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.