A change of plans.

I've decided to declare that I will post once a week. I'll also put a photo or video in each post.

Wish me luck!

Liquid Gold or Solid Gold?

For some reason honey that I harvest using a "crush and strain" method stays liquid for a long time, three years and counting in some cases. Honey I harvest using an extractor like most honey producers doesn't last very long, less than a year in most cases. I'm not sure why this is but it is one more reason not to use extractors unless you have too much honey to manage otherwise.

For most uses I actually prefer crystallized honey. It can be spread easily with a knife and it tastes the same although the texture is different. If the crystals are large it can be grainy and not so good but if the crystals are small you get what is called creamed honey which is my favorite form honey can take. I don't make much of it but I savor every bit that I do, if you haven't tried any you are missing out on one of the finer things in life.

I found myself in need of some liquid honey to sell to some friends so I decided to re-liquefy a few jars at the expense of some of their finer qualities. When honey is heated hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) is produced which isn't terrible for humans but it isn't desirable in honey. More importantly some enzymes are destroyed and the fragrance, taste, and appearance of the honey is altered. Because of these reasons it is best to use as little heat as possible when liquefying honey that has crystallized. I've found that a setting of "3" on my stove and a pot of water to distribute the heat do the job pretty well.

Pulling the Plug

The hive that went queenless and had laying workers from three weeks ago is no more (I hope). I went ahead with my plan of adding in a frame of eggs/young brood to convince them to generate their own queen but they didn't do that. With as many laying workers as there were I suspect that any cells which were young enough to become a queen had other eggs added to them which made them unusable for queen production.

I repeated this process of adding young bees for three weeks and only one queen cell was created. I knew it wasn't viable though because in order for it to contain a female bee it would have to be at least 22 days old. Queen bees do not stay in their cell that long, and furthermore by looking in the cell I could see that the young bee wasn't even close to pupating.

I decided that this hive simply wasn't going to requeen themselves. With that in mind I decided to attempt to combine them with another hive. The safest way to do this is to shake the bees out onto the grass and remove their old hive. The workers will either die or find their way into a new hive. I decided to do something with more risk to it and an opportunity to learn something new. I stacked the hive on top of a good hive with a single sheet of newspaper between them. The idea is that the workers will gradually remove this newspaper and by the time it is gone they will act as a single hive. The risk is if the bad hive doesn't play nice they can kill the queen in the other hive. Let's hope that doesn't happen!

Hopelessly Queenless

A new beekeeper who I offered to help called me with an odd report - her bees which were in two hives are now all in one hive! What happens is that a new queen that came with the package didn't work out. Sometimes the queen is killed by a beekeeper who wasn't careful enough but most times this happens it is because the queen needed to mate before she could start laying eggs. To do this the queen must leave the hive a few times and if a storm comes up or a clever bird spots her that is the end of the hive. Since the hive doesn't have any eggs in it the workers have no way to produce a replacement queen. In this case the bees had a solution though - they just moved next door and went to work there!

In my case I installed a single package out at a friend's house. I try to avoid this whenever possible because a single hive is difficult to tend, when something goes wrong having a hive to pull spare parts off of is by far the easiest fix. The donating hive is able to regenerate whatever you take from it - even the queen herself. Knowing this was risky I had plans to either split this hive or move a second hive out there at the earliest opportunity. My gamble did not work out though.

Yesterday I checked on the hive to ensure the queen was establishing a good brood nest and I was greeted by something I hadn't seen first hand before - laying workers. Normally around 1 in 1,000 worker bees have fully formed ovaries and the ability to lay eggs. Since these bees never mated they can only produce male offspring though. This is because male bees are haploid - unfertilized. That genetic trick is also how queens are able to decide to lay a male or female egg. In a normal hive the workers don't allow other workers to lay eggs, only the queen lays eggs. In fact, the mere presence of young bees in a hive suppresses the laying worker bees.

In this hive the queen that I got most likely wasn't mated so her first job was to leave the hive and search for male bees to mate with. Either she didn't make it back to the hive or she wasn't able to mate at that location. I think a bird ate her while she was out. Regardless of the cause this hive was hopelessly queenless, meaning they didn't have a queen or a young female bee to raise as a queen. In that situation the hive takes drastic measures to try and preserve its genetics. As the workers get more and more desperate they search for a queen - any queen. In my friend's case all of the bees moved right next door. In my case some of the workers just disappeared from my perspective. Perhaps they found a feral hive nearby, best of luck to them.

With the queen gone and without any brood the workers who were able now started acting like queens. They started laying eggs. This both calms the hive down and makes it chaotic at the same time. As you can see in this picture workers aren't very good at laying eggs. A queen will check a cell to ensure it is empty before laying in it - workers usually don't do that. A queen will lay the egg in the center of the cell, all the way on the bottom. Workers rarely have fully developed ovaries so many of their eggs look twisted and very few will actually produce a viable bee. Also workers don't have a long enough abdomen to reach the bottom well and they lack the instinct to do it correctly so the eggs are often on the sides of the cell.

