beekeeping

How Much Honey?

Honey box filled with honey

It’s the big question everyone has when we harvest a honey box. How much honey is in there?
Family wants to know, “Will we get some for Christmas?”
Colleagues ask, “Will you have any to sell this year?
Mr. Beekeeper asks, “How many pounds did I carry up from the bee yard?”
Mrs. Beekeeper asks, “How many jars do I need?”

One day this week found Mr. Beekeeper and Junior Beekeeper at home together. With the Star Beekeepers aligned, it was surely the day to harvest honey.

Removing the honey box

A peek through the queen excluder at the bees.

Hive D. We took the lower brown box and kept the top box on for a potential fall harvest.

Only one honey box was harvested this time. Hive D had clearly finished filling one honey box but was still working on their second one. We leave that to them to continue to fill. Hive A, new this year and thriving, already filling two hive body boxes, received a honey box just a couple of weeks ago. We leave them to their work.
Hives B and C, who had come through winter with one hive box, have struggled to fill a second hive box. They currently have no honey boxes on them at all. Hive C had a honey box, but it was removed and given to Hive A.

Junior beekeeper examines the honey box

So we harvested one honey box. In the fall we will see if we can harvest some more.

Junior Beekeeper spins the honey while his sister watches

This was Junior Beekeeper’s first experience with spinning honey. Grandma Beekeeper has been working her arms lifting grandbabies and willingly handed the privilege of honey spinning to the Oldest Grandchild.

He also learned a physics lesson about centrifugal force. As he turns the crank, a basket containing two frames spins round and round, faster and faster the harder he cranks. The honey is pulled out of the frames to the side of the container. When he stops spinning, the honey slides to the bottom of the container. We open the valve and pour honey into the bucket. It’s just like that ride at the fair that he dislikes so much…the one where you spin and stick to the side walls while the floor drops out from beneath you. (Junior Beekeeper is more of a Tower of Terror guy.)

Straggler bee in the wax cappings a day later…right before his water ride

And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened to a lone bee who got processed with the honey. He got spun and dripped out onto the filter. Another lone bee got stuck in the cappings which were also placed on the filter to drain. He was still barely moving the next day when it was time to process the wax. Alas, he went down the drain on a “water ride.” Some people think raw honey should not be filtered, but I personally prefer my honey without dead bees in it.

Spinning the honey is a lot easier than scooping 48,000 cells with a little spoon

Spinning the honey is a lot easier than scooping 43,000 cells with a little spoon

So, how much honey is in a honey box? Time for some math.
There are 9 frames in each honey box.
Each side of each frame contains about 80 x 30 honey comb cells. That’s 2400 little cells per side…or 4800 per frame times 9 frames. That comes to 43,000 little cells filled by busy bees.

Frame filled with capped honey

Or about 3 gallons.
One pound of honey equals 1 1/4 cups. We have about 48 cups. So maybe we’ll get 38 one pound jars of honey.

Maywood Honey 2014: a delicate fruity blend of black locust, wild grape, and wildflowers.

Which means Christmas gifts of honey will be liquid gold and jars for sale will have to wait until we see what we get in the fall. Or if one of the weak hives fails to make it, then we get all their honey. But who wants a hive to fail?

The Newbees Have Arrived

It’s a brisk morning, but delightful on the porch, where I am swaddled in a blanket, sipping hot coffee. From the comfort of my porch swing and the warmth of a sunbeam, I watch as BeeMan comes and goes from the bee yard. He is getting the hive ready for the new bees.

More bees than you want to count!

Yesterday we drove out to Whitehall to pick them up. Out the lane past the horse farm, along the road past the freshly manured field–so odoriferous the farmer had to post a “sorry for the stink” sign. (He should also have offered free car de-odorizers!) North we go, past the winery, the alpaca farm, a dairy farm, a sheep farm, a cattle farm. Finally, we come to a barn by a non-descript little rancher. Beyond the barn are dozens of beehives. In the barn are hundreds of boxes of bees.

Mr. Beekeeper ordered four pounds of Russians bees. He is given four pounds of Italian bees. It was too cold down in Georgia. No Russians are ready. Are you kidding me? They’re Russian. Do they need little balaclavas to keep them warm? The BeeMan thinks the Italian bees are more aggressive and prone to robbing other hives. Still, we accept the bees and bring them home to join all the Russian bees in the yard. Let’s hope they can peacefully co-exist.

