Cleaning Moldy Frames

Today I grabbed all the moldy fuzzy frames and hosed them out. Underneath the mold were beautiful swirls of pollen.  Another beekeeper told me that as long as the bees are not overwhelmed by the mold they can usually handle cleaning it out themselves.  He said they even have been know to eat the mold and blend it into their bee bread.  These frames were pretty fuzzy, so I figured I would give them the upper hand and hose some of it out for them. 

I knew it was going to rain the next day so I stacked all the frames up on my sweet pea tower to hopefully dry out before the rain.  The bees found them right away and started cleaning out the cells and carrying back the good stuff they could salvage back to their hives.

More on the Honey Guides

Honeyguides

"It has been reported that the ratel’s inclination for honey has resulted in a mutualistic relationship with sub-Saharan African birds called greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator). Honeyguides derive their name from a well-supported mutualistic relationship with humans where the bird actually guides humans to bee hives, using calls to recruit humans before guiding them to a known hive on their territory. The Bushmen that tend to cooperate with honeyguides incapacitate bees using smoke. The birds, along with eating larva, honey, and wax from the hives are often offered honey as a “thank you” by the Bushmen. While the relationship between humans and honeyguides is well documented and studied, many scientists argue that the relationship between honeyguides and badgers is not mutualistic and may be seen as an association due to honeyguides taking advantage of the opened hive. Regardless, the birds find it difficult to near impossible to access honeybee hives without the assistance of something like a large mammal (human or badger)." more from Scientific-Illustration

Got em

Lots of mites.  Every little red dot in this photo is a dead mite.  The golden specks are wax and pollen that has fallen through the screen.  There must have been 30 or so on each board.  Not great.  That is a lot of mites.  I'll shower them with more powdered sugar next week and see if I knocked the population back.

Powdered Sugar

The bees have varroa mites and one way to get rid of them is to sprinkle powdered sugar on them.  The mites slip off the wood and off the bees into the sticky board below.  It is suggested to use Vaseline, but that is a petroleum product and I want nothing to do with that.  I used it once and it was so nasty to clean up I decided I would look for something more natural that I could compost.  It was funny to send my friend on an errand into the Castro Walgreens to buy a giant sized tub of Vaseline, though.  This time I bought a giant tub of soy margarine from the health food store.  It is enormous and it made me wonder what on earth you would do with this much margarine if you did not have bees to take care of.  

The bottom board of the hive is a wooden frame with a screen on the bottom and a landing strip out front.  This allows for air circulation and to keep pests out of the hive and to allow condensation to leave the hive.  The hive boxes sit on top of that.  The one I have has a slot in it to slide the sticky board, thin white plastic rectangle, into the bottom board.  So I buttered up the sticky boards and slid them into the hive bottom boards of both hives.  Each sticky board has a little plastic loop so you can pull it back out again without having to use pliers. 

Then I took a sifter and showered about 1 cup of powdered sugar over the hive. 

The bees were a little startled but right away began grooming the powdered sugar off each other.  This is one of the ways they can knock the mites off each other.  I closed up the hives and let the bees take care of their new snowfall.  In 24 hours I will remove the sticky boards and see what I have caught. 

Honey Badger

I found a cool site called Scientific-Illustration while looking for some honey bee images. I have heard of these creatures but never saw pictures of them.

"The honey badger, consistent with its name, is known to raid honeybee hives. Not only is the badger after honey, but it also feeds on the honeybee larva. Naturally, the bees aren’t too pleased about the badger’s invasion, but have few options, with the badger being mostly resistant to their stings. While not immune to the stings, the badger’s thick skin and coarse, bristly hair offer protection from bee stings...read more here after the jump...

But be sure to come back and check out these amazing videos. It is interesting to see the difference in the tone we take now as compared to the 70's in nature shows. No more cute sound effects of bees stinging the nose. Now it is all about murderous and violent thugs in nature. I'd like to go back to the innocent "good old days".

Bees in Pakistan

Muhammad Khabbab, a visitor to Mr. E's Mysterious Bees via Kristin's blog, The Urban Field Guide,   is documenting his container garden in Lahore, Pakistan in his blog, Garden Geek .  I am amazed by the number of pollinators he has been able to photograph in his own garden over the year or so he has been blogging.  It makes me realize how few native pollinators we have in the city of San Francisco by comparison.

The bee in the top photo may actually be a fly that has evolved stripes to mimic those of the bee.  If a predator thinks you might sting its tongue, it thinks twice before trying to eat you.  I love the vertical stripes in the center segment and the horizontal stripes on the thorax.  It's a good look.

From the photos of all the flowers Muhammad is growing I thought that Lahore must be in a hot, humid tropical region.  I was right about the hot part,  Lahore is in a semi-arid region with long hot summers, as in well over a hundred degrees,  a monsoon season and then dry mild winters.   It is the capital of the Punjab province, with a population of 10 million, making it the second largest city in Pakistan and the 5th largest city in South Asia, 26th largest in the world.  It is known as the City of Gardens, which may explain, along with the climate, why so many insects flourish in such an urban area with a high human population.   When you see a container garden in a large urban city like Lahore covered with butterflies, moths, bees and flies, it makes you wonder how here in San Francisco, a city of a mere 800,000,  can emulate it and bring back some of the natural diversity to our own city.

This bee resembles the queen in a honeybee colony with its elongated body.  

But the queen is not usually out working on the flowers.  So this is some kind of native bee.  

This bee is possibly a carpenter bee.