Christmas Bee Customs

"In connection with these Christmas customs there are two curious observances among the more secluded dwellers of Shakespeare's greenwood, which, though they partake of the nature of superstitions, may very well be allowed accord here. They both occur on Christmas Eve, just upon the stroke of twelve (the witching hour), when the occupants of cot or farmstead, in the one instance, troop down the rustic garden to the beehives, " to hear the bees sing their Christmas carols." The belief is that these busy insects are as pleased at the birth of a new Christmas Day as the members of the human family, and testify their mirth by singing a set of new carols for the occasion. It is certainly a pretty and poetical custom which draws the peasants into the dim garden at midnight on Christmas Eve in the simple faith that the bees are singing Christmas in."



Shakespeare's Greenwood: The Customs of the Country By George Morley 1900

thanks to Historical Honeybee

Another One Bites the Dust

I went out to the hives yesterday to give them more antibiotics and to change out the sugar water in case it had gotten moldy. I got a nice fire going in the smoker and opened up the smallest sick hive to see how they were doing. I've been sick this weekend and did not get out there as soon as I had hoped. But I think it would have been too late for this hive anyway. They were all dead. I searched through the ones lying on the screened bottom board but did not see the queen.







I took apart the hive and prepared it for the process of cleaning out the contaminated frames. Two out of five failed before the rains have even started. This is not a good way for them to go into winter.



I opened up the others and did not smell any foulbrood stink. I gave the big hive antibiotics and decided again to skip the ones that were still healthy. No need to overuse antibiotics if they are not needed. I put one of the ziplock baggies full of sugar water into the top of the big hive and poked some holes in it with my swiss army knife so they could get at it without drowning.

When hives die like this I feel so guilty that I don't know enough yet to prevent the diseases or help them in time. I really want to move them to a sunnier spot. This garden is just about warm enough in the summer but it gets really dank and cold and wet back there in winter. All the cold sinks down into that low spot and all the diseases that kill bees love that kind of environment. Peter was talking about moving them up onto his mother's side deck or onto our roof. The roof would be perfect except we would need to build a staircase to get the heavy boxes up and down. The deck is better for access but worse for safety and convenience to his mom, who would lose the use of it all together.

I consoled myself by taking some photos of the healthy bees with my new macro lens.

My Method is Not That of the Germans

The German Shake sounded awesome, but I just did not have time or the nerve to bring a bunch of pissed off bees into my house no matter how well I thought I had sealed them up. I opted for Eli's San Francisco Shake. This method basically omits the 48 hour quarantine period and skips straight to the part about shaking the bees into their new uncontaminated home. I would then rely on the antibiotics to wipe out the remaining spores. Not perfect, but better than letting them all die in a pile of rotting baby bees while i enjoyed my holiday in Yosemite.

I do not recommend this for the faint of heart. These bees were sick but they were pretty mad that I was completely and utterly destroying their babies and their home. They did not care at all that I was giving them a new clean house and sugar water. I obviously could not take photos while I was in the middle of this escapade. Here is a visual image. Godzilla in a white bee suit ripping hives apart and tens of thousands of angry bees swarming around trying to protect their babies. Then Godzilla inexplicably puts the hives back together and gently feeds the angry bees sugar water.

When it was all over and the bees were all tucked in with enough honey and pollen for the winter, boxes reduced so they could stay warm and tilted up so they could stay dry, it looked as if nothing had ever happened. I only go stung once and it was just a little sting, no swelling. Miracle.

I went online to review the sugar water feeding and realized with horror that I used the wrong kind of sugar and the kind I used was going to give them bee diarrhea. To add insult to injury. I raced back out in my suit and removed the raw sugar syrup and replaced it with white sugar syrup. Now they should be OK.

Sick Bees in the House

I made a few calls to various beekeepers to get advice on the best way to handle this problem so early in the winter. As I expected, I got wildly differing advice. This is one of the things I love about beekeepers. They are very into the gearhead part of beekeeping and all have their pet theories that they vehemently promote and defend. I have had beekeepers in the San Francisco club email me privately to tell me to ignore the ridiculous advice of another beekeeper given on the public list serve. It cracks me up. And gives me a lot of info and a fair amount of confusion.

One particularly panicky beekeeper advised me to immediately burn all the hives and bees and equipment or face the guilt of infecting the entire city. "It's gonna be a BAD SCENE, man," he whispered. "A very bad scene."

Another, more laid back and experienced beekeeper told me to just get rid of the infected frames and give them the antibiotics he gave me to use last year. Then burn out the inside of the infected boxes with a propane torch to kill the remaining spores. He was not so into me using his extractor, though, to extract the honey from the infected frames. I can't give it back to the bees or it will spread the spores. I can't extract it in his extractor because it might contaminate his frames.