How does one bring home four pounds of bees? In the back seat of the car. We probably should have buckled them in. The box fell over on sharp turns, so I had to hold it straight for most of the ride home.

Shoulda buckled them in!

Back home, the bees were placed in the mud room. Mr. Beekeeper was feeling under the weather, so the bees would spend the night inside rather than going straight into their hive. We checked on them before going to bed ourselves. They huddled all together, quiet in one big four pound clump. Awwww. How often do you get to see a hive of bees sleeping?

(This is sign of experienced bee keepers. The first time we had a package of bees in the house I was freaked out. Those bees had arrived via U.S. Postal Service. The post office had called at 6 a.m. to tell us to come get the bees. I spent the day at work thinking, “There are thousands of bees in my basement!” Now I watch them and say, “Awwww! Aren’t they cute?”

As the sun rides high in the sky, we don our bee gear and take the Newbees to their new home, Hive A. It doesn’t take long to dump them in and set up the sugar water feeder to get them started.

First, BeeMan sprays them with sugar water to keep them too busy snacking to bother with him.

Next, remove the queen and put her in the hive.

The queen and her attendants arrive in their own little box. The other bees will eat through a sugar plug to release her into the hive.

The queen box is installed in the hive. This will be removed once the queen is no longer in it.

The rest of the bees are unceremoniously dumped in.

The sugar water feeder is set up to help the hive get started. Straggler bees still in the shipping box will join the rest soon.

A peek in the other hives…

We peek in the other hives. Hive D already has a honey box on and is filling the comb with nectar. Nothing capped yet. Hive C is busy building up into the second brood box. Hive B has a second brood box but is not making much progress. BeeMan has doubts about the queen. The joy of beekeeping…there is always something for him to worry about.

Hive A settles in. Mr. Beekeeper will pop down often to keep an eye on them. They arrived at a good time. The red maples have finished flowering, but today honey bees were all over the black cherry blossoms. That bodes well for a cherry harvest as well as for yummy honey!

Honey frame being filled

Happy to have 4 hives full!

Bees alive as glaciers recede at Maywood

Let It Bee Spring–Beekeeper starts the season

It’s sunny and positively balmy with temps in the 50’s as we trudge through the snow to get to the bees. Some parts of the yard still measure six inches of snow. This snow is not uniformly melting so much as it is receding, like a slow moving glacier. Or, to think more positively towards warm beach days, like the tide going out. Winter tide.

Down in the bee yard, we are delighted to see three hives busy, with bees coming and going and buzzing and sunning and enjoying the day. We have exited winter with more bees than ever before. Red maples are budding and these bees are ready to charge into spring.

Hive D is thriving

Tar paper comes off. After all, tonight begins daylight savings!

Sugar water feeders go on each hive.

Today’s task is to unwrap the hives from their winter protection of roofer’s tar paper. Mr. Beekeeper also wants to set up the hive feeders. The bees are ready to go, but there is not much for them to get to yet. Red maples are the first flowering tree for the bees. Fortunately, in spite of the semi-glacial look around here, the maples are waking up right on schedule. Why are humans so desperate for spring to arrive and then so surprised that it actually does?

Red maples are budding right on schedule.

Lids come off the hives to remove the tar paper. We get to peek in at the bees. They look so happy. They buzz around us, landing on our jackets and hanging out on my camera. Are they as happy to see us as we are to see them?

The bees don’t know that they can’t take selfies through the viewfinder.

They are happy to bee with me.

Little bee, don’t freeze on the snow!

The golden burr comb is a delightful contrast to the snowy ground and the emerging mucky mud of March. Yet, here and there, single bees lie frozen on the snow. I wonder, do they die because they landed on the snow? Or did they land on the snow to die? I watch one crawling slowly across its frozen landscape, slower and slower, and finally not advancing. I lift her off the snow. She warms up and takes flight.

Switching the top box to bottom.

Hive D, which went through winter with two boxes, is going gangbusters. Mr. Beekeeper decides to go ahead and switch the boxes. The top box–where the bees have been clustered all winter–gets moved to the bottom. The bottom box gets put on top. This will encourage the bees to build up. Literally. Soon, Hive D will get a honey box. Maybe next week.