The worst news is that once a hive is this far gone you can no longer simply introduce a queen to put things back in order. Most beekeepers advise to combine the laying workers into a queenright hive and chalk the queenless hive up as a loss. Most of the workers will integrate into the other hive and that hive will enjoy a significant boost in its workforce, not a bad solution. Since I'm in this more for the fun of it than anything else I'm trying something riskier but much more interesting. First I picked the hive up and moved it into my back yard so I could give it more attention. I shook the bees down into a single box and removed the other two boxes and put them in the freezer. Those boxes were full of drone eggs which weren't going to do anything for us but take up valuable comb space. Tomorrow I'll put the boxes onto some of my strong hives and they will take out the dead brood and eggs that will no longer hatch, a much nicer cleanup job than I could do. And now for the trick, I took a spare part from one of my strong hives - a frame of eggs. If the bees do what I hope they will turn some of these young female bees into queens. One of the queens will eventually mate and return to the hive to begin creating more workers. Until then I'll keep the hive going by putting brood into it from the other hives in the yard. If the workers don't start to raise a queen I'll give them more eggs and a second chance. If they still don't raise a queen I'll shake them into the grass and take the hive apart.

New Bees

I'm a member of the Nebraska Beekeepers and this year I've taken on two young boys as apprentice beekeepers. They are brothers who are both recipients of a beekeeping scholarship from our club which includes everything they will need to get started with beekeeping. If they fulfill their end of the agreement everything they received becomes theirs after one year. The program has been a great success and I'm very glad to be a part of it.

They got their bees the same day I got my packages (April 17), and from the same place! These were big packages, advertised as 4 lb packages but in reality they were about 4.5 lbs. Most packages are 3 lbs so these hives will start up even faster than what I'm used to. They put the packages into their boxes on their own on the 18th and I stopped by to answer questions and check on their queen yesterday. We had planned on doing it earlier but the weather has been very windy and rainy.

The good news is that both of their queens are laying and they both have some capped brood already (bees who are about a week old) so both hives are doing perfectly well. One hive had 8 frames fully drawn and full of brood, pollen, or nectar already. That means they need a second box and I recommended they stay well ahead of the bees with boxes. Their location has an abundance of everything a hive needs and I'm predicting a big challenge in keeping open comb in the hive to prevent swarming and another challenge in harvesting the abundance of honey they'll be getting.

The Many Faces of Death

The bees on the farm are indeed all dead. Both starved in the extra cold winter we had, they had honey that they didn't eat but the winter cluster can't move easily when it is very cold. The bees need to keep the queen in the 90s no matter how cold it is outside so they cling around her tightly. The cluster can eat any honey they are immediately adjacent to however they need the temperature to warm up a little for them to move the cluster over empty comb or a gap between boxes. A long string of very cold days means that the cluster won't be able to move over any gaps and then they will starve. That is what happened to the two on the farm.

Remember that hive that robbed the honey off of the other two hives in the fall? It stayed healthy through all of the winter and the hive stayed very heavy and full of honey. Then something very unexpected happened: The hive died. Why? I went through the hive to answer that very question. I found an abundance of mold and an unbelievable excess of uncapped honey. It appears that they weren't able to completely process their plunder from the late Fall and that was the very thing that did them in! There were no signs of disease other than the normal chilled brood that you almost always see in a winter kill.

I'm not entirely sure why but I do know that excess moisture in a hive over the winter is more dangerous than excess cold. The general thinking is that the excess moisture prevents the bees from clustering tightly and this in turn makes it impossible for the bees to maintain their 92+ degree temperature that the queen needs to produce new bees. Without new bees the hive will slow to a stop in the early spring when they should be accelerating at full speed.

With these unexpected losses and the expected losses confirmed I ordered some packages from a local beekeeper who was able to put them together with one week's notice. The queens will be Italian queens from a somewhat generic California breeder but at this point I can't be picky.

2010 has arrived

Although bees can sustain flight when air temperatures are over fifty degrees I hadn't seen any activity in my yard in the past weeks despite many days in the 50s. I checked on the MH hive throughout the winter so I knew they were doing well. I didn't open the hive, I put my ear against the side of the hive and listened to the sounds they were making and I picked up the bottom edge of the hive to make sure it wasn't too light. If either test indicated trouble there wasn't much I could do, but knowing the hive's status gave me a better idea of what to do when Spring does arrive.

Today I saw a bee make her way outside of the hive and turn around to scan her home. She flew side-to-side as she moved up and down the hive, making a mental image of what home looks like that she will reference for the rest of her life. I could tell by her behavior that this was her first time seeing the outside of her home, which makes sense because the bees that were old enough to venture outside last Fall are all dead by the time Spring arrives.

The crocus flowers in our yard are blooming and our big Maple is putting out a some pollen already. The bees aren't quite ready to take advantage of these yet but it was nice to see one of the ladies venture outside.

I haven't been out to the farm to check on the bees there in many months, my guess is that both hives are dead due to their late start last year and the cold winter we had. I hope to get out there soon to check on their status and make plans for the coming year.