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Managing packages and swarms

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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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

Faster than the speed of mite

Let’s say you have a brand new colony of bees that is guaranteed to be uninfected by Varroa mites. How does your colony become infected and how fast do the mites reproduce? Let’s take it from the top:

  1. One fine spring day one of your bees shares a flower with an infected bee from another colony. Busy doing what bees do, they rub against each other as they seek nectar or pollen and, bingo, a phoretic mite (a mite taking a ride) passes from the foreign bee to your bee.
  2. Your bee flies home with her load of goods: two full pollen sacks and a gravid (pregnant) female Varroa mite. You are toast.
  3. Once in the hive, the mite jumps off her ride and cases the joint. She breathes in luscious smells—larvae in their fifth day of development, just ready to be capped. She especially likes the smell of those drone babes, but there are so many cranky bees around, she decides to crawl into a worker cell before the bees have a chance to cart her away.
  4. She scuttles down to the bottom of the cell and submerges herself in brood food with only her breathing tube breaking the surface. She hunkers down and waits, a mite at the end of the tunnel. Patience, she knows, is a virtue.
  5. Eventually the immature bee consumes the brood food and the female mite crawls free.
  6. Meanwhile, the honey bee larva has transformed into a pupa and the mite pierces her soft young body and feeds, vampire-like, on the bee’s hemolymph (blood). Yum. Slurp, slurp.
  7. The mite feeds for about 60 hours, building her strength for the business of egg-laying. The first egg she lays is haploid, meaning it has only half of a full complement of chromosomes. This grows into a small but mighty male mite.
  8. Then, once every 30 hours, she lays another egg. All of these subsequent eggs are diploid, meaning they have a full set of chromosomes and are female.
  9. All the mites go through a series of stages: larva, protonymph, deutonymph, adult. As adults, they mate while still within the capped cell. After the male mite mates with his sisters, he dies. Good riddance, but the damage is already done.
  10. The female mites continue to live off the female worker bee until she emerges from her cell. These mites are then carried about the hive where they smell those piquant five-day-old larvae. When they get to feeling frisky, they jump off their steed, crawl under a larva, and prepare to start a family of their own.
  11. But now, instead of one gravid female mite, you have 2.2 gravid females. (Okay, from a practical point of view, it’s just two. But the 0.2 becomes statistically significant as the population builds. Simply put, every fifth cell yields 3 gravid mites.)

The time spent in the larval stage varies bee-by-bee, which is why some cells produce more mites than others. And the drone larval stage is naturally longer, so each drone cell can produce more mites than a worker cell. Nevertheless, the actual number of reproductive mites produced per cell is smaller than the theoretical number because not all eggs are viable and not all mites are able to reproduce. Thank heavens there is something on our side.

Still, the increase in mite populations is staggering, and it doesn’t take long for a colony to become overwhelmed. And anything that increases the time honey bees spend in the larval stage—such as some pesticides—can dramatically and quickly increase the Varroa mite load.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

Adult varroa mite on honey bee larva. Wikimedia Commons photo.
Adult varroa mite on honey bee larva. Wikimedia Commons photo.

Pesticide residues in brood comb

Pesticide residues are known to appear frequently in wax combs. Since most pesticides are either lipophilic or dissolved in oil-based carriers, it is no surprise that we find them residing in beeswax. These chemicals can be brought into the hive by the bees themselves in the form or contaminated pollen and nectar, or they may be introduced by beekeepers in an effort to control Varroa mites. Earlier this year, a paper[1] in the online journal PLoS ONE examined the negative effects of these chemical residues on colony health.

The authors designed an experiment in which areas of non-contaminated brood comb and pesticide-contaminated brood comb were affixed side-by-side within active brood nests. The contaminants, the brood, and the resulting adult bees were monitored over several generations in order to assess the differences between brood raised on clean vs. contaminated comb.