The most attractive suggestion, just based on the sheer insanity and thoroughness of the process, is called the "German Shake". Basically, you shake all the bees in the sick hive into an empty box and seal it (with plenty of ventilation) and meanwhile throw away all the contaminated frames of larvae and honey. If it is cold, you need to bring the bees into your house in the sealed ventilated box so they don't die of cold. After 24-48 hours you shake the now digestively cleaned out cluster of bees into a new clean hive set-up and let them start over from scratch. The theory behind this method is that you need to isolate the bees for 24-48 hours in an empty clean box with NO honey or pollen or nectar. During this time they will consume the spore contaminated honey in their stomachs. You have broken the cycle of healthy bees feeding contaminated honey to the larvae. When they re-enter the new box you have set up for them they will be free of the spores but very short of eggs and larvae so you have to feed them sugar syrup to imitate the spring nectar flow which will stimulate the queen to begin laying eggs even in fall when she is supposed to be slowing down for winter. Leave it to the Germans to be so cautious and thorough.

Here is what you do:

1. Before you start, obtain a cardboard box and make ventilation holes in it. Tape it up everywhere except the side you are going to need open for the "Big Shake". Or, even better, set up an empty uncontaminated deep box with a screen bottom. Screen off the entrance. Have a very secure lid off to the side. No frames in this box at all.

2. Set up a brand new uninfected deep box with uncontaminated frames of honey on the edges, frames of pollen next and several frames of empty drawn out comb in the middle, just like the bees like it. On top of that place a deep or super (half the size of a deep) full of mostly capped honey with a few of the middle frames empty built out comb.

3. Put an empty deep box and a lid on top of the new hive boxes you have just set up.

4. Set up some empty deeps and supers off to the side that can be completely sealed off. No bees should be able to get into them AT ALL.

5. I would advise doing this at the end of the day or in the early morning when all the bees are in the hive and not out flying in the field. Otherwise you are going to lose your field force. Find the queen and isolate that frame so you make sure she does not get lost in the havoc that is about to ensue.

6. OK. here comes the Big Shake part. Ready?
Take each frame of the infected colony and gently shake the bees into either the cardboard box or the empty deep (no frames at all). You are going to need to close this up after each shake so probably the deep is better than the cardboard box. You want as few bees in the air as possible during this operation. Good luck!

7. Put each newly shaken cleared off frame into the prepared sealed hive boxes off to the side and seal them up each time. Do not let any bees get in there. These frames are all going to be destroyed. Even the ones with nice capped healthy brood may have become infected even tugh you cannot see it yet. For this to work you have to get rid of ALL the spores.

7. Once all the bees are out of the contaminated hive boxes and frames, shake the frame with the queen on it into the box and make sure she stays in there with her workers.

8. Once all the bees are sealed up in their ventilated box you are free to extract any capped honey you may find before you destroy the frames. If you cannot burn the frames, put them in thick plastic garbage bags and tape them up so no bees can get into them to rob the contaminated honey. Do this within a few days or you will be faced with a very stinky and gross project.

9. Take a propane torch and burn out the inside of all the boxes. This should destroy the remaining spores.

10. After 24-48 hours take the sealed and ventilated box of bees and shake them into their new home and feed them with a 1:2 sugar to water syrup to stimulate the queen to get a move on laying eggs. You have just destroyed their entire next generation and the queen needs to get going on making her winter bees. She is now 3 weeks behind. You should also probably feed them antibiotics for three weeks just to be sure but remember you cannot use any of the existing honey for humans if you do this.

American Foulbrood AGAIN!

After the shock of losing my favorite hive I was not in any mood to deal with the next problem I found in the apiary. I had just finished cleaning up all the boxes and frames and setting aside honey to be extracted from the absconded colony. Now it was time to do an inspection of the remaining four colonies and set them up for winter. I had hopes that I could get one last harvest of fall honey since a friend at Rainbow Grocery was making a place in the produce department for any honey I could provide them.

As I opened the first small hive a familiar fetid stench wafted up and made me gag a little. American Foulbrood. We had this last winter and I think it came from some used equipment I had stupidly bought from a beekeeper in Guerneville when I first was starting. I thought it was so smart to buy frames with comb already built out. Less work for the bees. They could just move in and start laying eggs and putting up honey and pollen. Well, this also means that whatever diseases the previous hive had would persist in the wax and pass on to the next colony of bees that inhabited the used boxes and frames. I bought them for $50 bucks each. And now I know that for the exact same price I could have bought brand new already built and painted boxes with frames from the beekeeping suppliers Dadant and Mann Lake. Live and learn.

Meanwhile, I had introduced one and possibly two problems into my precious healthy hives. American Foulbrood and Varroa mites. American Foulbrood is a bacterial disease that spreads by spores. It is an awful disease if you are honey bee. It has no effect on humans aside from causing grief and a lot of extra work. What happens is during cool damp weather the already present spores become active and get into the cell where an egg is laid. As soon as the larvae is capped in its cell the spore starts to multiply and consume the larvae. When the worker bees clean out the gooey mess of the unfortunate larvae zillions of spores explode all over the hive and get on the worker bees and in the honey and everywhere. It is not long before every single larvae is dead and the hive dies out without new bees to replace the aging bees. And that many dead and dying larvae make for a very smelly situation. Some people say it smells fishy, others say like stinky socks. I think it just smells like dead bugs. Lots of them. Rotting.

