Prepare for Swarm Season

I was just reading a bee supplier price list and noted that a four frame nuc this year is priced at $195.00.

That's some major cash for a new hive.

Swarm calls are frequent in spring and mid summer so if you're looking to increase your hive count why not consider swarm collecting?

Dad and I have only collected swarms from shrubs or trees outside.

For the most part the hives have been less than 10' off the ground so a step ladder works well.

We hold a nuc box under the swarm and then sweep them gently into the box.  There are blank frames in the nuc so the bees have something to hold onto.

We don't use smoke for the most part.  The key thing is to get the main part of the mass into your box because that's where the queen will be.

Once she's in the box it's really easy from there as the bees will smell their queen and gravitate to her.

You should leave the box on the ground until after dark and then come back to collect it.  That way you'll also get the scouts or any foragers that may have been out and about.

This swarm took about an hour to collect and was completely free.

One thing about wild bees is you don't know where they've come from or what diseases they may carry.

Treating for American Foulbrood will be important as well as Nosema.  Mites are a pest for all bees and you can assume they've got them too.

Some beekeepers have a couple beeyards and so they can use one as a quarantine area for new swarms.  Once they know they're treated they can be moved into the main yard.

There are a ton of techniques out there for swarm collecting, many of them are listed on U-Tube. Here's a list below.

Removing Bees from an Old Building - Outside This video is great showing removing bees from the wall of an old building - done from the outside. Note the awesome vacuum that they're using.

U-Tube Videos on Swarm Collecting

An Ode to the Queen, or quite simply: Mom

There are many events in our lives that we can't avoid.  For our bees, it's the death of their queen.

For my family it was the death of my mother on 15 Jan 2013.

I've been reflecting a lot the last few weeks on moms, motherhood, parenting, and nurturing.

Sacrifice comes to mind too.

When doing talks or presentations on bees I like to let people know, especially moms, that bees aren't too much different than they are.  My main point is the sacrifice that the queen makes for the future of her offspring.

When it comes time to swarm, the old, mature but experienced queen leaves the hive.  She flies out into the unknown and unsafe world to seek a new home.  It's dangerous and it could mean her death or the failure of the swarm to reproduce.

The queen takes this risk so that she can leave the safety and comfort of the established hive to her inexperienced daughter who will soon hatch and be that hive's new queen.

When I talk about this I notice many women's eyes will well up.  They understand the reason why the queen does this.  She'll do whatever it takes to ensure the success of her offspring.

I'd like to thank all the moms and queens out there that have sacrificed their peace and comfort for their children.

The Secret Behind the Honey Bee Bite

Secrets of the Honey Bee Bite Revealed: A Previously Unknown Honey Bee Defense Weapon Against Varroa and a Potential New Natural Anesthetic for Humans

Researchers have discovered that honey bees can bite as well as sting and that the bite contains a natural anesthetic. The anesthetic may not only help honey bees fend off pests such as wax moth and the parasitic varroa mite, but it also has great potential for use in human medicine.

The surprise findings discovered by a team of researchers from Greek and French organizations in collaboration with Vita (Europe) Ltd, the UK-based honeybee health specialist, will cause a complete re-thinking of honey bee defense mechanisms and could lead to the production of a natural, low toxicity local anesthetic for humans and animals.

The natural anesthetic that has been discovered in the bite of the honey bee and measured at the University of Athens is 2-heptanone (2-H), a natural compound found in many foods and also secreted by certain insects, but never before understood to have anaesthetic properties. Independent tests have verified Vita's findings and the potential of 2-heptanone as a local anaesthetic.

As a naturally-occurring substance with a lower toxicity than conventional anesthetics, 2-heptanone shows great potential. Vita has already patented the compound for use as a local anesthetic and is seeking pharmaceutical partners to develop it further.

Until recently, research seemed to indicate that 2-heptanone was either a honeybee alarm pheromone that triggers defensive responses, or a chemical marker signalling to other foraging bees that a flower had already been visited. Vita's results contradicted these notions.

The new research clearly shows that 2-heptanone paralyses small insects and mites bitten by bees for up to nine minutes. Somewhat like a snake, the honey bee uses its mandibles to bite its enemy and then secretes 2-heptanone into the wound to anesthetize it. This enables the honey bee to eject the enemy from the hive and is a particularly effective defense against pests, such as wax moth larvae and varroa mites, which are too small to sting.

