native bee?

Not sure who this little guy is but he sure loves lavender. 
I saw it flying around my front porch and luckily I had my macro lens handy. 

Bee City

A homey old film from 1951 by John Kieran's 'Kaleidiscope' films.
If this video does not work or is cropped go ahead and view it here.  And get lost in the vast array of amazing old films at the Prelinger Archives.

Electron Microscope Bee Photos

I found this amazing set of photos on Discover's website a few months ago and meant to get them posted here a lot sooner than now.     Upon further investigation I found the photographer,  Rose-Lynn Fisher's, website and was able to see even more of these beautiful photos.  

(pollen and antennae)

The photos are taken using a high-resolution scanning electron microscope which reveals breathtaking patterns and structures not seen by the human eye.  The artists said that when she first saw the image of the eye with its hexagonal pattern so similar to the pattern bees form their comb into she wondered if there was a correlation with the way the bees see and construct their the world and the way their eyes are constructed. 

(eye)

(antennae)

And the best news is that 60 photos are available in this book which came out in 2010...9 copies left on Amazon!  But really, buy it at your local bookstore.  They need your support more than Amazon does.  

Bee Math

Another helpful post from a local beekeeper on our San Francisco Beekeeper's email list serve:

 

All of the numbers about the life cycle of bees may seem irrelevant, so let's put them in a chart here and talk about what they are useful for. 

Caste   Hatch    Cap          Emerge 
Queen   3½ days  8 days +-1   16 days +-1  Laying        28 days +-5
Worker  3½ days  9 days +-1   20 days +-1  Foraging      42 days +-7
Drone   3½ days 10 days +-1   24 days +-1  Flying to DCA 38 days +-5 

If you find eggs, and no queen how long ago do you KNOW there was a queen? 
At least there was one three days ago and possibly is one now. 

If you find just hatched larvae and open brood but no eggs when was there a queen? 
Four days. 

If you put an excluder between two boxes and come back in four days and find eggs in one and not the other, what do you know? 
That the queen is in the one with eggs. 

If you find a capped queen cell, how long before it should have emerged for sure? 
9 days, but probably eight. 

If you find a capped queen cell, how long before you should see eggs from that queen? 
20 days. 

If you killed or lost a queen, how long before you'll have a laying queen again? 
24 days because the bees will start from a just hatched larvae. 

If you start from larvae and graft, how long before you need to transfer the larvae to a mating nuc? 
10 days. (day 14) 

If you confine the queen to get the larvae how long before you graft? 
Four days because some won't have hatched at the beginning for day 3. 

If you confined the queen to get the larvae how long before we have a laying queen? 
28 days. 

If a queen is killed and the bees raise a new one how much brood will be left in the hive just before the new queen starts to lay? 
None. It will take 24 or 25 days for the new queen (raised from a four day old) to be laying and in 21 days all the workers will have emerged and in 24 days all the drones will have emerged. 

If the queens starts laying today how long before that brood will be foraging for honey? 
42 days. 

You can see how knowing how long things take helps you predict where things are going or where things have been.  Sometimes you just have to figure best and worst case. For instance, an uncapped queen cell with a larvae in it is between four and eight days old (from the egg). A capped queen cell is between eight and sixteen days old. By looking at the tip of the cell you can tell one that is just capped (soft and white) from one that is about to emerge (brown and papery and often cleaned down to the cocoon by the workers). A soft white queen cell is between eight and twelve days old. A papery one is between thirteen and sixteen days old. The queen will emerge at sixteen (fifteen if it's hot out). She'll be laying by twenty eight days usually. 

Michael Bush

Spring Cleaning

San Francisco has been lashed by rain storm after rain storm this month.  There has not been one dry sunny day to go out and check on the bees.  I am leaving town for the month of April and need to get them set up for their spring buildup before I leave.  Usually I have a day or two in March to get some spring cleaning done.  Not this March.  Rain Rain Rain.