Aside from the stink, which some people cannot detect, you can also tell you have this bacteria in your colony if you see cracked and sunken capped cells. And if you poke a little toothpick into the sunken cell you will pull out brown dead larvae goo that has the consistency of snot.

Check and check.

In the photo above you can see a very sparse laying pattern
and a few young dead bees that did not make it out of their cells.

Below you can see the cracked and sunken capped cells.
I did not get a picture of the snot goo but you all know what that looks like, right?

To make matters worse, as the colony gets weaker and unable to defend its hive, bees from stronger hives begin to come in and rob them of their honey, thus bringing the spores into their own healthy colony. This disease can wipe out hives in a matter of a few weeks.
Which is exactly what my strongest remaining hive, the new star of the show, was in the process of doing. It too had the telltale signs of AFB. The other two weaker hives were still healthy and minding their own business, lucky for them.

I did not have a lot of time or resources to deal with this problem. In two days I would be driving to Yosemite with friends for a long Thanksgiving weekend. And those days were completely packed with work related stuff and packing for the trip. I had to think fast and do whatever needed to be done today. This reminded me of something my friend with a 9 year old said to me one day. She said, I love having kids, but imagine that in your home you have this little thing that constantly explodes last minute projects all around you on top of the regular stuff. "Oh by the way, I need 40 decorated cupcakes for tomorrow morning. And my science project is due tomorrow." This is sort of like having 5 colonies of bees. Except, hopefully your kid does not abscond and move out in winter or completely die of a bacterial spore while you are inside watching TV.

Opening up the other hives gave me an idea of what I had to work with. Plenty of frames with pollen and capped honey to get them through the winter. Now I needed a refresher course on how to effectively clean the spores out of the two infected hives.

above: pollen
below: capped honey

Absconded

A few days ago I noticed that a few of the hives were looking a little weak. Not much activity even on sunny days. We are headed into San Francisco winter so the bees are slowing down quite a bit, yet that one colony should be less like a ghost town. And the colony that started it all in the blue box looked completely deserted.

I opened it up and to my dismay saw that they had swarmed. The box was completely empty. I think when the colony leaves without dividing in two (leaving the new queen in the old space) it is called absconding. My favorite and most productive colony absconded...completely gone. I checked the frames for any sign of disease or infestation or disturbance. Nothing. Just a bunch of hatched swarm cells. No larvae or eggs or anything. Just honey. I was devastated. This is the colony that started me off as a beekeeper. They arrived on the exact anniversary of my own arrival in San Francisco and moved into the wall of my apartment one June morning.

The past few years this hive has become moody and sometimes dangerously aggressive. A few times they chased me hundreds of feet out of the yard and into the street, buzzing angrily around my head for 30 minutes or more. This is NOT normal honeybee behavior AT ALL. Some people worried the queen had mated with an Africanized drone and should be destroyed. The problem with that theory is that half the time it was a calm gentle colony...not usually the case with Africanized bees. I was more inclined to believe that a raccoon or skunk was bothering it at night and that it was sick and tired of being pestered. And finally it just left. November is a pretty bad time to swarm. They are not going to have much time to build out comb and fill it with honey and pollen for the winter. Unless they found an abandoned hive that already had this stuff they are probably going to die.

I have been sort of an absentee beekeeper lately. I should have been back there getting them ready for winter earlier in the fall. In October I was powdering them with powdered sugar to knock down the varroa mite population before winter but I should have been back there reducing the boxes down and making sure they had the right space and configuration of boxes and frames for winter.

Most likely I could not have stopped them from absconding. bees do whatever they want. But I still feel guilty for leaving them on their own.

Fixing Broken Frames

June Swarm

One of the colonies swarmed a few days ago and we were able to catch them and put them in a box. This swarm is about three feet long and a foot wide. Maybe 4 pounds of bees. The queen is at the center. Scouts will spend a day or two looking for a suitable home and then the entire mass will move in a group to the new location. We caught them before they moved on. They are very docile when swarming but we suited up just to be on the safe side.


Charley and Peter got up on a ladder and cut the branch just above the swarm. They were actually on a few branches and this shot is of one of the last little clumps.


Charley shakes the bees into the box we set up for them and they happily move into the frames below.

We left the box there all day to give the scouting bees a chance to return to their home. When night fell we blocked the entrance and carried them to their new location about 5 feet from where they originally departed.

We opened them up two days later to see how they were doing and they had already built quite a lot of comb in the new box. we gave them a fully drawn frame with a few capped larvae and some capped honey from another hive so the queen would have a place to start laying eggs right away.

