Reflections on the year

As the year draws to an end, it is a time to reflect.  It is also a time to plan for the future; but right now, I’m stuck in the reflecting frame of mind.  My beekeeping passion started without a club and without a mentor.  In the first 2 years of this hobby, I started with 2 hives, a Beekeeping for Dummies book, and a lot of perseverance.   I jokingly tell others that I experienced every possible scenario and problem imaginable during these initial years.  A quick view of the propolis stained pages from the book which resided in my beginning toolkit can quickly ascertain these claims.  I will admit that I wasn’t very profitable and my bees didn’t flourish but I did learn a lot. 

I can certainly tell stories that occurred over the past 13 years.   Some are sad while others are sure to make you laugh until tears run down your face.  But what about this year?  What special things happened in 2014?

I could tell you about the 5000+ kids that had an opportunity to view my bees in an observation hive or the happenings with the USDA NC-SARE research grant which has taken up a considerable amount of time during the past two years.  Maybe you’d like to hear about the politics endured with state associations, the first queen that I instrumentally inseminated which laid eggs, the experience of marking 800 drones with tiny paint dots as they emerged, the successful formation of a local beekeeping club, the thousands of miles driven to assist other beekeepers, the hundreds of emails and phone calls responded too, the nucs and queens that went to beekeepers young and old, or the dozen or so presentations given to the non-beekeeping community about our crazy winged friends called the honeybee?  

Yes, these are things of special note but instead, there is something else that I want to share.  It is something that made me smile.  To some it won’t mean much, but to me it means a lot.   First, let’s set the stage.  We are at one of our local monthly club meetings.  There is a new attendee who recently found our club through our wonderful website.  I don’t want to embarrass her because I’d like to be sure she comes back; but she was very new to beekeeping and had a lot of questions.   But, I have to ask:  Who doesn’t have a lot of questions about bees?  Right?  If someone had all the answers, this beekeeping thing would be easy and we’d all be succeeding at it.

This scenario seems pretty normal for our meetings.  So, what about it made my day and year for that matter?  What could it possibly be? 

Well, you see, the questions were being answered by club members who had just started keeping bees this summer.    They had regularly attended the meetings and unbeknownst to themselves, they had learned a ton.  They were giving great answers! 

This thing we call a bee club, it does work.  It does have a purpose! 

Although I’d love to visit with every person who keeps bees, I realized I just couldn’t physically do it.  By using this club as a tool to teach others instead of adding even more miles onto my vehicles, I had hoped to be able to spread my knowledge and experiences even further and watch it grow exponentially.   Heck, I’m hoping to learn some things too.

So when you ask me to come to your bee yard and I ask if you might have time to take some photos of your bees and attend the upcoming meeting, I’m really not shirking my duties.  Instead, I’m able to tend to my bees – with 70 hives and counting that’s a lot for one person to do along with all my other responsibilities in life.  And you win too!  You win because not only will I be at the next meeting; but you’ll be able to pull from a vast array of experience from other beekeepers too.  Others win as well!  They get to hear about your bees and it just might help them keep their bees healthy. 

WIN!  WIN! WIN!

As you can see, our club is for beekeepers of all experience levels.  There is something for everyone to learn or share!   The 2014 December meeting marks the one year anniversary for the Hanover/Madison chapter of Southeastern Indiana Beekeeper Association.  Bring a friend and we’ll see you at the meeting!

Neonictinoid seed treatment targets the wrong bug

Very interesting news from Penn State.
 

You got to put this pesticide issue in terms that makes sense to those using it. Maybe this will do it!

Slugs are a huge issue for no-till soybean growers. Slugs have a natural predator: the ground beetle.  Neonicotinoid treatment on soybean seeds doesn't kill slugs (not an insect). BUT, the slugs can transmit the pesticide to ground beetles resulting in the destruction of 60% of these beetles. The result in the tests was a 5% reduction in yield. Yikes....

I say spread the word. What farmer wants a 5% reduction in their profit?