I have been reading about setting up swarm traps in spring.  Take your nastiest frames of moldy comb and fill up an old janky box and set it out somewhere in the sun, on top of a roof, anywhere that the scout bees might find it and they just might do you a favor and move into the box instead of the neighbor's attic.  They are attracted to the familiar smell of honeycomb.  It might catch a swarm from your own hives or maybe a swarm from out there in the world.  Just don't forget to check the boxes every week or so since you want to get them into your apiary as soon as you can.  Since they are in a box and not a tree or wall, all you have to do is move the box into your apiary after dark when all the field bees have returned.  Some beekeepers say that if you put a few blades of grass or a stick at the entrance it will alert the bees in the morning when they make their first trip out for the day that they are in a new spot and will need to reorient themselves to find the new hive when they are making their way back home.

I am excited to try this trick this spring.  Our hives usually swarm in April into the big fuchsia colored tea tree in the garden.  Convenient that it is not in a neighbor's yard, but still there is the whole rigmarole of getting up on the ladder and snipping the branch.  Every day this month I have been eying the sky worrying that the sun is going to pop out and trigger a big swarm event before I am ready for it. Or worse, that it will happen while I am gone! 

Today is the first day in weeks that the sun has come out for a few minutes here and there.  My fellow beekeeper, Peter, knocked on my door this morning and let me know that the bees were very active and wondered if I might like to have a look.  You do not have to do much convincing to have me drop everything and play with the bees so I suited up and headed out to have a look see.

We have two hives that are booming.  Three died in the winter.  That is about normal for us so I was sad for them but not surprised.  We hope to split the big hive this week in an attempt to keep them from swarming.  Peter had to meet with his daughter's teacher so I was out there alone poking through our supplies and cleaning up from all the rain damage.  I'd wait for him to get back before we opened the hives since he loves that part as much as I do but could care less about sorting and cleaning.  I am the king of organizing, nothing gives me more pleasure, so I was happily sorting the good from the bad frames, moldy ones in this pile, brittle gray comb in this pile for the swarm trap box, white clean comb for the honey supers, brand new frames with wax foundation in this pile.  After about an hour of cleaning out and scorching the boxes with the propane torch to kill mold and disease spores I had enough boxes for two swarm traps and three hives.  The rest were for honey supers, about 10 stacked up in a pile taller than my head.

apiary after I cleaned it up and got it ready for another spring

The neighborhood blue jay was also happily working on eating up all the dead bees I had shaken out of the frames from the hives that did not survive.  Windfall for him today.    He sits on the beehives or the fence and swoops in and eats bees all day long.  He also comes and taps on my kitchen window in the morning then sits in the plum tree and stares and squawks at me.  (see below)

I took one of the traps and put it up on the back deck facing out into the garden.  I'm not sure where to put the second one.  Up on the roof?  Any excuse to climb around on the house, right?  Now it's time for a lunch break and then, if the sun is still out when Peter gets home, we'll make a split and find a place for the second swarm trap. 

swarm trap on back deck...newly waterproofed so my laundry room no longer leaks.  yay.

discretely placed swarm trap right above the largest window.  You can hardly see it.

White Man's Flies

I have looked all over trying to figure out where I found this information. I think it comes from a yahoo group called something like Historical Honey Bees. But I can't find the danged thing anywhere.  Anyway, these snippets follow the introduction of honeybees into the United States.  

A long standing assumption, is that honeybees "preceded the settlers", and were "seldom met with, at any great distance from the frontier". Typically, this distance is estimated from 20 to perhaps 50 miles in advance of the white man. The first 3 references relate this belief. 