Bee Poetry

The Arrival of the Bee Box
Sylvia Plath

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

30 Hornets vs. 30,000 Bees

This is an amazing video off YouTube. It is an excerpt from NOVA Tales From The Hive. As a beekeeper it was hard to watch, but the images they managed to get of this attack are worth the discomfort. The entire program is beautifully filmed. I want to buy a copy.

Covered in Bees

I just got done having a look at the three remaining bee colonies in the back garden. The first one we looked at is the one that has foulbrood, a bacterial infection that kills the larvae and makes the hive stink like a rotten dirty sock. It seems to be bouncing back but we treated it with antibiotics just to be sure. You mix the antibiotic powder with powdered sugar and put a tiny mound of it on the end of each frame in the hive. The bees eat the powdered sugar and ingest the antibiotic that way. I was uncertain about giving them drugs but I don't want them to die or to spread the disease so antibiotics it is. I treat them two more times and then they should be OK. There is no honey stored right now so it will not effect any honey I want to eat or sell. They had a lot of new larvae and capped brood. The capped brood is the part of the bee life cycle where the larvae is sealed into a cell in the comb with a thin cap of wax. The larvae metamorphizes into a bee and then it chews it's way through the wax and joins the work force. I know it is weird, but there is nothing cuter than seeing a baby bee pop its little antennae out, then its black buggy eyes and yellow furry head.

We closed them up and moved them about a foot forward. This is one step in a long process of moving bees in a beeyard. We need to move our bees into a sunnier spot for next winter. Right now they are in the coldest dampest shadiest part of the yard in winter. In summer it is hot and sunny, but in winter the sun does not clear my landlord's house and that section is a cold sink all winter. Damp and cold is the worst environment for the bees and it makes them more susceptible to every disease and bug out there and probably has a lot to do with why the other colonies got so sick this winter and last.

You can move a bee hive if you move it more than 2 miles from the original location but you can't just move it across the yard or even 10 feet away without totally messing them up. The reason is that bees use landmarks and the sun to get back to their hive. If you move it a few miles away, they reorient themselves to the new location without running into any of their old landmarks and heading back to the old location since a bee's range is only two-three miles. If you move a hive across your garden they will use the old landmarks and head back to the old location instead of where their hive now sits. This can kill a hive because eventually the lost bees die and there are not enough new bees to take their place. But they do tolerate a slow day by day foot by foot move across the yard to the new location.

With the recovering hive on its way into a sunnier spot we moved onto the next hive. This one is the hive that was super productive and aggressive last year. We split it once to try to keep it from swarming but it swarmed twice anyway. It made 30 gallons of honey for us and gave us the three extra colonies. This year it is much calmer so it must have a new queen with different genetic material and a calmer disposition overall. What a relief. It was so hard to work with that hive. They would just come pouring out of there like an angry volcano and make it nearly impossible to do even the simplest maintenance.

Everything looked good, a nice brood pattern, lots of calm working bees and a nice looking queen. We considered treating them with the antibiotic, too, but decided to risk it and leave them alone since they looked so healthy. We closed them up and moved on to the original hive that started this whole endeavor, the ones that are my favorite because they moved into my house two summers ago.

This colony was very calm and productive last year. It had a hard first winter but did a lot better this winter. The first winter the top blew off in a big rainstorm and it got all moldy and wet while I was out of town. When I got back I saw what had happened and put them in a new dry box with a better lid but it suffered from nosema, which is basically bee diarrhea. You can still see the little splats of bee poop on the outside of the box.

We smoked the bees through the vent and along the front entrance and waited a minute for them to settle down. We took off the lid and the inner cover and they gave us a loud warning buzz. This is unusual. Normally, if you smoke the bees, they calm down and get back to work. Especially if it is a sunny day. Bees are always happier on a sunny day. Cold wet overcast windy days? Don't go near the hive, they are grumpy. AND, they are all home. On a sunny day many of the bees are out in the field so it is a nicer experience to open up the boxes.

These bees were not having it. We took the two honey supers off, they were almost full, but not quite ready to harvest. The bees went NUTS. They poured out and started pelting us with their little angry bodies. I could smell the angry bee pheromone, which smells a lot like a very ripe banana. Usually, you only smell this if you get stung. Maybe one of us did get stung but could not feel it. They sting and release the pheromone and the other bees are then drawn to the location and they sting too. These bees were seriously overreacting to a very simple hive check. Something was wrong in there.

