Hive Update

I have pictures from our honey extraction day last weekend but I'm short on time at the moment. I'm guessing that we harvested about 35 to 40 pounds of honey this year.. But we'll put it on the scale and let you know the final tally. later..don't have time right now!

Hive Update

We are done with honey extraction. It was quite the experience! We had some very angry bee ladies. I also noticed that we had significantly less honey stored in our supers than we did during a hive check up two weeks ago. Thanks to the drought, it appears that our ladies are turning to their reserves to feed the workers. So, a bit of a bummer in terms of overall honey yield. Live and learn I guess. Hopefully in the future I'll be better about judging the best time for harvesting honey. Tomorrow we're doing Susan's bees, now that we've got the hang of it, I'll bet it'll go much more quickly!

Sonja

Bee Update

Due to the rain, we are now (again) at T minus 24 hours til honey extraction time. One mustn't mess with Mother Nature (or wet, angry honey bees).

Honey Bucket...no. Uh. Honey container? Honey receptacle? Honey jar?

We are at T minus 24 hours until we harvest honey from our little bee ladies! Did I say that right? T minus 24? I'll have to ask Eric. It sounds military-y and something he would know.

-

We're not expecting much [honey]...It's been a bit of a rough year for our little ladies. I'll let you know what our final haul weighs. We'll also be combining two of our hives; hopefully they'll have a better chance of living through the winter as one, big strong hive rather than two puny hives. So we'll be back to two hives, rather than three.

The Bee Ladies: Their 15 Minutes of Fame

Our little girls are so photogenic. The inhabitants of Blue Moon Hive, along with their crazy hot weather behavior, are featured in an article on bee bearding written by Khalil Hamdan of the Netherlands.

Read the article here (our bees are on Page 2) and click here for a quick bio of Mr. Hamdan.

Oh Sweet Bee! How we love you!

Today is National Honey Bee Awareness Day! Hooray for our little bee ladies, who make it possible for us to enjoy tasty fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

A random side note: I was going to ask you, our dear readers, what category of food nuts fall into but I was going to phrase it as the following: "What is a nut?". I subsequently decided that it probably wasn't the best question to ask from this particular group of folks. I'll find out by myself, thank you very much.

Update: Nuts are in the meat and beans category, evidently. According to the USDA:

"All foods made from meat, poultry, fish, dry beans or peas, eggs, nuts, and seeds are considered part of this group. Dry beans and peas are part of this group as well as the vegetable group.

Most meat and poultry choices should be lean or low-fat. Fish, nuts, and seeds contain healthy oils, so choose these foods frequently instead of meat or poultry."

Here are a few ways non-beekeepers can support, help, and save the honey bee

1) Consider beekeeping as a worthwhile hobby and seek information to get started. The more beekeepers there are, translates into more voices to be heard.

2) Support local beekeepers by buying locally produced honey and other beehive products. Honey is the best "green" sweetener you can use.

3) Attend and support beekeeper association events held throughout the year in most communities such as environmental centers, schools, state parks, and other various places.

4) Educate yourself on the dangers and risks with homeowner pesticides and chemicals. Whenever possible, choose non-damaging non-chemical treatments in and around the home. Most garden and backyard pests can be dealt with without harsh chemicals, which many times are not healthy for the pets, the kids, or the environment.

5) Get to know the honey bee. Unlike other stinging insects, honey bees are manageable, and are non-aggressive. Don’t blame every stinging event on the honey bee. Many times, stinging events are from hornets, yellow jackets, and wasps.

6) Plant a bee-friendly garden with native and nectar producing flowers. Use plants that can grow without extra watering and chemicals. Native plants are the best to grow in any region. Backyard gardens benefit from the neighborhood beehive.

7) Understand that backyard plants such as dandelions and clover are pollen and nectar sources for a wide variety of beneficial insects, including honey bees. Dandelions and clovers are a unwarranted nuisance for many homeowners. The desire to rid yards of these unwanted plants and to have the "perfect yard" are sources for chemical runoff and environmental damage from lawn treatments. A perfect lawn isn’t worth poisoning the earth.

8) Consider allowing a beekeeper to maintain beehives on your property. In some areas, beekeepers need additional apiary locations due to restrictive zoning or other issues. Having a beekeeper maintain hives on your property adds to overall quality and appeal of any country farm or estate.