"The Author of A Tour on the Prairies, says the Indians regard thebee as the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and say, that in proportion as the bee advances the Indian and the buffalo retire. The
wild bee is said to be seldom met with at any great distance from the frontier."
Tioga Eagle
February 07, 1849 Wellsboro, Pennsylvania


"As long as civilization, literally speaking, was in the woods, the bee went with it. The earlier settler and the bee were hand in hand, and the former plundered the latter and the latter stung the former with equal persistency through all the changing seasons of the year. The Indians realized in the advent of the bee the beginning of their end."
The Bucks County Gazette
December 04, 1890 Bristol, Pennsylvania


"Swarming, it became known to the Indians as the "white man's fly" and often preceded the settler into the wilderness by a good twenty miles or so. ... "
1948 - The Land / Washington. Page 359


But there is a problem with this belief.  And that is how honeybees reached Illinois, far in advance of the settlers. 
There are accounts of early explorers, traveling through Illinois, recording that they "found bees in many places, used their honey." Less than 50 years from the introduction of honeybees to Virginia in 1622, early records suggest that wild bees were abundant in Illinois. One might expect that bees would have arrived in Illinois sometime around the time which records suggest they reached Indiana in 1793, but they in fact, arrived much earlier. 
How they got there, remains a mystery. 


See Timeline of the advance of honeybees westward to Illinois: 


1622 - Virginia 


1622, Honeybees Imported from Europe.


"By 1649 people in Virginia 'have store of bees in their woods, make plenty of honey and wax…'." 

1698 - Pennsylvania


"In Swedish settlements in Pennsylvania between 1630 and 1707, `Bees thrive and multiply exceedingly… 
the Sweeds often get great store of them in the woods where they are free for any Body …'." 




"1698" (Source Oertel, E. 1976, Early Records of 
Honey Bees in the Eastern United States, 
ABJ 116, 5 parts, Feb.-June.)


=====


1754 - Ohio 


1754, Probably Spread by Swarming.
(Source: Eva Crane, World History of 
Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, Pg. 359) 


"1788" (Source Oertel, E. 1976, Early Records of 
Honey Bees in the Eastern United States, 
ABJ 116, 5 parts, Feb.-June.)


=====


1793 - Indiana 


1793 , Probably Spread by Swarming.
(Source: Eva Crane, World History of 
Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, Pg. 359) 


=====

thanks to Historical Honeybee

11 Execs, 6 Foreign Firms Caught in Honey Sting

found on the AOL news site
and reported by

Andrew Schneider Senior Public Health Correspondent

AOL News

 
(Sept. 2) -- U.S. consumers stand a better chance of buying honey free of drugs, chemicals and other illegal contaminants because investigators from several federal agencies have scooped up some of the biggest players in the sticky, international honey-laundering maze.

A 70-page indictment, released in Chicago by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, reads like Cliffs Notes for a spy novel: smuggling, bogus shipping papers, phony lab tests, shipments to Chicago warehouses and small honey-packing plants in Washington's Cascade Mountains. All that's missing is the sex.

Eleven Chinese and German executives and six of their food supply and honey export companies were charged Wednesday with 44 counts of conspiring to illegally import Chinese-origin honey, including honey tainted with antibiotics, into the U.S. by mislabeling it as originating in other countries to avoid paying anti-dumping fees, Fitzgerald said.

Why the foreign intrigue with something as benign and universally loved as honey?

The one-word answer is money. Tens of millions of dollars, and that's just what the field agents and federal prosecutors can prove at this point.

These are not nickel-and-dime scams.

"They are charged with conspiring to import more than $40 million of Chinese honey to avoid paying anti-dumping duties of approximately $80 million," said Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in the Pacific Northwest. (HSI was formally known as ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

Illegal Additives Create Health Problems

Fitzgerald said the defendants were distributing "adulterated honey that never should have reached the U.S. marketplace."

The adulterants -- illegal additives that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says cannot be permitted in any food product -- included mostly small amounts of the antibiotics and antibacterial drugs Ciprofloxacin, Norfloxacin, Chloramphenicol and Furazolidone.

Health officials say these chemicals can create health problems for just a small percentage of the population with specific chemical sensitivities. Public health experts say the public should never be exposed to unneeded antibiotics.