My friend suggested we just have a very quick peek at the upper brood box to make sure there was a laying queen, since if it is not "queenright" (without a queen) the hive can become unsettled and aggressive. We could see larvae and capped brood and that meant the queen was laying, so we closed them up and walked away. We were covered in about a hundred bees each with hundreds more flying around our heads. We knew that if we kept walking they would go back to the hive. We walked down the path and through some shrubs to get them off us but they did not all go back to the hive like they should have. Now there were about 50 bees angrily ramming into us and buzzing around our heads. We stood there for 15 minutes waiting for them to give up and calm down but they would not settle down. I had never seen anything like it. They were so aggressive and persistent. Normally, if you walk away from a hive, even just 5 feet or so, the guard bees will return to the hive. There may be one or two really pissed off bees that follow you ten feet but I have never seen so many pissed off bees follow us 100 feet from the hive and stick around so long.

We had a conference and agreed it was not acceptable behavior. The colony has a queen so that is not the reason it was so aggressive. Bees should be calm and easily soothed with smoke unless we really are aggressive towards them. Like, if we smash their hives and throw the frames around and dance on their baby bees. All we did was open the box and they went nuts. This means there is a new queen in there and she is producing aggressive honeybees. The only way to deal with it is to get rid of the queen and her aggressive genes and replace her with a gentler queen. No small task, considering that in order to save the colony we would have to open them up and find the queen and kill her. It is hard to see anything when 20,000 angry bees are flying around you and looking for a way into your bee suit and veil. My friend thought the best thing would be to kill the whole colony and start over. My landlord and I wanted to try to save the worker bees and just replace the queen. My friend clearly thought we were insane, and was probably right since he has way more experience than we do.

To humor us he called another more experienced beekeeper and asked him what he would do in this situation. This guy recommended having a spray bottle of soap ready, bump the hive and get the guard bees out and spray them with soap and kill them. There are only so many guard bees so after enough of them are killed eventually the hive will become easier to manage while looking for the aggressive queen. That sounded like a plan. I hated the idea of killing all those bees, all life is precious, but it is our responsibility as urban beekeepers to make sure that we do not propagate aggressive honeybees. This queen was making very productive workers, but they were also going to hurt someone. The last thing I want is to have someone hurt by our bees and ending up in the hospital and maybe even making it so beekeeping in the city is restricted. I knew they would not be aggressive to people out in the city while collecting pollen and nectar, just when they were near their hive. But my landlord's elderly mother lives here and works out in the garden a lot and there are kids and pets nearby. No need to take a risk like that.

We decided to stick a queen excluder between the two deep brood boxes to isolate the queen in one box, making the search half as difficult since she would only be on 1 of 10 frames instead of 1 of 20. After two weeks all the new eggs will have hatched and we will be able to see which box she is in by the way the comb looks. Empty or capped and she is not in that box. Full of various stages of larvae and that is where the queen is. My friend and landlord had to leave so the job was up to me. I had them check my zippers and ankles to make sure there was no access for the bees and then headed back down there with the smoker.

I was nervous and worried I was going to get stung. They were already mad as hell and started flying at me right away. I gave them some long puffs of smoke in the front of the hive and in the back vent hoping it might calm them at least a little bit. I laid out the excluder, a thin flat wire grid in a metal frame that is spaced so the queen can't get through but the workers can, then strategized about what order to lift the boxes off to make sure I had as few moves as possible. The faster this happened the less chance I would have getting stung.

I took a deep breath and lifted off the lightest box and lid and put it on the ground. I could barely see through my veil the bees were so thick. Their buzzing was a roar. I lifted the two heavy honey supers partially full of honey and put them on top of the lid I had just set down. All the boxes were boiling over with bees. I pried the top brood box off the lower brood box and lifted it up and over onto the ground. Quickly grabbing the excluder from where I had placed it, I slid it across the surges of bees seething out of the lower box and then slammed the top box back down on that, accidently killing about 40 bees in the process. They were enraged by this and the banana anger pheromone smell was overpowering. The bees were in clusters all over my bee suit trying to find a way in so they could sting my skin and nose and eyes and ears. I could see them stinging my suit everywhere, the little bristles of stingers like cactus spines. I slapped the final boxes and lids into place and got the hell out of there. I was covered head to toe in hundreds and hundreds of angry dying bees. I tried the trick of walking through shrubs to brush them off and that worked pretty well. Now I was only covered with about 100 bees. The buzzing was so loud and I could hear some really close to my face caught in the collars and folds of the veil. I would have to be careful when I got out of the suit for any strays that were still on me. I kept walking around and around the garden through bushes and blowing the smoker at the clumps of bees still left on my suit. Eventually, I got it down to about 10 very persistent and angry bees. I went into my yard and took off the suit, careful to watch for bees in the folds of fabric. I stepped out of the suit feeling very vulnerable and exposed after that onslaught and sort of scampered away from it with my butt tucked in panic. I left it lying there on the sidewalk because some bees had found me and were angrily buzzing around the crumpled pile of gloves and jumpsuits.

image taken from an article on africanized honeybees

I walked in my back door with relief and went to the sink for a tall glass of water. I closed the living room an office window in case any stray bees decided to come in that way and then bent down to untuck my pant legs from my socks. This is an excellent way to keep bees out of your pants...and ticks, for that matter. I pulled one leg out and had started on the other when I heard one angry little high pitched buzzing somewhere on my shoe or sock. I looked closer but could not see anything. I was afraid to move in case it was close to getting into my pants. It could be on my sock somewhere and could sting right through it. It could be working its way into my shoe. It could already be in my pants. I could not feel anything but I could hear it perfectly. It was on my shoe somewhere. Then I saw it, burrowing into my shoe lace eye, trying so hard to get in so it could sting me. I walked outside and took off my shoe and shook it out into the air. It buzzed around and looked for something to take its anger out on and then headed off back to its hive. Close call.

