Leaked Memo Shows EPA Doubts About Bee-Killing Pesticide

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/epa-clothianidin-controversy/

Over the concerns of its own scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency continues to approve a controversial pesticide introduced to U.S. markets shortly before the honeybee collapse, according to documents leaked to a Colorado beekeeper.
The pesticide, called clothianidin, is manufactured by German agrochemical company Bayer, though it’s actually banned in Germany. It’s also banned in France, Italy and Slovenia. Those countries fear that clothianidin, which is designed to be absorbed by plant tissue and released in pollen and nectar to kill pests, is also dangerous to pollen- and nectar-eating bees that are critical to some plants’ reproductive success.
In 2003, the EPA approved clothianidin for use in the United States. Since then, it’s become widely used, with farmers purchasing $262 million worth of clothianidin last year. It’s used on used on sugar beets, canola, soy, sunflowers, wheat and corn, the last a pollen-rich crop planted more widely than any other in the United States, and a dietary favorite of honeybees.
During this time, after several decades of gradual decline, honeybee colonies in the United States underwent widespread, massive collapses...

And this:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/nicotine-bees-population-restored-with-neonicotinoids-ban.php

In 2009, Italy's neonicotinoid-free corn sowing resulted in no cases of widespread bee mortality in apiaries around the crops. This had not happened since 1999. The European Research Center, Youris, reported that Moreno Greatti, from the University of Udine stated, "Bee hives have not suffered depopulation and mortality coinciding with maize sowing this year. Beekeepers from Northern Italy and all over the country are unanimous in recognizing that the suspension of neonicotinoid- and fipronil-coated maize seeds."

Oprah's Bee Giveaway

In other news, I gave some bottles of mead to Santa Claus for distribution so if the boys and girls reading this blog are very good, you may get a bottle.

I Heard Some Bees

I put my ear to the side of the hive and heard them inside murmuring to each other.

The comments section is now open to unregistered and anonymous persons, except for undesirables including blasphemers, fornicators and diesel fitters.

Winter at the Hive

On thursday the 18th I went out to visit the hive and found a massacre or something had happened. there was an unusual amount of bee parts scattered on the landing board. Had they been raided?

As temps have been steadily dropping and its been rainy/windy I decided to close the opening of the upper box with a little plastic plug:

Saturday Nov 20 after a night of snow:

Maybe 25-30 dead bees on the landing board and in the snow around.

The mead is all bottled and mellowing in the wine cellar.  For thrift and convenience sake it was put into beer bottles of various sizes, 36 bottles in all.

Just 2 sample bottles were taken and the results are quite professional tasting imo. Left for a month or 2 in the cellar, the remaining bottles will only improve.
It is potent stuff!  I wish I had taken a hydrometer reading at the beginning to get an idea of the  %alcohol, but I didnt. Anyway its some pretty good stuff and will provide many opportunities to toast the bees. Thank you bees!
Jah bless them and keep em warm and safe through the winter.

Orange Pollen and Traffic Report

During the past weeks many bees were seen going into the hive carrying large amounts of orange pollen. Traffic is slower. Outside night temps have dropped below 10C. There has been heavy rain and periods of sun.
i havent done any inspection thingking to leave well enough alone to let them do as they  think best.

Sugar Shake and Skunk

There seems to have been a skunk attack. On Monday morning there were a few dead bees on the landing board and digging marks in the dirt in front of the two bottom corners. So, I put up a fence with sharp pokey parts on the top and some blackberry vines for barbed wire, and i thought it was unlikely a skunk could climb over. the next morning there was a bit of digging around the bottom of the fence, and the next morning a hole that almost went under, but there was a sharp pokey wire sticking down into the hole so i hope the skunk got discouraged and didnt actually make it under. Last night Danna shoved a paving stone into/over the hole and i put a nail board to guard the ground beside it. this morning there was a little disturbance in the dirt in front of the stone/nailboard but it looks like not much effort was made. i hope the skunk (im assuming it was the skunk) is discouraged enough to give up.

I opened the hive today and everything looked ok to my inexperienced eye.I looked at all the open brood for any sign of mites and didnt see any.  I did a sugar shake test but i dont know if i had a large enough sample of bees. I sprinkled the sugar onto a piece of white paper and looked for mites but i could not find any.

blurry pic of powdered sugar on white paper

less blurry

 

 

 

 

 

I wasnt sure what to look for in the sugar, because i didnt have a clear idea of what size the mites are. I thought they were tiny tiny little things, and when a saw more than twenty little specks in the sugar i began to despair. When I began to look more closely with a magnifying glass, and then with a microscope at the little dark specks in the sugar, my hope returned, because I could not find anything that looked like a mite at all.
Danna found this pic http://picsdigger.com/keyword/varroa%20mite/   to give a better idea of the size we were looking for and there was certainly nothing that big in the sugar. So to make a long story short, i could not find any mites. If theres no mites, then theres no reason to treat for them.