The researchers found several significant differences:

  • Delayed adult emergence occurred in brood raised in contaminated cells.
  • Increased brood mortality occurred in contaminated cells.
  • Bees reared in contaminated comb had shorter lifespans (about four days) than those reared in clean comb.
  • Over time, the amount of pesticide decreased in the contaminated comb and increased in the clean comb, indicating that pesticides migrate throughout the hive. This is probably caused by movement of the nurse bees during their daily activities.

These differences can have far-reaching ramifications for colony health.

  • Delayed adult emergence means more mites can be raised to maturity. In this experiment, some foundress mites were able to produce an extra mite per brood cycle. This can have catastrophic effects on a colony over time.
  • Increased mortality of brood puts a greater strain on both the queen and the workers. The queen must lay more eggs to make up for the losses, and a smaller number of workers are available to care for the brood. In addition, valuable resources are expended on brood that doesn’t survive.
  • A shorter adult life span means that each forager has fewer total foraging days in which to build colony strength before winter. In some cases, “under-aged” worker bees may be forced to forage, which decreases the number of nurse bees available to raise young.

From a practical point of view, in-hive chemicals should be avoided whenever possible, and brood combs should be rotated out of the colony on a schedule commensurate with total pesticide exposure.

Rusty

HoneyBeeSuite.com

[1] Wu, J. Y., Anelli, C. M., and Sheppard, W. S. 2011. Sub-lethal effects of pesticide residues in brood comb on worker honey bee (Apis mellifera) development and longevity. PLOS ONE: 6(2): e14720. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014720.

Drowning in drones

Several beekeepers with foundationless frames have reported finding large number of drone cells in their hives. In some cases, the new brood is 25% to 50% drones.

While colonies on foundationless frames always have more drones than those on preformed foundation, the number of drones can seem out of hand. And indeed, vast amounts of hive resources are going to raising these bees who give nothing in return. Instead of having workers out there collecting honey and raising more workers, you have hundreds of drones lazing around, waiting to be fed.

The first thing you should do is make sure the queen is laying at least some worker brood. If so, the queen is probably fine. If you see no worker brood—or at least none in a clear pattern—you may have an infertile queen that needs to be replaced. Although not frequent, it does happen from time to time.

If you think the queen is okay, you can try moving the drone brood to the outside of the brood nest and inserting new frames near the center of the nest. It is usually best not to remove the drone frames completely (unless you are doing it for mite control) because the colony will just expend more energy in an effort to replace it.

One thing to remember is that most drone brood is raised in early spring just before and during swarm season. It should taper off after that. You may just have to be patient for a few weeks. As the season progresses you should see a greater and greater percentage of worker brood.

Some beekeepers use a queen excluder just about the hive entrance to keep the drones from returning to the hive where they take up space and use resources. The problem with this is that newly hatching drones are unable to leave, so it is necessary to remove the queen excluder every few days to allow the newly­-hatched drones to exit.

Another thing you can try is using a pre-stamped piece of wax foundation as a starter strip to encourage worker-sized cells. If you have a proper saw, you can even cut starter strips from plastic foundation.

Remember, there are many reasons that beekeepers developed pre-stamped foundation. One of them was to keep down the number of drones. If you go foundationless, you will always be faced with a higher proportion of drones and a lower yield of honey than a beekeeper using patterned foundation. Every method has its pros and cons.

Rusty

How to start a queen in a two-frame nuc

I had a request to write about how I start queens using a two-frame mating box such as the Brushy Mountain “Queen Castle.” The Queen Castle is a standard size deep brood box that can be divided into four two-frame sections, each with its own entrance. But the following instructions could be used for any small mating nuc, regardless of the configuration.

First, prepare the box.

Next, select your starter frames. With a system like this, you can start with swarm cells or you can start with eggs and very young brood.

Starting with swarm cells:

Starting with eggs and brood:

Variation:

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Each section of the “queen castle” has its own entrance.
Each section of the “queen castle” has its own entrance.