Back in the house, Beekeeper Man orders another package of bees to replace the hive we lost over the winter.

And another season of beekeeping begins.

Yay!

Golden honeycomb…a beautiful contrast to still barren looking March.

Bee-ing hopeful in the dead of winter

The bees are still alive! I saw them yesterday.

Today a boatload of snow is falling… to be followed by frigid temperatures and a sub-zero wind chill. Already, with hours of snow yet to fall, gusts of wind whip clouds of snow off the roof and swirl it around the yard. The bees and sensible humans are tucked inside where it is warm. Yesterday, however, when the temperature soared into the low 50’s, we were all out and about.

Look closely--bees coming and going at the entrance and at the lid. Hive A.

Click to look closely–bees coming and going at the entrance and at the lid of Hive A. There’s a lot of bee poop in this picture too.

In Maryland, humans spent the warm day before a snowstorm stocking up on bread, milk, and toilet paper. Quite a few also took advantage of the warmth for some exercise along the NCR bike trail. It was a good day to be outside. The bees also found it agreeable. Bees don’t emerge from their hives unless the temperature is about 50. When I stopped by for a look, the reading here was 45. They are on a protected hill and wrapped in tarpaper, so they clearly felt safe to emerge.

Boy, did they need it! Recent weather has been so bizarre that one day my French III class reviewed most of their weather vocabulary just by discussing local conditions in the preceding 48 hours. We’ve had sub-zero temperatures with howling winds followed by snow and ice, sleet, and freezing rain. We’ve had temperatures pushing 50 degrees with rain and flood warnings. Throw in some fog and a chance of thunder. We’ve had pretty much anything winter can throw at us. These are challenging conditions for the honeybees at Maywood.

Sunday a week ago was our first chance to venture to the bee yard since Christmas. It’s not just the extreme cold that is worrisome, but the drastic changes in temperatures. How well do bees handle a plunge to minus 2 and then up to 50? We slogged through the muddy yard to see. The temperature was still in the 40’s so we were not expecting too much. To our delight, Hive D was showing activity! There were a few bees on the entrance porch of their hive and another cluster of bees up near the top of the hive, entering by the lid entrance. We were very encouraged to see them moving about. Hives A and B each had one bee on them. Hive C showed no signs of activity.

Hive B. Click to see the bee flying back to the hive.

Yesterday, there were bees at each hive. Coming and going. Doing a little basking on the hive lids. I was so encouraged by the activity at the hives that I sent Mr. Beekeeper photos at work to warm his little heart.

So what do bees do to recover from one extended stay indoors before the next one hits? They take cleansing flights. In other words, they go outside for a good poop. Bees, being a clean society, do not pee or poop inside their hives. An extended cold spell means they just have to hold it. (Some of my students could learn a lesson from them.) Needless to say, bees like a warm winter day as much or more than we do!

Hive C. Bees coming in for a landing after their cleansing flights.

Today is a different story. The recently relieved bees are huddled together to maintain a 92 degree warmth. Mr. Beekeeper and I, wrapped in new chenille sofa throws, will snuggle by a toasty fire, secure in the knowledge that the bees are still ok and we are well-stocked with toilet paper.

(Correction: forget the toasty fire. We seem to be out of cut wood. I guess we’ll snuggle to the glow of our Ipads.)

At least we have bread, milk and toilet paper.

In the bee’s midwinter

In the bee’s midwinter frosty winds made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.

Snow was falling, snow on snow, snow on snow

In the bee’s midwinter not so long ago.

Ok, so I changed a couple of words.

After a morning fussing with the tractor, he identified the problem as the ignition switch. But he got the job done!

Winter has hit hard with the New Year. Six inches of fresh snow blanket Maywood. My car remains halfway down the driveway where I abandoned it last night for fear of sliding right into the house. (I had already inched my way down the Wicked Curve on Miller Lane as another car tried to make its way up the Wicked Curve, neither of us able to back up.) As I click at the keyboard this morning in blinding snowlight, Maywood Man is outside trying to get the tractor to start so that he can begin plowing.

It is 11 degrees with 25 mph winds. The snow dazzles under cloudless blue skies. Gusts of wind blow through snow-laden branches and send the powdery flakes whirling like smoke. It is stunningly beautiful from my indoor perspective near a cozy wood stove. Homemade butternut squash awaits my frozen plowman when he comes in from clearing the road.

