogwood. I didn't need the rabbit poop to confirm it, you can tell bunny damage by the perfect little cuts that their teeth make. For once, I disapprove!

Rabbits weren't the only pruning offenders. This one looks like it has both bunny damage and a bit of deer damage. Ah, the joys of planting for wildlife...sometimes the unintended wildlife eat it before the birds do.

Bees & Owls

When you're sick as a dog, your friends will blog. Mr. Neil did the beekeeping entry this week! When we learned that the Kitty hive had died, we decided to keep her honey for ourselves rather than give it to Olga (on the off chance Kitty died from some bee disease). So, this week Mr. Neil undertook that monumental task of extracting Kitty honey. He used the simple (and sticky) cheesecloth method.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to catch up on all the work I missed last week. Ugh. Tomorrow, I plan on going out and birding the crap out of Sunday. Perhaps, take my Fuji out for one last hurrah before my new digiscoping camera arrives. Today, I stepped out for an hour to peak at a great horned owl nest that Ecobirder has blogged about. It's a busy intersection in the south metro, across from a strip mall. The owls are remarkably obvious when you drive by.

There are two owls in the above photo. Can you spot them? If you can't see them, check out the photo below:

The female was on the nest and the male was hanging out towards the center of the tree. Normally, the males are well hidden, but I'm not gonna argue a good look at a great horned owl. If he doesn't want to behave the way books say he's supposed to behave, who am I to tell him what to do?

You could see the female on the nest through the scope, but it was pretty much a vent side (aka butt side) view of her.

The male was much easier to see and a welcome treat for sore eyes that had been holed up indoors for the past week.

Whoot

My goodness today was busy! We had a lot going on at The Raptor Center: programs, inspections, moving birds around indoors because it's too cold for them outside.

This imprinted male kestrel was very fascinated with the doin's a transpirin' outside his crate. We were having a conversation about the morning's activities and he was watching us intently.

Well, my talk at the Minnesota Beekeepers Association went really, really well! The audience was very engaging and my fears about not knowing what I was talking about were quickly relieved and the talk became more of me sharing some of my experiences and mistakes and laughing together. I also talked about the cameras that I use. One of the instructors from the Beekeeping Short Course that I took last year in the audience. He asked if I would send him the above photo for research, he said that he thinks the bees are removing propolis in this photo and not pollen. I told him that I learned so much from that class that he's welcome to any of my bee images.

The best part was that the talk really helped me formulate a book outline. There has been some interest in a beekeeping book and I wasn't sure how I would structure it or what I would have to say, but tonight, it all came together--whoot.

The meeting itself was very different from the county beekeeping meeting that attended last year. It was rowdy and funny and even had a show and tell time where members can show off inventions or ideas that have worked for their hives. The next meeting is going to feature a talk by master gardeners with tips for plantings for your hives. We started some bee plantings last fall, but I hope my travel schedule allows me to come to that one as well.

Here's another photo of those tracks we found outside the Olga hive. I was thinking with the thumb and the smaller star shaped track to the right that these are opossum tracks, but again, if someone has a better idea, I'm open to it.

So A Drone Walks Into a Bar

That subject line was totally taken from Belinda who gave me an idea when I expressed my nervousness. Thanks, Belinda!

I'm feelin' a bit nervous. Tonight, I'm speaking to the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association. When I was asked, I hesitated--what could I possibly have to share with experienced beekeepers apart from my mistakes? The person booking me was interested in how I document my bees--types of cameras, video, etc. That is something I can easily talk about--but I'm still nervous. I've done so many bird programs that I have a good sense of the audience, I have some tried and true bird jokes, I have a sense of when to use my phalarope joke and when to leave it unsaid. I know how to work that audience and give a bird talk at a moment's notice and know that I will slay the audience. I have no idea which jokes will work with beekeepers--this is new ground. But, it's good to shake up my program giving skills.

Speaking of bees, last time we were at the hives, Mr. Neil pointed out some new tracks around the hives. I think these are possum tracks and not skunk, so I'm not too worried, but if anyone has any ideas, I'd sure love to know what you think.

Kitty Hive RIP

Alas, the fear I had this past fall has been realized, the Kitty Hive has failed. The above photo is the last one I have of the hive alive. On January 1, I could hear some activity in the hive, but I have put my ear up to Kitty twice in the last two weeks and both times the hive has been silent. I had hoped it was just that they were tucked deep inside, but today we got confirmation. Mr. Neil checked the hives this afternoon and with the warm weather, the Olga hive was dumping out dead bees and pooping. The snow around her hive was completely melted. Kitty was silent with no visible activity and the snow was not melted around the hive. He opened the roof, looked in and found all bees inside to be dead (on the upside, that's not Colony Collapse Disorder).

I think it all started with my mistake of preventing the swarm, that led to a late requeening and having too few bees to keep the hive warm for the winter. Sigh.

We expected complete failure our first year, and were pleased as punch that we got as far as we did this fall, including harvesting a wee bit of honey from Olga. But, I still feel bad and will miss our girls. After all, they were the ones who I installed after my initial panic and unlike Olga, none of us have ever been stung by a Kitty bee.

I also got some of my best photos from the Kitty Hive. I loved the above shot of all the Kitty workers coming to lap up a river of honey that surged down a frame when I accidentally opened some cells. Kitty, you taught me lots. I'm sorry we couldn't keep you through the winter.

Seven Years, Four Months

Just got a report from Mr. Neil. A mouse has been found in the trap under the beehive. The dead mouse was carefully laid on a stump for consumption by any interested predator.

So, I was reading a story about a barn owl being used as a ring bearer in a wedding in Wales, when I realized, hey, time to schedule the next Birds and Beers--Thursday, January 17, 2008 at Merlin's Rest. I'll be just back from Bird Watch America and have tales of what's on the horizon in birding products. Birds and Beers is a gathering of ANYONE interested in birds to have a beverage, maybe a meal and talk some birds. It's a great way to share birding stories, ideas, and meet fellow birders of all levels. If you lead trips or run a bird store and want to promote yourself, please do. If you are working on some project or research about birds--come on down, if you want to know more places to see birds or ask about how to attract more birds to your yard--come on out.

Cinnamon had an appointment today at the vet. As you can see in the above photo, she was not happy. Check out the name tag on her box, she got that from our friend Dawn, who invited us to her office blessing. Everyone had name tags--including Cinnamon. They are huge fans of Cinnamon had Sunshine Travel--speaking of which, we'll be doing some tours through them, one to Harlingen in Texas this fall and one next January to San Francisco.

Check out that furry little chin! I had to give Cinnamon lots of treats after the vet. She's happier when her nails are freshly trimmed, but like most rabbits doesn't seem to like the indignity of having them trimmed. The weird thing was that I finally got a handle on her age. I don't celebrate pet birthdays, I don't like to think about how much shorter their lives will be compared to mine. I have an idea of how old Cinnamon is, but can't remember the exact year we brought her home of the St. Paul Humane Society. When I was paying for her at the front desk, someone asked how old she was, the receptionist behind the desk said, "You've had her seven years and four months." She had Cinnamon's file in front of her and we had brought Cinnamon in for an exam and to schedule her spay right after we got her, so they would have the records. Wow, her HS file said she was just under a year old when we got her, that makes her eight. My, how the time flies.

First Bee Post of 2008

Lots of snow has been falling in Mr. Neil's woods. There are some trails from the deer, some from the dog Cabal, and quite a few from rabbits, squirrels, and deer mice. This morning we took whoever was still around from the New Year's party out to the beehives so people could experience the magic of live buzzing bees while it was somewhere near zero degrees (Fahrenheit) outside.

As everyone was putting their ears to the Olga hive, I noticed a very steady trail of deer mouse tracks...

...leading directly underneath the Olga hive. This is not good. We have a mouse guard on the entrance, but our hives are elevated, so there is a space underneath the hive that a mouse could chew and gain access to the inside. It's a tempting abode for an enterprising deer mouse: bees keep it warm and you'd be surrounded by honey. Was the mouse just hanging out under the hive, or was it going up and into it? I stuck my camera into the space below Olga:

There was a pile of bee parts and some tiny wood scraps The bee parts could be decomposing dead bees that had fallen out, but the wood was a sure sign that some chewing was underway.


I tried to take a photo of the bottom of the hive, and low and behold there is a hole large enough for a deer mouse to gain access to the bottom of the hive. I think we have caught this early, I was just out a week ago and there were no tracks. Lorraine headed out and purchased some snap traps to place under the hive. I feel bad for the mouse, it's a clever way to survive the winter, but I have a responsibility to my girls to help them survive the winter--the mouse has to go. Funny thing--we had two traps, but had trouble setting one of them in the extreme cold because the metal was contracting.

But now to some very exciting news! We are prepping the hives for the coming spring! Last year, Non Birding Bill and I put the hives together and painted them. In preparation for this spring, we ordered assembled hives and Mr. Neil is commissioning artists paint them. The first artist?

Kelli Bickman came in from New York to paint one of the new hives! It is so incredibly cool(and isn't Kelli adorable?)! The colors, the dripping honey, the skulls! I love it, and I can't wait to see it alive with a colony of bees.

Here is the other side. Kelli has actually done three deep brood boxes and two of our comb honey supers. I'm going to find myself impatient to put this hive together through spring and summer in order to see the whole art, but it will be a gradual process.

Here is a close up of the eye. Kelli's cousin, Jen did all the detail work here, down to a bee in the middle of the pupil. Beekeeping is fun enough, but to have an artist create such a space for our bees, really takes it to a new level. This is just such a gift and this beekeeping thing combines so many elements I love: art, natural history, learning, and friendship. Kelli's work is so vibrant and the color composition has a way of taking me to a peaceful, vibrant world. Can't wait to see what the personality of this hive will be.

So, here we have it: The Kelli Hive. I like this new rule, you paint the hive, we name it after you.

Bees In The Snow

Thank you to do Stacy Kagiwada for getting this awesome photo of Cinnamon! This is from the Indianapolis book signing, you can see more here--wow, Stacy has really nailed how to get a disapproval out of my bunny. I just love this one below--Cinnamon's totally disapproving of me in the background. Stacy also got a shot of Non Birding Bill and I together--we have so few of us in the same shot, I love it!

Whoa, doggies! Sounds like I'll be signing lots of Disapproving Rabbits books tomorrow. About a month after the book came out, we learned that Harper Collins had run out of the DR book and were going to print more. According to UPS, the packages will be dropped off tomorrow and I'll be signing away so we can mail them out on Friday and get them to people in time for Christmas.

It continues to be super cold here, but very lovely--like this puffed up little downy woodpecker. This morning I woke to 5 degrees but I am assured by the weatherman that it will warm up to twenty degrees before the sun sets at 4:30pm. I went out check on the beehives.

Single digit temperatures are much easier to take in when there is snow. Also, between all of my layers, hand warmers and the marching motion I have to do to maneuver over unplowed paths in the woods, I can work up quite a sweat. It's a strange quiet in the woods, and all you hear is the chip note of a chickadee, the industrious soft tapping of several woodpeckers, and crow caws echoing off of the hillsides. So different from the cacophony of warblers and vireos in spring and the dry humming and buzzing of katydids and grasshoppers in late summer.

I took a very long route to the hives to enjoy the scenery in the snow. The creek on Mr. Neil's property is almost completely frozen, apart from a few pockets that the birds are using for drinking water. I can't believe I've seen some ice fishing houses out already on some of the lakes in town--it's too soon. If there is still some slush on the lake, it's too soon, you crazy fishing people! As I was working my way to the field near our hives, I noticed a strong aroma.

Hoo-wee, you've been warned of yellow snow...how about brown snow? Someone must have run a manure spreader right after our last big snowfall. It was still very pungent--and rock solid.

