Honey Bee Suite

Update on ants

Rusty — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:40:51 +0000

The post titled “Bad-ant ant advice and the ascension of bees” coaxed readers out of the woodwork. Some agreed with me that the ants were not the problem, some thought they were definitely the problem, and others thought there wasn’t enough information. I have to say that I learned a lot from the discussion. As with all beekeeping issues, the ant problem seems to hinge on the local environment: some places have troublesome ants and some don’t.

The reader who posed the original question has shared more information. It turns out I was right about new wood and no starters. He says, “I built a Warré hive . . . of new wood without foundation nor starter strips, just bare top bars.” He goes on to defend his decision to go with Warré, but I don’t consider that a problem. The shape and design of Warré hives is just fine and I have stolen a lot of good ideas from Warré beekeepers.

However, he goes on to describe the ants, “The ants are tiny and black, and I assume they are Argentine ants (I live in California).” Based on reader comments, it seems that California is one of the places where ants can definitely be a problem and Argentine ants can cause bees to flee.

The good news is we haven’t lost the beekeeper. He says, “I am okay with waiting until next year to try again.” He doesn’t want to buy a nuc because it won’t fit in his Warré, which is a good point. He adds, “After reading your posting (and reader comments) I accept that even without ants, my bees may still have left. But I will try and figure out a way of keeping ants out of my next hive.”

So for next year, I recommend the following:

Use starter strips or a bead of wax on the top bars (same as in a top-bar hive)

Keep the queen caged until the bees begin to build comb

In addition, you could place a pheromone lure inside the hive for a few days to give it a good homey smell before dumping the package

Use one or more of the reader-suggested ways to control Argentine ants

That’s where we stand at the moment. Besides being a bit wiser about ants, I’m ecstatic about having a new word in my bee vocabulary. But the thought of having to wait a whole year to hear how it all works out is nearly unbearable.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Great expectations

Rusty — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:17:13 +0000

My daughter sent me a news article about bees on a rooftop restaurant in Kirkland, Washington. For those of you from elsewhere, Kirkland is an urban/suburban city outside of Seattle. If the name sounds oddly familiar, it’s because the city is home to Costco and its Kirkland Signature brand of products.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Now, as part of the Woodmark Hotel, Yacht Club & Spa’s latest program, “Bee on the Lake,” Seattle-area residents will have the chance to taste a buzz-worthy batch of golden honey produced by 180,000 Italian honeybees and six queen bees housed just steps from the property.

Once settled in, it is expected that the six hives of bees, which are located on top of a Carillon Point rooftop near the Woodmark, will begin producing honey around mid-July. At the end of production in September, the Woodmark will have approximately 1,200 pounds of honey to work with, and with that impressive number in mind, has already begun planning how to best use the locally-produced product.

Did you catch that? These six colonies, during a span of ten weeks, are going to produce 1200 pounds of honey for the restaurant. That’s 200 pounds per hive or 20 lbs per hive per week. And that’s just the amount the restaurant will have “to work with.” One has to assume they will leave some for the bees.

Maybe all those folks in Kirkland have Costco-size expectations, but that is nuts. According to a report by the USDA, the average honey production in Washington was 37 pounds per colony in 2010 and 38 pounds per colony in 2011. And that’s for the whole season, not a ten week period spanning the July and August nectar dearth. It makes you wonder where they get their information.

Impressive numbers like that are certainly attainable in some places—but not in western Washington in the middle of the summer. No way. I hope they have some other sources of local honey lined up. Maybe some of you Seattle beekeepers have a new market . . . just keep those prices high as the rooftops.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Managing packages and swarms

Rusty — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:22:59 +0000

Sometimes little gems of wisdom get hidden within the comments section. In this tip, Jim of Withers Mountain Honey Farm in Flint, Michigan, describes how he bolsters new bee packages with brood from strong hives that might swarm. It is a way to equalize the strength of his hives while boosting packages and reducing swarming. It also increases his chances of getting a honey crop from first-year colonies.

Jim is a beekeeper I trust because his management ideas are always based on a solid knowledge of honey bee biology and colony life cycle, which he then combines with a good dose of economic sense. Although he has many hives, these steps would work for anyone who has both a strong overwintered colony and at least one new package. Below is the entire message:

I installed 20 packages this year and and bought 35 queens for splits bringing my hive count up to 150 . . . I know, crazy! One of the things I like to do to boost my packages and, at the same time, reduce swarming is to steal about 5 frames of bees and brood from my strong hives to combine with the package.