Judging from the dip in the snow on top, the hive is warm enough to melt it. Icicles are on the outside of the hive.

I’m guessing the perspective inside the bee hives is less spectacular. It is the bleak midwinter for them. Too cold to leave the hive, they huddle in a ball to maintain the hive temperature. They eat the honey they stored last summer. They also have grease patties that Mr. Beekeeper/Plowman made for them, a combination of sugar and Crisco. If they have sufficient numbers, they can keep the hive warm enough to move around to the honey. If not, they eat what is nearby and hopefully don’t starve before the weather warms up.

At Winter Solstice, bees were busy, but still had plenty of grease patties.

Two weeks ago, on a balmy almost 70 degree day, we took a peek in the hives to assess their strength and to offer more grease patties. The hives were all active with plenty of bees coming and going. Although the bees have no plants to pollinate in winter, they use the warm winter days for cleansing flights. Yes, the ladies must keep the hive clean! Some bees were nibbling at the grease patties, but they had still had plenty from the last gift– good sign, I think, that they had plenty else to eat.

A week later, Mr. Beekeeper took another quick peek. Hive B was low in numbers. So now he has reason to worry. Should he have removed the grease patties and replaced them with easier to digest fondant? Is there enough air circulation to keep moisture from building up and freezing into tiny stalactites in the hives? Should he sweep the snow from around the hives? Or leave it to act as a blanket? If he could put tiny little blankets on each of his bees, I think he would do it.

A couple of dead bees at the entrance to Hive C.

Last winter we lost all four hives before Christmas. It hadn’t even gotten really cold yet, but their numbers were too low to keep themselves warm. This year, the hives are wrapped for solar heat in tar paper and they have plenty to eat. They just need to stay warm. Weather like today’s does not make it easy. As my son-in-law commented, we went to bed in Maryland but woke up in Siberia.

Ah, but that’s the thing about Maryland. The weather is always changing. If the bees can get through this week’s projected snow, rain, ice, and minus two degrees, by next Friday it is supposed to reach 40.

Minus two?

Hang in there, little bees! We’ve passed the Winter Solstice. The days are getting longer.

First frost and fingers crossed: winterizing the hive

Sunlight sparkling on the bees…a bee-utiful sight.

The temperature has dipped low enough to zap the basil, which I did not snatch in time. So much for making pesto. A more pressing issue is getting the bees ready for winter. Saturday was a delightful day with crisp sunny weather and crunchy leaves underfoot, but it was still warm enough for the bees to be out and about. Mr. Beekeeper had three tasks in mind:

put sugar patties in each hive for food and for mite control
put bottom boards on the hives to reduce drafts
insulate the hives with tar paper to keep the bees from getting too cold

We have had a 50% success rate in getting bees through the winter. One year they were too cold and would not leave the warmth of their cluster to eat honey elsewhere in the hive and so they starved to death. Last year, they were unable to maintain critical mass to stay warm, due most likely to a mite infestation.

Crisco and sugar. Bees eat the sugar. Crisco masks their scent so mites have trouble finding them.

The wax paper helps keep the patties on the frames instead of falling in them.

The mason jar is the sugar water feeder. Giving them sugar did not make them lazy…they were busy little bees but get to store their honey for winter.

This year we replaced all four hives. Due to a lengthy winter in Georgia, the bees did not arrive in Maryland until the first day of summer. They missed the abundant spring blooming season, so Beekeeper Man has been feeding them sugar water all season long. He also started them off with sugar patties. Sugar patties are a simple mixture of Crisco and sugar. The bees eat the sugar but, in the process, get Crisco on them. This supposedly masks their scent so the mites can’t find them. As we head into winter, the sugar patties are a better way to feed than glass jars of sugar water which would freeze.

Sliding the plywood in sure beats lifting the entire hive.

To help the bees stay warm, Mr. Beekeeper slides a bottom board onto the bottom of the hive which is just open screen. This minimizes cold air rushing in. Bee Man also wraps tar paper (the kind used for roofing) around the hive and on the top lid. We’ve had bees survive without the tar paper and we’ve lost them from pests with the tar paper. If nothing else, it keeps a certain beekeeper’s worry level low. He will still fret over his “girls” all winter, but at least I won’t be hearing him moan every time it snows, “I should have wrapped the hives.”