The path to the hives was dug deep into the snow with splatters of hard poop. I know the kind of enjoyment I get from walking through fresh snow...I wonder if it's the same when one is riding a manure spreader. There's a huge field full of pristine snow and you're gonna cover it with some hot liquid manure. Good times. Actually, I had to chuckle, because the field is part of a network of snow mobile trails...I would wager that there have been some very disappointed snow mobile drivers who were raring to go after our first big snow of the season only to come upon that road block of several acres.

But I made my way to the hives and found Kitty nestled in the snow. I put my ear up to the hive and you could hear all the bees inside buzzing softly keeping the hive warm. Incredible.

You will note that the snow just around the hives is melted away--they keep it that warm! Again--Incredible. And now in French--Incroyable!!

There were some dead bees outside of the hives, here's a little pile in front of Olga. I had closed the entrance reducer, but Mr. Neil read about some Canadian beekeepers, leaving it open a little bit for some air circulation. The bees seemed to have covered the entrance holes with dead bees on the inside, so I'm not sure if they need in ventilation or not. There's a small hole at the top as well, so they can take cleansing flight. I'm not too worried about. After all, our bees have insulation around their hive, in the wild, they don't have anything, but their honey and their little wings to maintain temperature. I put my ear up to Olga and you could hear the humming in there too. Amazing, just amazing to hear them living on the other side of some thin pieced of wood while it's in the single digits outside. Ah, my bees, I miss you. Can't wait to play with you next spring.

Indoor Bees

Sunday, when the snow had stopped, Non Birding Bill and I took a stroll (or trudge in snow boots would be a better description of what I do). It was in the teens and you could see the edges of the lake freezing up. This is a popular destination for gulls right before it freezes. Within twenty-four hours after this photo was taken, someone posted on the listservs that the lake had frozen and the gulls have moved on.

Okay, someone had questioned of the sanity of NBB and I taking a walk in the morning in the single digit temps, well this is what we walk in, the Minneapolis Skyway--we can walk for a few miles without taking a step outside, most of the buildings are connected in some way in downtown.

Just kind of think of it as one of those tunneling systems you can get for hamsters. In one two mile stretch, we pass six different Caribou Coffees--and that doesn't include the other coffee shops, I'm sure we pass between 12 - 15 coffee stops. Most of the snow from Saturday has been cleared around, and just in time, tomorrow we are supposed to get an Alberta Clipper and another 2-3 inches in my neighborhood. I hope it holds off, there's been a report of a great gray owl in Hastings, and I'd like to go look for it after my shift at The Raptor Center tomorrow.

I found some photos that I took last Friday that I took at Hyland--they have an indoor beehive. Mr. Neil and I have kicked around the idea of an indoor hive but have no clue as to how to maintain it without letting bees run amok in his house. I talked to the staff there about how they maintained the hive. They said that because it's such a small box, you have to feed the bees all winter--there's a top compartment, that's kind of an ante chamber so you can put the food there, there's a hole for the bees to access the food from inside, so very few if any get out. So, essentially, these indoor hives appear to be educational tools and conversation pieces, not a means to produce honey.

I opened the side to take a look at the bees on the inside, they were moving slow, but they were moving.

There's a little tube that goes from the hive to the outdoors. It was in the teens when I took this photo, so most of the bees were opting to stay in the hive.

A few would work their way down the tunnel and as soon as they got to the edge the hightailed it back to the hive.

They did have one hive by the bird feeders, and unlike our hives, this one wasn't insulted for the winter--another example of how every beekeeper does something different (and I asked, this is a hive the staff plans to overwinter). I suppose bees in the wilds don't have insulation, so I'm sure it's possible for them to survive without it.

Speaking of bees, I got the sweetest gift at the Paper Session on Saturday--blog reader Kathy gave me some of her own honey from Lake Isle of Innisfree Apiaries--Thanks, Kathy!

Cold, Quiet Bees

First, a big shout out to Jennifer Tanner! Thank you so much for sending me the bee song! I love it! I have been listening to it all week. Go to Mirah and Spectratone International and download the song "Community" (it's free and legal). I now imagine the bees singing that while we're working the hives.

There's not a huge amount going on with the bee hives right now. We're feeding them, trying to get the girls fully stocked with honey for the winter. Today, the temps were in the forties and the girls were clustering together for warmth and moving very slowly. I even took a video to show how quiet they are. A month ago there would have been loud buzzing, now there is this:



Very quiet. Compare that to this.

We're feeding them a nectar solution to substitute the current lack of natural nectar sources to build up their stores. Olga is chock full, her hive is very busy, but I'm feeding her anyway because the book says I'm supposed to. Kitty is a different story. We didn't harvest any honey from her hive, but even still she is behind on comb and honey production from swarming this summer. Her hive is light. I don't know. If we have a warm winter with milder temps, she just might make it. But if we have the type of winter this part of the northern United States is known for, I'm afraid we will lose her. Ah well, we're doing all we can to keep her going and the bottom line is that this year is our first year beekeeping and it's all a learning experience.

I will say that Kitty has done an outstanding job of gathering pollen. In this undeveloped comb, you can see on the other side of the comb, all the many colors of pollen that is in the bottom of honey cells.

Since the bees were calm and we were feeding them, I had Mr. Neil try his luck at hand feeding the bees. The bees were happy to feed from his fingers. Non Birding Bill learned from the QI tv show that bees can recognize individual people, so this hand feeding business may prevent future stings. Here's the blurb from the Telegraph:

"Bees can recognise human faces. Given that many humans struggle with this once they have turned 40, it seems utterly remarkable in a creature whose brain is the size of a pinhead. Yet bees who are rewarded with nectar when shown some photos of faces, and not rewarded when shown others, quickly learn to tell the difference. Not that we should read too much into this. Bees don't "think" in a meaningful way. The "faces" in the experiment were clearly functioning as rather odd-looking flowers, not as people they wanted to get to know socially."

In a couple of weeks, I will have to close up the hives for winter. How long this winter will seem without being able to look in on the girls.

Sigh.

MN Pioneer Press Bee Article

We know it's not cell phones, in the scientific community, that was never a possibility.

I really like this article for not being so Chicken Little about it, the way most of the stories about Colony Collapse Disorder have been. You can read the full article at the Pioneer Press, but here is an excerpt:

A new ailment had emerged over the winter, causing bee colonies to mysteriously flee, and fueling scary stories about the vanishing honeybee - and the threat to crops that depend on bees for pollination.

But Minnesota's honeybees are still here. In fact, most honeybees thrived this summer, state beekeepers report. Minnesota's crops were richly pollinated. Apples, berries and pumpkins are abundant. There's even plenty of honey here in America's No. 5 honey-producing state.

David Ellingson, an Ortonville beekeeper and past president of the Minnesota Honey Producers, told Congress this spring about losing 65 percent of his bees while wintering in Texas. Now back in Minnesota, he's still having problems among his 3,400 hives.

"We did see probably 20 percent of our colonies go from excellent to poor, at the end of June and into July," Ellingson said. "Some of them have rebounded, and others have gone away."

Losing bee colonies is one of the gloomy facts of life for beekeepers, and over the years, bee losses have been worsening. Bee mites, viruses and pesticides have taken a toll.

"Twenty-five years ago, if you lost 5 to 7 percent of your bees (during the winter), that would be normal," Ellingson said. "But today, we look at normal as being 20 percent."

"We know it's not cell phones," said Katie Klett, a University of Minnesota bee specialist, who added that, "in the scientific community, that was never a possibility." But it did grab lots of media attention.

Since last spring, scientists have identified an imported virus that appears linked to collapsed colonies. They're also examining a long list of other suspects, including a class of insecticides and an array of bee diseases. Beekeeping practices are coming under scrutiny, too.

"We've got a 50-piece puzzle here, and we've only got 10 pieces that we know are going on," Ellingson said. "There's too many unknowns."

Klett, whose family runs a North Dakota farm breeding queen bees, said it suffered big losses in 2006. Yet 2007 was "the best year we've ever had," she said, with production "through the roof."

So it's a riddle and a concern. Winter will test the state's honeybees again. But thus far, they're hanging tough.

White Pollen Mystery

Some may remember that I blogged about some of our bees coming back to the hive with white pollen and wondering where it was coming from. Well, Michele may have the answer:

If you look on the bottom flower here you can clearly see someone has left behind a trail of while pollen. :) This is ipomoea purpurea or common morning glory. Bindweed, a member of the same family that has smaller white flowers and grows tenatiously also appears to have white pollen. Both are hard in zones 3-8. This picture is from my yard. Here in my neighborhood they are everywhere.

Thanks, Michele!

Death By Propolis?

Well, here's something unexpected. I went to put some feeder pails out for the Kitty and Olga hives today. When I opened the lid to Olga, I found a drone stuck by the head to the propolis trap.

I could see him hanging when I lifted the lid. When I set it on the ground, he remained rigid in this head stand position. He's been dead awhile, but he sort of looks like he's in some weird yoga pose. I wonder how he managed that? Perhaps the workers did it because they are tired of the drones eating the honey and doing nothing but going on their daily flights to look for a queen to mate with and return day after day, unsuccessful virgins. It's easy to tell if a drone is still a virgin--because it's still alive. Once they mate with a queen, they die in process.

The Olga hive has been in propolis overload. When I went to switch the feeder pail, they had glued it to the boards with propolis. I admire their efforts, but it makes feeding them a bit of a challenge.

In other news, I found a fifth edible fungus in Mr. Neil's yard today--a shaggy mane. I've read different explanations of how tasty it is, but I didn't try it because I didn't have time to prepare it and once you pick it, the fungus will quickly autodigest turning into a black liquid--bleh. It will do it a little slower if you don't pick it, which is what give this mushroom its folk name, the inky cap. Plus, Mr. Neil isn't in town and no one else around seems as interested in the wild edible shrooms.

Rolling Bees In Powdered Sugar

Or

How To Make Your Bees Really Angry, Yet Really Popular In The Hive!

Hey, I found a way to soothe a bee sting. Make an apple pie from apples the bees pollinated. That puts you in a forgiving mood.

So, periodically, I have to check the bees for varroa mites. They have actually been a problem for the last 15 years or so and could be part of the problem with Colony Collapse Disorder. They can seriously weaken your colony. And if you're wondering why I don't talk about CCD much in the blog, here's why: every few years, the media likes to find some disease and use it to scare the pants off of us, "this could wipe out the human race" ie SARS, West Nile, Bird Flu, and now CCD. I want to wait and see before I run around like Chicken Little. Anyway, in some recent photos, I thought I was seeing mites on a bee or two. Case in point, check out the bee just emerging from the cell in the above photo. See the brownish spot on top of the head coming out? I'm fairly certain that is a varroa mite.

So, I have two ways for testing for mites. One is getting 250 bees, soaking them in alcohol (killing them), and sifting the dead mites from the dead bees. The other is to fill a jar with 250 bees, put screen over the lid, drop in a tablespoon of powdered sugar, roll the bees around in it (not killing them), and letting them sit for a minute. Apparently, the powdered sugar causes the mites to fall off. After a few minutes, I shake the jar and sugar and mites fall through the screen and I return the sugar coated bees to the hive, mite free...although a tad angry. I decided to go with the powdered sugar method, I'd rather have angry bees than dead bees.

I took out some frames to gather the bees. You're probably wondering how you know when you have 250 bees in a jar? Apparently, one fluid ounce roughly equals 100 bees, so we poured in two and a half ounces of liquid in a jar, marked it with tape. Then we took a bee brush and used that to brush bees into the jar. Once we had them n the jar, we slammed on the lid with the screen, and bonked it to make the bees fall to a pile. Fortunately, we estimated well, and the pile reached the 250 mark. For the record: bees REALLY do not like this at all. I'm pretty sure if someone could translate the buzzing coming from the jar, they would have recorded much profanity and threats of bodily harm.

