Spring 2015 - Hive Losses

I managed a peek at my beeyard on Sunday around dinner time. It was cold and windy. A winter day actually with temperatures around -4 Celcius. I know other beekeepers took advantage of a few sporadic warm days that we had to open their hives. Everyone that did reported some lost hives. It's hard to be patient in spring and sometimes the temptation can be to open hives a bit too soon. When it's still cold you can get some good info from looking at the outside of the hive, peeking in the upper entrance you may see bees converging there during the day time. Also, doing a heft of the hive to get an idea of the weight can let you know if the bees will be needing heavy spring feeding, or even emergency feeding. (They won't eat sugar water if it's cold anyway so only a candy board would help when temps are still too cold). When the weather warmed up I was able to check the hives. I didn't pull frames because I didn't want to break their seals since it was still cold. In the Pines bee yard I had 10 haves and 5 were dead. They were weak all last year after the move from the corn area. I think I had them in too much shade from the pines so in winter they didn't get enough sun to help keep the hives warm. I now plan to shift the 5 living hives more into the sun. At the Heeman's Garden Centre all 7 hives survived and are doing well. Two of them were weak but surviving. All the hives were bringing in a pale coloured pollen in a month ago and now are bringing in a yellow or deep gold pollen. I started medications last week but this week we've gone back into winter again.

Insect Mimicry

The idea is really quite brilliant:  Take a scary insect and make yourself look just like it.  Then others will be scared of you too.

The result is they'll leave you alone.

There's a whole raft of insects from earwigs to flies that are stingless and harmless but they copy the bees stripes as a deterrent.

It's like having a built in security system.

I rescued these "bees".  While visiting friends outside London these fake bees were coming in the barn door and hanging around the window.

[photo from Wikipedia - false bees]


It was cool outside but the sun in the barn window was pleasant and warm.  These insects had the humans scared until I picked them up and showed them.

They're actually flies - complete with fur and stripes the exact same colour as a honey bee.

Their tongues are like a fly' with the round stopper at the end.


One particular bee liked me and actually sat on my hand and arm for over an hour.

The attraction was probably my great personality as a fake bee whisperer and not that I was warm or anything like that.

Fueling Stations and Filling Station Bees

When you're relaxing in the rec room do you have a bar fridge close by that you keep snacks in? 

 

If you do then you're thinking like a bee.

The bees use the center of a frame as the brood area.  But to make it easier for the nurse bees to feed the hungry brood the bees deliberately put food close by.

They store honey and pollen in the top corners of every frame in the brood chamber.  As the bees work outwards from the center the frames will become full of just honey.

After the brood box is filled they'll move up and put honey and pollen in the supers.

 

Have you every noticed on a frame of fully capped cells that there's the odd cell here and there that the queen didn't lay in.  She didn't miss that cell.  It was done by design.  It's a fuel cell.

 

The workers use these cells as fueling stations. As you can see in the photo the cells are very close at hand for hungry nurse bees.  Remember they feed the larvae royal jelly created by their bodies so they need to fuel up so they can put the fuel out.

You can tell a fuel cell because it'll be full of nectar.

A worker chore that I had not known about before is a filling station bee.  These bees are charged with the task of filling up the fuel cells for the nurse bees.

Jurgen Tautz reported on these fueling cells in his fascinating book, The Buzz about Bees.  I highly recommend this book.  I learned so much about bee biology in this easy to read book.  See a review of it on Amazon at: The Buzz About Bees. 

I don't think the bees will ever stop being amazing.

Tips for entrance reducers & hive wraps

From experience I found that the best time to put in an entrance reducer is on a warm day.

In fall if it gets really cold and I added an entrance reducer during the day time I'd come back the next day to find an awful lot of dead bees on the front porch.

What killed them was the cold weather and the sudden change to their entrance which they'd discovered when they returned to the hive after foraging.

They'd wander around outside going back and forth and many would not figure it out.  Because of the cold they'd lose their body heat too quickly and then they couldn't move at all.

They'd just sit there and die a few inches away from the entrance.

But if it was warmer, the bees don't cool down so quickly and it gives them the extra time they need to figure out the new entrance.