Dr. Max Watkins, Technical Director of Vita (Europe) Ltd, said, “We are very excited about our findings on at least two levels. Firstly, the revelation that honey bees can bite enemies that they cannot sting confounds some existing ideas and adds significantly to our biological knowledge. Secondly, the discovery of a highly effective natural anesthetic with huge potential will be of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry eager to develop better local anesthetics."

In laboratory neurophysiological trials in the School of Biology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece), 2-heptanone was found to have a similar mode of action to Lidocaine, the dominant local anesthetic used in humans and other mammals. 2-heptanone is found naturally in many foods such as beer and white bread and is so safe that it is permitted as a food additive by USA regulatory authorities. 2-heptanone therefore offers considerable potential as an alternative to Lidocaine. Very recent laboratory research using mammalian cells in the USA, has confirmed Vita’s expectations that the anesthetic could be as effective on humans and mammals as it is on insects and mites.

In considering the biological impacts of the findings, Dr. Alexandros Papachristoforou, a Vita researcher working under the supervision of Professor G Theophilidis in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, said: “It is amazing that this second line of honey bee defense has gone undetected for so long. Beekeepers will be very surprised by our discovery and it is likely to cause a radical rethink of some long-held beliefs. It will probably stimulate honey bee research in many new directions. For instance, many beekeepers have spoken of the 'grooming' behavior of honey bees in helping to control varroa populations. This grooming behavior can now be interpreted as biting behavior.”

Dr. Papachristoforou described how the unexpected properties of 2-heptanone were discovered: “We were investigating wax moth control. Wax moths are a serious honey bee pest whose larvae consume wax and pollen, often completely destroying honeycomb. When exposed to 2-heptanone, which is produced naturally by honey bees, the wax moths appeared to die. However, on closer inspection, we realized that the wax moths were merely anesthetized for a period of one to nine minutes. This was quite unexpected, so our scientific team set up a series of rigorous experiments to find out what was really happening and came up with our remarkable discovery.”

The research has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal, PLOS ONE: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047432

Several organizations contributed to the research in collaboration with Vita (Europe) Ltd: the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Université Paris-Sud, Cyprus University of Technology, and the University of Athens.

All I want for Christmas is: A main floor honey house

Dad and I had been carrying our honey supers from the driveway down a flight of stairs to the basement. It’s a lot of heavy carrying. Sometimes we’d remove a few frames from a box to lighten it up a bit and other times we’d both take and end and carry it down together. Somehow no matter how many frames we’d remove those boxes would still feel really heavy.

The arms get tired after a few boxes and I was so nervous about falling forward down the stairs that I’d most often carry the supers down the stairs going down backwards. It actually worked well because if I was going to fall I’d fall forward into the stairs.

So I got to thinking about all this and how it’d be so very nice to have a main floor honey house. I did consider the garage for a bit. I could convert it or even close off part of it to create the honey house. I must say I’m the only family member that actually puts their vehicle in the garage—something I’m very proud of—considering the amount of organizing it took to accomplish. I didn’t want to put my truck out in the snow and hail AND I didn’t want to get gas fumes and exhaust around my honey. So I vetoed that.

Next I considered a small bedroom that is nestled between the kitchen and the master bedroom. That room had always been a bit of a junk room. When the niece and nephew were younger I used it for sleep overs but over the years it mostly stored stuff that I couldn’t figure out where to put. I’d kept some rabbits in there and foster cats over the years so the hardwood had some wet damage from spilled water dishes, etc.

The floor was a mess but the room had possibilities. I figured the floor should be torn out and redone. I was costing that out and then realized the best option was to refinish the hardwood. Even that was expensive. So, being a brave soul I thought I’d look at U-Tube to see how floors are refinished. After an hour of watching the pro videos I was certain I could to this myself.

And I did. First I bought paint, a nice terracotta colour. I painted the ceiling a bright glossy white and then I did the walls. It was July and it was right in the middle of this project that the lay off letter came. One good thing was that I had a major project underway, as well as the bees to keep my busy.