The black tar paper will help with solar heat in the cold winter.

A primary but unlisted task when opening the hives is always to assess how the bees are doing and to enjoy them.

Opening one hive broke open some burr comb that was attached to the lid. And it gave me a chance to peek at the bees on some honey.

Burr comb…the bees don’t always keep their honeycombs in the frames.

Going in the hive also means checking for pests. One was found outside of a hive–an assassin bug. Assassin bugs are considered a beneficial bug in the garden and they don’t thrive in numbers to make them a danger to the hive, but this hapless bee sure did not benefit from the bug at her doorstep. The assassin bug inserts a paralyzing enzyme into the victim and then sucks the “juice” out of it. The assassin bug normally hangs around flowering plants where nectar loving insects hang out. With the first frost killing off the flowers but warm weather keeping the bugs alive, this guy was running out of places to hang out.

A more nefarious pest was found in the third hive–small hive beetles. But that will require some research and another post.

Small hive beetles can ruin a colony. We’ll have to get on this. Stay tuned.

Busy as…

With the school year heading into its final stretch, I’m feeling as busy as a bee. And I’m feeling about as productive as the honeybees in our yard. Oh wait, we don’t have any honeybees in our yard. The 44,000 bees we ordered from Georgia haven’t arrived yet. We have carpenter bees in droves, doing their destructive thing and also dive-bombing me while I try to weed the gill-over-the-ground from snaking all over the oregano. Between the carpenter bees and my limited flexibility (new hip #2 coming in a mere six weeks!), I didn’t get much weeding done this weekend. I gave up the bending and pulling to sit in a sunny spot to watch Mr. Beekeeper clean the empty beehives with his new power washer.

After a good nap, I pondered lesson plans. Ugh. At this point in my career I should be on auto-pilot like a few teachers I know. Alas, my ESL prep is new this year and requires actual thought. And my juniors and seniors in French are heading into AP season, so my French IV-V lessons have to try to sync with the craziness of who’s in class on which day. I try to accommodate them with a more or less self-paced unit, but they will try to whine and complain about their AP tests…which will activate my hyper-angry button. They have been warned. Someone tried to pull the AP card last week and I went ballistic. You could have heard a pin drop in that classroom which normally is so full of laughter that the math teacher next door can’t imagine what is so funny about French class.

(Warning to pretty much anyone in my vicinity: don’t complain to me about anything. My pain tolerance does not allow for whining. Exceptions are made for my pregnant daughters, especially the one who is teaching full time up until her due date while also moving into a new house the week of her spring concert. She’s allowed to whine.)

I took a break from my meager attempt at lesson planning to get more familiar with my new school-issued iPad. Teachers were given iPads in order to explore the possibilities of teaching via tablet. Training is coming in the new school year. For now, we’re supposed to figure the thing out. “Just play with it,” we were told.

I started out very professionally, looking for word-processing apps and wondering if they were worth exploring. Then I wandered into French apps and downloaded one freebie from a site that I regularly use online. After that, I let the iPad inform me on new apps. Well, the free app of the week was a clever little game called Bee Leader. Since it was free, I downloaded it and got sucked into its little world. I am pretty sure that my seven year old grandson would have caught on to it quicker, but I got the hang of it. The goal is to collect as much pollen, nectar, honey, and bee buddies as you can before the sun goes down..while also avoiding nasties like spiders, wasps, and little black rain clouds. If you smash into little alarm clocks you gain more minutes in your day. Maybe you only have to touch the alarm clock to gain the minutes, but the way my bee was flying, everything got smashed. He was buzzing through his day like a maniac. I could relate.

I don’t really want to fly through this week like a maniac. I’d rather be a calm, focused, productive little bee, intent on the task at hand. And, wow, I could really use some of those time stretching alarm clocks placed strategically throughout my day. Is there an app for that?

Up to our ears in wax

Beeswax. We’re up to our ears in beeswax.

(I’m so tempted to recount an earwax story my sister told me about a certain niece’s boyfriend, but I’ll behave myself. Family members have here enough data to figure out the source and ask her–if they dare.)

