Burr Comb and a Failed Scoop

August 12, 2016 / lizbaessler / 2 Comments

I promised we’d be back with the bees soon, and here we are!

When we last left our heroes, we’d given them a honey super and some more time to build burr comb in the shim between the hive bodies.

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They’ve been hard at work since. About seven of the ten honey super frames have been filled up – this one is mostly capped. The honey starts out very moist, and the bees leave it open to evaporation until it’s distilled down to about 18% water. At this point they cap it with wax to stop the evaporation. We don’t want to harvest honey that’s mostly uncapped, since it’s likely to ferment. This frame’s probably alright, though.

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Setting the honey super aside, we tackled the top hive body. Our plan was to cut out some of the burr comb and put it in a jar to display for educational purposes. Unfortunately most of it was full of brood, but in the name of educational purposes you can let your scruples slip a little bit. We lifted a few of the frames, one at a time, and cut away the burr comb from the bottom.

Incidentally, the capped cells all have the larger, bumpier look of drone brood. Varroa mites tend to prefer latching onto drone brood, as their development in the cells takes a few days longer. One very low-impact means of varroa treatment is to give the bees special frames designed for drone brood, wait until it’s all capped, and then destroy it. So we may have inadvertently done a little mite treatment of our own.

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Speaking of mite treatment, I was anxious to try out the sugar shake method for myself. I’d brought a half cup measurer, and I was somehow under the impression that enough bees had fallen into our tub with the burr comb that I’d be able to scoop them in easily.

I was wrong. They were too spread out, and the comb kept getting in the way. I got more bees on me than in my little measuring cup, and they were getting angrier by the minute. I could understand why – I felt like some kind of deranged god shoving them around in their own honey.

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Next time I’ll do it right and knock a whole frame into the tub. Turns out bees in small numbers don’t move as a liquid.

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As we were moving through the top hive body we spotted the queen. It was very good to know we hadn’t knocked her off with the burr comb.

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At the end of the day it was a messier hive dive than we usually have. A little bit of honey spilled on the deck got cleaned up immediately.

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Likewise, a bee who didn’t survive the manhandling got cleaned up immediately by a passing wasp. Wasps can be carnivorous, and this was an easy meal.

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I found another wasp on the outside of the hive. I was worried that the honey spilled while collecting the burr comb might attract invaders. But at the time of writing this, almost a week later, the bees seem fine.

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Even if robbers are about, our colony seems pretty tough and capable of defending itself. Here are two little guys shaking their butts outside the hive to mark their territory with pheromones. They, unlike the happy bee on our sign, mean business.

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We’ll be going back in again soon. I’d like to do a sugar shake that isn’t an embarrassment and, assuming it’s going to show that we have too many mites, we want to get treating. I’ve just ordered a shipment of Hop Guard, a relatively new mite treatment regimen that’s derived from hops. It’s only just legal in Rhode Island this year, but I’ve heard good things from beekeepers just over the Massachusetts line where it’s been available longer. It’s supposed to be gentler on the bees than some other options, but still effective. And it doesn’t contaminate your honey, which is a big plus.

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I’m not advertising for Hop Guard. In fact I’ve already read complaints that its instructions are unclear and it dries out so quickly that you have to apply it three weeks in a row for it to work. But I’m excited to try. If all goes well, maybe this will turn into and advertisement – both for Hop Guard and for its necessary workarounds.

A Trip to Bee Town

May 31, 2016May 31, 2016 / lizbaessler / 3 Comments

Another day, another glowing bee report!

We went into the hive again this weekend, and the bees couldn’t be doing better. This frame, taken from somewhere in the middle of the box, is almost completely covered in capped brood, with a band of capped honey in the top left corner.

This one has more of a smattering of capped brood – maybe that means it’s older and a lot of the larvae on this frame have already emerged. Last time we inspected we spotted the queen but no brood, which meant she may not have mated yet. She clearly has now, which means her sole objective is egg laying. She has enough sperm stored up in her body (bees do it a little differently than we do) that she’ll never need to mate again. Barring a swarm, she’ll never even need to leave home.

