Dead Hive

I went out to check on the bees today. It has been cold and raining a lot this month and last year I almost lost a colony because their top blew off and they got all wet and cold and moldy. I wanted to make sure they were OK and it seemed warm enough today and sunny to open them up and make any adjustments they might need: more empty frames, reduce them down so they are warmer, treat for mites, feed them, whatever.

I have five colonies. Well. Now I have four. Hive Four is dead. No activity, dead bees all over the place. I am heartbroken. It was one of the swarms from the super productive colony, Hive Two, and we caught it when it swarmed on the fig tree last April. This means that Hive Four had the original queen from Hive Two and perhaps she was old and died this month. I also remember being a little hurried with them last time I opened this hive and I worry that I might have had something to do with their demise. Tempting fate, I lifted the top off even though I did not have a veil on to protect me if they were still some bees left in there. Nothing. No activity. Plenty of capped honey, just no bees. I had to hold back tears. I love these bees and want them to do well. This is my first dead hive. I am taking it hard.

Hive One, the ones that are my special favorites because they are the ones that swarmed into my house after my invitation, is weak again this winter. Hive Two is still a mini volcano of bees, not sure what their secret is. Hive Three is also a bit weak, not a ton of bee activity. Hive Four is dead. Sigh. Hive Five, another swarm we caught from Hive Two is doing fairly well.

It is funny how the stronger hives and weaker hives perform in winter. I would not have thought Hive Four would have failed since they were doing pretty well up until I left in early December. Hive Five, which is doing medium well, was fairly weak when I left. That is the one I was worried about but it is doing fine. And Hive One was pretty strong when I left and now it is barely putting along.

I wanted to open the hives up and see what was going on in there but decided to leave them alone since it really disrupts them and makes them use a lot of energy to put things back in order. Energy they do not really have to spare. Right now there is very little food for them. San Francisco is a great place for bees since something is blooming for them almost year round. November and December may be warm and sunny some days but it rains a lot and nothing is blooming for them. I understand that in a few weeks the eucalyptus will bloom and the bees will happily break their winter fast and fly out to collect the eucalyptus nectar.

Bees Want Their Honey Back

I extracted about 4 gallons of honey on Friday. I am getting the hang of it and it is going a lot faster. 2 1/2 hours from start to final clean-up. This weekend while I was filtering honey and managing all the wax and making candles I had to open the kitchen window because all the heat from the oven and space heater was making me feel faint. As I opened the window a bunch of honeybees came flying in and more were headed my way. I screamed a little and shut the window as quick as you can when covered in honey and wax. I guess they could smell it cooking and homed in on their property. I caught all the inside bees in a glass with a postcard over the top and let them back outside. I could see them all hovering outside my windows looking for a way to get in to take back their honey.

Molded Beeswax Bars

You think these are so cute? Me too. But look what I had to do to my kitchen to make them.

Procrastination Defeated

I managed to get my honey sold to Mission Pie yesterday despite trying every known self-sabotaging procrastination trick in the book. Biking it down there was not so bad, it was not as hot as I thought, it was a beautiful day for a bike ride. I had the two boxes of honey jars wrapped in a bag and then bungeed to within an inch of its life to my bike rack and then I tried not to hit any bumps as I swooped down 20th street hill at 100 miles per hour. I sat in Mission Pie and made little tags for the jars since I could not find any suitable stickers on such short notice. They are handwritten with too much info for a hand written tag. I got 80 bucks in pie credit and I am so happy to magically change extra honey into pie made from locally grown wheat, fruit and eggs...on a farm where my friend works! I love this town. And now I am started in the honey business!

Lacking Labels

I am trying to figure out how to sell my honey to Mission Pie. Actually, I am procrastinating. I lack labels. And since my truck is in the shop I can't get any before the 2pm meeting I have with the owner. And I can't figure out how to get the honey over there. It is heavy and all I have is my bike. It is hot and I do not want to get sweaty. Guess I'll break out those shorts again. It is noon. I have to get to the grocery store to find an average honey price, to use their scale to find out how much each jar holds, to find labels that fit the jars at the lame-o office supply shop, and then to bike all the way from the store to the pie shop all before 2pm.

So I am blogging instead. Classic.

My bee sting is settling down and I can bend my elbow again. I finally figured out that a combination of the homeopathic bee remedy, lots of advil and smears of arnica gel on the swollen area make it so instead of ten days of itching and painful swelling, I get three days of swelling, very little pain and no itch! Magic medicine.

I screwed up on the honey filtering the other day and contaminated about a gallon of honey with water from the anti-ant bucket that the whole contraption was sitting in overnight. It seeped in through the gate valve at the bottom of the bucket. Either it is not watertight or I did not screw the valve shut hard enough. Either way, now I have a gallon of watery honey. I am going to feed it back to the bees as soon as I can get one of those goofy feeders that looks like a mayonnaise jar turned upside down and screwed to a wooden platform. I still can't figure out how sugar water or honey won't just flow out due to that thing called gravity, but somehow it works.