It's at this point where you pour in the powdered sugar and roll the pile of bees around to get completely coated. Boy, if I thought they were unhappy before, that's nothing compared to this.

You let them sit in there to give the varroa mites a chance to fall off. Isn't this just the coolest photo? It's like you're looking into a tunnel of ghost bees. It's like what you might find in the closet of the movie Poltergeist. It's even freakier when you see this image moving around each other.

After a few minutes we shook the sugar out onto a white plate and we found about three or four varroa mites in each hive. So, we have an infestation, not a bad one and I am choosing not to treat it this fall, but next spring we might take some action, I want read up to see what the latest is. In some areas, the mites are developing a resistance to antibiotics, but there are some other options to look into. So, after the mites are counted, we have to release the sugared bees back to the hive, here's a video, it reminds me of when the ghosts joined the battle in the Lord of the Rings series:



Isn't that freaky. The other workers swarmed around the sugared bees to lick of the sugar. Here's a photo:

The bees get cleaned off fairly quickly. Here's an up close shot:

Now, you may be wondering if powdered sugar causes the mites to slide off, why not dump a bunch all over the hive from time to time? Some bee experts say that powdered sugar gives the bees too much starch and can cause problems. Although, I hear there are some beekeepers who do it with good results. Again, I have all winter to research our options before I make a decision.

Something else interesting we noticed in the Kitty hive, a few of the bees had a yellow mark on them. We did not see this on any of the Olga bees, just Kitty. NBB and I found about four bees with the yellow mark. It almost looks like someone took a tiny paint brush and slapped it down the thorax a la Pepe Le Pew cartoons.

I watched one of the marked bees for sometime, and I'm guessing that it's just some sort of pollen dust pattern. Maybe from going inside a hibiscus? I don't know, any experienced beekeepers have any input?

And I'll end with one more bee video that NBB shot of some workers trying to clean off a bee. It's a really sweet video, the sugared bee almost falls over and the others rush in to lick off the sugar. Maybe they are trying to help or maybe they are taking advantage of the food, but either way, it's cool:

Hello Bee Sting, Goodbye Dignity

It was inevitable. Working with bees I had to be stung sooner or later. I've been kind of dreading it, but I thought it was more the anticipation of the sting as opposed to the sting itself. I learned many lessons today, one being that the anticipation of the sting is not worse that the sting itself. The sting HURTS.

One week, I'm hand feeding my bees. The next week, they're stinging me. Women!

So, we have this madcap plan to rid Mr. Neil's woods of invasive exotic plants like buckthorn and garlic mustard and replace it with (mostly) native or at least bird and bee friendly plants. This is a long term project, but the buckthorn must be taken away--more on this later. Today we began the plan by trying to get some bulbs in the ground that will pop up in early spring to aid the bees with pollen and nectar gathering. We got some daffodil, hyacinth, and crocus bulbs on sale and started putting them around the gardens. I had the brilliant idea of planting the bulbs near some of the hives. This wasn't too crazy of an idea, earlier this week I planted some bee friendly trees (red osier dogwood, lilac, and pussy willow). The cool weather has slowed them down a bit, and as along as I kept a good ten feet from the hives, they were okay with our digging.

I had been out the hives earlier today--that's where most of these photos came from. I was feeding Kitty and just checking on Olga. For some reason, the bees were really interested in crawling all over my suit. I thought I must have spilled some home made nectar on my bee suit, but in hindsight, I wondering if they had it in for me from the get go? Especially that one on the far left in the above photo. This little pack of Olga bees looks like they are plotting against. But that one on the end, she has it in for me, she wants to do the stingin'.

I went out with Cabal and began planting my bulbs. It was later in the afternoon and the foraging bees were heading back to the hive. I noticed that I was working under the bee super highway, the spot where bees from both hives descend in the area and then split to go to their respective hives. I figured that if I kept bent over and low to the ground, all should go well and it did.

Then my cell phone rang, it was my sister Terri. I told her that I was standing between the hives, she was honored. I told her that I was sans bee suit and she was really impressed. I continued planting bulbs while on the phone. We caught up and then I noticed Lorraine approaching the bee area. I hung up from my sister and Lorraine paused before coming closer. "Wow, there are a lot of bees." She noted.

I looked over to the Olga hive. In the time I was on the phone with my sister, hundreds of bees had descended on the entrance of the Olga hive. In the instant that I thought I should maybe leave, I felt a prick on my head, just behind my ear, but well into my hair. I realized that I was being stung. It didn't hurt that much in the first instant and I wondered if I really had been stung or if it was a mosquito. Then I heard angry buzzing. Then I felt tremendous pain.

"I've been stung!" I shouted. Lorraine and Cabal looked as though they were about to bolt. "Ow! It's still in my hair! Ow!"

It was still in my hair and I wondered if I was far enough from the hive to avoid attracting the other bees attention? Would they smell the attack pheromone from her sting and come join the party? I couldn't see where I was stung, but I tried to get the bee out, by flicking fingers near the epicenter of the pain. They dying bee buzzed harder and that sent me into a panic and flight mode and I ran towards Lorraine. I'm not sure if when I reached her I tripped and fell or if some twisted response of stop, drop and roll came into play, but I was on the ground thrashing, yelling all the while, "It's still in my hair! I can hear it!"

Lorraine who is at best on uncertain terms with bees to begin with, tried to look at my hair, but my trashing on the ground was making it difficult. I think I had a fear that the bee would get loose from her stinger and get in my ear. I plugged my ear with my finger and rolled over to the other side, giving Lorraine a view of the stung side of my head. Lorraine started stomping on my ponytail. "It's still there!"

It was at this point that Cabal sensed something was amiss and wanted to help. He sensed our panic as I was writhing and squealing on the ground and Lorraine was jumping up and down desperately trying to get a bee out of my hair without actually having to touch it. Cabal wanted to help too, but what could a mere dog do? He barked and whimpered and then began digging at my clothes.

It was at this point I realized the ridiculousness of the situation and just started laughing. Lorraine pulled out the binder holding my ponytail and frantically kept searching for the bee. I could hear more buzzing from my unplugged ear. Every time she would find it, the bee would slip deeper into my hair. It didn't help that the bee was the same color as my hair. Finally, she got it out and then said, "Ah, it's flying at me!"

"That's not the same bee," I warned, "They die after they sting you! That's a different bee!"

She ran. Cabal ran. I ran. We made it to the four runner, but the bees were still chasing us. We took off down the field. We made it a safe distance away, I looked down to my feet and realized I had kicked off my shoes and was barefoot.

"We have to get back to the four runner." Lorraine said nervously, noting how close it was parked to the hives.

"I have to go back to get my shoes and all the planting tools I left behind." I noted.

We got the stuff and headed back to the house. Lorraine asked how my head was. For a moment it would have a warm, almost pleasant sensation, then would come searing pain and then it would go back to a warm sensation again. When we got to the house, Lorraine had to go through my hair to find the sting. She asked where it hurt and the area was getting wider. It didn't help that I have really thick hair to sift through. After some searching, she located the stinger and pulled it out, the waves of throbbing pain ended and I could feel the side of my head and ear swelling slightly. We were both nauseous and had some mint tea to soothe ourselves.

I hope no one in a nearby farm house was watching us from afar.

Ah, dignity, it's sometimes overrated.

Favorite Moment Of Beekeeping Thus Far

I have started giving extra food to the Kitty hive to help her build up her winter stores. She's just not drawing out comb very quickly and by putting a feeder right in the hive, maybe that will give them more time to work instead of flying away. I will say, they are doing one heck of a job of bringing back pollen. Dozens and dozens were flying in with loaded pollen baskets on their back legs--and in several different colors: red, orange, yellow, even white!

What was really cool for me was watching some of the other workers removing the pollen baskets. Here we have a bee with orange pollen. Behind her is a worker removing the pollen. Note the blurry bee in the front of the photo with the yellow baskets?

I like this photo. A forager hanging out and talking to another worker while the pollen baskets are removed.

I just couldn't believe how mellow the Kitty bees were behaving. I was watching everybody getting there baskets removed. I like this because you can see the bee with the baskets raising her wing while the other bee works on her load of pollen. It was at this point I noticed something very interesting. I had set my camera on the inner roof and as I was getting the macro shots, my fingers were splayed out for leverage. That's when I looked over to my pinkie finger and saw this:

That's my gloved pinkie in back. I had some homemade bee nectar that had spilled on my gloves and the bees were licking it off! Check it out:

More bees came over and started crawling up. So, apparently not only will smoking your bees make them mellow, but so will hand feeding them. I was so excited, I threw caution to the wind and removed a glove and dipped my pinkie finger in the nectar solution:

Look at that! She's reaching...almost there...she's reaching for the nectar with both front legs and her tiny tongue:

Contact! Alas, the actual photo of the bee licking the bare finger turned out blurry, but you get the idea. Hands down, I think this is my favorite moment of beekeeping this summer. Having a bee lick homemade nectar from my bare finger. That is something I never thought would ever happen. Ever. And no, I did not get stung.

Honey Harvest

At last we harvested some honey! We are only harvesting from our Olga hive as the Kitty hive is not producing any surplus. Olga has plenty for winter and a little extra for us to enjoy.

I want to thank all the readers who recommended Bee-Quick to me for getting the bees out of the honey supers--it worked GREAT! I have no basis for comparison for what some of the other alternatives smell like, but the aroma of this wasn't so bad. Although, I did learn that the oils will wipe off the little marks on your camera that let you know what setting you are shooting in--oops. What you're supposed to do is spray the Bee-Quick on a fume board.

When I opened the hive and looked on top of one of our supers, I saw many bees milling about amidst sticky propolis. Smoke isn't the most ideal option at this point. Yes, it will cause the bees to move from the top and be mellow, but it also causes them to open up capped honey and eat it--not the desired effect when you want to extract capped honey.

You put the fume board on top of the super that is full of honey that you want to take out. The super is the smaller unpainted box. The fume board looks like the hive roof on top of it. You let it sit there for about two to five minutes.

Here's what that same super looked like after three minutes with the fume board--a ghost town of honey and propolis. Pretty slick. The supers full of honey were very heavy and this time I drove out to the hives instead of walk to make bringing them back to the house easier.

"Why iz I stuck in back wit da beez?"

I don't know why, but I can only hear Cabal talk in an I Can Has Cheezburger voice. There were about three or four bees still milling about in the frames but they left by the time I took the supers back to the four runner, so Cabal was safe. I harvested two supers, a regular cut comb honey kit and our Ross Rounds super.

When I got the Ross Round super into the kitchen, I began to wonder how I was going to get the frames out. There was propolis in every visible nook and cranny. The frames are kind of wedged together as it is so as not to violate bee space, but they literally sealed the deal with the propolis. Perhaps they knew this super was for Mr. Neil and myself and they thought, "Okay, if they're gonna steal the honey, we're gonna make it as difficult as possible."

Never under estimate the power of a hive tool--an essential piece of bee keeping equipment that looks remarkably like your garden variety paint scraper. Anyway, it lives up to the reputation by prying open anything, including propolis packed frames.

I got the frames apart and inside you could see the rounds and excess foundation comb.

I took out the rounds and trimmed away the extra foundation. I place a cap on each end of the round and voila:

comb honey ready to go. It was at this point that I realized that the fantabulous logo that Olga has designed for our honey (we've even named it--Mr. Neil and Beechick's Dangerous Honey) is rectangular and most of our honey is in round form...we're gonna have to rethink the labeling a little bit.

Not all of the honey was capped. This means that it's "not quite ripe." You can still eat it, but it has a little too much moisture in it and it will ferment in storage. Some of this I will put out in a feeder to the Kitty hive to help her build up her winter stores since she is a tad behind Olga but some I will keep for myself. I really like it, it's like some strange chewy candy. The entire cell isn't quite full, so when you bite into the comb, it's a soft textures that pops little bursts of sweetness into your mouth. I think eating fresh comb straight from the frame is now in my top ten foods. And to think, about three years ago, I didn't like the taste of honey. I made fun of friends for eating their "bee vomit" (well it kind of is) but now, with my own bees I've raised with great friends, I can't get enough of it.