The procedure works like this:

First, I give the package time to release the queen and for her to start laying. Indeed, I wait until there is capped brood a couple of days from emerging. By this time the bees that came with the package are only a couple of weeks from expiring at best. This typically occurs around the end of April. This is also when the bees around these parts begin having visions of swarming.
I go through those strong hives and do a little thinning of their population by stealing about 4 frames with capped brood with the attendant bees and a nice frame of honey. Obviously, you must be certain not to take the queen when you do this. I checkerboard either empty drawn comb or new foundation in the place of those frames. In most cases, this slows the swarming instinct.
The bees I took are combined with the package bees by placing a sheet of newspaper over the box with the package and placing the box with the stolen brood and bees over top of that. It takes the bees a day or two to chew their way through the newspaper and, in the process, become accustomed to their new queen’s pheromone. I would guess the success rate of the combined bees accepting this new queen to be in the high 90′s percentile. I have seen times when the new bees, apparently, killed the queen and made an emergency queen cell but this is rare, likely because I make a point of taking only capped brood and larvae too old for them to make a queen out of.

This procedure super charges the new hive so that I can expect a honey crop from it and, perhaps, prevent an overwintered hive from swarming. It has worked well for me the last couple of years.

Jim
HoneyBeeSuite

And I thought bumbles were big

Rusty — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:06:46 +0000

What looks like a combination of a bumble bee and a hummingbird and a skipper? I certainly didn’t know as I began taking photos of this creature in the ligustrum bush.

At first I thought it was an oversized bumble. But I soon realized that it never held still. Rather than folding its wings while nectaring, it hovered like a hummingbird. Then I saw its tongue, which unwrapped like a roll of toilet paper and reminded me of a skipper. Then I saw the antennae, which were straight and looked nothing like those on a bee.

A name came to me before I looked it up: hawk moth. I had seen pictures of these before, but never saw one in person. So I looked up hawk moth and there is was! And no wonder I was confused, these behemoths are often called “bumble bee moths” because they look like what?

The hawk moths are in the Sphingidae family and are listed as important pollinators. The one I photographed was probably Hemaris diffinis—common throughout our region according to Insects of the Pacific Northwest by Haggard and Haggard (2006).

The honey bees working the ligustrum had been chasing off other pollinators, but not this one. They give it first dibs on everything it touched. Sort of like a bank, this moth is just too big to fail.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Hawk moth hovering while drinking nectar.

Uncoiling its very long tongue.

The little bee on the right is about honey bee size.

Honey bee forage: vine maple

Rusty — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:57:55 +0000

We have a lot of different maples here in the Pacific Northwest, but by far the most inconspicuous in the summer is the vine maple, Acer cincinatum. Not very imposing, it grows to the size of a large shrub or a small tree. It often lives in the shady understory of a conifer forest, although it also pops up in lowlands, clearcuts, and on steep slopes. It has long and skinny branched trunks that root when they touch the soil, so the tree gets a tangled and viney appearance, often forming graceful arches over trails and small streams.

In contrast to its modest summer appearance, it is the most showy of the Pacific Northwest maples in the fall when its leave turn bright red or dayglo orange. What was almost invisible during the summer evolves into an autumn masterpiece.

John Lovell in Honey Plants of North America (1926) says the vine maple is a more important honey plant than the broadleaf (bigleaf) maple, Acer macrophyllum, probably because it blooms a little later. He says, “The honey has a fine flavor and is white or amber-colored with a faint pinkish tinge.” According to Nectar and Pollen Plants of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest (1989), the nectar is 27-58% sugar and some years the trees produce large amounts. Honey bees collect pollen as well as nectar when the trees bloom in late April to early May.

I got the photo last week. The blooms were mostly over, but a few bees were searching for those last delicious drops.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Sipping vine maple nectar.

News clip about neonicotinoids and honey bees

Rusty — Fri, 11 May 2012 03:32:27 +0000

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Post-package anxiety

Rusty — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:24:16 +0000

Every time I install a new package of bees, I get post-package anxiety. It comes from thinking too much about the egregious price I just paid for a bunch of bees that, save for the queen, has a lifespan of four or five weeks.

Not only is the package doomed to fade away, but the bees have a lot to accomplish before they do all that fading. They have to accept the hive, establish it as their home, build a nest, tend to the brood, and start putting away stores. In short, they have to replace themselves inside of a month and, since there is no brood in the oven when they start, hive failure is only one mistake away.

The first thing I worry about is the queen. Is she alive? Will they accept her? Is she fertile? And will she be a decent layer? And then there’s the rest of the gang. Will they like their new home, or will they abscond the first chance they get? Will enough bees survive long enough to care for that critical first batch of brood?

Instead of becoming more relaxed with the passing years, I’ve gotten more anxious. Before I knew so many things could go wrong, I didn’t worry nearly so much. But now . . . well . . . I even invent things that might go awry.

Nineteen days ago I installed three packages, the first I’ve purchased in several years. I released the queens three days after installation and then left the colonies alone for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks I decided on an abbreviated inspection—just a quick look for brood with minimal disruption.