1 more thing: there is one frame in the top box on the outside wall that doesnt have anything in it. it has only a little comb drawn out but nothing stored in it. im thinking that one could be taken out and a feeder put in, if it is a good time to start feeding.

Update

Mead in the Making

The mead has been fermenting for a little over a week now, next friday is the day to siphon it off to the glass carboy for the second stage of fermentation / clarification, then after that is bottling.

On Saturday Aug 21 I opened the hive to see what was going on.
There were not many bees in the top super, and only a couple frames of capped honey.The rest of the frames were largely empty, but there were all drawn out and the extracted frames we put in were all cleaned up and nice looking again.  In the top brood box there were a lot of bees and a lot of honey. The middle frames that didnt have complete foundation had a bunch of what looked like drone cells -i opened one up with a corner of the hive tool and saw a fat  larva inside. There were quite a few, i just left them because those frames had bigger cells than the other ones and with nothing to replace them (except the one hated black plastic one) destroying them would be pointless. Besides, since the big flow is over and the honey harvested it shouldnt matter too much having a few extra drones (im hoping).

I didnt pull out all the frames, only the middle ones, but i tried to look on the bottoms of all of them for a queen cell or anything unusual but didnt see anything. In the bottom brood box there were a lot of bees, honey, orange capped cells (pollen? brood?) there were a lot of bees covering these frames so i didnt dig into any. Plus it  was so hot i was more than ready to get outta that suit.


Otherwise, bee traffic has been good and we have seen them on many many flowers around including mint, geraniums, the green beans, squashes, clover etc. The neighbors report that their garden is being visited in great numbers. All in all, they seem like they are doing well.

Mead

 Check this out:
 http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/fast-cheap-mead-making.htm

Honey Cake

1 1/2C cake flour
1C honey
1/2C vegetable oil
1Tbsp lemon juice
1/2tsp salt
1tsp baking soda
1tsp grated lemon zest (or maybe a little more)
3/4C cold water

Method: preheat oven to 325F.
Sift flour, salt, baking soda and stir in lemon zest.
Blend honey, oil, water and lemon juice.
Mix wet +dry ingredients and pour into 8x8 pan (or use 2 smaller pans like I did) bake till toothpick test.

Honey, Sweet Honey

We visited Hollis' farm today for the use of his excellent manual extractor... a machine which uses centrifugal force to spin out the frames. Mostly it was all capped, so we use a 'cappings fork' to scrape the 'lids' off the comb and place into the spinner. There was a small pail (~10 lbs) of light honey which came from the uncapped parts first spun, kept separate. This is honey that is very light amber and liquid (runny) since the bees weren't quite done with it (hadn't removed all the moisture and capped it yet). That might ferment sooner, so it will be used first. (More about MEAD to follow as well, as H. suggested to us that batch is a good source to make it.)

Next we uncapped, and spun out ~35 lbs. of the deeper, more viscous golden elixir, as the poet Lorca put it, "the epic of love/the materialization of the infinite/the soul and the blood of flowers". Absolute delight. We also saved the cappings and the wax for candles. P'raps a picture or two to follow. Next we'll jar it up for friends and family! Yayyy!
edit: pic!

We gave back the supers for the bees to clean out, but will likely put them away in a couple of days for next spring. Leaving on the original brood box, the second brood box, the queen excluder, and the dadant super from last week for now. H. suggests we take them down to a single box for the winter. We're looking into questions of size and medicine now, thinking about splitting the hive and growing a new queen, probably will wait until spring now, since the blackberry flowers have all pretty much turned into lil'green berries now. A top bar hive? Maybe building our own with a viewing panel? Lots to research and think about for the future. For now, we know that our mysterious unidentified queen is an amazing layer!


All is tinder dry here... note to self to make sure smoker is fully extinguished before setting it down in the dry grass...

Rainfall totals for July 2010 @ YVR: 0.6 mm (usu. average for July is 40 mm)

I Did It Myself!

I hadn't even considered opening the hive on my own but the desire to see what was going on inside outweighed my hesitation and I decided to go for it. Sorry there are no pictures of in hive interior but iIcan report that there was absolutely no room available in the brood box or honey supers. The entire hive was jam packed with bees, comb and sweet sweet honey!