Read the story on the Penn State website

I have free bees for you

At our last club meeting, a newer member said, "My neighbor has some bees if anyone wants to come and get them.  They are free."  Immediately a hand rose in the air.  Because, after all, we all love free bees.  Right? 

"But wait a minute", chimed a more seasoned veteran.  "Are these bees in a hive?  Or, just exactly where are they living?"  A few text messages later, the response was "they have been living ON my neighbors pine tree".    How quickly the tone of the discussion changed but it became a quick lesson for all.  Honey bees don't typically live ON trees.

Yes, they may swarm and land on trees.  But, that isn't typical in mid October.  And, if they do, it is only for a day - not a permanent residence. 

There are many insects that are colored black and yellow.  Many of them are very aggressive and can put out a wallop of a sting.  So, before traveling 3 counties over for some free bees, be sure you ask a few questions first. 

 

Which leads to a question posed by the club members.  Can we have someone come and talk about the other types of insects that resemble honey bees? So, I'm looking for a speaker that can discuss bees - good, bad, and ugly as well as those that want to be bees but really aren't bees.  Any suggestions?

 

Moisture boards are a great help

For those of you who purchased ‘Easy Bee’ starter hives form me in the spring,  you may have noticed that your hive differs from some ‘traditional’ set up as you have a screened inner cover instead of the traditional wooden inner cover with a hole in the middle.  

Screened inner cover

Traditional wooden inner cover

I have found that the screened inner cover really helps with ventilation during the summer but you might be wondering, what do I do with this over the winter?   I recommend using a moisture board which fits nicely inside of the top of the screened inner cover.  

So what could cause the demise of your bees during the winter?  It is either starvation or moisture.  And, I have added a third item to this list – diseases from mite infestation.

      Mites are a whole topic by themselves.   Mites are basically virus machines.  They are out-producing the bees in numbers during August.  So, this was the ‘critical’ time to address them and curtail the spread of viruses to your young bees that will be expected to live all winter long.  These tiny menaces do not have a foolproof method for eradication so develop your plan and stick to it.

2    Sixty pounds of reserve honey stores is the minimum recommendation for our area.  A deep frame full of capped stores can weigh anywhere from 6 to 10 pounds.  So, that’d be 6 to 10 frames of deep foundation full of capped stores and some say you should plan on having as much as 12 –18 deep frames.   If you don’t have this by now, start feeding ASAP as time is running out.  Now, we switch to 2:1 syrup – that’s 2 parts sugar to 1 part water.  The days are shorter and cooler so the bees do not need the extra moisture to help cool the hive. (See the post about feeding.)

3    As for the moisture, the huddling cluster of overwintering bees produces a water vapor similar to the exhaled breath of air that we produce.  The cooler outside air can cause the moisture particles to condense and fall back down on the bees as water drops.  This in turn causes them to freeze.  So be cognizant of excess water in the hive and provide ventilation all winter.  By using a moisture board, it will absorb the moisture instead of allowing it to condense.  The screened inner cover therefore becomes a multipurpose tool to be used not only in the summer but also serves a purpose in your winter care.

The boards are fairly heavy and therefore if you are only purchasing 1 or 2 boards, it will cost over twice as much to have them shipped.  Therefore as a courtesy and to help keep costs down for our local club members, I have purchased a few more moisture boards than I need this year.   I will be bringing the extras to the October SIBA- Hanover/Madison meeting (Oct 9, 2014, 6:30PM at Hanover College).  They will be available at my cost which $5.50 per board at the meeting only. 

Is it time to feed?

Over the past 2 weeks, I've received a ton of emails and phone calls about feeding.

So, I'll start by admitting it.  I'm a believer in supplementing bees with sugar water and pollen supplements.   I get up every morning and take a handful of vitamins and other supplements myself.  It helps my body maintain a level of the necessary nutrients that I can't consume via meals.  I also provide my dogs, cat, and livestock with supplements.  I view feeding the bees the same way.

So, if you aren't a believer in feeding your bees, just disregard this post and go onto helping people establish their hives with your methods.  Please realize that we all are learning about bees and trying to save them.   If we had all the answers, we wouldn't have so many questions.  It isn't a time for 'hate' mail.  So, back to feeding . . .

