The Inner Bee

Thanks to Bill for this surprise image in my mailbox today.

Final moments of bee landing tactics revealed

"Landing is tricky: hit the ground too fast and you will crash and burn; too slow and you may stall and fall. Bees manage their approach by monitoring the speed of images moving across their eyes. By slowing so that the speed of the looming landing pad’s image on the retina remains constant, bees manage to control their approach. But what happens in the final few moments before touch down? And how do bees adapt to landing on surfaces ranging from the horizontal to upside-down ceilings...read more here

Human Bee Pollinator

In our scenario, we imagine that in the next future we could run out of the bees and in order to survive we will have to become “human bees”, collecting pollen and spreading it among the flowers. People would become new “bee” workers and also exchange pollen between themselves to improve the genetic exchange that former bees used to do before naturally...read more

Rainy Plum Blooms

The rain is here again.  Just in time to knock all the blooms off the plum tree.  The bees are flying this morning even though it is raining.  The newly opened flowers must have an irresistible nectar flow that they would brave the raindrops and cold.  I went out to get some dino kale out of the side garden this morning and was admiring and lamenting all the blossoms lying on the wet ground when I heard a weak buzzing sound.  I looked down and saw a young foraging bee walking around on the sidewalk.  She must have gotten knocked out of the air by the sudden hard rain a few minutes ago.  I picked her up on a leaf of kale and carried her back to the hives.  She was cold and weak when I set her on the landing board of what I hoped was her hive.  50/50 chance.  I hope she made it back inside to warm up. 

Echium

The Pride of Madeira.  Bees love it.  It is blooming in San Francisco right now. 

Inching the Bees

 

I found some wooden platforms at the green dump this week that are perfect for moving beehives slowly across the garden into the sun.  The hives are heavy so I cannot move them alone unless I dismantle them and move the hive box by box. I don't want to disrupt the bees that much every day. 

The platforms are a perfect solution.  I love to save stuff from the dump, so that was a bonus as well.  I needed help initially in getting the stack onto the platform, but now that they are up there I can just slowly slide them over a foot per day on the platform without having to get someone to help me. Much easier than trying to suit two people up every single day just to go out for 5 minutes to lift them.  It does not jostle or disturb the bees.  They hardly even noticed when I went out there today.  Easier on the back, too. 

The brick colored hive is the superstar hive.  I think it will produce a lot of honey this year.  The green hive is also strong.  The short blue hive box in the foreground is empty right now.  I am either going to buy a nuc from a friend who is raising bees of a few different races or wait for one of ours to swarm.  I might even try to do a split later in the season. 

A split is when you take a healthy hive with a good population and remove a few frames that have eggs 3 days old or less, uncapped and capped larvae along with the nurse bees and put it in its own small nuc box.  The bees realizing they do not have a queen, will start feeding the eggs royal jelly and make themselves a new queen.  You have just made it possible for one hive to become two.  

You can also prevent swarms by doing splits so the bees do not feel crowded.  Since bees naturally swarm in spring to propagate their species, the beekeeper can take advantage of this natural tendency to make more colonies out of a single productive colony.  If you see a queen cell on a frame you can remove that frame as part of the split because you will have  a head start on a new queen.  

The brick red hive started out on the cinder blocks in the lower left corner of the photo.  Over the past week I have moved the hive a foot per day so now it is about 7 feet away from its original shady location.  I noticed some of the bees were confusedly circling around the old locations so I decided to put off the next move for a few more days till everyone in the hive understands where their house is.  If you look closely, you can see bees sitting on the cinder blocks, on the side of the hive and on the stacks of empty boxes behind their hive.  There are quite a few in the air, as well, but I could not get a good photo of them. 

It has been too overcast to do the powdered sugar Varroa mite treatment.  It is supposed to rain all this weekend and next week, but maybe there will be a sunny day were I can slip the sticky board under the screened bottom board and sprinkle the powdered sugar in the hives.  It makes the bees groom each other, the mites fall off and can't get a footing in the slippery powdered sugar and they end up stuck in the margarine on the board below.  What a way to go. 

February Inspection Part Two

The South Hive is our new superstar. It is a swarm out of the original hive that moved into my wall and started this whole apiary. There was a bit of scare this winter when it got foulbrood, but it succeeded, with the help of some antibiotics, to overcome the disease.