9) Know that beekeepers are on the forefront in helping communities deal with wild bee colonies in unwanted situation. Every township and community should welcome beekeepers. It is not the managed colonies that beekeepers maintain that cause many problems, it is the unmanaged colonies. Every community should be able to rely on beekeepers and beekeeping associations for dealing with issues, and with other aspects such as educational programs. Communities should not pass restrictive measures or ban beekeeping altogether. Banning beekeepers means nobody may be around to help when help is needed.

10) Get involved with your community with things such as the local environmental center program for kids, the volunteer program at the county garden program, and other agriculture and nature based programs. No doubt you will meet a beekeeper. Beekeepers are not just people who keep bees. They are part of your community and most love nature on all levels. Beekeepers give generously to affiliated programs, as they are all connected within the communities in which we live.

List courtesy of http://www.nhbad.com/

Hive Update

We're closing in on honey harvesting time. I did a hive check up yesterday (our first in almost a month) and I was generally a bit disappointed with the progress of our ladies. Not as much honey as I was expecting. This could be due to several reasons: high bee populations combined with a poor nectar flow, queen mortality, but is most likely due to the fact that we had a swarm smack during the middle of nectar season. It killed our productivity. Live and learn, I guess.

-

Most interesting observations this time around:

-

-I found our Mud Honey queen in the upper deep. She had an excellent egg laying pattern and this hive will shortly have a huge influx of workers. A little too late. Most importantly, it was NOT our green queen. La reina has been replaced! This probably hurt our productivity significantly which was a bummer since I had such high hopes for this hive. We're wondering if perhaps this hive swarmed as well and we just didn't catch it. A few factors are puzzling about that theory though: first off, they have plenty of room; the two supers on top are practically empty. Secondly, our green marked queen had clipped wings, making it difficult for her to fly. So I'm not sure how she would have swarmed. It's possible that she died in the hive and the population suffered significantly in the time it took for the hive to requeen. I guess we'll never know.

-

-Last time we had a bee post, I mentioned how the swarm hive had a very naughty queen. Here's the deal. When you get a hive, you put the bees in one deep and then add an additional deep and honey supers on as the bees need more room. When we collected this swarm from the tree, however, we were worried that the bees would find the one deep box to be too small a cavity and chose to look elsewhere for hive location. Since we didn't have a second deep, we added a honey super. The differences between the two (besides size): the deeps had plasticel foundations, the supers had genuine beeswax foundations. Lesson learned: Bees greatly prefer beeswax foundations and will thumb their noses at the plasticell, if given the opportunity. So our queen started laying her eggs in the shallow super (where the honey is supposed to be stored) rather than in the deeps. Naughty queen!

-

Last time we had placed a queen excluder between the bottom honey super (where the egg laying was occurring) and an upper one, hoping that the bees would start to fill in the top super with honey. We also sprayed down the plasticel, in the hopes that the workers would start to draw out the comb.

-

When I checked yesterday, I observed the queen still holding forth on the bottom super. Bad, bad queen. Having pulled out the frame on which she was located, I gently encouraged (read: pushed) her onto one of the deep foundations. This is a tricky process: hurt/kill your queen with a clumsy finger and you've just set your hive back by weeks. Now that the queen was in the upper deep, I moved the queen excluder down to below the lower super. Hopefully our ladies will start filling the supers with honey now that they will no longer be occupied by brood.

I'll keep you posted on our progress.

Bee Bearding. For real this time.

I'm sure my dad just winced when he read the title of this post. "For real this time"? * Groan.* I thought I taught my daughter proper grammar. Sorry Papa. But at least I didn't say "For reals this time". Seriously, some folk might just say that. For reals.

Ok, moving on.

At last, a proper bee bearding photo. According to my Mama, they've been doing this all week. Hanging out on the hive front porch during the evening, cooling off. Like I explained to Quinton last night, the bees often appear to look like a man's beard, clustered around the hive mouth. Not a beard that I'd be thrilled about to have covering my face*. Reminds me a bit of this dude.

*Let me clarify a bit: Since I am of the female persuasion, I wouldn't be too thrilled about any beard on my face, but a bee beard looks especially unappealing.