Just one frame over we found uncapped brood. Look carefully inside the cells. See those white C-shapes? Those nasty little maggotty things? Those are baby bees! If you look closely, you can see that they get progressively bigger from left to right. That means the queen worked her way from right to left and the larvae on the right are just that much older and, therefore, bigger. It takes just 21 days to go from a tiny egg to a fully formed bee, so every minute of development counts!

This is the same frame, shifted slightly to the right. A lot of the larvae are big, and four of them have already been capped – those are the four cells around the middle that are opaque. The worker bees seal off the larvae with a layer of wax once they reach a certain size. In the sealed cell the larva will grow into a pupa, something that looks a lot more like a bee than these little grubs. Eventually she’ll become an adult and chew her way through the wax cap, ready to get to work. By mid-June all these gross little worms will be full-grown bees and all the bees in this picture will dead or on their last legs. Bee time moves fast.

This progression from empty and capped brood to mostly open brood meant we were following in the queen’s tracks. She works methodically, laying from one frame to the next. And sure enough, there she was in the next frame. There’s a little bit of everything going on here. The whole left corner is a swath of capped honey. Coming in from the right is a patch of capped and soon-to-be capped brood. The white dotted queen is bustling around in the middle, above a really nice patchwork of pollen. The pollen will be mixed with honey into a tasty sludge called bee bread and fed to the brood.

Bee colonies have personalities, just like any animal, and this one is nice and easy going… until we get too close to their queen. We can always tell we’ve pulled out her frame before we see her because the bees get more agitated and aggressive. No stings yet, but there’s a lot of movement and angry buzzing.

It’s not all babies in beetown. This frame was extra heavy with uncapped honey. The honey starts out high in moisture and is left open to the air to evaporate. As it distills down, the bees combine it into fewer and fewer cells. Once they have a cell full of honey down around 18% moisture, they cap it with wax to stop it evaporating more. At this low moisture content, the honey won’t ferment and can be stored all through the winter. How do the bees know all this? Magic.

Since the bees are doing so darn well, we made some big adjustments to their hive. We took away their jar of syrup. This is a bit of a controversial move, and a lot of beekeepers in the area are still feeding. There are flowers galore now, though, and our jar looked to have been emptied a while ago. We think they’ll be fine. In the place of the jar we added a second hive body with ten more frames. The bees haven’t quite filled out their current box (two or three frames are still empty) but they’re moving fast and it’d be such a shame to overcrowd them and cause a swarm.

We put a shim between two boxes. It’s just a square of wood two inches high with a hole drilled in it. This should give the bees a little more ventilation and room to come and go.

We also removed our entrance reducer – this big piece of mesh that keeps out opportunistic mice in cold weather and makes the hive more easily defensible for a new, weak colony.

This is our entrance now, with plenty of room for foragers to come and go. I really hope our colony’s tough enough to defend all this new open space. We’re probably going to put in a moderate entrance reducer until they build up their numbers some more. For the time being, they seem to be enjoying the new easy landing. Check out the two foragers with loaded pollen pockets! There are obviously at least two pollen sources coming in right now – one golden yellow and one bright orange.

Here’s another from the yellow source touching down after a flight. She’ll go inside, hand her pollen off to the house bees, and probably turn right around to make another trip. Unless another bee gives her a hot tip about an even better or closer pollen source.

Like that cool bright orange stuff.

Progress

May 17, 2016 / lizbaessler / 1 Comment

The bees are kicking it into top gear. Late last week we took advantage of the sudden good weather to do an impromptu inspection. It was very nice not to have to hold an umbrella over the hive the whole time.

The first thing we noticed was that a good third of the syrup was missing – you can see a few droplets here on the inner cover, but most of it has gone into the bees and been converted into much needed energy. This means the bees have been munching away and working hard to draw their wax frames out into livable comb.

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When we lifted the inner cover, we found the bees more or less clustered around the middle few frames. Eventually they’ll work their way out into all ten and will have to be given a second box to make way for expansion. For the time being, though, population is low and momentum is going to take a while to build.