In the honey super with the missing frame they had filled the empty space with comb attached to the wall which I removed to put the new frame in. It was beautifully made and filled with deliciousness, too bad it got all warped and distorted on removal because it was warm and soft and  honey was dripping everywhere.

It took superhuman willpower but I managed to save some for you:

The brood box was completely filled with bees, and the plastic frame was all drawn out. There were so many bees it was difficult to see what was in the cells, and i only pulled out the middle four frames because their sound  began to increase both in volume and pitch so I decided to finish up as quick as possible. So my inspection wasn't complete, but I can report that I did see open cells with brood, cells capped with white, cells capped with yellow and honey. Mostly i saw bees. We thought there were a lot of bees the last time we looked, but I'm tellin' you what, there were just bees upon bees covering every surface, and more bees in the air all around. I didnt see any queen cells, and that strange bulge on frame #4 (counting from the track side) was still there, still closed and didnt look any different as far as I could remember. What could it be?
The queen excluder was all covered with burr comb dripping with delicious honey. I scraped off some and gave it to the kids, but I left a lot simply because there were so many bees all over it that it was hard to tell what was what. also it was hot and i was sweatin like a hog.

I quickly put the new brood box, the excluder, then honey super and then the two full ones on top. Maybe I overestimated my strength because it took almost all my power to lift all that honey to the top of the stack. with 2 brood boxes and 3 honey supers the hive is a beautiful tall tower:

 Even though the boxes should only be painted white I couldn't resist adding a little pastel color just for fun. I read all over the interweb about alternate colors and the consensus seemed to be that only light colors should be used due to heat concerns, but beyond that the bees dont care.
All in all I am very pleased with the work of cleaning up the boxes and fixing up the frames with new clean foundation and replaced missing/broken wire (one frame is fixed up with a guitar string) and cutting down two large frames to make up for the missing ones. The bees have a lot of room now to expand their operations and judging by their flight traffic they are busy doing it. Go Bees!

speaking of bees on lavender

i just thought i'd forward along this lovely shot i happened across upon flickr today:
see it large (it's better)

Still Going Strong

It has been 10 days since  putting those new frames in, and the bees have been gettin down to business. The weather has been fine, sunny and warm without being hot. The big seasonal flow seems to be still going strong  judging by the action around the hive, the bees are arriving and leaving in numbers that cause a terrific traffic jam at the entrance.

workin the lavender:

Busy busy bees!

Wow, the blackberry flowers flow is really on! So incredibly busy, the queen's been laying and the hive seems to have quadrupled in size since it first arrived in happy little Davesland. To "recap" so to speak:

On June 17th, we went in and took a peek, and all seemed well, and at that point we put on a 'dadant' honey super. We should have returned sooner, since the flow was very good in the last few weeks, and by the next time we opened it up, July 6, just a little over two weeks later, they'd managed to quite fill that super, with mostly all capped off honey! Sweet! There was a crazy mass of burr comb all over the queen excluder, and several of the brood box frames had been drawn out right to the wall, bursting to full with honey and new brood. In fact, even one of the two ugly black plastic frames that the bees had heretofore avoided drawing out had foundation starting to rise on it. There were so many bees and so few empty combs that I feared the queen would decide she didn't have enough room to grow, and might swarm if we left her like that another couple of weeks!

So, we scraped of lots of the burr comb, rotated inwards the two black plastic frames, and put on a second honey super (moving the full one up a level, we set the empty new one directly on top the queen excluder. Then, on Thursday, I went over and met and chatted with Chris, of Chris' Honey Yard (at 72 Ave & 152 St.) He very kindly helped set me up with some older boxes and frames, as well as some new sheets of foundation, and showed me how, after the frames are cleaned up, to half or quarter the sheets, and hang them into the frames as neatly as possible (we attached with wax, but he said you could also nail them in with a small top strip of wood.) It was so incredibly hot on Thursday, and the boxes (a brood and a dadant) plus frames were so grimy, that we only fixed up one brood box frame to replace one of the crappy black plastic frames, and also one extra honey super frame, as it turned out the new box we'd put in on Tuesday was TWO frames short not just one, so we'll definitely have to get another dadant frame in that box in a few days too. Anyway, they've got some space to work on now, and hopefully the queen --she of wonder and mystery driving this whole growth overdrive, yet who we still haven't been able to eyeball!--hopefully she'll now have enough space at least for a few more days to keep laying.