Photo O' the Day: High Temp Beekeeping

Oh, it is hot, Hot, HOT! Here is a quick pic from beekeeping the other day. Note that the hair on my forehead is soaked. I discovered the other day that our wee little ladies can get a stinger through my jumpsuit. It was unfortunate as it occurred the day before STP, leaving me with a rather sore shoulder for the bike ride. Fortunately, I'm not swelling up too much these days. Anyway, I now wear thick sweat pants and a long sleeve shirt beneath my jumpsuit, making beekeeping a rather sweaty, stinky affair. A few days ago we were discussing 'bearding', which is when the bee ladies cluster on the outside of their hive during hot weather. It looks a bit like the picture (above) although more concentrated nearing the hive entrance. We'll occasionally spray down the front of the hives with sugar water after opening them up for inspections; we've found that they calm down more rapidly after the abrupt disturbance of hive inspections. So, these ladies aren't really bearding, they're soaking up sugar water. Close enough though.

Hive Cooling Strategies

Seattle is currently in the middle of a rather massive heat wave.

-

In an effort to keep the hives cool, Karin placed wet towels over the hives.Here is our Mud Honey Hive (above) and our humble little swarm hive (below).

One note about the swarm hive: When we first captured this swarm, we only had one deep deep and one shallow super. We were concerned that they would soon swarm again if only given the deep hive, due to the sheer mass of bees that left our original Blue Moon Hive. So we put on the additional shallow and then later purchased the second deep hive (note the unpainted wood of the new deep box). The deeps were filled with plastic frames; the shallow boxes contained pure wax frames.

-

Clearly our bees are wax snobs. The workers pulled out the wax comb, all the while turning up their noses at the platicicell foundations. Naturally, our queen laid her eggs in the cells that were fully drawn out; those of the wax foundations. This wouldn't be a problem except that the drawn foundations belong to the shallow supers, the place were honey, not brood, is supposed to be deposited. Our check today revealed that the bees have begun to slowly draw out the plasticell foundations of the deeps but continue to use the wax foundations as well nesting. Bad bees!

-

So we're conducting a bit of an experiment. We placed a queen excluder between the two honey supers, prohibiting the queen from using the new wax foundations for nefarious breeding purposes. On second though, we probably should have placed the excluded one box down, but didn't have the time to comb through the bottom super, looking for our queen and booting her down to the lower deeps. We'll keep you updated.

Bee Update

The ladies are thirsty. This morning the pond was alive with busy bees, zooming in to collect water for hive cooling activities.

The girls don't know how lucky they are, having a stream that meanders past their front door. Honeybees use water to dilute the honey and to cool the hive during hot weather. Foragers bring water to the hive and deposit it into cells; hive bees then beat their wings furiously to evaporate the celled honey, lowering the overall temperature of the hive.

This morning mom and I did a quick hive inspection. Things, in general, are looking pretty good. Each hive has 2-3 supers that are quickly becoming heavy with honey. The Blue Moon and Swarm Hives have excellent brood patterns and lots of eggs. The Mud Honey Hive is awash in capped brood but we noted an absence of eggs and uncapped brood. We're going to continue to monitor that hive closely.

There are a few things that we've noticed with our bees as of late:

-

• The ladies have become a wee bit more territorial as their honey stores have increased. More to protect=more aggressive. When we first introduced the bees to their hives, they were sweet and gentle. Now, not so much. Mom still handles the hives without gloves (After my run in with The Bee Sting that caused a nasty infection, I've yet to return to handling the ladies bare-handed) but we suit up entirely when doing full inspections.
• The sound of the hive changes, depending on their mood. We've become good listeners. Upon first opening up a hive and spraying with sugar water, the hive emits a gentle, calm humming. Yet upon moving individual boxes and delving deeper into the hive, the sound changes to a more agitated buzzing. Frankly, they're probably rather ticked off and are letting us know about it. It also may be that there are more bees swarming in the vicinity by the time we get down to the lower layers, but I don't think this accounts for the abrupt change in tone, just the intensity of the sound.
• Keeping a bee diary has been really helpful. Today we were able to go back in our journal to read about the queen cells that we observed in the Mud Honey Hive. Coupled with a lack of eggs observed today, we're forming a timeline of happenings.
• Generally, the amount of swelling I experience after a bee sting has been decreasing. Thank god.

Seattle Urban Farm Store?!

Photo credit here.

-

Oh, Seattle! You are such a nifty city. You allow chickens, ducks, goats, and honeybees within your city limits.

-

But why is it that I have to travel for miles outside of the city to purchase supplies for my dear chicks and bees? Why do you not have an urban farm supply store?