It is important to note that I employ different feeding methods for STARTING A HIVE versus MAINTAINING AN ESTABLISHED HIVE.  I think overall we do a poor job of helping new beekeepers because we usually tell them the methods used once a hive is established and forget that it takes a different management style to establish the hive in the first place.  Most of the notes below are for those who have started a hive this past spring - whether it was a nuc or a package of bees.  But, there are some rules of thumb for the experienced beekeeper to use as well.

The bees can't make an entire diet off of just the food we feed them but it can really help them get established - especially when there is new foundation to be drawn out.  So, in the spring and yes in the summer, if it is needed, I encourage feeding 1:1 sugar water (that's 1 part water to 1 part sugar)  until 2 brood boxes have drawn foundation in all 20 deep frames.  This thinner syrup more closely mimics the nectar flow and also stimulates brood production.

In some cases, while the bees are in the mood to draw out wax, I encourage some beekeepers to keep feeding when they put a honey super on - only if the foundation is not drawn out. Having drawn wax is like a pot of gold when the honey flow starts the following season.  If the bees happen to cap off a little of the sugar water in the honey super, you can scratch off the cappings, put it back onto the hive and feed it back to them in the fall.  If there is room, they will move the food supply down to the lower boxes.

What kind of feeder?  Some sort of TOP FEEDER.  I highly encourage the use of the polystyrene (styrofoam) top feeders.  These feeders hold 3 gallons of syrup so when the bees are going through a quart a day, you are not running out to feed the bees every day.  You also do not disturb the bees when feeding them so this means you can feed at night, when it's raining, or just about any timeframe.  For me, it is a convenience factor.  DO NOT USE a feeder that sits on the front of your hive as this encourages robbing.

If you do not have a styrofoam top feeder, all is not lost but you do need to have some spare  equipment.  There are many options but one economical option frequently used employs canning jars with small holes drilled into the lids.  The canning jars are placed upside down on pencils or other sticks about 3/8" thick around the wooden inner cover hole.  The jars need to be surrounded by a hive body and cover in order to allow all the feeding to occur inside the enclosed hive.

When do I stop feeding?  The rule of thumb is that the bees need a minimum of 60 pounds of stored, capped, honey for the winter.  I usually try to ensure that the bees have this by Thanksgiving.

How do I know if I have 60 pounds?  Usually, you can tip the hive slightly forward from the back and tell.  However, a rule of thumb, is that there is approximately 6 to 10 pounds of honey in a deep sized frame.  So, 6 to 10 deep frames of capped honey would be the equivalent of 60 pounds.

What do I do if I don't have 60 pounds of capped honey?  Around the end of September or first of October when the weather starts to cool in the evening but yet you have warmer days, start supplementing with 2:1 sugar water.

Why 2:1 sugar water in the fall?  The consistency of the sugar water should be a thicker syrup in the fall.  The bees will not have to evaporate off as much water and can quickly cap it off.  The days are getting shorter and cooler so they won't need the water evaporation to help cool the hive.

How much do I feed them?  A rule of thumb is that 1 gallon of 2:1 sugar water will equate to approximately 1 pound of capped honey stores (assuming the foundation is already drawn out with wax).  So be prepared to feed as much as is needed to get to 60 pounds.

Do I mix the sugar water based on volume or weight?  There is such a slight difference that I don't think the bees care.  I usually use weight as a very quick measurement guide.  1 pound of water weight 8 pounds.  Sugar comes in 4 pound bags these days.  So a 1:1 mixture is 1 gallon of water with 2 bags of sugar (4 pounds each) and 2:1 is 1 gallon of water with 4 bags of sugar (4 pounds each).

Eviction Notice

The days are getting shorter, the leaves are showing their colors, and my hives are starting to smell like toffee (or some would say dirty socks) from the goldenrod pollen.  The end of another beekeeping season is drawing near as the drones receive their eviction notices. 