Here's the pile of our harvest. Keep in mind that this is just from one hive during our first summer when we weren't expect to get any honey. What will next summer be like when we have two hives in full honey production? Yikes!

And now, I leave you with some bee art that the Olga girls made. This is actually propolis that was surrounding one of the Ross Round frames wedged against the wall of the honey super. That Olga, she is so artistic. And true to form, she was our early on problem child, but the best honey producer in the end.

Holy Crap! Everybody Look Busy!

I can't stop watching and laughing at this video I took of the bees today. I just set my little camera on top of the hive and puffed them with the smoker. The smoker is supposed to mellow them out and make them go down into the hive body and eat honey. But in the video they look like bees on a coffee break and then when the smokers puffs, it's pandemonium as if they suddenly realize, "Holy crap! The human is watching, everybody look busy!"



I apologize to those who can't watch video, I don't have a photo to go with this one. A full bee update will bee up soon.

Har har.

Other Bugs At The Beehive

I've gotten a couple notes that some readers are grossed out by bees and by other bugs. FYI, this post is certainly not for you. We have other bugs in this post, and one photo is slightly gross.

This post is the combination of two days of beeing. Mr. Neil is leaving for a while and I wanted to make sure he got a bee experience before he left. Unsure of what his packing schedule would be, I came out the night before he was to leave so I could be up early and ready to beekeep at a moment's notice. When I arrived, I met up with a woman who is assessing the surrounding woods and will help come up with a plan to get rid of some non native plants and managing the woods for native plants, bees, and wildlife. She mentioned that the bees were very active and loud, crowding at the entrances of their hives.

I zipped up my bee suit and stoked the smoker to go see what was happening. Olga bees were all over and swarming out of the hive. When I was about 50 feet away, you could hear the buzzing--usually you can't. From that angle, when you first approach the hives you can see the bee super highway as they head up over the tops of the trees on their way to look for nectar and pollen. There was a pretty steady stream of bees coming and going. I don' think it was swarming, I think it was four days of constant rain--they wanted out and wanted to gather winter stores. I didn't open the hives, but just took some time to sit at the entrance of each hive and watch the bees coming and going.

The Kitty bees were coming back loaded with pollen of various colors. Note that almost every bee in the above photo is loaded with pollen--I love the neon yellow stuff. Goldenrod is blooming all over, so my guess is they are using that.

Now, look at this one. In the middle is a bee with the neon yellow pollen. But, look in the bottom right hand corner. That bee has pollen that is snow white--where are they getting white pollen? Wish I knew my plants better.

This bee is so loaded with pollen, she's practically dragging it in.

When I came to the Kitty hive, there were some grasshoppers (sometimes called by locusts) hanging out. There are always some on one of the hives and I always wonder what the appeal is. Do they like the buzzing? These appear to be two different species. I've been trying to id them with the Kaufman's Field Guide to Insects of North America. I think it might be a two-striped mermiria but am willing to listen to anyone who knows otherwise.

I think the larger one is a differential grasshopper, but whatever it is, I love the yellow antennae.

When I went over to the Olga hive...I didn't find any life grasshoppers. Apparently, Olga has a lower tolerance for these guys hanging around their hive. This is a dead Carolina grasshopper. When they jump/fly they resemble a mourning cloak butterfly with dark wings and a light stripe. I found this species in my Songs of Insects book (I love this book. Not only does it a beautiful picture book, but i comes with a CD that identifies the buzzy insect songs of late summer early fall--I'm paying way more attention to the number of species I'm hearing now. Sometimes I just let it loop on my iPod while I'm writing, it's great background noise).

One of the really cool things of just hanging outside of the hive was that I noticed some things I had never seen before. The dead grasshopper got my attention, and then I noticed a worker from the Olga hive dragging out another dead worker bee. She was trying to fly it away far from the hive--this is part of they hygienic behavior my bees are bred for. Here's a video of it:



This helps keep the hive clean and healthy. I wondered if the workers had been putting some of this off because of the rain or if I'd never just had a chance to sit and watch them come and go from the inside of the hive. of just I noticed something interesting. I scanned the ground just outside the entrance and found a few lethargic drones and workers. Then I found this:

This is a solitary wasp called a beewolf (some books lump it as one word, some make it two separate words) and it's attacking one of my workers. I wondered if this is a lethargic, dying worker and not one of the stronger ones. They paralyze other stinging insects and take them back as prey for their larvae. You can read more about them here.

The next day Mr. Neil and I went out to check what was going on inside the hives. It was very much the same as last week. Again, I think it's because the workers haven't had a real chance to forage and draw out more comb and produce honey. I'm not too worried about Olga, but I'm going to need to give food to Kitty if she's going to have enough food to supply the colony for the winter.

We tried putting the queen excluder in last week and I think I'm done with them. The queen excluder is supposed to prevent the larger queen from going up into your honey supers to lay eggs. However, it's very obvious that workers are having a tough time passing through the bars too. This poor girl was so wedged, I had to push her out. The beekeeping community seems to be divided on the queen excluder, but myself, I'm done with them. My other option is to do what's called a reversal--which we did do and is kind of a mess, but it's better than watching a bunch of workers stuck in a metal frame.

When we opened the Olga hive, about nine moths flew out from just under the roof. One landed on my hood. One concern you have with beekeeping are wax moths (you know the wax worms you get for fishing or sometimes to feed birds--the larvae can wreak havoc on a beehive). The larvae will eat the beeswax and make cocoons in the frames, generally making a dusty, webby mess. This moth doesn't look like a wax moth to me, I think this was more some other type of moth and they were trying to keep out of the rain. Either way, Olga is a nice strong colony and a strong, healthy colony can keep wax moths out.

I Think The Bees Are On To Us

Just a short update on the old bees. Yesterday, Mr. Neil, Lorraine and I checked on the beehives.

The Olga hive is really expanding with comb honey and I'm very hopeful for what she will do for us next summer. She's got three deep brood boxes (the large ones on the bottom) full of brood and honey for winter, and the top three smaller boxes are the honey supers for us. Two are the Ross Rounds and one is the cut comb honey kit which had some melting issues earlier in the summer and is now full of burr comb. Ah well, in the end it's all edible.

One of the Ross Rounds super is almost completely ready to harvest, almost all the frames are capped. We should be able to take it out next week. Up until this point, we've been putting an extra empty frame in our third brood box. We've just been harvesting it there from time to time. The frame is empty, but the bees are perfectly capable of drawing out comb without foundation.

However, I think the Olga bees are on to us. When I opened the box, I could see comb from the frame attached to the wall. I tried to pull the frame out, but it felt stuck. We took out the frame next to it out for a closer look inside.

Sure enough, the girls had drawn out their own foundation from the wall to the frame, making it impossible for us to harvest. It was as if they were saying, "Ha ha, take that, thieving humans." So, no honey harvest this time, but next week (insert maniacal giggle) we shall plunder the honey supers and no amount of propolis will stop us.

On our way to check the Kitty hive's progress we found a grasshopper waiting for us on the outside. You would think that they could sense all the activity in the hive and would want to stay away. You can hear much more activity before you open the box--the most I've heard in weeks. The brood has definitely hatched.

The girls still have not quite drawn out all the frames in the third brood box, but they are over halfway there and with more workers hatching every day, I feel that they will be ready by the end of August. Above is some of the freshly drawn out comb, see the little glob of bright yellow? Some worker has just deposited some pollen stores.

We found more freshly laid eggs, which means Queen Kitty II was here sometime in the last three days. As we were checking this hive, I suddenly realized that next month I will need to begin preparations to overwinter the bees. They will have to be sealed up in October and I won't be able to check on them every seven to ten days. What on earth am I going to do with myself between October and April?

Go See Stardust and A Little About Our Honey

One of the fun things about being a theater major is that from time to time you see former classmates show up in anti-drug commercials, episodes of Law and Order, or live action kid tv shows. It's just fun watching friends get into the Hollywood industry. That's kind of the way I feel about Stardust--it's the Hollywood version of Mr. Neil.

Unlike Non Birding Bill, I had never read any of Mr. Neil's stuff before we met him. I got to know him as this fun British guy who has an interesting job. I think Anansi Boys was the first book that I read (and that was just checking bird facts) and I have read a couple other things since then. I listened to Stardust as an audio book on my travels the last couple of weeks just prep for the movie. Sunday we were invited to the preview and had a great time.

The movie is different than the book--it's a Hollywood version of it--what fun to see something a friend had written turned into a big summer movie with lots of special effects and actual stars--Robert De Niro, Clare Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer. It's about a fallen star that has landed into the fairy side of the world and all the people going after her. If she had landed on the real world, she would have been a cold, hard rock. Since she landed in fairy land, she's a woman who now has princes, a boy in love, and an evil witch all coming to claim her.

De Niro was by far my favorite part of the film. I figured he was just going to be his usual De Niro self which would have worked fine with the book, but they really take the character to another level which I was not prepared for and loved.

I would call this an adult fairy tail, kind of along the lines of Princess Bride (but with much cooler effects) but I think kids would enjoy it. It has some violence, but not nearly what is in the book--the book is far grosser in my opinion. The movie version has some sword play--not a lot--the end has a fun fight scene with some cool effects. There's something for everyone: pirates, magic, pretty dresses, hot guys, a couple of sword fights, unicorns, even a bird--I think it's a magpie jay, but if someone else has seen the movie and knows what it is, please let me kn0w.

So, go see Stardust this weekend, take a friend. Supporting this movie does help support the bees you read about in this blog. If the movie does well, next year we can add more hives--perhaps even making it available for sale or to give away as prizes. I know it's crazy to make blockbuster movies to fund a beekeeping business, but it's just crazy enough that it might work. Speaking of bees, Mr. Neil told me to do a taste comparison between the first frame of honey we harvested and the second. Here is a photo of our first honey:

Now, below is some comb honey from our second harvest two weeks later:

Look at that, it's a little darker and more yellow. The flavor is a bit different too, it's more sweet and not as peppery and lacks the hint of pine that the first harvest had. Still very tasty. Some honey was sent to our friend Malena and she reviews it here...although as much as I love Malena, her bee natural history is a little inaccurate, so don't take that bit too seriously.

And, I have it on good authority that four out of four dead princes agree, our honey rocks.

More Honey Extraction From Our Bees

It was time to check on the progress of the bees once again, so Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill, Cabal, and I headed to the hives. Last weekend, NBB checked on the hives and found that the bees were still not using our new comb honey supers. The instructions that came with our Ross Rounds supers led us to believe they were already fully assembled. Well, I did some digging on the Internet and found that they were supposed to have wax foundation on the inside of the rounds to get the bees started. GRRRR. I emailed NBB from out of town and he did some digging. Fortunately, the boxes that the supers arrived in hadn't been recycled yet, so he found the foundation. WHEW!

He put together one of the supers and replaced it with the one that was already on the hive. We're supposed to take the brown plastic pieces apart--they just snap apart easily. Well, even though the bees hadn't been filling that super with comb and honey--they did manage to propolis the crap out of it. But, NBB and Mr. Neil managed to pry them apart with the aid of the hive tool and get the foundation in, so it will be ready if we need more supers this summer. Our goal with the inspection today was to check on Kitty's progress and see if Olga was finally filling the Ross Rounds with the foundation.

Kitty's buzz is much improved. Before, when we would open the hive, it was very quiet and if you did some digging you would find the bees, and there would be a quiet general hum, but here and there would also be a weak solitary buzz. Today the bees just sounded more contented and industrious--they sounded like they had a purpose.

