Bee-On-Bee Violence

I've learned an important lesson this month and that lesson is how to better manage an apiary.

This year I had five hives in one location, something that was new for me. Four of the hives were NWC hives, New World Carniolan. I've found them to be healthy and gentle, a bee that is easy to manage. The other hive was an experiment, they were MH bees. Minnesota Hygenic. These bees are a fairly new variety and they have one trait that caught me by surprise: they are prone to robbing honey from other hives.

The MH hive was very strong coming into the Fall, as strong as my more established NWC hive. I suspected these two strong hives were the two that brought the smaller hive to its end last month, but this month I learned that the large NWC hive was not to blame. The MH hive recently robbed the large NWC hive of all of its honey and they have died as well.

Robbing is not a good thing, the invading hive overwhelms the defending hive and both hives end up with dead bees. The defending hive in this case lost so many bees that they were unable to keep their hive warm. By the time I noticed there was a problem with the hive all of the bees were dead, the cold November temperatures froze and killed the survivors of the initial invasion.

This means that the MH hive has over 100 lbs of honey in it at this point, much more than they will need to survive the winter. Since the weather is so cold now I plan to leave things where they are and focus on what I'm going to do in the spring. With the loss of this NWC hive I don't think I'll be able to repopulate the hives myself.

This big NWC hive was my favorite one and I'm sad to see it gone.

Sometimes bigger isn't better

The harvest this year wasn't too good, only fourteen frames of honey. Of those fourteen five are only partly ready to go and they are dark honey so we'll be processing those by hand, no extractor. The other nine went through the extractor I'm borrowing from a friend.

Using an extractor to spin the honey out of the frames was supposed to be easier than the old crush-and-strain method but I have to say for only nine frames it isn't worth the extra setup and cleanup. I was expecting to have at least 30 frames but found that most of the hives didn't have any honey for me this year. Only two hives produced enough honey for me to take some!

The best part of this is that the frames I put through the extractor will be ready to go next year with the wax comb waiting to be filled. This is great for preventing a booming hive from swarming, when they run out of wax comb the queen stops producing bees and the hive splits. That is a good thing if you can get two hives out of it but if you send thousands of bees flying into a city that is a bad thing.

Preparing the farm bees.

I made a trip out to the farm to check on the two new hives. Last month they had little to no honey stored and weren't drawing new comb. When I checked on them now they still hadn't drawn any comb but they did have enough honey to make it through the Winter. Probably. One hive was a little light, probably about 40 lbs of honey stored. The other is good, with about 55 lbs stored. If we have a mild winter they will eat about 20 lbs and a cold winter will take about 50 lbs so I am taking a bit of a risk with the lighter hive.

While I was going through the hives I removed the crazy cross comb from before, I didn't have enough drawn frames to give proper comb guides so the bees went off of the frames in a few places. Since the comb won't be used until the Spring there's no harm in removing it now.

After inspecting both hives all I had left to do was to reduce their entrances for the winter, but I didn't bring anything along to do that with. I grabbed a few pine branches of the right width and broke them down to the right length and put them in place, I think it will work just fine.

Just one hive left to check, I'll get to that one tomorrow.

A hive lost?

The new hive in my back yard was not very active so I wasn't too surprised when I opened it up and found the hive nearly empty. Further investigation revealed a queen and about 50 workers alive and little to no brood. There wasn't any sign of disease but I set aside some comb that had scattered capped worker brood for further investigation.

My diagnosis is that the hive was robbed of all of its honey and with the cool weather the bees couldn't bring in enough nectar to keep the hive going. Furthermore the stronger hives in the yard continued to pester the weak hive. There were a few spiders and a few wax moths in the hive but the comb was still in good shape which means the hive crashed sometime in the past month.

I should have reduced the entrance size when the weather got cold and the activity slowed, the large entrance allowed the stronger hives to overcome the defenders and steal the honey. My decision now is do I let this queen and her small cluster of workers die or do I try and save them? I know the answer is that I should let them die but I am curious what would happen if I gave them some honey and protected the hive from further robbing. I put in a division board feeder and closed up the entrance to only a single bee width entrance and put the hive back in the yard. Once I did this the outside of the hive was covered in bees, a few of them nasanoving but most just trying to get into the hive where the top entrance used to be. After a day this activity ceased (the weather also turned cold). I plan to check on this hive in a few days to see how many bees are left alive in the box and to check if they have taken in the feed.

Even if the queen survives until the Spring I know that this hive won't produce much next year, they'll continue to be a weak hive. At this point I've got nothing to lose with the hive (other than the honey I put into it) so I'll learn what I can from this failure.