The Chinese used these drugs in the late 1990s and into the new century to fight off a massive outbreak of bee-killing disease that swept like a tsunami across millions of bee colonies throughout their huge country.

As part of the conspiracy, the indictment alleges that the defendants had honey en route to the U.S. tested by a German laboratory. After they learned that the honey contained antibiotics, it still was to be sold to U.S. customers and even resold to some after it was rejected by others due to the presence of antibiotics.

The thousands of drums of Chinese honey, or sweetened product being sold as honey, allegedly were falsely declared as having originated in Russia, Australia, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.

Sometimes the drums were actually shipped to the second country before being transshipped with new country-of-origin identification to the U.S. Often, the switch was done by just painting the blue drums -- which are almost always used in China -- a different color and typing up bogus shipping papers.

Federal authorities have seized more than 3,200 drums of honey in Seattle; Tacoma, Wash.; Minneapolis; and the Chicago area during the investigations that led to the indictments.

AOL News Watched Inspection
Last September, AOL News watched a honey packer examine rows of steel drums in a bonded customs warehouse near the docks in Tacoma. They were reportedly filled with white honey from Indonesia, according to the importers from Southern California.

The deal didn't smell right to the packer. The price was too low, and that specific type of honey wasn't what Indian bees produce. He even tried to test what was being sold. He popped the bung on several drums, carefully drew out samples of honey from each and squirted the pale, yellow-white syrup into clean jars.

The results were inconclusive, the certified lab reported. The "honey" had to be so thoroughly filtered that it was difficult to say if was even honey, the analyst told the packer.

Eventually, he declined the bargain prices even though the brokers repeatedly told him they were selling hundreds of other drums from the same shipment to other packers.

Problems Were No Secret

The honey laundering and the alleged fraud listed in the indictments has never been a secret among the U.S.'s largest honey importers and packers. All the major players knew who was buying what and at what price. The bogus, mislabeled or transshipped honey stood out, as if it had red flags waving from the shipping pallets, several in the industry told AOL News.

These experienced honey producers knew that tens of thousands of pounds of honey entering the U.S. each year come from countries that raise few bees and have no record of producing honey for export. Their newsletters, conference reports and honey market analysis laid it out in great detail.

Only as the honey industry learned of the pending indictments did it publicly anguish over the problem.

"We estimate that millions of pounds of Chinese honey continue to enter the U.S. from countries that do not have commercial honey businesses." Jill Clark, president of Dutch Gold Honey of Lancaster, Pa., said at a meeting of honey packers this spring.

Warrants Expected for Defendants Still Outside U.S.
Two of the defendants, Stefanie Giesselbach and Magnus von Buddenbrock, were executives of Alfred L. Wolff Inc., the Chicago-based U.S. affiliate of the German corporation, which is believed to be the world's largest honey importer, Fitzgerald reported.

Four were Chinese or Republic of China nationals (three of whom are also cooperating), who have pleaded guilty to related federal charges -- two of them in federal court in Chicago and two others in Seattle. Nine of the accused live abroad, and authorities said arrest warrants will be issued in the U.S. for those defendants living outside the country.

Fitzgerald and Seattle U.S. attorney Jenny Durkan may be the exceptions when it comes to prosecutors going after these smugglers. Federal investigators on the East Coast and the South interviewed by AOL News lamented that their U.S. attorneys thought the illicit honey smuggling was of little importance and not worth pursuing.

However, at least this investigation was a unique example of everyone playing nicely together.

Winchell said that in addition to HSI, FDA, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. attorneys' staffs, ICE attache offices in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Manila worked closely on the investigation. And as one told AOL News, he'd learned more about honey then he ever wanted to know.

Winchell tactfully declined to comment on whether he thought this week's indictments was a wrap-up of the honey laundering or transshipping scams.

However, he said he has a newly created,15-person, full-time team of federal, state and local investigators "closely watching what comes through our ports."