The larvae from the new queen hasn't emerged yet, but I'm not too worried, there are massive amounts of honey stored for the time being (that's the workers eating some of it above), so if there is a shortage of foragers for a small period of time the girls have reserves for the next week or two. Some workers have finally started drawing out comb in top box--that's the box they need to fill in order to make it through the winter. It's the beginning of August so there is still time. OK, maybe I'm a tiny bit concerned, but we'll do what we can when we can.

Olga is in mass production mode. When we took her roof off, we found lots of propolis, these girls are really going to town. I wish I had such a great fix up tool. Got a hole or crack, got a dead mouse? Just cover it with propolis--it prevents the spread of bacteria, plugs up holes, and keeps everything together.

We checked the Ross Rounds and found some very exciting activity. Each compartment was jammed packed full of workers drawing out comb, soon to fill them with honey--WHOOT! Finally, they are using the super! They are also sealing all the frames together with massive amounts of sticky propolis.

Here's a little video:



NBB asked me last night what I enjoy most about bees, and I think just watching their industriousness. They each have jobs and those jobs change over time, they always have something to do, some place to be.

We found that the empty frame we put in the brood box was once again chock full of capped honey for us to harvest. I'm wondering if push comes to shove with the Kitty hive and she doesn't have enough stores for winter, if we can replace some of her empty frames with honey frames from Olga? Of course, that means less honey for us this year, but next year we'd have two hives that would produce nothing but honey. We'll see how things are at the end of August.

Here's another video of some general bee activity while we're getting the frame ready to take back with us:



Did you notice Mr. Neil using the bee brush in back? We're gently brushing off the workers from the frame with the honey. We're taking them off, so we don't take them back to the house with us. Thinking back to the Ross Rounds, we suddenly began to wonder, how are we going to get the bees out of the super when we are ready to harvest it? The frames are all wedged together (and now sealed with propolis), we can't really get a bee brush in there. We can't smoke the frames, that affects the flavor of the honey and also the smoke calms the bees and makes them eat honey, which doesn't help the situation. I've heard of some chemical methods, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. I'm going to have to google that a bit to find out how we harvest the honey.

On the bottom of the frame, the workers had made more comb, but they made larger cells--we know what that meas--drones. The whole bottom of the frame either had squishy larvae or capped drone brood. It was easily cut away from the honey were going to eat, but it got me thinking: The queen has been up here sometime in the last week or two. We did have a queen excluder between this box and our other honey supers to prevent the queen from laying eggs in the Ross Rounds but we took it out when the workers weren't drawing out comb in them, thinking that was preventing them from working in the supers (plus many beekeepers are anti excluder). We also reversed the brood boxes, which gets the queen to start in the third brood box and work her way down to lay eggs. But larvae this small means she's been here in the last two weeks. Is there any possibility she has gone up to the Ross Rounds to lay eggs? I don't want to use the excluder now on the off chance she is in the rounds and that cuts her off from the rest of the hive. Oh well, only time will tell and this year is supposed to be a learning curve.

One thing I am really encouraged about with the beekeeping is that even though this is our first year and I've made some mistakes, we've still managed to get honey for ourselves. Last time we harvested we got seven boxes of frame honey, and on this run we got six boxes of honey--a total of 13 boxes so far and things looks promising that we will get more.

Oh! Here is something interesting. Some say that in nature you never find straight angles--check out what I found in the Olga hive entrance. I think that's propolis on the floor that may have dripped down, I'm not sure, but it's in straight angles. What are the Olga bees up to? Are they defying nature? The Olga bees, always leaving me with more questions than answers. Perhaps that is why I love them so.

This post is covered in bees

Hello, all, NBB here.

As Shazz pointed out, I was initially apprehensive about her keeping bees. Given that both her and Neil's schedules are so hectic, I was convinced that his assistant Lorraine and I would end up being the bulk of the work. And while I don't have a bee phobia, the idea of intentionally walking up to a big pile o' bees and tearing their home apart to steal their honey gave me pause.

So it was a little surprising to find myself heading off to inspect the hives today, alone. Well, except for Cabal the beekeeping dog, who really serves only in an advisory capacity.

I can haz beez?

The really weird thing is that beekeeping isn't all that scary. The suit covers you completely, and the smoker causes them to instantly scurry back into the hive. Whenever we go out there, I'm more concerned about crushing a bee that I am about getting stung.

Another thing is that the bees themselves aren't aggressive. As long as you handle the boxes carefully, and smoke regularly, most of them just go about their business, even as you take the frames out, one by one. You'd think you'd get a bigger reaction, since they live and work in darkness, but opening the hive really only affects a small portion of the hive, who come out and buzz around, but don't immediately attack. Part of this, of course, is because we go out in the middle of the day, when the foragers are out collecting pollen, but still.

The only time they've become deliberately aggressive is when a frame we were handling slipped from the glove, fell about an inch, but landed on the hive with a good, solid, bonk! In a split-second, the buzzing got much louder, and Sharon and I both froze.

"I wish that hadn't happened."

"Me too."

Still, even when they're buzzing around your head, butting against the screen that shields your face, there's not really a sense of attack--though we have been stung in the gloves a couple of times. Maybe it's because before all this, my interaction was with lone bees--foragers, and all you think about is the stingers, rather than them working as a group, building a hive.

So anyway, I like the bees. They're kind of cute. Perhaps it's because they're fuzzy.

And now for your weekly bee report.

Queen Kitty II, by the Grace of God, Defender of etc., etc. had been accepted into the hive and it was hoped that she would start laying workers to replenish the hive. I'm happy to report that I believe this is happening!

Let me first apologize for the quality of the pictures; taking good shots of bees is tough enough, but add in a black screen in front of your face, direct sunlight on the view screen, and sweat dripping onto your glasses, and it's hard to feel the love when you're trying to get out of there as quickly as possible, before you need to find out if you're allergic to bees (and you realize that you left your cell phone back at the house. Screaming "911" doesn't really work as well).

Plus, and I hate to gossip, but the bees just really didn't take direction well. "Throw back your wings!" I shouted. "Show me how much you love that honey! Stick out your proboscis!" Honestly, it was like they weren't listening at all. Prima donnas.


This is the top box of Kitty. Some activity there, and a lot of buzzing. The last few times we visited the hive was very lethargic (quiet), so I took this as a good sign. Pulling out the end frames:

Workers, drawing out comb, which means that they're building their own comb on top of the plastic sheets in the middle of the frame. I don't know if you can see it in this picture, but there are a lot of bees in the middle box, below this one. Pulling out the center frame:
It's almost entirely filled with honey, some of it capped. This actually made me a little apprehensive, because what we hoped for was brood: eggs that would turn into workers. At least, I pretty sure it's all honey. Sharon's the head beekeeper here and I'm just trying to remember what she told me as I watched her inspect the hive. Anyway, not seeing any evidence of eggs, I moved onto the second brood box.

Tons of activity and a lot of buzzing, which I was happy to hear. On the end of the box they were drawing out more of what looked to be honey, and making more of their funky comb (Kitty hive takes after her namesake). I was pleased by the activity, but knew that I had to keep digging until I could report to Sharon that we had larvae. So, moving into the middle frame of box 2:
Larvae! Precious, precious larvae! Now, if I remember correctly, the worker cells are relatively flush with the comb while drone cells puff out, because the males need more room for their recliners and beer. So, is this almost all future workers for the Kitty hive. In addition to this, there was a lot more activity going on inside, lots of noisy buzzing. Yay!

Having established that Kitty II was having a prosperous reign, I closed the hive and moved onto Olga.

Olga, as you'll recall, was our big hope for honey after the Kitty I decided to go on tour with her Swarm (which would be a good name for a hair metal band, late 80s. So if you're thinking about traveling back in time and living like a modern cowboy, on a steel horse you'll ride...). However, after having no end of problems with the first honey super (the wax centers kept collapsing), we added a section of plastic rounds, but left the first super on as well, just to see what the bees would do.

And here it is: The bees are building feral comb in the empty frames, which, if all goes well, will translate into edible honey for us, albeit in a very funky form. Olga, your bees are getting results, but they're not following the rules!

Suddenly I'm a chief inspector in a bad 70s cop show.

Very little activity otherwise. Moving onto the plastic rounds:

ZILCH.

We're getting completely nooged by the Olga bees, who I think might be onto us. One was constantly buzzing my head, and despite my best efforts to smoke her, she kept right on flying a patrol around my noggin. Lots of bees running around in the plastic rounds, and they'd glued them all together with propolis so tightly I had to pry them out with both hands, but not a single spot of comb.

UPDATE: Turns out the plastic rounds are supposed to have a wax foundation (like the other frames) that goes in between them. After rummaging around in the shipping boxes, I found them, added them to our second set of rounds, and swapped the boxes. Needless to say, the bees don't really appreciate two visits in one day. Ah, life.

So, this concludes your regular bee update. And now, if everyone will please close their browser windows...

A PRIVATE MESSAGE TO SHARON:

Darling, please come home. I'm sorry I made jokes about birds. I'm so, so sorry. I miss you. The pets miss you. Well, Cinnamon doesn't, but you know what I mean. I promise never to make jokes about how brown birds look exactly alike, even though they obviously do. And all those times I said you were nuts to go and stand in a field at 5 a.m.? Well, uhmmm... well, I was right about that, too, but if you come back I'll keep it to myself and only laugh when I think you're not looking.

Please, please come back.

END PRIVATE MESSAGE.

Mini Honey Harvest

Well, it's official, Mr. Neil took one for the team...

...and got stung on the neck. The going pool was that all the helpers with the hive had to give the stingee $10 each, so for his pain he got some payola. He was walking near the Olga hive sans bee suit, so it was kind of his own fault. Good news though: no allergic reaction and he is still alive, well, and underfoot.

We went out to check the status of the Kitty hive, to see that the new queen was laying eggs, and boy howdy had she gone to town! If you look in the above cells, you will see minute grains of rice--those are fresh eggs, laid sometime within the last three days. We even found larvae and some brood being capped. Overall, worker numbers are low, but the honey supply for the hive is rich and I think it's still very possible to recover enough to survive the winter.

There is still some brood left that hasn't hatched yet that was transferred from Olga to Kitty, so even while we're are waiting the three weeks for the new eggs to emerge into workers, fresh workers will still be on hand to keep the hive running. Once the new eggs emerge into workers though, watch out!

Here's a new worker just chewing her way out to join the crowd. I'm glad I added in these frames from Olga, when bees first emerge, they are "nurse bees" that are to tend to eggs and larvae, keeping them fed and helping them grow. It's the older workers who are the foragers that look for pollen and nectar. This worker will tend all the eggs and larvae from the new queen--an important bridge in our hive's survival.

We checked the Olga hive and found one frame of harvestable honey--it was capped, when bees cap the honey, that means it's ready for storage and more importantly, ready for human consumption! This was a frame I stuck in one of the brood boxes, below the queen excluder as an experiment. It was a completely blank frame with no foundation and the bees built on it all over on their own. They filled it and capped it... but they haven't really done any comb building above the queen excluder. I've read different theories on the queen excluder. The idea is that the smaller workers can easily pass through the excluder to build comb, but the larger queen cannot get through. This makes the workers fill up all the comb with surplus honey and insures that no eggs and larvae are mixed with your honey for human consumption. Some beekeepers say that bees are reluctant to pass through the excluder and it slows honey production. They say that the third brood box is so full of stored honey that the queen won't go past it into the supers. Since we haven't had luck using the queen excluder and our honey supers are going empty, we took it off today to see what would happen. Hopefully, this time next week I can report that the girls are drawing out comb in the honey supers.

In the meantime, we decided to take advantage of the experimental frame that got filled in the brood box and harvest the honey! H-O-L-Y C-O-W was it an unbelievable taste--it's so light and delicate and yet, so full of nectary goodness. We each took a chunk of the comb loaded with the lightly colored honey. When my teeth pushed through the wax, a wave of honey surged over my tongue, covered the roof of my mouth, and flooded around my teeth. The flavors seemed to shift from minty, to peppery, to unbelievably sweet, but always fragrant. After I had swallowed several chunks, my breath smelled like a field of flowers.