Right now it is composed of two deeps and one super, all for brood. I checked the entrance and the bees seemed calm. I lost my calm when I opened up the lid and found this lurking on the inner board. It is about the size of a quarter.

 

The hive is bursting out of the top board.   A good sign.

                           

   

  

The top super contained a lot of capped and uncapped honey, some spotty drone and worker brood and pollen. When I pulled out one of the frames I saw it was connected to the middle box by a few rows of drone larvae.  They were torn open in the process, so I was able to photograph what the bee larva looks like.  Once I got the camera in there I could see that the drone larvae had some of the Varroa mites attached to them.  They are big and red and look like a flat tick.  They are more attracted to drone brood for some reason, so one of the ways you can clear them out of your hive is to throw out all the frames that have drone brood.  there is a special frame designed just for that method.  I bought one last year and maybe I will end up using it.  

You can see the mites in this photo in the upper right corner of the photo.  

It is the red disk on the white body.  Here is a closer look. 

As if having a big ugly red parasite on you as a baby bee maggot is not insulting enough, when the bees hatch their wings are deformed and they are weaker than their healthy sisters.  I saw a few bees that had been damaged by the mite and got a pretty good photo of one. 

 

Here is an adult worker bee that has one. 

It does not have the damaged wings, so it must have gotten this parasite after it hatched.  

  

The middle deep had a beautiful brood pattern, pollen, honey.  The works.  The bottom deep was completely empty of bees.  There were the four frames of capped honey I had put in there at the beginning of winter and the rest were empty drawn comb.  The queen had moved her operation upstairs, as they tend to do.  Time to do a little swapping of boxes.  I put the middle and upper boxes full of brood and bees on the bottom and moved the empty deep to the top of the hive so the queen could keep moving upwards and building up her colony for spring.  I also took their entrance reducer off since they seemed to have plenty of guard bees. 

  

By this time the weather had turned cold and windy and the bees were pretty irritable.  they were loudly buzzing and pelting me with their little bodies.  I could smell the familiar banana scented alarm phermone and figured now would be a great time to close them back up.  Below you can see in the lower left corner, the bees are having a little conference about how they are going to try to get that big white suited guy the heck away from the nest. 

 

Next up:  applying powdered sugar to the bees and catching the falling mites on a stickyboard.  

February Inspection Part One

The weather has cleared up a bit after all the rain so I thought it would be a good time to see what the bees were up to.  I only have 2 colonies right now and I do not want them to swarm.  Best to see if they need anything now before it is too late.

The first thing I did was clean up the dead hive and burn out the bottom board and boxes.  There was a lot of capped honey in there I had given them a few months ago in hopes they would use it during the winter.  I had treated them with antibiotics a few times to try to stop the foulbrood, but they did not make it.  I know this honey was capped before I put the powdered antibiotics in the box so I set it aside to be extracted.  I could see they had lost their queen by the queen cells they had built.  They tried so hard to make it, poor things. 

Peter and I have been talking about moving the bees up onto the roof or onto his mother's deck, but I don't think that will happen this year.  Instead, I will start moving them bit by bit over to the sunnier back fence.  I really think it will help them to be in more sun.  They can start their day earlier and the hive does not have to work so hard to stay warm and dry in our damp foggy climate.  If you move them one foot per day they will acclimate to the new location of the hive.  Any further than that and they will lose their bearings. So today was the day to start the first foot out of about 15. 

The storage stack of boxes and frames is against the sunny fence right where we want to put the bees, so I lay down a big piece of plywood where I thought the stacks would be out of the way and got ready to move them.  There are wood chips in the garden that get stuck on the bottom of the boxes and that annoys me when I am in a hurry to close the boxes up.   I find the plywood platform to be helpful.  I sorted through each box and looked at all the frames to refresh my memory for what I have to work with and to make sure that nothing has been damaged by moths or mice or other critters over the winter.  Some frames had been put into the storage area with uncapped honey or nectar and they were absolutely consumed with the most spectacular array of colorful molds I have ever seen. 

I set those four aside to clean out later.  I probably could hose out the worst of it and let the bees do the rest.  I put together a few boxes of frames with nicely drawn out comb, a few others with capped honey.  I found the one annoying plastic frame I keep meaning to get rid of and threw it in the trash pile.  Good riddance.  I also found some warped frames and got rid of them too.  They cause such a problem when inspecting the hives.  They don't line up in the hive box right and the bees build burr comb in the extra space so when I try to pull the frame out to have a look it tears capped honey and brood and pisses the bees off.