After all this hysteria I was not so sure about trying to save that hive. Even at its worst, the other hive last year was nothing like this one. This thing was out of control To kill it I just spray soapy water into the boxes and the bees die pretty quickly. What a mess and a waste. And how terrible that my favorite colony has been taken over by a mean queen. I don't think I can live with the guilt so I will probably try to find the queen in a few weeks and kill her and either replace her with a new queen or let them raise their own. The problem with that method is that the mean queen's genetic material is in there and there is a chance the new queen will be just as bad.

I have two weeks to think about it.

Bees move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Obama makes me cry about every other second. His newest tug on my heartstrings is the the decision to put an organic garden and beehives in at the White House. I am too busy sniffling and wiping my eyes to write much more, so here is an article for you to read from Bee Culture The Magazine of American Beekeeping By Kim Flottum and a link to the New York Times article from March 20th.

"From the perspective of probably every beekeeper in the U.S., the first day of spring, 2009, should be one of the most memorable in decades. It was on that day that Michelle Obama announced that not only would there be a garden on the White House lawn, the first since FDR's Victory Garden, but there would be, yes, BEE HIVES!

The chefs at the white house are looking forward to cooking with locally grown fresh vegetables (and sharing what they can't use with a soup kitchen near the White House), and being able to use honey in some of their recipes. Honey produced right outside their kitchen door.

Mrs Obama readied the garden plot on the first day of spring with the help of a couple dozen local fifth graders. They worked to remove the sod and loosen the soil in preparation of planting of the spring crops. The L-shaped plot will contain year-round vegetables once completely established, with vegetables, berries and other tasty edibles. All will be raised organically.

To complete the garden, two bee hives will be moved in early this week. They will be managed by a White House employee who is a beekeeper and lives nearby. The hives belong to the beekeeper.

We found out that the beekeeper was a subscriber to our magazine, so we had a contact and were fortunate to have a phone conversation late last week. But, of course, there has to be some preparation for all this, so everything we discussed had to remain off the record. He is, however, a three year veteran beekeeper and had a strong desire to keep bees and beekeeping in front of the folks who live where he works, and to keep reminding them of the importance of the pollination efforts their bees will be performing.

As far as we can tell, there's never been a bee hive at the White House, so this first-ever apiary event is something that beekeepers everywhere are excited about. The calls and contacts received in our office once this broke exceeded any event in the 23 years I've been here.

At the ground breaking on Friday the kids, with the help of the First Lady removed sod and started the process. In a couple of weeks the planting will take place. The early spring garden, as with many early spring gardens will be red romaine lettuce, oakleaf lettuce, sugar snap peas, butterhead lettuce, radishes, shallots and shell peas, onions, chard spinach, kale, collards and a host of herbs including sorrel, thyme, oregano, sage, rosemary, marjoram, chives, chamomile, garlic chives and hyssop. There's also carrots, dill, cilantro and parsley. Some mints and rhubarb will be going in too. Later, squash, tomatillos, some berries, and perhaps more, since the garden is to be a year-round source of vegetables.

The L shaped garden is 40' tall, 40' wide at the bottom, and the width at the top of the L is 20'. There are marigolds, nasturtiums and zinnas lining the two walkways through the garden. Several raised beds surround the garden.

An organic garden and beehives at the White House...it doesn't get much better, does it?"

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This message brought to you by Bee Culture, The Magazine Of American Beekeeping www.BeeCulture.com.

Bees In Trouble Again

Another hive is dwindling and I do not know what to do about it. This is the one that got all moldy and gross in December. I had added a few frames of brood from the stronger hive and cleaned up the mold and wet frames in hopes it would give them a better chance of making it through winter. I was just out there looking at them today and saw that they are really weak and have hardly an bees in their colony. So few I was able to open the hive without any protective gear. Tomorrow I open all of them up to see what is going on but in the meantime I have to figure out if there is anything I can do to help.

I found a great bee blog by this guy in West Virginia and he suggests taking young bees and larvae out of a stronger hive and adding them to the weak colony. But I thought that if you mix bees from two colonies that they will fight to the death and also kill the queen by making a giant bee ball around her and suffocating her. He says that if you spray them with a mix of sugar water and spearmint oil it masks their hive phermone for enough time for them to get used to each other. They clean the sugar water off each other and by the time they are done they all smell like they come from one colony. Of course, it might not work and then I will have a giant bee war on my hands. Hard choice. Let the little hive starve and die or introduce possibly aggressive bees into its house in an effort to save it.