Drones, male honey bees,  live to eat and mate.   Heck, they don't even feed themselves nor do they have stingers to protect the hive.   But before all you guys think this is a great thing, you must know that they live for only one season.  They either die after their male part is ripped from their body during mating or the girls kick them out because they are eating too much food.

This is a short video with lots of drones (they are bigger) who are hanging out (mostly in the upper right hand corner) just hoping that they can get back in the door.  Occasionally, you'll see a bossy female worker bee herd them into the bachelor corner.  Unfortunately, the guys won't last long outside the hive without any food and most will be found laying in the grass tomorrow. 

So sorry, big dudes.  You really are an important and often overlooked piece of the honey bee life cycle.  We'll see you next spring!

Learn about a program which offers assistance for winter colony losses @ Sept Hanover/Madison SIBA meeting

The preliminary results from the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) 2013-2014 winter loss survey show that Indiana was one of the hardest hit states in the nation with an average respondent colony loss rate of 65%.

Yikes!   If you are among this group, what can you do?  Besides preparing for the upcoming winter, which the Farmer's Almanac is again predicting to be colder than normal, you might want to hear about a program established to help beekeepers recover from last year's winter losses.

At the next Hanover/Madison SIBA meeting, attendees will have the opportunity to meet Dave Poling, the Executive Director for the Jefferson County Indiana USDA Farm Service Agency.   He will explain the program entitled 'Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees, & Farm-raised Fish' (ELAP for short) which is part of the 2014 Farm Bill.  Learn about records needed, program benefit eligibility, and upcoming deadlines.

If you didn't experience losses, this meeting can also be important to you.  It is a great opportunity to start  discussions about how farmers and beekeepeers can work together for the betterment of both industries. 

When:  September 11, 2014  6:30PM

Where:  Geez Beez Apiary  7473 S River Bottom Rd Hanover, IN

Note:  If the weather is nice, we meet outside.  Bring a chair.

How do Varroa Mites know when to leave a hive?

Varroa mites are one of the single most detrimental stressors to honey bees.  Living off the blood of young bees and replicating alongside the capped, young honey bee larvae, they also rapidly spread viruses to the colony.  If the bite from the mites don't cause the bees' death, the viruses usually do.

Varroa mite on a bee.  Photo by Alex Wild  www.AlexanderWild.com

But, if you are a living organism that is constantly killing your host, how do you survive?

Researchers in Italy may have answer to this question. The results of their study are published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.  It suggests that varroa mites will stay within a hive with low levels of mite infestation.  There, they ride on the backs of the nurse bees which rarely venture far from the hive.  They can distinguish them from older foraging bees by the difference in their 'smell' - presumably by the chemical make-up contained in the wax coating in their backs. However, as the mite level increases, the odor differences become less and less distinguishable.  This allows the mites to attach to foragers where they can leave the hive on a regular basis.  Once outside the hive, these hitch hikers have a better chance of ending up in a neighboring hive as bees naturally drift between colonies.

So, now that we know the chemical odor that attracts varroa mites, my question is:  Could we make a trap for them baited with this odor?  Or, would it befoul the delicate balance of natural volatilized chemical compounds found within the hive?

Read more:
http://jeb.biologists.org/content/217/17/2998.abstract
http://entomologytoday.org/2014/08/29/how-do-varroa-mites-know-when-to-leave-honey-bee-hives-its-all-in-the-bees-wax/

Did you catch the lastest 'Buzz' in Bee Culture?

I'm excited to see the September 2014 issue of Bee Culture magazine.  When it arrives in the mail every month, it is always contains a wide array of interesting bee information that I can't wait to read.  But this month, it includes an article that I wrote about the advancements in queens we are trying to make in the Midwest through the cooperation of queen producers in the Heartland Honey Bee Breeders Cooperative.

Geez Beez Bottling Day

Early in the year, Geez Beez Honey made the decision to concentrate on bee production and sales  instead of honey production.  The reason:  the cold, harsh, long winter which resulted in a 60% bee loss for Indiana beekeepers.  

The sale of small colonies of bees known as nucs exceeded our expectations and taxed our available 'woman'power this spring.  But, the people that we met along the way made it all worthwhile. 