Wild Bee Nest

I just found these photos in my backlog of blog ideas file. Holy macaroni.

Wild bee nest, originally uploaded by Max xx.

Bee Beard 2, originally uploaded by Max xx.

Filtered Honey

After work today, instead of eating dinner, I filtered all the honey we extracted yesterday and made a peach pie just to show off. I fueled myself with an entire bag of Paul Newman mint chocolate chip cookies and a glass of water and the occasional finger lick of honey. Occasional, hah! I probably licked about a pint of honey off my hands during the whole process. Don't worry, I washed them each time with hot soapy water.

Filtering and bottling honey is a little like watching paint dry. You have one giant bucket full of honey straight from the extractor with bits of wax and bee parts and other weird stuff that got in the honey somehow. Then you have an empty bucket with several layers of metal strainers of different mesh sizes and then a few mesh paint socks under that all strapped into a five gallon bucket with a bungee cord so it hangs suspended in the bucket. Then you pour the unfiltered honey into the top of the first strainer contraption, which is only about 2 inches deep, very inefficient, until it passes through to sit in a glob in the paint sock below. The paint sock has a pretty fine mesh so the honey filters very slowly through this section. Finally it reaches the bottom of the bucket and you are ready to open the gate valve in the bottom of the bucket and fill the glass jars with fresh clean honey.

Repeat for about two hours until you finally have poured the entire contents of the bucket of honey through the strainers. It takes forever, I mean it's honey, right? You often have to scrape off the globs of wax clogging the wire mesh of both sets of strainers plus the paint socks, plus you have to make sure there is enough space between the various strainers for the honey to slowly drip drip drip down to the bucket. I had it sitting in the sun all day so it would be more liquidy, but by the time I got home it had cooled off a bit so the honey was pretty thick again. I think warmer honey would go a lot faster.

There has got to be a better way to do this. My first improvement would be to make a deeper first layer of straining so I could wander off for half an hour rather than just having 10 minutes to wait for the two inches of honey to drip down. Second, I would find a way to set the buckets up so I could just open a gate valve and pour the honey from the first bucket into the strainer rather than the current messy heavy method of lifting the bucket up and pouring it in, hovering over it and trying to scoop the drips that are escaping down the sides back into the bucket where they belong with one hand while desperately trying not to drop the whole thing into the dirt in my front yard with the other.


By the end of my filtering process I had filled up about 4 gallons of honey in various size mason jars. There is an unknown amount in the bucket slowly dripping through the filters right now and I may get another gallon out of it. I thought we had seven gallons, but I guess not. Still, it is a LOT of honey.

Stern Grove Swarm

This afternoon I was on my way to Peter S.' house to extract all the honey I removed from the hives yesterday. My phone rang and I forgot until just this second that it is against the law now to talk on a cell phone and drive, so I answered and it was Peter S. He had just got a call from the fire department and he needed to go catch a swarm in Stern Grove that was "on a bench." We agreed that catching a swarm would be more fun than extracting honey so I met him at his house and helped him load up the nuc box and some other stuff for catching the bees.

We arrived at 20th and Wawona, right on the edge of the park, a steep ravine filled with eucalyptus trees bordered by lawns and paths and benches. We drove right in through the service entrance, thrilled to be driving in the no drive zone since we were Official Beekeepers. At first we did not see anything by any of the benches we passed. Then the park gardener rolled up in his red electric mini truck that lucky city gardeners get to drive around in. He pointed out the bees in a tree "over that way" but we still did not see them. We worried they had already moved on but then I saw a long dark arm-like shape dangling out of a holly tree about six feet off the ground. There was our swarm.

The first cut we made was a mistake. The branch the bees were hanging on turned out to be two branches and only half the bees came down. A blob of them fell to the ground in front of the nuc box we had set up under the swarm. The second cut was better and we got the rest of the swarm and laid them on top of the open nuc box to let them make their way in. Meanwhile, the ones that fell were marching right into the box via the landing board. They just know right where to go...right into their new deluxe accommodations.

The gardener hung around and peppered us with questions and talked about how it warmed his heart to see the bees here and how worried he was about them and did we know why they were dying out and he was extra worried ever since he found out Haagen Daz was concerned and people who make candles and how much he loves ice cream and how he got stung by some when he was mowing the lawn and oooweee did it hurt but he tried not to be mad because he likes honeybees. On the 5th or 6th cycle of his speech Peter S. wandered off to his car and I was left to nod and smile and hope the guy would be on his way soon.

We left the box there till dark so the field bees could return to the hive.

It took about 2 hours to cut the wax caps off the super frames, put them in the extractor and whirl it around till all the honey flew out.