I can also make this stuff called bee patties...basically brewer's yeast, soy flour and sugar water mixed in such proportions that it turns into a thick sticky paste that you then spread on wax paper and drop in the top of the hive boxes for them to snack on. This bee blogger says that you can see the happy increase in bee activity in a few hours. I want to do that for all the bees, expecially the little sick colony, but do not have time to make any tonight or tomorrow in time to get it in the hive by the time I open them up at 2pm. I have to do some unexpected gardening work tomorrow so I am busy till 2. And I have to open them and get them all closed back up before it gets cold and the sun goes away. Not much time for making bee patties with a 5 gallon bucket, a drill and a paint stirring attachment.

Then I learn that honey is not the best food for bees! Why do they make it? They prefer nectar and pollen first. They will eat honey if they are really hungry, so I guess it is like me carrying powerbars around. I don't really like them but they will do in a pinch.





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Cleaning Up

When I got home there was a break in the rain so I cleaned up the soggy fermented bee hive stuff I have had sitting out in the rain in the side yard for about a month now. It was nasty and messy and rewarding to finish that job up and get them out of my sight and all neatly scraped and bleached. I need one free sunny day to open the hives up so I can see how they are doing and give them some more space so they can draw out more comb. I hated throwing all that hard work of theirs away today, but it was covered in mold and beyond saving. They must be really hungry because they were flying in between rain showers to try to get every last drop of good honey out of those gross frames. I need to make them some bee patties but I lost the recipe. Bee patties are like little bee hamburgers made out of brewer's yeast and sugar and some other stuff. It helps them get through the winter. Seems like they need it right now.

Yesterday I totally blew up my kitchen and made taper candles and also painted the new hive boxes. Why? Because I have a pile of paperwork on my desk I am avoiding. Technically, these things were on my to do list, so now I can check something off. The discount paint I bought for the beehives seems to perfectly match my bathroom so I can use it to paint over the blotches and mold spots. One step at a time. Soon I will have the most beautiful bathroom IN THE UNIVERSE.

Bumble Bee Identification

When I was in Montana I saw a bumble bee that had a few orange stripes on its torso. I'd never seen that before. After the amazing native bee talk I attended last year I have been very interested in all the native bees in our area. Supposedly over 87 separate species have been identified in the east Bay. I've spotted a few bright green ones in the community garden where Tree has his Free Farm Stand. This winter I have been burning old wood from an enormous fallen oak tree in one of my gardens. The wood has been cut to size, but has been sitting outside for several years before I decided to take it home and burn it in my fireplace. I have notice holes drilled in some of the logs and worried about what creatures might have made a home in there. They are also covered in shelf fungus. Is that dangerous to inhale smoke of fungus? We'll see. The little holes are not plugged, so I have hoped there are no native bees nesting in there over the winter. I cringe each time I throw a log on the fire.

Someone from the SF Bee Club posted this link from the USDA Agricultural Research Service on our bee list for a wallet ID card for the native bees in Utah. I LOVE it that there are people out there that care enough to make a wallet ID card...and who believe enough that there are others who care that might want this thing in their wallet. I know I do!

How To: Identification Bumble Bees of Northern Utah
written by Jim Cane with help from Matt Shepherd
illustrations by Linda Kervin

The Cache Valley and its neighboring mountains are home to 11 species of native bumble bees. Among them are the region’s largest bees, particularly the robust queens seen flying and foraging in the spring when they are establishing and provisioning a nest. Bumble bees are important pollinators of our native flora, especially in the mountains, as well as some of our garden plants.

Bumble bees possess three attributes that will help you to distinguish them from all other bees in the region: they are big, they are more furry than most other bees, and females transport pollen as a wet mass held in a “pollen basket” on the hind leg. The pollen basket of the hind pair of legs is broadened and concave like a shallow, elongate spoon. If empty, its polished surface can be seen reflecting light. Only the honey bee in our fauna has a similar pollen basket; all other bees here that collect pollen carry it in a dense brush of hairs either on the hind leg or under the abdomen. Bumble bees are much more furry than the honey bee, the only other bee here that has a pollen basket.

(For Your Wallet)

We have depicted the eleven bumble bee species of Cache Valley and neighboring mountains as stylized portraits. Each portrait depicts the bee’s back from above, with their heads facing the top of the screen (or page). Legs and wings are not shown, as they lack diagnostic features. The accompanying uncolored figure will guide you through the different relevant parts of a bee.