I rented a floor sander from Home Depot and bought floor brushes and Urethane. I chose a red mahogany stain for the floor to help cover up the damaged areas.  I can’t tell you what a feeling of achievement I got from doing this project myself. All through it I didn’t tell Dad what I was doing. I wanted it to be a surprise. His job is to sell our honey and to do all the extracting. So it was him who’d spend hours and hours tucked into the corner of our basement extracting. Now he’d be able to do it on the main floor.

The final part was to add patio doors. This would be the most important part because now we could walk straight from the driveway to the doors, up three steps and right into the bee room. My brother was home from Australia for the month of August and he built the stairs for us.

The project was done just in time for our fall harvest of honey. I did the reveal to Dad and he was really happy with the change.

[Photo - ignore the small loom sitting on top of the gray uncapping tank].

Through the summer I had increased from six to fifteen hives so we had a lot of work to do. We averaged from 100 to 125+ lbs of honey per hive, but more on that later.

2012 has been a good honey year for us.  We were fortunate not to have bee kills from corn planting like many other beekeepers did.  The summer drought did slow down the flow for a few weeks but the prolonged summer kept the bees busy.

It’s great to get back into the blog again. Sorry for the hiatus. I hope you had a great honey season this year.

Wishing you a blessed 2013 to you and your family and your bees.

Bee Dinner

This time it wasn't the bee having dinner.

The bee was the dinner.

The preying mantis is a skilled predator in the bee yard.

He/she is disguised to look like a twig.

She'll stay completely still until a bee comes within reach.

Then bam!  She lunges forward and grabs the bee in less than a second.

Next she'll bite off the bee's head.

That ends any arguing from the bee.

Now she can dine in peace.

Later that day I saw her again.

This time she was fifty feet away at the robbing table where I had put out supers of sticky frames.

This could only be described as an all you can eat bee buffet for this predator.

I must say her abdomen was looking kind of fat. 

That's why I think she's female.

She's certainly well fed.

A Beekeeper's Best Helper - a Bee Escape Board

The next best thing to have in the bee yard, besides a beekeeper friend to help, is a Bee Escape Board.

This simple board is designed with a small triangular maze on one side and a simple round hole on the other.

The clever idea of this contraption is that you slip it underneath a full honey super that you would like to remove.

How do you place it on the hive?  The round hole goes facing up under the super.  When the bees exit the hive they leave the box by going through the round hole.  As they come down there are three straight paths of the maze underneath that they exit through.

Later when the bee wants to return to the super and she tries to go up she won't be able to figure out how to get into the super.

Your job is to be sure to return the next day (24 hours later) to remove the super.

During that 24 hours most of the bees in the super will exit the box.  They especially will go down into the hive if the nights are cool because they'll want to cluster.

I do find if the nights are warmer that not as many bees will exit the super but using the escape board is still worth it to reduce the number of bees that will need to be swept off the frames.

Later when the bees want to travel back up into the supers they're faced with the maze which is too complex for them to figure out.

If you wait longer than 24 hours to return though the bees will have discovered where the entrances are to the maze and will travel back up into the supers.  So timing is important.

My success with this has been great.  Even on hives where most of the bees didn't exit (a warm night for example) there are still many less bees to sweep off the frames than there would be otherwise.

So be sure to add bee escapes to your list of bee equipment to get.

Stinky Bee Yard? Blame the Goldenrod

You can certainly tell when fall is in the air.  The goldenrod flowers are in bloom and boy does the bee yard ever stink.

It's true that flowers give honey its flavour so don't be put off by the smell of goldenrod in the yard as the bees process it.  The final product doesn't taste anything like the smell.

What does goldenrod smell like?  If you put your nose to a flower it has a faint but pleasant fragrance.  But when the nectar is being processed by the bees there's a very distinct and unpleasant smell that comes out of the hives.

It smells like stinky feet.  Image a hot day with lots of walking and you're wearing your shoes with no socks.  Then you pop off your shoes and within a few moments you've cleared out the room.  Everyone complains.

That's what golden rod smells like.

So don't panic and think you've got American Foul Brood (AFB) if it's fall and you get a whiff of something stinky.

Goldenrod is a plant native to North America and it grows abundantly in meadows and alongside roads and highways.  If you're lucky sometimes you'll get what I call a bird poop gift--a bird has eaten a flower seed and pooped it out in your garden where it catches and grows.  I have a goldenrod plants now in both my front and back yard.

I have to say that goldenrod honey is my favourite flavour of all the honeys flowers and bees produce.