Cleaning the frames

Actually, it’s not the beeswax but old honeycomb that we have in great supply. Mr. Beekeeper is using the demise of all the bees as an opportunity to clean all the frames. This, ideally, should be done regularly on a rotating basis so that we aren’t dealing with processing 80 frames of comb. (The real reason is to provide healthy conditions for the bees, but this is not about the bees today, this is about me.) However, we never claimed to be ideal beekeepers and we do have 80 frames of comb in the mancave to deal with.

Beeswax cappings

Four hives full of old honeycomb is a much bigger ordeal than melting the cappings from a honey harvest. Cappings are beautiful white fresh wax that bees make to seal the finished honey product. Cappings are the tops of the comb. Harvesting our honey yields about a kitchen colander full of cappings, enough to make a batch or two of lip balm. In contrast, old brood comb that has been sitting around is brown and black. It is full of sticky propolis and pollen and old cocoons and yuck. Scraped off the frames, it is crumbly like granola and sawdust. To make a grand understatement, there is a lot more debris in the comb than in the cappings. The comb from our four hives will eventually fill multiple 5 gallon buckets.

Old comb from the empty hives

Why do I even want to deal with this? I want the wax. I want to have wax so I can make some lip balm and some candles. I want to be able to offer the art teacher at my school some wax so that a student can try a hand at encaustic painting. I want to be able to say to my brother-in-law, “Sure, you can have some wax to lubricate the bullets for your black powder shooting!” And Mr. Beekeeper plans to roll some of this clean wax onto the empty frames to give the new bees a jump start.

There really is a lot of debris in old comb. The debris not only accounts for the volume in the bucket; the wax sticks to all that glop, making it difficult to extract all the wax. Melting Batch #1 of comb resulted in a layer of wax so thin that Mr. Beekeeper broke it into crumbs when he touched it. (And then I yelled at him.) With Batch #2, I squeezed the cheesecloth-enveloped glop (the “official” beekeeper term–I kid you not–is slumgum) to extract more wax. That resulted in a wax disc the size I normally get from cappings. By Batch #3, I was running out of cheesecloth so I raided John’s undershirt drawer. (He’s due for new undershirts anyway.) I’m now reaching the end of Bucket #1 and pondering how many pairs of dead pantyhose are lying at the bottom of the laundry pile in my closet.

For the uninitiated, I first wrap the comb wax in a filtering fabric like cheesecloth. Then I heat it in a pot of water until all the wax melts (about 20 minutes). I squeeze the cheesecloth to extract as much wax as I can. I remove the cheesecloth and let the liquid cool. The wax rises to the top and solidifies. I lift off the wax and dump the rest of the liquid. (For more detail and photos, check my archived post “Purifying the beeswax.”)

This is what I got from the better part of a 5 gallon bucket.

The first bucket yielded 2 disks of wax and some crumbs. It will have to be processed again to make it cleaner. And the blobs of slumgum can be re-processed to extract even more wax.

A normal person would abandon the melting-bee-glop-in-underwear-on-the-stove project and do something more productive, like bake cookies. Alas, my first three batches of wax and a Sunday afternoon in cyberspace have merely motivated me to do it more efficiently with the next batch.

You may think I’m nuts to spend my time on this. Fine. You mind your own beeswax and I’ll mind mine. But don’t complain when I charge money for my lip balm.

Filled tubes of lip balm

BSI: Bee Scene Investigator

(Note and disclaimer: The following post might actually contain factual information relevant to beekeepers.)

The bee scene to be investigated

All the bees are dead and I want to know why. I want to autopsy the bees. Technically, since they are not human beings, I want to dissect the bees. But Mr. Beekeeper husband is feeling really sad about these bees. He feels like he failed to take care of his girls. We, therefore, are treating his loss with all due respect. Autopsies are in order.

I personally can’t wait to dissect…I mean, autopsy…the bees. It takes me back to the dissection unit of my 10th grade biology class. I had really squeamish lab partners, so I ended up pretty good at dissecting by the end of the unit. By the time we got to the pithed frog I felt like I was doing surgery. It was cool, even though the frog died.

John doesn’t quite share my enthusiasm. While I set up my equipment, he gets out the build-your-own-volcano kit that Harper got for Christmas. And he and Harper later go feed a pinkie mouse to the snake. That apparently is more interestsing than cutting open honeybees. Nevertheless, John brings a frame containing dead bees up from the basement.