-

Anyone interested in starting a farm store with me? We could call it The Urban Farm. Or The Seattle Farm Store. The Seattle Farm Company? How about The Farm Company? Seattle Farmers Supply. The Urban Chicken. Oh, I like that one!

-

Anyone, anyone?

Bee Update

I did a quick checkup on the bee ladies last week. I almost don't want to say this, in fear that something terrible is going to happen...but: all three hives looked good. Our Mud Honey hive is giant; I found the number of bees to be rather overwhelming. Didn't see the queen, but she had a good egg laying pattern. We also have three honey supers on that hive so I'm hoping that the colony feels that it has adequate space to continue growing and storing honey. Please don't swarm.

Our Blue Moon hive was also looking good. They recently released their new queen from her cage and she had just begun to place some eggs in the prepared cells. We were initially worried that this hive was honey-bound, meaning that the queen had no place to lay her eggs because they frames were filled with honey, but she has an excellent space in the lower deep. We're keeping our fingers crossed. Most pleasing of all, our swarm hive queen (the former Blue Moon queen) is doing well and has an excellent egg laying pattern. Check out the capped brood (above). It doesn't get much more complete than that!

I also snapped a few (somewhat fuzzy) pictures of a new worker been emerging from her cell. She has chewed most of the way through the cap and is making her way into the world.

We have one family member that is definitely not pleased with our bees. Bailey. Perhaps it is his bear-like appearance, but whenever he wanders into close proximity of the hives, the guards zoom over and badger him mercilessly. He, too, has been stung a few times. Nowadays, when we prepare to open up the hives, he turns tail and seeks shelter as far as possibly from the angry bee ladies, in this case: inside the house, upstairs, down the hall, in the bathroom, and behind the toilet. Poor old dog.

Honeybee Life Cycle

I've been meaning to put up this post for a while...So, without further ado:

THE LIFE CYCLE OF A HONEY BEE

Artist Alison Schroeer

The following is my rather unscientific description of the honeybee life cycle. If you would like further reading, stroll on over here, or, for a nifty pictorial step-by-step version, click here.

In a well functioning hive, the queen bee is the only honey bee capable of reproducing and sustaining the colony. When the queen hatches, she is called a virgin queen. She leaves the hive and does a mating flight, where copulation with male honey bees, called drones, occurs. She is now a mated queen.

Upon her return to the hive, she begins her queenly duties: laying eggs. The queen lays a tiny white egg into an empty cell that has been specially prepared and cleaned by worker bees. (See illustration, above). A good queen will lay thousands of eggs per day. After three days, the egg hatches and a small larva emerges (part two of the illustration). The larva goes through five stages (or stars). The larva is referred to as "the brood" and is fed and cared for by worker bees.

In the last stage (on the 9th day of the larva's existence), the a cap is placed upon the cell by nurse bees and the larva pupates. Up to a week later, the brand new honey bee emerges from her cell and begins life in the colony. The length of time for the above-described process varies, depending on the type of bee. For example, a queen emerges from her cell in 16 days, a worker in 21 days and a drone (male) in 24 days. The life of a an adult worker bee is hard; she may only live up to three or four weeks before dying.

Scientific artist Alison Schroeer kindly granted me permission to use her lovely bee life cycle illustration. I looked through hundred of life cycle depictions on the web and this one was the best. Thank you, Alison! You can find her more work on her website, Schroeer Scientific Illustration.

Photo O' the Day: Sweet Nectar

We've stopped feeding our bees sugar syrup for the season so this picture is a bit dated. A while back we spilled some syrup on the top board and the ladies swooped down to take advantage of this unexpected sugary bonanza.

The Queen and Her Cage

Here are a couple photos of our new Mud Honey Queen. She's the one that was piping yesterday as she was being placed into the hive. Sort of a: "I have ARRIVED! All you other queens better watch out!". Normally, this queen, upon release from her cage, would go around and stab all the other queens to death. The other queens were laid by our original queen, before she departed with the swarm. They are still within their cells and consequently can't defend themselves from the pointy end of our present queen. Since we didn't want to leave anything to chance, we did her dirty work by dispatching all of the yet-to-be born queens. This queen is marked with a green dot, indicating that she was born in a year ending in a '9', in this case 2009. Her dot is somewhat visible in this picture.