Since this was in a brood box, the queen had laid a few drone cells in the center of the frame--they were easily cut out. You can see two drones in the above photo--the two cells with dark objects filling them. Mr. Neil said that in Italy, people will sell the larvae with the honey--perhaps for aphrodisiac purposes...not really what I'm looking for, so we just tossed them out. I had to laugh, when I was taking this photo, I was holding the hunk of comb to the window for the light, and just kept my finger on the camera button to take several photos in a row. About photo six...

...Cabal came over to to sniff the comb! Crazy dog. He didn't eat it, but the sudden nose surprised and tickled me.

So, we have our first mini harvest of the Gaiman-Stiteler honey (Non Birding Bill calls it Stamen Honey) from the Olga hive.

We ended up getting seven suet cake sized packs of comb honey. There were four of us and we ended up eating at least one full box. Which seemed like a good idea at the time--we were swept up in the excitement of the first harvest--Mr. Neil and I both assumed that we would get no honey either because it was our first year or some freak accident would happen (like, oh, I don't know, a swarm, killing off the queen, or the queen flying away) and yet despite all that we got a little honey, and there's still hope on the horizon for more to come this year.

We were down right gluttonous sampling Olga's wares, it was intoxicating--almost like tasting all the plants within five miles all at once in a sugary burst. But then the insulin goes a little haywire and you find that eating half jar's worth of honey is probably not the best idea you've ever had in your whole life--up there with eating a whole tube of chocolate cookie dough, but boy was it fun at the time.

Whoot!

New Caterpillar Madness

I've been monarch ranching for awhile, but I've always wanted to ranch some swallowtails. Some species of swallowtail caterpillars feed on parsley. Earlier this spring, I found out that we had accidentally had a black swallowtail living in our apartment (we guess it came in as a caterpillar on some of Cinnamon's parsley) but I wanted to it right this summer, and find the caterpillar and watch it grow. Mr. Neil has some parsley (above) in his garden, so I decided to see if I could find swallowtail caterpillars on that. I find that locating caterpillars takes a long time the first time you look for them, but once you find them, your eyes become trained and in the future, they are easier to find. I sat down and studied the parsley.

After a good ten minutes of study, I found six small caterpillars. They looked nothing like any of the swallowtail caterpillars in my books. I looked up the general characteristics of the black swallowtail: caterpillars are found on parsley (check), on the top side of the leaf (check), and early stages resembles bird poop (check). But still, if you look at what a large black swallowtail looks like, the books show you this. This tiny thing doesn't look like that at all. Fortunately, with the magic of google, you can narrow your search of images on the internet and I found photos of young black swallowtail caterpillars and they look just like what I found in the above photo--success, we have swallowtails!

I took four of the six swallowtail caterpillars and put them in my butterfly pavilion. You can see a water bottle inside, holding a bunch of curly parsley for them to feed off of, right along side a water bottle full of milkweed and monarch caterpillars. Next to the pavillion is a bunch of milk weed in a different water bottle--those are plants with monarch eggs on them. I keep the eggs separate until the caterpillars hatch so I don't confuse leaves with eggs with the leaves for feeding. Should be an interesting couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, we've had an early sampling of our dangerous honey from the Olga hive. Mr. Neil told us to mix some of our honey and comb with some plain Greek yogurt. YUM!

It's like a decadent dessert, only it's yogurt...and honey... from our own bees--that's got to be healthy, right?

Son Of A Beeswax!

Non Birding Bill and I headed out to check the status of the Kitty hive. Last time, we had placed a new queen in a cage inside the queenless hive. The cage opening was covered with hard candy. The workers were supposed to chew their way inside and by the time they got to her, the whole hive would be under the spell of the new queen's pheromone.

When we took out the frame with the queen cage, several bees were gathered around the queen, a good sign. They didn't appear to be attacking the cage, but VERY interested as to what was inside. I decided to remove the cage from the wax to see if the queen was still inside.

You can see on the side of the box is a piece of tape with a hole chewed through it. Behind the tape is the cage's opening. The opening is jammed with hard candy. The hole in the tape and the tunnel in the candy tells us that the workers have been trying to get the queen out--and have almost made it all the way through.

If you look at the workers on the side of the cage, you can see their proboscis is out to feed the queen nectar through the screen--they look like they are ready to serve under her rule. We did one more test. I had NBB smoke the cage to remove all the workers and we waited to see how long it would take for the workers to come to her again. Not long! They came to the cage before I had a chance to turn on my camera. Watch them come to the queen:



I think it's safe to say that they are assimilated to her. We put her in on Tuesday and here it is, Saturday afternoon and they are all over her cage, and have almost chewed their way through the hard candy. I decided to go ahead and open up the queen cage like we did when we first installed the bees in April. I'm an old pro at that now. I gave NBB the camera and had him make a video of this momentous occasion:



Did you catch what happened there? In case you missed it, that big bee flying away above my hand in the last few seconds of the video is our queen, flying away. HOLY CRAP! That wasn't supposed to happen! As soon as the camera was off, she flew to the right, I almost had her in my hand. She landed on one of the brood boxes. I went to get her and then she flew behind NBB and I lost track of her. It was not unlike the moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie lost all the screws when he and his dad were changing the tire and he said in slow motion, "Oooooooooooh Fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge."

Only, I didn't say "fudge." Imagine the worst profanity you can think of and that's pretty much what I said at that moment. What else could possibly go wrong with the Kitty hive? I briefly thought back to just a scant two months ago when Olga was the problem child.

Then, I immediately switched gears to problem solving mode, and thought back to the beekeeping class I took. The instructors warned us that this could happen when we would be hiving our new packages and releasing the queen. They said the thing to do is just stand where you are when the queen left and wait for fifteen minutes. The queen who just flew off is full of eggs and ready to lay and therefore, kinda heavy. She can't fly far and as she leaves she will realize that this isn't really what she wants, she's not going to find what she's looking for on this flight and back track. She'll look for familiar objects from where she she started--what could be more noticeable than two giants dressed all in white?

We stood and waited. I noticed when she flew that she was obviously larger than the workers and flew like a drone--slow and heavy. I went behind NBB to see if I could find her clinging to any nearby bushes, but didn't see her. NBB and I still waited. A large bee flew by my head, I watched it land at the entrance--drat, it was only a drone. The noon time sun combined with my tension of wondering if the queen would come back started to form sweat along my forehead and back. I kept remembering what the instructors told us, that the queen would come back, even if we didn't see her. After fifteen minutes, go ahead and close up the hive, she was probably in there. Although, those instructions were for installing a package in April when there were no leaves on the trees, no flowers, and much cooler weather. This was a warm, sunny day, with clover all around, and trees chock full of leaves--perfect for a queen to hide. Would the same strategy work?

Another large bee bounced off my hood, I watched it fly low to the ground, and then to the entrance. Another #$%& drone.

I started to form another strategy in head. The queen dealer wasn't far, maybe I could pick up another queen and start all over? Boy, that would be embarrassing to explain that I lost another queen. Although, I prudently hadn't killed the queen cell with an egg that we found last week, maybe I could just go with that plan? Suddenly, a large bee came from behind NBB, it was heavy and slow, and very tan. It landed right on the frame where the queen cage had been. Could it be? Was it really? YES! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes yes! The queen came back! Of course, we videoed her triumphant return:



I'm sure we only waited for less than five minutes, but I have to say that it felt like we were waiting for an hour! In case you are having trouble viewing her in the video, I did get photos:

She's right in the middle of the photo, surrounded by attendants. Note how her abdomen extends well past her wings. She's also much lighter in color than the original Queen Kitty. We have noticed that our workers in both hives have been changing colors. This hive started with lighter bees and now has darker bees, I'm sure it has to do with what types of drones the queen was mated with. The queen dealer told me that he had mated this queen with a variety of males, including a couple of carniolan drones which should bring me some colorful workers. Since carniolans are black, I wonder if the original Queen Kitty was carniolan?

Anyway, help us, Queen Kitty II, you're our only hope. The workers will show her around, she'll get rid of any queen cells in progress, and commence to layin' some eggs. Man, oh man, what nail biter that hive visit was.

In other news, the Olga hive continues to be a model of good bee behavior. We got in our new Ross Rounds comb honey super and are going to try that since we are having so many problems with the original comb honey kit. I'm happy to report that not only did the Ross Rounds kit come with instructions (unlike the other kit) but it was already assembled. Since I didn't want to waste time, we didn't paint it, but added it right to the Olga hive. You can tell the Ross super from the rest because it's not painted. Here's hoping we get some good old honey out of that.

Can't Stay Out Of The Hives

I dedicate this entry to Christina, who I inadvertently stood up--I swear I left a message, just on the wrong phone. Here's what kept me away:

A first for me: placing my ungloved hand on top of a brood box loaded with bees, and not having a complete and utter nervous breakdown. When I realized that the Kitty colony was queenless, I tried to purchase a replacement queen but every place I called had just run out of queens. So, I decided to go for the madcap raising an egg from another hive into a queen plan--risky and time consuming, but my only other option was to combine our two hives and I didn't want to do that unless I absolutely had to--the hive would then be just be too high for me to reach and inspect.

I recently made friends with some local beekeepers and was telling them about my problems with Kitty and several of them told me of a man nearby who still had queens for sale, but they warned, I had to get her installed now. I called the number, he said he had what I needed, we made an appointment, and in a warehouse out in undisclosed town that could pass for the picture definition of the boonies, the deal went down. We shook hands, he pulled a small wooden box from his pocket, I pulled some cash from my pocket, and the queen was mine. I put her in Non Birding Bill's pocket and from there we hightailed it out to the Kitty hive to install the new queen.

We threw on the bee suits, NBB lit the smoker (because he is the smoker master), and I gave Mr. Neil the queen for safe keeping. It was late in the day and we had to act fast. The foragers would be back in the hive and those are the most likely to sting you. However, when we opened Kitty, all was surprisingly calm--must be the lack of queen. Mr. Neil took the queen from his pocket and as soon as he took out the box, one of the Kitty bees landed on it. The queen's very first subject! That's it, my pretty, drink in that pheromone, assimilate, assimilate.

Basically, the queen is in a little cage that has a piece of candy covering the opening. When we first put the queen cage in the hive, the workers will want to come and kill the queen--but when they approach, she releases her pheromone and they want to serve her. Her aroma is released through the screen and both she and the other bees chew through the candy to have access to her. Once they get through the candy, they will have worked out their differences and the workers will show the queen around the hive so she can commence laying eggs. Here is the video of attaching the queen cage to one of the frames:




When we pushed in the cage, some of the cells with honey came open and created a small river of honey. In the video, you can see some of the workers start to lap it up. Here's a detailed photo:

Look at the lines of bee proboscis (tongues) lapping up that honey. Feast, my girls, feast. A new queen has arrived to build up your numbers. Some of you readers may be wondering why I went for a whole new queen if we started some eggs growing in a queen cell? Well, that wouldn't yield any new eggs for two weeks, and then it would be another three weeks until those eggs would hatch into new workers. Now, we have a new queen, fully fertilized and ready to lay. She'll need a few days to work her mojo on all the workers, but then she will get to layin' and I'll have new workers in three weeks instead of five weeks, giving them more time to build up food stores for winter.

So for the moment, the workers are all over the queen cage, like ugly on a pig, absorbing her pheromone. More bee madness to come this weekend.

Requeening The Kitty Hive

I took a photo when we opened the Kitty hive and just when I hit the button, a worker went straight for me--INCOMING! Oh, and if you are curious, none of us have been stung through our bees suits...yet.