Kathy Harp, BSI

Although the bright flourescent light in the basement is better for microscope work than the warm cozy sleep-inducing glow in the log-framed kitchen, it’s cold in the basement. So, once again, the kitchen becomes the staging area. I gather my supplies:

microscope (We need 20x-50x. The one we have says 1x-2x but John swears it’s 100-200 because he researched the model number when he bought it–at work–from General Electric.)

cork (Plenty of those at our house! We have a whole jar of wine bottle corks saved for what? My sister-in-law uses hers to anchor pillar candles in sconces. I am using mine to anchor honeybees with pins.)

pins (Jos A Bank still pins men’s dress shirts, so I have a bunch of pins. It’s not like I ever use them for sewing.)

razor blade (No, I do not take apart a safety razor. John actually has blades in his shop.)

The Beekeeper’s Bible (Richard Jones & Sharon Sweeny-Lynch)

Now it is time to actually dissect the bee. Umm…what am I supposed to do exactly? It was Richard Jones & Sharon Sweeney-Lynch’s The Beekeeper’s Bible (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2011) that put this idea in my head in the first place. It tells me to pin the bee onto the cork at an angle for better viewing and then cut off the bee’s head and thoracic collar. This requires a little more research because The Beekeeper’s Bible does not provide me with critical information, like how the heck one finds the thoracic collar of a bee.

Dave Cushman’s instructions provide some clarity. (http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/acarine_diagnosis.html)

This technique can also be used for interrogating the bees. The flashlight is particularly effective.

Oh, the cork is cut at an angle. The bee is pinned to the cork. The cut is made between the first and second sets of legs. The thoracic collar, which is to be pealed off with tweezers, is nicely highlighted in red.

This is where French teaching and beekeeping intersect–the guillotine.

Minor problem. The thoracic collars of my bees are not highlighted in red. And, second minor problem, the tweezers are not official dissecting forceps and are a little clumsy to work with. So, even if I think I know where the thoracic collar is, trying to remove it to get a better look at trachea pretty much rips the bee apart. Not that I have any lack of bees to experiment with. I decide, for the sake of my own sanity, to forego the removal of the thoracic collar and just see what I can see.

And just what am I supposed to see? I have no idea. Dave Cushman has some great pictures, but they are black and white illustrations. I end up at youtube. Jamie Ellis’ video is very helpful. http://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/afbee/resources/Trachaelmites.shtml

I really have no idea what I’m showing you here.

Here I actually see video images of what healthy bee insides look like. Our bees don’t look anything Dr. Ellis’ bees. I’m thinking maybe our bees have been dead just a little too long. Either the autopsies are strongly conclusive of mite destruction or they are completely inconclusive of anything. I lean toward the latter.

Do stale bee bodies mean the end of our investigation? Not at all. The presentation of bees in the hive tells us something. The bees are not as clumped together as we would have expected. That could be symptomatic of erratic behavior induced by tracheal mites. More importantly, we think back to the behaviors of the hives since last spring.

Hive D never did get off to a good start. It never thrived and was the first hive to die in the fall. John had thought that it was a problem with weak queens and so he requeened some of the hives. He didn’t realize that the weakness of the hive in the spring could also have been due to tracheal mites. Requeening was not a bad idea. However, according to Dr. Ellis’ report, it would have been more successful with queens who were resistant to tracheal mites. This supports our current thinking of buying Minnesota Hygienics in the spring.

Do these wings look weird to you?

There is one really obvious symptom of tracheal mites that we have observed but were clueless as to its significance: bees walking around the beeyard. More specifically, bees with odd wings walking around the beeyard. Bees don’t walk places. They fly. Walking bees, particularly if they walk up a blade of grass and are unable to take off in flight, are not normal. We found this phenomenon fascinating. In hindsight, those are the bees I should have been dissecting. Those were the bees afflicted with tracheal mites. Instead, we watched doomed bees wander around on the ground while we sipped chardonnay and beer, oblivious to the knowledge that the doomed bees’ sisters were infected as well.

Oh, how callous we were! Oh, how expensive a lesson we learned. We’re like detectives who went out for a drink with the prime suspect and let him get away. And now there are bee bodies everywhere. Really. John dropped a few coming and going to the basement. He thinks he picked them all up, but he didn’t. The evidence speaks for itself.