Piping Queen

Yesterday as we were placing our new queen into the hive, she started piping. It was LOUD. According to Wikipedia:

Piping describes a noise made by virgin and mated queen bees during certain times of the virgin queens development. Fully developed virgin queens communicate through vibratory signals: "quacking" from virgin queens in their queen cells and "tooting" from queens free in the colony, collectively known as piping. A virgin queen may frequently pipe before she emerges from her cell and for a brief time afterwards. Mated queens may briefly pipe after being released in a hive. The piping sound is variously described as a children's trumpet tooting and quacking. It is quite loud and can be clearly heard outside the hive. The piping sound is created by the flight motor without movement of the wings. The vibration energy is resonated by the thorax.

Piping is most common when there is more than one queen in a hive. It is postulated that the piping is a form of battle cry announcing to competing queens and the workers their willingness to fight. It may also be a signal to the worker bees which queen is the most worthwhile to support.

The piping sound is a G♯ or A♮. The adult queen pipes for a two-second pulse followed by a series of quarter-second toots.[2] The queens of Africanized bees produce more vigorous and frequent bouts of piping.

By the way, that is not my video, above. I borrowed it from youtube.

Bee Swarm Photos

Here are the swarm photos from last week. Thanks for your patience. The bees consolidated around two branches in an evergreen tree in our neighbor's yard. They were understandably a bit concerned by the thousands of bees zinging around their property. Fortunately, and unbeknownst to most folks, honeybees are quite gentle when they swarm as they have no hive [home] to defend and they have gorged themselves on honey. We didn't even use smoke, just a few squirts of sugar water on the hive to entice them in. Our girls were about 20 feet off the ground; too high for our ladders. I wish we had pictures of the actual swarm retrieval; but sadly, we were a bit preoccupied with other bee-related tasks. Papa perched on top of a ladder in a full bee suit and used several cutting devices attached to windsurfer masts. Once the branches were cut, he delicately lowered them to the ground and I placed the branches into their prepared box. Once the bees decided that the box was an acceptable new home, the workers align toward the hive and extend their abdomens in the air, fanning the release of Nasonov pheromones.

And then, en masse, the bees walk into the hive. It's actually pretty spectacular to witness. I sat on the ground and watched. And the whole time they were marching, I was humming:

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching one by one,
The little one stops to suck his thumb
And they all go marching down to the ground
To get out of the rain, BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Random songs have a way of getting stuck in my head but this one seemed rather appropriate.

Hive Update

I'm still waiting for swarm photos. Sorry for the delay. In the meantime, here is a quick update on the State o' the Hives. Last time I posted bee news, our Blue Moon Hive had swarmed and we'd captured the swarm into an empty bee box. Initially, we wanted to combine the swarm hive and the original Blue Moon back together in the old location in an effort to save on equipment and keep our time commitment reasonable. After consulting with various folks, however, it became clear that combining the hives back together was a wee bit risky and frankly, we should get used to the fact that we now had three good hives. So I trucked down to Lakewood to pick up more equipment from a delightful old man named Harvard (thanks to David for the resource!). On Tuesday I spent the day putting the new frames together and adding boxes onto the existing hives.

Here is our new swarm hive [above]. We need to think of a good name for it. Also, I saw our old marked queen in the swarm hive laying eggs, a good sign [top photo]. This is actually the first time that I've seen her as she proved quite elusive while living in the Blue Moon Hive.

As for the Mud Honey hive, I think things are going well although I can't be certain. We had placed our queen within a large wire cage attached to one of the frames.

Last time we looked, it appeared that the hive had accepted her since they were feeding her and didn't appear to be exhibiting aggressive behavior. When I checked this week, they had freed her from her cage by eating away the confining comb. Those crafty bees! I wanted to give her a bit of space so I refrained from pulling apart the hive to get visual confirmation of her existence. We're keeping our fingers crossed on this one.

These ladies are still a little testy; they're probably ticked off from having their hive torn asunder so many times. As I turned away from taking this picture, one of the guard bees zipped over and stung me on the cheek. Hump. A little too cheeky, if you ask me.

Stuck

For some reason, I find the picture of a honeybee with her head tangled in my bee brush to be hilarious. Maybe it's because I know that frantic buzzing sound that goes along with this action.

We use the brush to sweep bees off of hive components, such as the removing the feeder, in order to refill it. Often, our little girls will get temporarily stuck in the bristles.

Help! Get me outta here!

I'll come rescue you!