Harvesting honey by absconding

I finished with the MH hive yesterday, the third box was full of honey but half of the box was filled with cross comb, to get the first frame out I had to tear through the honeycomb and make a huge mess. I pulled out three frames and got the bees off of them as best I could. The rest of the honey was going to be even harder to harvest.

This was a problem because the bees had a box with no guides in it, so they made the comb in a different direction than the frames. It works fine for them, but it makes it hard on the beekeeper. I decided to try a different method of harvesting, I set the box of honey above the hive, separated by an open box and an inner cover. The idea is that when the sun goes down and the temperatures drop the bees will go down into the hive and leave the honey. The beekeeper then collects the honey with only a few bees left on it.

My problem is that I did this in the afternoon when the bees were the most active. This set off a very vigorous robbing/defensive behavior as all of the hives in the apiary started collecting this honey. After getting stung twice when being nowhere near the hive I declared the yard off limits for the rest of the day.

Before dawn the next day I collected what was left in the box, the bees collected most of the honey that was there but I will still have some. Most importantly, I learned that this will only work when done just before dusk. I'll be trying it with another hive tomorrow.

Also interesting is that this morning there were hundreds of bees looking for water, the pool I have for them only had a small puddle left and they were all over it. All of the honey they collected needed to be diluted down so they could reprocess it and store it. I could probably collect the honey again, but I've stressed that hive enough this Fall. I'll let them go into Winter heavy, the honey I would have collected lost to my learning experience.

No honey here...

I went out to take some honey off of the Minnesota Hygienic hive, my plan was to take the top two or three but I forgot how much time it takes to harvest a frame of honey without using chemicals to repel the bees. The top two boxes didn't have any honey, they were full of bees who were building wax comb, which is odd given the time of year. Another odd thing about this hive is that in the warm afternoon there is a flurry of activity at the entrance, the level of activity I'd see on a summer day when the temps were around 85.

I took the two boxes off and shook the bees onto the grass in front of the hive one frame at a time, I ran out of time (had to head to work) and ended up leaving three frames behind in one box with a mental note to visit this hive again soon.

How can a bee survive without a beekeeper!

I haven't looked at a single hive in about 6 weeks now. This is the longest I've gone without checking up on the ladies, but everything was looking good last I checked. This time of year the varroa mite becomes a significant concern but I think my hives will pull through another year without any treatments. Every hive is new this year or had a lengthy break in the brood cycle earlier in the year to keep mite numbers down. This is how the Russian honeybee keeps varroa in check, when there aren't any young bees in the hive the varroa mite can't reproduce.

The best part about this break is that I'm proving what I claim, that beekeeping doesn't have to be a lot of work. The bees know how to keep their hive healthy and they know how to put away honey for the winter. I enjoy working with them but it is good to know that I don't have to.

Of course, when I do open them up next, I may be eating these words. Without any honey.

The First Loser!

Our honey was awarded second place at the state fair, very exciting! We've got all sorts of plans on entering multiple categories in the future, but we'll see how well that motivation holds out over the next year.

Most notable is the 15.1% moisture content of the honey. Honey sold in a supermarket typically has about a 20% moisture content and really good honey has a 16% moisture content. Given the wet year we've had I'm quite impressed that the bees were able to bring the moisture down to such a low level. I'd bet that with a more careful harvesting we could bring that number down below 15%, although I'm not sure if there would be much benefit to that.

For our large fall harvest I borrowed a tan-genital extractor from a friend, it needs significant cleaning but all he asked for in return was a portion of the extracted honey and a clean extractor. I thought I was getting an amazingly good deal but now that I see how much cleaning is needed I think we're both getting a good deal!

The Silver Lining

I hadn't checked on a pair of hives I have out on a friend's farm in a while and my parents were in town for a visit so we put together 2 boxes and 20 frames and went out to see the bees. When we got there I found that both hives were healthy and doing well but they were pretty light, not enough honey to make it through the winter at this point.

We're just getting out of the annual Summer dry spell and in hindsight the bees didn't have much to forage on before the heat came on. They were started from a split I made this year and I'm expecting that they will probably be OK once the fall nectar flow starts up. I ended up not needing to use either of the two boxes I made, they both had at least ten frames that weren't drawn yet. From what I saw they hadn't drawn any comb at all in the last four weeks.

The best news in this is that I won't have any honey to harvest from those hives. It would be good if I did, but not having to harvest from that location this year means less work for me!

Participation Ribbon?

This year we're trying something we haven't done before, we are entering some of our honey in the Nebraska State Fair. We had grand plans to enter in multiple categories: Extracted Honey, Comb Honey, Beeswax, Photography. When the deadline came (today) all we have ready is 4 lbs of honey. Since we haven't done this before we're not sure if it should be categorized as "Light" or "Extra Light". A little searching on the web brought up this wonderful image which clearly indicates we have "Extra Light" honey in this particular batch.