SEVEN GALLONS!

Honey Harvest

At the very end while we were loading supers full of honey into my truck, the family and neighbors all came home at the same time and descended on us. Honestly, the whole sharing of the bee kingdom with so many people stresses me out. I like things to be quiet and solitary, but so far, each bee adventure has been shared with at least three other people and sometimes more, all vying for a good view or to hold the frames or to peer inside. People stand in the wrong spots, drop frames of bees, squish them in the boxes while returning frames to the brood. One guy does not like to wear his veil and he has long hair so I worry he is going to get bees in his hair and get stung badly. There is a teen who is forced to get close when she does not want to and she got stung on the forehead last time and now is extra scared. It is very chaotic and not relaxing at all. I miss the days of the quiet hum of the bees, the smell of wood smoke and the clear blue sky as company.

I have to figure out some way to keep it more simple and peaceful and to make space for the family's enthusiasm and interest. I mean, they are so kind and generous to let me put the hives in their garden and they pay for half the equipment, so I need to find a way for all of us to get what we want out of this situation.

Bee Souls

I got interviewed a few weeks ago by a woman who is writing a book about urban beekeepers. I showed her my hives, showed her where they made a home in the wall of my house and answered her questions about the mechanics of beekeeping. We got to talking about communicating with insects and I told her about how I had invited the bees to come pollinate my vegetable garden last year and a week later 20,000 of them showed up and moved into my house. She sent me an email thanking me for my time and had one more question for me:

Do you think each individual bee has a soul? Or is there one soul per hive?

I loved that question. So gentle.

Here is my answer.

I think that everything has some kind of soul, but I don't know what it is, where it is or why we have one. I guess I believe that everything is connected and made out of the same stuff and that stuff keeps working its way through the universe in different forms. And I think it is possible to recognize these common elements in other beings or objects and to feel connected in that way. I also sometimes think that our physical life is a metaphor for something larger.

As far as the bees...they seem to act as a group with one mind and one purpose and many bodies to carry out that purpose. But the same could be said of humans if we looked at ourselves from a distance. I know that I am sad every time I accidentally squish one bee or cause it to sting me and die, a tiny life extinguished. suffering. pain. I prefer not to cause it. So that makes me think that i am reacting to the soul of the individual bee because I have sensed it there. I feel a very strong presence when one flies into my house or buzzes around me. Whether that is me anthropomorphizing the bee or actually feeling its soul, I do not know. I try not to be arrogant about other creatures and always assume they have their own destiny and life to lead so I try to respect it and make way for them.

Second Swarm

The bees swarmed a second time this week. Peter H. saw them flying around the fig tree and had us all come out and check the two football sized swarms hanging in a low branch. We suited up and gingerly shook them into a cardboard box, then carried them over to their new home. Luckily, we had a spare deep box with frames and wax foundation ready to go. Peter H. and Charley quickly built a bottom board and cover. So now we have five colonies. One has a queen for sure, but with the other four we will have to wait and see.

Native California Bees

I went to a presentation on native bees in California given by Gordon Frankie, UC Berkeley entomologist and director of the Urban Bee Project.

There are at least 1600 species of California native bees, 81 of which have been identified in the Bay Area. They pollinate 1/3 of our vegetable, fruit and nut crops and most of our wildflowers. They are solitary, not social like honey bees. They make nests in the ground or in fallen logs or living trees.

He brought along a case of labeled specimens on pins, which always makes me sad, but the variety of colors and forms was quite amazing. Some were iridescent green and yellow, others looked like beautifully polished wood.











You can read
this article from the March/April 2008 issue of Orion Magazine by Matt Jenkins and this fascinating article on Buzz Pollination by Sue Rosenthal in Bay Nature magazine. Bumble bees pollinate flowers not just by walking around and collecting the pollen on their bodies, but actually grab hold of the anthers and vibrate the pollen off. I love nature!

Cold Wet Moldy Bees

While I was away in Florida there were two weeks of intense wind and rain storms in San Francisco. The colony that first got me into beekeeping experienced a major setback during these storms. Somehow, the waterproof cover leaked and left the bees with a soggy cold wet home. This colony had been going like gangbusters in the summer and fall, but today there were just a few depressed bees loitering around the entrance. I opened up the hive and was sad to see that about 60-70% of the bees were gone and blue mold was covering the brood comb.

Outside the hive on the ground were hundreds of waxy white brood, tossed out by the worker bees. I reduced the hive down to one box and managed to find 10 frames that were not too moldy. I felt terrible for the creatures having to live in the cold wet hive for the duration of the bad weather. I hoped that they would recover. I opened the stronger hive and took out two frames of capped brood and stuck it into the weaker hive hoping it would boost their population fast enough for them to make a comeback.

I did manage to get a few frames of capped honey the smaller hive would not be needing.