I picked a few good spots on the back fence as a final destination for the hives, set up a new empty hive box in hopes we catch a swarm this year, then set out some cinder blocks one foot away from each hive so I could move them easily as I inspected.  With the empty hive boxes all organized and moved to their new storage spot and the rest of the plywood platforms and boxes full of capped honey and comb arrayed around me, I was ready to open up the hives. 

I got the smoker going and slowly waved my hand in front of the entrance to check the mood of the North hive.  None of the guard bees followed my hand and none flew out at me.  They were calm and busy.  Some of them were carrying a lot of yellow pollen.  This hive is less active and for winter  is made up of one super on top and one deep on the bottom.  I opened the top, remembering not to smoke the entrance since it drives them up into the hive.  If I am going to smoke them, I should wait till the box is open and smoke them down from the top.

They looked good, busy and calm.  They had two empty frames of drawn comb on one side and three on the opposite.  In between were five frames of nice looking pattern of capped brood, larvae, and I assume eggs.  I have not gotten good at seeing them yet.   I think the queen was in this section because they really started buzzing, but I did not see her. 

This image just amazes me.  Bees made this!  It is so beautiful and perfect. The texture is gorgeous.

The larger raised bullet shaped capped brood is drone brood.  This colony is gearing up fro spring and queen mating.   You can see a bee cleaning out a cell, probably its own.  That is the first thing they do when they hatch. 

 

 Here is a brand new bee chewing its way out of it's cell.  

I lifted the top super off and placed it gently onto the waiting plywood platform and covered it with a board so the bees would not get cold and so the queen would not accidentally fly out. 

I inspected the lower box and saw two frames of capped honey on one side and 3 frames of empty drawn comb opposite.  In between were 6 frames of capped brood, no larvae and probably no eggs.  The pattern was a little spottier than the upper box.  I noted a few swarm cells were being built or maybe were left from last year.  I did not see anything in them. 

This hive looked great so closed it up and moved it onto the new cinder blocks a foot away.

To be continued.....

Spring Flowers

 

The California poppies are really starting to bloom.  Bumblebees love these flowers.  

I took a walk this morning, the first really nice day of the year after the rains.  Everything is blooming are getting ready to.   I saw the bees on a flowering Jade plant.  The midwestern house plant I used to nurse along as a kid, often unsuccessfully, grows quite large here in San Francisco.   I have a few in my front yard that are about 4 feet tall and wide.  I kind of consider them a weed now.  But surprise surprise, the bees love them when they flower, so I won't be as hasty pulling them out. 

The bees also love rosemary, which is is full bloom right now.

This cherry tree was covered in bees.  But I still had to chase them around for these blurry shots.

  

 

Beekeeping Book

 

If I was all fancy, I would know how to make it so when you click on this image it would take you to a website.  But I am not and I don't.    So you're gonna have to do it the old fashioned way. 

I was excited to get an invitation to be in a beekeeping book written by a woman named Ashley English who writes on her blog Small Measure and also a weekly column for Design Sponge.  I filled out her questionnaire and maybe (fingers crossed) I can be one of the featured beekeepers.  Her blog is awesome and her other books look great.  I would be proud to be in one.  And even if I am not, I will probably buy one.  And maybe you will, too. 

Tasmania

My dear Tasmanian friend visited this week from New York and brought me a gift from her dad in Tasmania. He kept bees for a while and thought I should have this book.  It really meant a lot to me.  I met him when he came to visit San Francisco many years ago.  We had a great time at a trivia night held at a local pub. If not for him, we would have lost.  He knew every single answer to the questions about the Olympics.  They had booked a hotel on 6th and Market, an area notorious for drug dealers and sex workers and violent crime.  We were concerned that they would get a bad impression of our fair city, but all her dad noticed was the local wildlife:  pigeons, grackles, crows.  When he and his wife came to visit again, my friend took them to Big Sur for a few days.  I was working and could not go along, but I sent a bunch of natural history field guides along with them and hoped it would make their visit more pleasurable. 

I guess he remembered the kindness and returned the favor by sending me his beekeeping manual and permit.