We gave them a half and half mix of new frames (like the one being lifted here) and old frames. The old frames were drawn out into cells by bees of the past, while the new frames hold virtually flat sheets of wax that these bees will have to draw out themselves.

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Here’s a nice bundle of bees on a new frame. What they’re doing is building up on the hexagonal imprint on the wax foundation we gave them to create a wall of cells in the classic honeycomb shape. Where do they get the wax? From nowhere pretty. The workers eat honey (or for many of them right now, sugar water) to give themselves energy. They then exude tiny bits of wax through glands in their sides. They (or maybe some close friends) scoop up these little bits in their mouths and chew them to warm them up to malleability. Then they spit it out and work it into the existing wax, expanding the honeycomb by a little more.

This process is repeated countless times by countless bees to make a perfect, highly uniform pattern.

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Up close you can see how the honeycomb is starting to take on a 3-D shape. The cells have gotten deep enough that some bee has decided to store a single serving of pollen. Are these bees with their heads in the cells working to build them out more or bringing in more pollen? I’m not sure.

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The old frames have a completely different look to them. For one thing, the wax has turned a dark yellow to brown from the countless bee feet that have passed over it. For another thing, the cells are already at full size, so the bees on these frames can focus on storage instead of wax making.

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Even so, they’ve been making some wax. The chunk in the top middle is a hunk of burr comb, which the bees make to fill in spaces they deem too open. What are these bees up to? The ones with their heads in the cells are most likely depositing pollen or honey for storage. The others could be doing any number of jobs. Maybe they’re talking about the hottest new nectar source.

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As usual, one of the main goals of this inspection was to find the queen and make sure she was alive and happy. When we picked up our third or fourth frame the bees got much more agitated, and sure enough it was because we’d exposed the queen. I took this picture that looks like it would have been fantastic if I’d managed to focus the camera. Just look at that sunlight seeping through! The queen, though fuzzy, is the large, light yellow bee in the center with the white dot on her back.

Try squinting – it looks almost passable.

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Since everyone was so upset about about us bothering their queen, we decided to leave them alone after this. We didn’t see eggs, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. And even if they’re not, that may just mean the queen has yet to go on her mating flight. She’s had some bad weather keeping her indoors.

But now the sun’s out and spring and love are in the air, so she should be able to go out and find a dozen nice gents to kill as she sucks their semen into her body where it will be stored for several years.

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Isn’t nature beautiful?

Happy as a Bee

May 10, 2016May 21, 2016 / lizbaessler / 3 Comments

I was pretty worried about the bees.

We moved them in on a cold, wet day, and the days after just got colder and wetter. We’d planned to peek in on them on Saturday, but because of the cold we pushed it back to Sunday, which was also cold. And wet.

It was a bad week for bees all around.

Despite the weather, we had to check on our queen. My parents were visiting, so my dad acted as photographer and my mom, to her credit, spent her Mother’s Day standing in the drizzle watching me play with bees.

I did make her brunch afterward.

The bad weather had me worried. I’d gone down the day after installation and didn’t see a single one. Normally after moving into a new home, the workers will fly around and around the entrance orienting themselves. The temperature was in the 40s, though, when no sane bee would leave her home. It made sense not to see them, but I didn’t like that I couldn’t.

I put my ear up against the side of the hive – I thought that if I could hear buzzing, I’d at least know they were alive in there. But I couldn’t hear a thing. I was prepared for the worst.

But I didn’t need to be! The bees are not only alive, they’re productive! They’ve already started drawing out comb!

The queen is alive and has been naturally released from her little cage. We spotted her crawling around on a frame.

They haven’t taken very much of the syrup – the jar was still mostly full. We’re not overly worried, though, since we started them with a few frames of pollen and honey from last year. It makes sense that they’d want to eat that before sugar water.

Since it was raining, we closed up shop as soon as we found the queen. One of these days it’ll be nice enough to do a real inspection. For the time being, we confirmed everything we needed to – the queen was free, she’d been accepted, and the workers were working. We put the syrup jar back in place and popped the lid on top.