People are sometimes surprised to hear that honey has different colors and tastes that depend primarily on what flower the honey came from. The honey most people buy in the supermarket is blended from many individual colors and flavors, they do their best to keep any variety out of the honey so the consumer knows they are buying the same honey every time.

If you haven't tried varietal honey yet head out to your local farmer's market and see what you can find, there is probably someone there who will has free samples of at least three different varieties. They can give away tastes like this because once people realize what they are missing they are sure to make a purchase!

The National Honey Board has a great pdf available that describes 21 of the most popular honey varietals in the United States:
http://www.honey.com/downloads/varietalguide.pdf

Plants put sugars in other places too.

I got some interesting news from a friend who has a couple of my hives on her land. The mid-summer dearth has arrived and the bees are finding other sources of sugar for their hive as the flowers become fewer and farther away.

There are many grapes planted a short distance from the hives and the bees have been spotted collecting grape juice and taking it back to their hive! Birds peck holes in the grapes and this gives the bees access to the juice inside. I know that bees will collect most anything sweet when flowers aren't available but this will be the first honey I've dealt with that is from a fruit and not a flower.

If I'm lucky the honey will be a very odd color, in some areas bees will produce blue honey from local berries.

8,000,000 flowers

I've run out of boxes.

With quadruple the number of hives this year and a lot of healthy bees I'm finding that I always need more wood then I have. As the bees fill the boxes with honey I have to keep adding more to the stack. This means the hive grows taller and taller as the girls collect honey.

I'm trying something new this year, a friend of mine has a very nice honey extractor that I can use. We've come to an agreement and I'll be picking it up in the next week. Until now I've only done the "crush and strain" method for getting honey out of the hive which basically consists of using a knife to cut the honeycomb out of the frames and then forcing the honey through a filter which separates the wax from the honey, or I leave the honey in the wax as comb honey.

An extractor spins the frames to pull the honey out of the comb without destroying the comb (when done correctly). It takes four times the energy and resources of 1lb of honey to make 1 lb of beeswax so keeping the wax intact lets the hive produce more honey. More importantly though having drawn comb ready to put in the hive lets me manage the bees better, I can use it to better convince the bees to do things that I want them to do. I try asking nicely but that doesn't always work!

Laying Workers

My friend's hive is indeed doomed. I conferred with a couple other beekeepers and learned that in a queenless hive the workers will make queen cells with drones in them. Since they haven't had any new workers in the last month the hive will continue to decrease in population until the bees can't keep pests out like wax moths. At that point they plan to harvest any honey in the hive and keep the equipment in good shape for next year. In the Spring they'll be getting another package of bees with a new queen and some experience under their belts.

Workers, Drones, and the Queen

The honeybees I keep are Apis mellifera, also known as the European honey bee. They come in three types: a worker, a queen, and a drone. Most of the bees are workers, like their name says they do the work in a hive. The hive also has some drones, in the Spring and the Summer there are enough that you can find one without too much searching but in the Fall and Winter it can be hard to find a drone. The hive also has one queen.

When the queen lays an egg she decides if the egg will be fertilized or not. If she lays a fertilized egg it develops into a female, so it will be a worker or a queen. If the egg isn't fertilized it will be a male, this is a drone.

If the hive decides it needs a new queen the workers will tend to an egg in a special way and ensure that it turns into a queen. They do this by putting the egg into a larger cell (if the queen didn't lay it there already) and feeding the young bee a lot of extra food with special qualities. This food is called royal jelly.

Fuzzy or Shiny?

Some friends of mine started their first hive this spring. They've had a few challenges so far this year including losing their queen a couple months ago. They weren't sure if the queen was replaced or if the hive swarmed but they knew that they ended up with a new queen. It's been about a month since that happened and there haven't been any new workers, only drones. This means one of two things, either the queen couldn't mate in their area and is only laying drones or the hive has laying workers. Either way without new workers being produced the hive is doomed.

Some good news came along though, not far from their hive someone found a new bee hive between some hay bales. This is great news because they could get their old queen back and the hive would be saved! They asked for my help in recovering the swarm and I gladly accepted. When we got to the farm where they keep their hive the owner was happy to see us and we went over to see the bees. While we were walking over there I was telling them about getting calls about bee swarms and how the first question you should always ask is "Are they fuzzy or shiny?". I then realized I should have asked that question long ago because they told me that these bees were shiny.

This meant that the "bees" were actually wasps. Bees are fuzzy, wasps are shiny. We walked down to make sure and indeed these were yellow jackets. This meant that their hive was still doomed, without a mated queen the workers would die off and without young workers to replace them the hive will become weaker and weaker until there are too few bees to keep the hive working.