Some of the species will be exceedingly difficult to distinguish in the field, especially worn individuals, but other species can be recognized given a trained eye. There are three attributes of a bumble bee’s furry coat that you should see and note for identification. Progressing from head to abdomen, these are:

1) Head. What is the hair color atop the head yellow or black? 2) Thorax. Is there a patch of black hair on the top of the thorax, between or behind the wings? If so, is it a disc of black, a band of black, or is the entire hind half of the thorax covered in black hair? 3) Abdomen. Is the tip white? Are there orange bands? Which segments are orange? Is an orange band split by a central black stripe along the upper surface? Are the yellow hairs greenish or golden?

This might seem like a lot of detail to gather from such a small creature, but with a bit of practice it becomes easy and quick to see and note these features, just as when you are trying to identify a bird. To make it a bit easier, carry a notebook in which you can jot down the information or sketch the bees that you see. Binoculars can help with bees on bushes or in more inaccessible places. Importantly, take the time to enjoy watching the bee as she forages, and listen for her buzzing those flowering species that shed their pollen like a salt shaker through tiny pores at the tips of the anthers (examples include shooting star, tomato, and nightshade).

If that was not enough. How about this extensive chart from bumblebee.org

Bombus fraternus Range: New Jersey down to Florida, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico.	Bombus crotchii Range: California and Mexico	Bombus nevadaensis auricomus Note: sometimes just called Bombus auricomus. Range: Ontario to Florida, west to Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia.
Bombus nevadensis nevadensis Range: Alaska to California, Arizona, New Mexico east to Wisconsin, Mexico.	Bombus morrisoni Range: British Columbia to California, east to South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico.	Bombus pennsylvanicus pennsylvanicus Range: Quebec, Ontario south to Florida, west to Minnesota, S. Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, Mexico.
Bombus pennsylvanicus sonorus Note: sometimes known as Bombus sonorus Range: Texas, west to California, Mexico	Bombus grisecollis Range: Quebec south to Florida, west to British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, northern California	Bombus perplexus Range: Alaska to Maine, south to Wisconsin, Illinois, Florida, Alberta
Bombus bimaculatus Range: Ontario, Maine south to Florida, west to Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi.	Bombus impatiens Range: Ontario, Maine south to Florida, west to Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri.	Bombus affinus Range: Quebec, Ontario south to Georgia, west to South Dakota and North Dakota. Note: Also known as the rusty-patched bumblebee. Range has declined sharply recently, now found in only a few areas. Often has a bald patch between the wings in the middle of the thorax.
Bombus vagans vagans Range: British Columbia east to Nova Scotia, south to Georgia, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington.	Bombus sandersoni Range: Ontario to Newfoundland, south to Tennessee and North Carolina	Bombus frigidus Range: Alaska and Northwest territories, south to Colorado (high elevations only).
Bombus lucorum queen Range: Alaska south to Southern British Columbia and Alberta, east through Yukon and North Western Territories. More>>>	Bombus lucorum worker	Bombus lucorum male
Bombus ternarius Range: Yukon east to Nova Scotia, south to Georgia, Michigan, Kansas, Montana, British Columbia.	Bombus terricola terricola Range: Nova Scotia to Florida, West to British Columbia, Montana, South Dakota. Note: Also known as the yellow-banded bumblebee. Once common, but now in steep decline.	Bombus terricola occidentalis Range: Alaska south to northern California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota. Note: also known as Bombus occidentalis.
Bombus vandykei Range: Washington to southern California	Bombus vosnesenskii Range: British Columbia south to California, Nevada, Mexico	Bombus californicus Range: British Colimbia, Alberta south to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Mexico
Bombus rufocinctus Range: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebac, west to British Columbia, south to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Vermont, Maine, Mexico.	Bombus rufocinctus Range: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebac, west to British Columbia, south to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Vermont, Maine, Mexico.	Bombus rufocinctus Range: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebac, west to British Columbia, south to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Vermont, Maine, Mexico.
Bombus caliginosus Range: Washington, Oregon, and coastal areas in California	Bombus bifarius nearticus Range: Alaska to Yukon south to California and Utah.	Bombus bifarius bifarius Range: British Columbia, Oregon, California, Idaho, Utah, Colorado.
Bombus balteatus Range: Arctic Alaska and Canada, Sierra Nevada and White Mountains, Truchas Peak in New Mexico.	Bombus hyperboreus Range: Arctic Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Greenland.	Bombus polaris polaris Range: Arctic Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Arctic Eurasia.
Bombus edwardsii Range: Oregon, California, Nevada	Bombus melanopygus Range: Alaska south to northern California, Idaho, Colorado	Bombus borealis Range: Southern Canada from Nova Scotia to Alberta, Northern USA from Maine to New Jersey wast to North Dakota and South Dakota.
Bombus fervidus fervidus Range: Quebec and New Brunswick south to Georgia, west to British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California and Mexico.	Bombus appositus Range: British Columbia east to Saskatchewan, south to New Mexico, Arizona and California.	Bombus sylvicola Range: Alaska east to Newfoundland, south through the mountains (Cascases, Sierra Nevada, Rockies), California, Utah, New Mexico.

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