Today was the day to find out if the mad experiment worked. You may recall that last week, our dear Kitty hive had swarmed and in my efforts to try and prevent it, I removed all the queen cells, but the hive swarmed anyway. Doh! I read about a plan to take eggs from the healthy Olga hive and see if Kitty would raise one of the eggs into a queen...

But first, I have to show you a really cool new tool I got to make our hive inspections easier. It's a little hanger you attach to a brood box while it's open. When you take out a frame, you can hang it on that, instead of setting the frame on the ground--it was pretty sweet and keeps you from crushing bees or letting the queen crawl onto the ground.

We had to dig around and look for the queen cells and we found one. This one had LOTS of activity around it. We tried smoking the bees out of the way to see if we could look inside and find an egg or better yet, larvae. Any fertilized honeybee egg can be a queen. What separates an egg from being a worker as opposed to the queen is that the the larvae is fed only royal jelly every day before it pupates. Workers only get royal jelly for three days. All this activity around this cell had me hopeful there was larvae inside, but I couldn't see anything, because it was at a weird angle. We continued our hunt for more queen cells. We found many, but they were empty.

But then we found two queen cups on the bottom of a frame (queen cups are the early states of a queen cell and low and behold, there was an egg inside the queen cup on the right. Can you see the tiny thing that looks like a grain of rice? That's an egg that has been transferred so it can be raised as a queen. WHOOT! If you're having trouble seeing the egg, try clicking on the picture, that will make it larger. Things are looking up for the queenless Kitty colony. An Olga egg that was originally intended to grow into a worker, is now to become a queen--should I change this hive's name to Anny Boleyn?

Okay, it will be an egg for three days, a larvae for about 5-6 days and pupate for about 7-8 days. When she emerges, she will get a quick tour of the hive for a couple of days, then fly around and fornicate and kill some drones for three days, and then get down to business and layin' some eggs. Hopefully in about two and a half weeks, we'll see some eggs!

Last week, we had added a honey super to Olga, as well as a propolis trap. I went to check in and see how that was doing. As you can see in the above photo, the trap is well on its way to filling with propolis--yum. The honey is another matter...

I've been having some issues with the comb honey kit that I ordered. First, there were no instructions that came with it that told me the important step of nailing the comb foundation into the frame, so last week all of our foundation started to melt, bend, and fall out of the frames. I called the place I ordered my kit from and they unhelpfully asked, "Didn't you nail in the foundation?" I told him no because there were no instructions. So, I nailed in all the foundation. Today, when went to look inside, the foundation had fallen out again! And I had nailed it! In the above photo, you can see the foundation laying between frames on the bottom of the box. They bees are using it, but it's going to make inspecting the hive and extracting the honey a pain. Hey, and remember how Olga had a talent for building funky comb? Well, that talent finally came in handy:

She built her own comb on one of the empty frames! Go Olga bees! Not only did the bees build inside the frame, but on the bottom for good measure. As much as I appreciate Olga's ambition, this may not be the best way to go. I called the company and complained about my dissatisfaction with this comb honey kit and we are going to exchange the kits we have for a comb honey kit called Ross Rounds, hopefully that will work better for all involved. So, if anyone is reading this blog and thinks one day they will try having their bees make comb honey...choose your kit carefully.

In other news, on our way to the hives today, Mr. Neil was telling me about a hen turkey and poults he and Cabal flushed on their way to the hives a couple of days ago. Just as he was describing it, Cabal flushed a turkey right next to us that was hiding in the grass. She popped up and flew in one direction and then Cabal flushed about five poults who flew in the other directions. The poults were about the size of a cantaloupe and could fly already! I didn't know they could fly that young. All the young turkeys made it safely into a tree and Cabal did not get them.

Queen Excluder Time

I took this photo of an entrance reducer to show you guys what it is...I didn't notice the juxtaposition of Non Birding Bill until after I downloaded photos. If you read my answers at Nerve.com, you get the joke (insert naughty giggle here).

I'm confused about the Kitty hive, but I have a plan and am rallied by all the support! First, let's talk good news: Olga was reversed and given a queen excluder and a propolis trap today! Chances are good, that last sentence made very little sense to you, but it's a whoot in my book.

Olga had filled all three of her brood boxes with eggs and honey. Since all the frames in the boxes were 100% filled with drawn out comb, we need to switch the top box with the bottom brood box. Bees tend to fill hives from the top down, so to encourage more brood, we needed to switch--all the frames in the bottom box have hatched, all the frames on the top were full of freshly laid eggs. I'm SO glad NBB was with me. I learned something today: a brood box full of honey and brood is too heavy for me to lift...and I can lift sixty pounds without a problem.

It was a messy business. As we took the whole hive apart, worker bees were running a amok, gathering all over the sides. We smoked the crap out of them, but still had a tough time keeping them out of the way. Now, I see the value of a hive brush. One of the instructors in the class inferred that the hive brush was an unnecessary tool, but we could have used one today. I ended up sweeping all of the bees out of the way with my glove--boy they really didn't like that! But it was that or squishing them as we put the hive back together.

After we reversed the hive and reassembled it, I placed the queen excluder on top of the three brood boxes. This allows only the workers to pass above the brood boxes and insure that all the frames placed above this point will only be filled with honey. After I set it on top, I watched closely to insure that the workers could pass through--yes they could.

After we put on our honey supers, I placed a propolis trap on top of them. This will encourage our bees to produce more of the sticky stuff they use to seal up the hive for us to eat. Ah, propolis--irritating when inspecting the hive, tasty and nutritious in your tea.

Now, on to the Kitty hive! I wanted to take a look today to see if there were any eggs--hoping against hope that a new queen had returned from a mating flight and had started laying. As I scanned, I found a bee emerging and was watching it...then I found something troubling. Notice the worker bee right above the emerging bee? That worker bee is doing something she shouldn't--she's plunked her little abdomen into a cell to lay an egg! Doh! That really isn't a good sign for this hive. She sat in there for some time, almost appeared to be struggling like she was constipated.

I watched the hive and the other frames for a long time (at least a half hour) and only found this one worker bee trying to lay eggs. Here's the problem. When a healthy queen is present, workers don't lay eggs. When a queen is gone and the workers aren't controlled by her pheromone, ovaries develop in the workers and they begin to lay eggs. These eggs are infertile and will only turn into drones (female workers and queens are the result of fertilized eggs). If this is happening, this means that there is no viable queen. Perhaps I did kill off all of the queen cells right before the swarm--my effort to prevent the swarm has kind of doomed the colony.

There are other signs of this as well--spotty drone cells capped over in the worker brood frames. Above the bee is a capped over cell that looks puffy--that's a drone that has been laid in a worker cell. All the flat capped over cells are capped worker cells. I called B&B Honey Farms--that's who I have been getting all of our bee supplies from. They ran out of replacement queens last week, so the very helpful Tammy went over some options with me. She agreed that one bee laying eggs is a very bad sign for that hive and I need to take action now.

1. Can I find the swarm? Boy howdy have I tried, but the woods are so thick and full of hollow trees, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

2. Do I want to pick up a swarm? There are apparently quite a few showing up along Hwy 90 and 94 through Minnesota and Wisconsin. Someone who travels around so their bees can pollinate farms has lost six already. One was in Tomah at a truck stop if I wanted to go for it. A little too far away for me at the moment.

3. Combine what's left of Kitty with the strong Olga hive using the newspaper method.

4. Then I ran an idea I came across on the Hive Mind Bee Blog(one of the beekeepers who answered questions like I did on Nerve.com): take a frame or two of brood from the Olga hive (making sure that it's full of freshly laid eggs) and inserting that into the Kitty hive. Like birds, bees look at eggs as something needing to be raised. They will take some of the eggs (they will all be fertilized and therefore female) and place them in queen cells. The only difference between a worker bee and a queen is that the queen is raised entirely on royal jelly. If one of those queens makes it, she will go on the mating flight and then come back and lay eggs. Also, the bees won't turn all the eggs into the queen, but raise them as workers--this will put some new life back in the hive to cover for the lack of eggs being laid in the last few weeks. Tammy said I could try it, however for every person who has had it work, there's another person who hasn't had it work. I think it's crazy enough of a plan that it just might work. What have I got to lose at this point anyway?

I think that's what we'll try tomorrow...too bad we just did the reversal and all the eggs are in the bottom box. Ah well, it'll be good exercise.

Because Kitty's progress we had to change the third brood box. When you start them, you put in ten frames to help with the way the comb is drawn out. Once they fill the brood box, you take one of the frames out so you only have nine in there. When you are expanding, you put the tenth frame in the new brood box. We'll we've expanded all we can in the Olga hive and the supers for honey are too small to hold a brood frame.

So, I brought it in and we had a little of the honey in our tea. It wasn't capped over, so it wasn't true honey, but it tasted awful darn close.

It was yummy! Although, now that we are going to take a frame of brood out of Olga and put it in the Kitty hive, we'll need to put this frame back in Olga. Good thing we didn't scrape off all the honey from her comb.

Refreshed, recharged, and ready to tackle the situation!

Quiet in the Kitty Hive

Non Birding Bill and I are watching Cabal (the beekeeping dog) while everyone is away--If you don't regularly read Mr. Neil's blog, the last week has been hilarious--Maddy, his 12 year old daughter has been guest blogging their adventures on a movie set in Budapest. Check it out, she writes exactly as she talks. She's crackin' me up, this one is my favorite.

Well, on to the saga of the Kitty hive. If you remember from last week, she was showing signs of swarming or a failing queen by building lots of queen cells. If queen cells are on the bottom of one of your frames, that means she's feeling crowded and the old queen will stop laying eggs, and then fly off with half the hive. If the queen cells are on the middle of the frames, that's a sign that the current queen is failing and is about to be superseded. We had mostly queen cells on the bottom frames and a few in the center. We removed as many queen cells as we could find and added a third brood box, hoping that room for expansion would encourage them to stay. We decided to wait a week and see what was happening.

Non Birding Bill and I went out to the Kitty hive and opened the box. It was quiet...too quiet. There was not the usual buzzing. We took out two center frames and they had not drawn out any comb at all. Not a good sign. We opened the second box, still quiet and the bees were totally calm. One of the most important beekeeping tools is the smoker, it helps keep them calm. We really didn't need it. The bees were as calm as the were when we first installed them...there were also noticeably fewer. We had our answer, sometime in the last week, the Kitty hive had swarmed. The old queen left, taking half the workers with her. The other half was left behind to start with a new queen.

Taking out more frames we found queen cups, the start of queen cells, the workers probably started those after I had ripped out all of the queen cells I could find last week.

I also found queen cells that I had missed. Can you find this one? Look at the top of the photo right in the center--there's kind of a vertical peanut shell structure--that's a queen cell. If you recall, this was the hive that kind of doubled up on each frame--the cells were away from the frame, so the bees had brood on the outside and between the cells and the frame--I wonder if that contributed to the feeling of being overcrowded? If you still can't see the queen cell, here is an up close shot:

I started to think back to the last time we were at the hive, last week when we first discovered the queen cells, quite a few bees were covering the side of the hive--they were much further along in swarming than I realized. Ah, hind sight is twenty twenty. Now, what will I do. I tried to find the new queen, but we couldn't. However, depending on when she hatched, she could be out on her three day "maiden voyage". A newly emerged queen is a virgin. When she hatches, the workers show her around the hive and she seeks out any remaining queen cells and kills them--it's kind of a Highlander thing--there can be only one. This takes about three days. Then she flies off for another three days to a "drone congregation area". Seriously, this is what the drones live...and die for. She will go up in the air about a half mile and find a few dozen drones to mate with (each drone she accepts will die in the copulatory act). After three days of sex and killing, she will return to the hive full of sperm and begin laying eggs.