After that first experience I wait for a warmer day to put the reducer on, even if it's too early.  You can put it on at night too.

If you stuff a bit of grass in there, it'll slow the bees down exiting which is believed to help them orient the front door before flying off to forage.

[photo - wrap on and reducer in place but the wrap isn't snugged down until later in the season].

I found the same problem when installing the hive warps.  So now I put the wraps on a bit earlier in the fall but I don't snug them down over the entrance.  Every visit I pull it down a little more each time.

The bees get used to the minimal adjustments much more easily.  The bottom line is a lot less dead bees who can't find their way in.

Hive Tilting

Hive tilting was one piece of wisdom that my beekeeping mentor gave me and it was very helpful.

New beekeepers are often uncertain what is going on inside a hive.  It takes a few seasons to develop a knack for looking at the outside of a hive and having a pretty good idea what is going on inside.

We do need to do inspections to be watchful of bee health and invade the bees privacy to add treatments, frames, etc., but the less often we disturb them the better.

The overwintering advice in Ontario is that a deep should be full of honey - about 85 lbs.

Aside from lifting the deep, the best advice is to stick the hive tool under one edge and tilt the hive.  If it's full, it'll feel like it's glued to the floor.

This is a really awesome non-invasive quick way to test the fullness of a super or a deep.

How to Insert a Queen Excluder & Recycling Propolis

 

I remember a time a few years ago when I drove home from the bee yard crying.

I had just inserted a queen excluder and I was pretty certain I'd crushed all the bees under it when I put the super on top.

I returned a week later and didn't find a dead bees pinned under the excluder so I things turned out okay after all.

But to help you, when you want to put the excluder on you may find the deep box boiling with bees.  If that's the case you need to smoke them to get them to move down.

 

You should do this whenever you're putting a box or excluder on in order to make room so they don't get crushed.

Also bear in mind if you had a super in play already then there could be bees hanging under it, in which case you can set the super on it's side and smoke the bottom to push the bees back inside the box.

Then when you put your boxes on top you won't crush bees, or go home crying because you thought you did.

 

Queen excluders resemble propolis mats and often the bees will put propolis all over the excluder.  Don't every throw away any propolis scrapings.  Just watch this video (below) where I put a glob of propolis on top of the excluders after removing them.

 

 

I set all the excluders out for the bees to clean the propolis off.  They recycle it and it's especially needed in the fall to help winterize their hive.  After about 4 days that glob of propolis was completely gone.

Cottage Gardening with bees in mind

I don't have any grass in the front or back yard. It's all garden.

Over the last 27 years I have added more and more perennial beds.

It's my passion to garden and I knew it was environmentally a good choice.

I've chosen to create cottage style gardens.  This type of garden is not formal and so plants have a casual look.  Plants are allowed to self sow where they please.

Most people find the garden attractive and interesting, but others who are more traditional may prefer their grass.

I believe I think differently because I've lived in other countries.  England especially where the gardens are so amazing.

Many homes were built with a low brick wall all around the front.  The perfect backdrop for a garden.  No one can grow roses like the English.

Gardens are less work than most people think.

By using a layer of large chunk bark chips (the small ones disintegrate way too fast) the weeds are kept to a minimum.

Stick with hardy, drought tolerant native plants and you'll not need to water either,

Close plantings--or allowing the flowers to crowd each other--also limits space for weeds.

Birds pick at seeds and do an awesome job of eating insects.

Before taking up beekeeping, I had spent a year reading, writing, researching and talking about honey bees.

I'll never forget a particularly difficult time a few years back.  I went to tour the garden as a way to relax.

If there was any kind of message to send to encourage me, it was bees.

They were very busy buzzing all over the Russian sage that was in bloom.
Every summer the bees come to this plant, almost like a frenzy of collecting.

[Photo Russian Sage across the front of the photo above - photo taken prior to blooming]

It smells like sage and is very hardy and drought tolerant.  It spreads nicely but is not invasive.  And of course the honey bees love it.

Bees love all the flowers in the garden but Russian Sage is the plant I watch them forage the most.

It might be because it blooms later in the season when there are less flowers available.