That brief look turned into one of those joyous moments in beekeeping. In each hive I saw brood all the way to the frame edges and solid as rocket fuel. What a sight! The hive populations are set to explode in the next two weeks and there are still many bees from the original packages. I have never seen so many frames of brood come together so fast.

Are they as anxious as I?

So what did I do differently? The answer is honey. I had many, many frames of honey on hand, so I started each package on five frames of drawn comb sandwiched between five frames of honey. I was really excited about the prospect of not having to make syrup, which is why I did it, but I never imagined it would have such an impact on the bees.

Now that I’m thinking about it, of course their feed would affect their performance. Honey is designed to be the perfect bee diet and has much more to offer than syrup. It’s full of vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals and flavonoids. It has a flawless balance of sugar types. It has flavor and aroma. It has the ideal amount of stickiness and the perfect amount of water. No doubt I have made a great discovery . . . honey is good for bees!

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Bumble bee on ligustrum

Rusty — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:02:14 +0000

My camera was trained on honey bees in the waxleaf ligustrum when this little bumble bee-bopped into view. I like the orange of her abdomen against the orange of the flowers. Actually, I didn’t even know the flowers had orange in them until I began shooting. Kinda cool. —Rusty

Bumble bee on ligustrum.

Bad-ant advice and the ascension of bees

Rusty — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:41:14 +0000

You have no idea how terrible I feel about the following turn of events. I feel remorse. I feel guilt. I feel like I should buy the guy a new package of bees. At the same time, I don’t think I was wrong; I gave him solid, well-reasoned advice. Still, the entire incident is heart wrenching.

It all started with this e-mail:

I’m a new beekeeper and I installed my 1st package last weekend. By Sunday morning there were ants walking on the outside of the hive and ants inside the hive walking around my container of sugar water. Should I try and control the ants or leave them alone and hope that the bees can control the ants? I sprayed soapy water on the ants (but avoided spraying bees), which killed them. Is that enough? Or should I place those small metal containers with ant bait around the base of my beehive?

I hate ants but I answered with equanimity:

Don’t do anything more for now. The bees are just getting accustomed to their new home. As they start building their nest and “taking ownership” of the hive, they will take care of the ants. Ants and bees are very closely related, both in the order Hymenoptera. Anything that kills ants will kill bees, so it is best to not use ant bait. The bees probably wouldn’t go for the bait, but if any gets in the hive it could do some damage.

The killer wrap-up came a few days later:

Thank you for replying. My bees ascended last Saturday around 12 noon, 7 days after their installation. There were a lot of ants in the now empty hive. I’ll try again next year after I figure out a plan to keep out ants. (The package cost $99.)

No way! His bees absconded! I was mortified. Still, in my heart of hearts, I don’t think it was related to ants. I tried to get more information from him but, so far, I haven’t heard back. My guess is that he installed his new package on brand-spanking-new equipment, did not use foundation or drawn comb, and then released the queen before any comb was built. The colony—not finding any delicious used-comb odors—decided to sample the market. Sure enough, they found something they liked better and were off. It happens. I’ve had it happen more than once.

Bees may abscond because of excessive heat, noise, strange odors or just because they feel like it. It’s hard to assign a reason but a well-fed package with a strong young queen has lots of options. In my own experience I have found that new wood, especially with no foundation, is a crap shoot—maybe they will hang around and maybe they won’t. After learning the hard way, I always advise people who are starting on new wood to keep the queen tied up until you see comb. Like us, bees hate to walk away from a down payment.

By the way, I don’t know if he made a typo when he wrote “ascended” instead of “absconded” or if he is a literary genius. But I have never encountered such a poetic allusion to bees on the run. I imagine them at high noon arising from the hive in a slow spiral, circling up through the trees, up past the clouds, up through the blue, up, up until they mingle, glistening and shimmering among the stars and indistinguishable from them. Magic and melancholy all rolled into one.

In any case, I can’t think of anything so discouraging as losing a new package, especially when it’s your first and your only. I wish I could say something consoling and reassuring. I wish I could issue a recall to his bees. Instead I feel like I led a lamb to the slaughter. So what do you think? Did the ants do it?

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Out for a drink

Rusty — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:40:30 +0000

After I wrote about favorite watering holes for bees, several readers wrote to say their bees liked wet potting soil. One reader sent the following photo of four bees in a small plastic pot.

Yesterday I was able to capture three bees drinking from some wet woodchips that I had dumped on a woodland path. Another person said their bees liked wet coffee grounds. I put some out near the hives for a few hours but found no takers . . . swearing off the caffeine, I suppose.

Bees in potting soil. Photo by DW Krape.

Three bees in wet woodchips.