In that time, I have to hope that nothing bad happens like a phoebe or great-crested flycatcher eating her before she comes back from her mating flight. There is some unhatched brood, but there haven't been new eggs for awhile. I'm kind of at a crossroads: do I start a new queen or do I work with the old queen? Which ever way I go, is there enough time for them to build up enough food and workers to survive winter this far north? I also wonder if I just shouldn't have left the queen cells last week.

Searching bee forums, I did what I could, but I should have caught this much sooner. My mistake was not checking the bottom box after adding the second. I thought that if I had let them alone, they would construct faster. Although, I did learn that even if I had caught it early, my methods of stopping a swarm still might not have worked. There are even some valiant efforts I could have tried, but probably wouldn't have, like finding the queen and cutting off her wings, making her flightless. If she couldn't fly, she would fall down on the swarm flight and the other workers would have been forced to stay. I don't think I could have the heart to cut the queen's wings.

As I look at the frames that are completely empty of brood, I feel that I have let this hive down with my inexperience. NBB was very excited--he was looking at this from a more scientific angle. He found the whole swarm process and the change in the hive's behavior fascinating. As I kept feeling like a failure, he kept marveling that our bees were now out in the wild--starting fresh and perhaps this healthy line would help build up the population that is so in trouble in North America. Our main goal was to have bees for pollination and well, the swarm couldn't have gone far so they will continue to pollinate Mr. Neil's yard--we will just not be managing it or getting any of the excess honey. So, for now, I will check Kitty daily for eggs, signs of the new queen. If there are no eggs in a week, I'll order a new queen.

The Olga hive, our former problem child is right on schedule and is ready for honey supers--honey for us to collect for our own purposes. Go Olga! Look at this frame full of honey! We took a small taste--it was awesome.

I walked the woods to see if I cold find signs of the swarm. Swarms don't go too far from the hive. There are quite a few hollow trees nearby, so they could be near. I watched the hives to see where the bees were flying off to. From this photo, they start from each hive respectively, and then fly up and off to the upper left corner of this photo. They clear the tree line and then go on. I tried following the bees, but was stopped by waist high stinging nettle.

I started following the creek. I was feeling very down, NBB had a hard time understanding it. It's understandable that there will be some problems your first year as a beekeeper, but I wanted to get everything right. Our class instructor even advised us to get two hives in case something goes wrong, and from what I've read, swarming happens to the best of beekeepers (although usually the second year, not with a new package). I'm bummed, I feel I've let our beekeeping operation down. But on a deeper level, I think what was really bothering me was a sense of rejection. The Kitty bees didn't care for the hive and took a bunch of their workers and left. A bunch of stinging girls left me and moved on. It's middle school all over again.

And then I heard this (it's about 32 seconds long). Can you identify the bird singing:



It's a song I haven't heard for a long time. I've never heard this species singing in Mr. Neil's woods before (this has been a good year for them, many more reports on the local listservs than usual). We used to get these in the woods where I lived as a kid in Indianapolis. It was the first bird I tried to id based on song--without the help of bird identification CDs--or records as we used at the time. My mom and I spent an entire Saturday morning chasing this bird down trying to see what made such a beautiful song. It took us a long time, but finally we caught a glimpse through the leaves of a robin shaped bird, with black spots on a white belly, and brown back: a wood thrush.

Hearing this song reminded me of how much work it was to id this bird. We'd heard it for several days before we had the chance to really track it down and find it. It took a long time, and a lot of work--that's how it was early on my birding life. And it's a good reminder of how it will be with my beekeeping life. I will make mistakes, and bees will do what they want to do.

Thanks, wood thrush, for the reminder and for making one of the most haunting melodies a person can ever hear in the summer woods.

Beekeepers Give Advice

"I don't approve of this entry at all! I'm seriously considering disowning you. Harumph!"

I've been kind of debating about whether or not to put up a link. But, I'm going back to my personal blogging rule, "Would I find this interesting?"

Yes, I would.

Nerve.com asks for experts in different fields (like sudoku masters) to give sex advice once a week. This week, they were looking for beekeepers and I was asked--that's right, they were looking for beekeepers, not birders. Who knew that beekeeping would ever lead to this? So, with LOTS of warning that this link is NSFW and to those of you who are reading this with your kids, save it for later or visit this beekeeping blog about a guy who is experimenting with bee sculpture. He was one of the beekeepers also asked for advice.

Okay, if you still want to proceed and are chronologically an adult, here is the Nerve.com link.

If you are visiting this blog for the first time from Nerve.com and you're wondering where all the bee entries are, check here. And, everyone wants to know what an entrance reducer is, so here's a photo of a wooden one and here is a photo of a metal one--I've got both! You use these to control your traffic and it helps maintain temperature and ventilation early in the spring.

Unrest In The Kitty Hive

Five days ago we checked the hives to see if they were ready for some expansion. Olga was very ready and we added a third brood box. Kitty was about three frames behind, so we decided to expand Olga and give Kitty a few more days to build up comb.

We took a look at Kitty today, and I noticed all but one of the frames had comb drawn out. We took out a center frame to check the status of the brood and found something most troubling. Can you see it in the above photo? It's down at the bottom, towards the right...kind of looks like a peanut shell...here's a close up:

The bees have formed queen cells. Now, I'm perplexed as to what is going on. There were about six queen cells formed throughout the hive and most were formed on the bottom of the frame--off of a column of drone cells. Now, here is the deal, queen cells are formed for two reasons--swarming (when the bees run out of room, they raise a queen, divide up and swarm) or supercedure (which means the current queen is failing, injured, or dead and the workers are trying to raise a new queen to replace her).

Now, according to bee literature, swarming queen cells are on the bottom of the frames. Supercedure queen cells are formed on the center of a frame...Most of the queen cells in the Kitty hive were on the bottom, but I did find two that were on the frame towards the center. I could find no eggs, but if the hive is about to go into swarm mode, the queen would have stopped laying eggs. However, it's been weeks since I've seen the Kitty queen. Is she dead? did she get injured or killed when we checked the box five days ago? Now, what do I do? Should I buy a new queen to introduce to the hive?

Check out this frame laden with capped over honey and a small patch of brood. From reading about queen cells in books and bee forums, the only thing that is certain with bee keeping appears to be that there are some guidelines, but really nothing is hard and fast. Sure swarming cells are usually at the bottom of a frame, but according to bee literature and bee forums--anything is possible. All of this may just be the Kitty girls feel crowded and are ready for a third brood box. I started thinking back: We checked the hive five days ago, and all seemed normal--eggs in cells and no queen cells. Today--there are about a half dozen queen cells. It takes fertilized eggs three days from when they were laid to be larvae and queen cells get capped at about seven days after being laid--these can't be more than four days old. The queens don't emerge until nine days after they have been capped. I decided to remove all the queen cells I could find and to add the third brood box and check again in a week. If there are no eggs after a week, then I'll order a new queen.

Ack, this is nerve wracking.

I ended up removing quite a few of the drone cells as I removed the queens. I felt terrible about it, but the hive needs workers to build and gather food,not males to eat honey while they bide their time to fly out looking for queens. As I removed wax, cells got exposed and you can see the larvae oozing out. I really felt bad killing the, but it needed to be done. On the upside, none of the larvae and pupae I exposed had any varroa mites--which means the overall health of the colony is good. After I scraped this chunk off, some of the drones started to emerge (above photo). I'm sure it was panic at feeling the cells being moved. As with any type of farming, you will have to kill some of your stock, but I found myself feeling more guilty about it than I had anticipated. If I'm like this with drones, I don't want to even think about my state at the end of summer in 2008 when I have to let my older colonies die off.

If anyone has advice or insights to my queen situation, please feel free to comment.

In other news, I have three new monarch chrysalises around the apartment. Two were formed about three days ago and appear to be parasite free. Whew!

Bee Update and Misc. Bugs

Warning: there is a spider at the end of this post. I used to be scared of spiders, not so much now.

We checked the hives yesterday and we had one of the hive namesakes to help out (Olga). We currently have three bee suits, which Mr. Neil, Olga, and I wore. Non Birding Bill came along too, but he wore the pith helmet with a net and a set of gloves. The rest of his outfit was a red t-shirt and gray sweats. I admired his bravery (or foolhardy attitude), although he wasn't digging around in the hives like I was, only staying back and taking a few photos.

Here is Mr. Neil showing a frame of burr comb from the bottom brood box of the Olga hive. Olga is giving the frame a puff of smoke. She still prefers to think of her bees as striking out new ground and innovative design as opposed to being problem bees. Actually, since I've started using the frame spacing tool, we haven't had too much of a problem with bees making the funky come.

Here's an up close look at the comb. If you recall, when I first posted a photo of Olga's odd comb, it was light in color and now looking at it above, it has darkened quite a bit. All normal and to be expected as the wax ages. Most of the worker brood has hatched on the above frame and there are quite a few drone cells.

We wanted to check both the top and the bottom boxes to make sure that all looked healthy and happy, see if we need to reverse the position of any of the boxes to encourage more brood. Some brood cells had been built between the two brood boxes and we exposed some larvae. We had to scrape them off and I felt awful about it, but the comb couldn't stay there. That is one tough part of beekeeping--you will kill some of the bees. Every time you go out, some of your colony will perish--some workers will sting your gloves and die, some bees just will not get out of the way when you put the hive back together (I hate crunching sound), or you have scrape away brood cells that are not in an appropriate area.

Despite some of our killing we did see new life. If you look at the above photo (towards the top and towards the left corner), you can see a new worker who has just finished pupating, chewing her way out of her cell--new life emerging into our hive! That was really exciting. Int he lower right hand corner is both a worker bee and a larger drone.

Here's a great frame shot! On the bottom is bright yellow capped brood (pupating into new workers) and some uncapped brood still growing. Above that is a layer of workers tending to the uncapped brood and feeding on honey. The top is the lighter colored capping is honey--all honey--properly aged and everything! Mr. Neil got some of it on the hive tool and we took a taste. Earlier in the season we had tasted the uncapped honey, which basically means that it had more moisture in it and wasn't true honey and could ferment. After the worker bees regurgitate the nectar into the cells, they fan it, evaporating the water from the regurgitated nectar and raising the sugar concentration. When the nectar has evaporated to less than 18.6% moisture, it will not ferment and that is when the bees cap it. When there is capping, you have true honey. We tasted it, our first true honey from our hives. Before we had tasted promise, this time, we tasted perfection. I was so proud of my girls.

All looked well, Olga had filled both brood boxes and was ready for a third brood box. I remembered from my notes in the beekeeping short course that three brood boxes were essential to overwintering our bees to insure that they would have enough honey and pollen stores--however, I couldn't remember if I needed to use the queen excluder at this point to that it would only be filled with honey and no brood. I reread my manual and couldn't figure it out, so I emailed the professor. She said to not use the queen excluder until I would put on our honey supers for our own consumption, that the queen have access to the the third box. So, no queen excluder for the moment. Kitty is now about three frames behind Olga, so we did not add a third brood box to her. We'll check again next weekend and then let them go. Hopefully, by mid July, we might be able to add our own honey supers and then use the queen excluder.

And since we're talking about bugs at Mr. Neil's house, I thought I would add a few more. I don't know about where you live, but around here I am noticing a TON of red admiral butterflies. The drive way was covered with them yesterday!

I even found a few flitting around in the education bird courtyard at The Raptor Center this year. I think their larvae like stinging nettle, must be a good year for that plant too. Yippee.

This isn't a painted lady, but a giant leopard moth near the trash bins. As if this moth isn't cool enough on the back, check out the front side:

Check out those crazy blue mandibles. I'm not sure if they make it look scary or incredibly wise. Speaking of scary...brace yourself:

Ewww! Spider--with an egg sac. At first glance, I thought this was a wolf spider. Someone else speculated garden spider. I remember once seeing a wolf spider with her back covered in babies, but some quick Internet research showed that wolf spiders carry their egg sacs in back and this girl was carrying her eggs in front.