If you are a one of our customers who enjoy the sweet treats provided our bees known as 'world class flying machines', don't despair.   We didn't forget you!  We started bottling this week.

Drone production starts when colony size is right

Researchers at  Cornell University recently published the results online of a study entitled

"A critical number of workers in a honeybee colony triggers investment in reproduction". 

Abstract:  "Social insect colonies, like individual organisms, must decide as they develop how to allocate optimally their resources among survival, growth, and reproduction. Only when colonies reach a certain state do they switch from investing purely in survival and growth to investing also in reproduction. But how do worker bees within a colony detect that their colony has reached the state where it is adaptive to begin investing in reproduction? Previous work has shown that larger honeybee colonies invest more in reproduction (i.e., the production of drones and queens), however, the term ‘larger’ encompasses multiple colony parameters including number of adult workers, size of the nest, amount of brood, and size of the honey stores. These colony parameters were independently increased in this study to test which one(s) would increase a colony’s investment in reproduction via males. This was assayed by measuring the construction of drone comb, the special type of comb in which drones are reared. Only an increase in the number of workers stimulated construction of drone comb. Colonies with over 4,000 workers began building drone comb, independent of the other colony parameters. These results show that attaining a critical number of workers is the key parameter for honeybee colonies to start to shift resources towards reproduction. These findings are relevant to other social systems in which a group’s members must adjust their behavior as a function of the group’s size. "

Frame with drone brood on the bottm

See the full text  of the study

An overlooked and valuable beekeeping tool

While learning to sky dive, my instructor told me that one day I would be able to see the plane when I left it.  Being new to the sport, I really had no idea what he was talking about until one day it happened.  At 13,000 feet over the Florida coastline, I left the twin engine plane through the side door. While my body plummeted toward the earth I looked up and saw the plane.  After about 20 jumps, I was finally getting accustomed to the routine.  I knew the sights, sounds, smells, and was used to the force of wind pealing back my cheeks.  My circle of vision was gradually increasing as my level of comfort increased.

Now, skydiving has nothing really to do with beekeeping.  But the lesson of an increasing circle of vision applies to the concept of learning anything new- beekeeping included.  You put on your suit, light a smoker and take off with hive tool in tow.  The sights, sounds, smells are new and unique.  You've studied the books, attended classes but once you open up the hive, it's all a blur.  You're sure the first drone you see is a queen.  Does my wax look right?  Are they trying to swarm?  You're circle of vision is very narrow.  But there is a tool that will help.

With the advent of the smart phone, most everyone is an arms length away from a camera. Therefore,  I highly recommend that a smart phone (or other small type camera) become a regular tool used in hive inspections. They say a picture is worth a 1000 words and in the case of hive inspections, it is no different.

You can snap a photo of that bee you thought was a queen.  Later that night, at home, you can blow it up and see that it is actually a drone.  And, look there is a mite on his back.  In the cell under him is a small larvae.  How in the world did I miss all of that?   Don't worry, your circle of vision will increase as your anxiety levels wane and your comfort level and experience increases .  But, until that happens, use all the tools you have available.

And, still don't quite understand what you are seeing when the photo is blown up on a big screen.  Now is the time to email the photo(s) to your mentor and ask. If your mentor is like me, they would love to be there for every hive inspection but it just isn't possible.  Email isn't usually conducive to debugging hive problems but a few photos might help answer a question.  Like . . .is this my queen? I think I'm seeing eggs in this photo - do you? 

Additionally, as your circle of vision increases, continue to take photos of what is blooming as well as the inside and outside views of your hive and what activities you are performing that day.  Use these photos as a journal of your beekeeping activities.  Next year, when you aren't quite sure when to add supers, go back and look at what was happening from the previous year as your guide.

Note:  You might consider getting a cover for your phone as propolis ridden gloves can gum things up in a hurry.

Marking Drones

Bee with a green dot is a drone returning to the hive in the afternoon.  A done is a male honey bee.  They are larger than work bees (females) and can not fit through the wires.