Evidence

Disaster Strikes the Hives

A sad sight…a lost hive

The bees are dead. All of them.

John is distressed. In the fall, he loaded each hive with fondant (bee candy made from sugar-water) for them to eat. He insulated their hives. They should have been warm and cozy with plenty to tide them over til spring. This past week, when he was home on a warmish January day, John visited the hives to check on their fondant supply. He discovered all the bees dead with plenty of honey and fondant still in the hives. Many of the dead bees had fallen to the bottoms of the hives, but small groups still lay in clusters, faces into the frames. It appears to be a classic case of starvation death by cold.

Huh, you say? No, it was not Mrs. Peacock in the library with a candlestick.

Bees maintain a constant temperature in their hive around 96 degrees. In the winter, they do this by clustering together in a huddle and vibrating their muscles, kind of like when we shiver. As the bees on the outside get cold they move inward and others take their place. (It reminds me of geese flying in the V formation, who take turns in the lead and fall back when they need a break.) If the temperature gets too cold, the bee colony won’t be able to maintain the proper temperature. Or, if the bee colony is lacking in critical mass, they won’t have enough bees to generate enough heat.

Capped honey on the left and a cluster of dead bees on the right

If bees get too cold, they will stick together to conserve heat and to protect any brood in the hive rather than move over to get food. So, a cold cluster of bees will actually starve to death, even though there is food nearby.

Our bees had honey and they had fondant. They had been eating the fondant. They must have gotten cold.

Why? It hasn’t been terribly cold here. We understood, a couple of years back, when the bees did not survive Snowmageddon. That was an extreme winter. We had a little bit of snow last month, but overall the weather has been rather mild. So we are confused.

One hive died before Thanksgiving. That was disappointing, but since that hive had never been very strong, it was not too surprising. The other three hives went into winter very strong. All three hives had young queens who were very productive through the summer. To lose those hives is very unexpected.

One current working theory is that the bees we have been buying from Georgia are not suited to Maryland winters. Georgia is a popular source for bees because the mild southern winter means that bees are ready to be shipped north earlier in the spring than bees from, say, Ohio. An earlier shipment means Maryland beekeepers can have bees taking fuller advantage of the spring blooming. It means getting more honey that first year.

Another theory is that something caused a massive loss of adult bees in the late fall. If many bees died off, there would not be enough bees to keep the hive warm. The usual suspects for such a die-off are the varroa mite and the tracheal mite.

There is evidence in this photo. Wish I knew what it was.

Mr. Beekeeper did not notice evidence of mites. And Mr. Beekeeper has tossed away the dead bees that were lying in the bottom of the hive. Will the remaining few dead bees on the frames reveal anything? Were they infected with anything or just innocent victims of the cold?

Do we need to do some bee autopsies? I may be a French teacher, but I was really good at dissecting in my 10th grade biology class. Give me some tiny tools. Get me the microscope. I want to KNOW!

I had no idea when John starting doing beekeeping that I would have to study bee forensics. We have a mystery on our hands. We need to solve it. Buying new bees every year is a very expensive way to get honey. After four years of this, we were rather hoping to be able to start expanding the number of hives. Instead, we find ourselves with a lot of beekeeping equipment but no bees. Clearly, something needs to change.

Last October when we went to the Lima Bean Festival in Cape May, we got talking to a beekeeper from New Jersey. He tipped us off to his preferred bee– the Minnesota Hygienic. He has 150 hives and has never lost a hive of Minnesota Hygienics over the winter. They have the advantage of being bred in a more northern climate and (this is the hygienic part) they keep a very clean hive which greatly reduces their susceptibility to the varroa and tracheal mites.

It looks like John will be spending the winter researching a good (northern) source of Minnesota Hygienics. I will carry on my forensic research on the probable cause of death of the Maywood bees.

Slightly Off the Grid

Slightly Off the Grid

beekeeping

How Much Honey?

The Newbees Have Arrived

Bees alive as glaciers recede at Maywood

Bee-ing hopeful in the dead of winter

In the bee’s midwinter

First frost and fingers crossed: winterizing the hive

Busy as…

Up to our ears in wax

BSI: Bee Scene Investigator

Disaster Strikes the Hives

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