An early harvest

A hive that was started from a package this spring was getting too tall to work alone so I decided an early harvest was in order. Normally I would wait until September to harvest honey. There are two popular methods for getting honey out of a bee hive, one is to put a chemical into the hive that drives the bees down and away from the smell. Another method is to use a blower to blow the bees out of the boxes you want to take. I used a leaf blower to do this in the past and it does work but I wasn't happy with the results, the bees were upset.

My method for getting the honey out of the hive is to remove it one frame at a time. I then shake the frame about three times over the entrance of the hive which removes about 95% of the bees when done correctly. It also doesn't seem to upset them at all! I then use a brush to quickly brush off the few remaining bees. This also doesn't upset them when done correctly. At first I used the brush to slowly push the bees off of the honey, this got them quite upset. A quick flick with the brush though and they don't seem to mind.

I removed nine frames this way, leaving the tenth frame because the honey wasn't completely capped. Bees know to cap the honey cell when the honey has less than 15%-20% water in it, depending mainly on humidity. The reason they cap the cell with wax is to keep the honey dry, the bees remove so much water from the nectar when turning it into honey that it will actually draw moisture out of the air! A capped honey cell is airtight so the honey stays dry enough that no bacteria or fungus can grow in it. That is the reason why honey will keep forever, as long as it is kept in a sealed container.

In a commercial honey operation they will harvest any honey/nectar, even when the nectar isn't cured into honey yet. They put the honey into a "hot house" to evaporate off the water until it is under 20% moisture content and then they extract and bottle it. Smaller honey producers will instead choose not to harvest a frame of honey until it is at least 70% capped. Since I plan to enter this honey in the state fair I decided to only harvest fully capped honey to keep the moisture low. I also plan to avoid heating the honey because that also degrades the quality of the honey.

These nine frames are now sitting on a counter, if I wasn't going to harvest the honey from them yet I would put them in a freezer to make sure any wax moth eggs that are hiding on the wood frames didn't have a chance to hatch. Once I separate the honey from the wax I should end up with 40-50 lbs of honey.

A new queen in a new castle

This evening I opened up a swarm that I hived on June 18th. I put them in two boxes, a deep box and a medium box, both ten frame. Their frames were completely empty, only wood surrounding where I wanted them to build their comb. Given that all beeswax foundation is full of nasty chemicals and I'm not able to make my own foundation I've been using a trick where I use a wedge top bar but no foundation, I just turn the wedge on its side (after cleaning up the messy wood bits) and nail it in place. I last looked at them on July 19th and found that most of their comb was being drawn as I wanted and I removed a few pieces that weren't.

I'm proud to report that after that small correction that the bees completely drew out the medium box, nearly perfectly! The hive was packed full of bees and looked very healthy and their mood was very mild, which was a pleasant surprise given that we are entering the time of year when the nectar flow slows to a stop and the bees get a little grumpy. I know that this queen's grandmother was a NWC, New World Carniolan. Despite having opened the hive twice now I have yet to see the queen, she's doing a good enough job that I don't need to inspect her and I can forgive her odd brood pattern given that she's short on space with only 10 frames of comb. I was surprised to see that the other box was not yet drawn out at all. That explains why those 10 frames were packed so tightly with bees.

Given their reluctance to draw out the bottom box I added another medium with ten frames (also no foundation). I removed five drawn frames and alternated every-other frame with drawn and empty, now the top two boxes each have five drawn frames and five empty frames. This will be a bit of a mess because the corners of the drawn frames that have uncapped honey will get drawn out even deeper but I can take care of that later, I don't want to lose their comb drawing instinct. New swarms are great at making comb.

This hive came from a split I made this spring. I'll have to tell tell that story later, it is a good one. I ended up with one of the three hives having too many workers and too much brood and when the queens emerged it swarmed, ending up in this hive.

250,001 pets

I have four pets.

One of them is a Canis lupus familiaris, also known as Man's Best Friend. Her name is Osa and she loves to eat loaves of bread off of our counter.

The other three pets are something a bit more exciting. I have three bee hives in my back yard. It is true that I have about 250,000 bees in my yard but each individual isn't much of a pet. They only live for a few weeks and their individual lives aren't that exciting. Work, work, work. The hive as a whole though, it can live forever. It can be upset, happy, sick, or tired. Each hive has its own personality that I have to learn and work with. As far as pets go, they are very cool.

1 lb. of Honey

A worker bee will live for one month.
During that month she will fly for ten days.
In those ten days she will visit 2,600 flowers.
In her lifetime she will produce 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey.

750 bees work their entire lives to produce 1 lb. of honey.
2,000,000 flowers are visited to produce 1 lb. of honey.
55,000 miles are flown to produce 1 lb. of honey.
A farmer's market asks $6 for 1 lb of honey.