I feel like we quite disturbed them this week, smoking them and messing around lifting up almost all of the frames looking for any peanut shaped queen cells that might be hanging around, that any swarm instinct has probably been thwarted for now.

It was truly amazing to see though, the stunning growth in just a few short weeks. It seems like the blackberry flowers only just opened up, but the window is so brief, even now as I look at the big splash of blackberry bushes in my own backyard, most of the flowers are now withered into tiny green berries. Chris suggested this flow is probably the last big one of the summer. Like my apiarist mentor, Hollis, he suggested that if we'd had a second hive box, and done it a couple of weeks ago, we probably could have pulled out a few frames (that we were certain didn't hold the queen) rotated some new empty foundation in, and tried to get them to grow a new queen, effectively creating a second hive. Now at this point, we have a box to clean up, and we could put it over the existing brood box, or even just clean up and install the dadant for the existing queen to lay in, but now that the flow is on the tail end, perhaps it would be better to try to maintain one big strong hive instead of two weaker ones.

Ah well, we'll watch and see (closer and more frequently now) and we'll know for next year to be even better prepared for when the flow first hits. Also, for that full super on the top: I think I worked out the use of Chris' mechanical extractor... but Hollis' hand cranked one is also available to us, although out in Langley. We should very shortly get the honey out of that one and put it back into the hive for them to re-fill if they can, if it looks like the flow might continue another couple of weeks yet.

I also have some pictures from a couple of weeks ago to post for your viewing pleasure.
Cheers to all!
-=pj=-

lately

Everything seems to be going ok for the bees.
Several times I have seen them a block or so away on some flowers.
you should come over.

oh how i love the little bee

that makes the honey for our tea

and pollinates so many plants

and wear those crazy pollen pants.

Rain today and yellowjackets

EDIT:
I didnt go open the cover to the super yesterday, i  thought it is probly better when in doubt to not do anything and leave them undisturbed for a while.
Traffic was pretty good yesterday but light today on account of the rain.


thinking about that big bee... maybe i just got all excited about a big bee. i notice they arent all the same size.



Yellowjackets:
There were a few yellowjackets hanging around the hive, one was feeding on a dead bee then another attacked a live bee on the ground, when i saw that i said "you must die!" and i heroically killed 3 of them with a stick.. un fortunately one got away to gather its friends and come back for revenge.

we will be ready

What I Saw Today

Today at about 3 o'clock i was watching the bees at i usually do, and there was good traffic since today was warm and sunny. as i was watching, a very large bee came out of the hive and was walking around on the front porch (or "flight deck" as i like to call it) closely followed by a regular sized worker bee. I was like "Dayum, that is one big bee," becuse it was obviously bigger than the others, and I didnt think it was a drone because it didnt have that blunt shaped abdomen. So i thought "Can it be the queen?" because it was so obviously larger than the other bees all around it... but none of the others except one seemed to pay any attention to it except one, which was normal sized compared to all the others going in and out.

The very large bee jumped off the board and started walking along the ground and jumped down to the base of the compost bin and tried to climb up the side. The plastic is very smooth so it couldnt climb up, it's little legs were going and its wings buzzed a little but it couldnt crawl up the side of the compost bin. The whole time I'm thinking, "Is this the queen? Should I do something? That can't be the queen, can it?"

While Im thinking all this wondering what if anything I should or shouldnt do, the very large bee turned and walked over to the tire just near the compost bin and climbed up the side to the squash vine, and getting to the very large squash blossom, the very large bee took off and flew away to the south east.

So i dont know if it was a queen or not, i dont think a queen would just walk out and fly off by herself, and im thinking, not in summer when the nectar is flowing and the pollen is abundant... but I dont know. maybe I should have tried to catch it while I had the chance, but I just didnt know what was going on.
all i do know, that was one big ass bee. it had a fuzzy thorax like all the others tho, and not a round hairless part like all the queen bees in the pictures. Awwwwwww man i hope i didnt mess up by not taking action in the moment.

The behavior of the rest of the hive was business as usual, so im hoping everything will be ok whether that was the queen or not. Since it has been a week and a day since last inspection, i plan to take off the lid and look into the top super tomorrow (and pull out the bottom board and clean it off) on saturday, unless you see this and let me know if i shouldnt or if you want to be here for that or what.

Traffic Report

The bee traffic has been very good this week since inspection.

They have been using their new middle door since the new super was added, but mostly some bees can be seen just inside the hole.

There are still a few bees outside the door at night. D says they are blocking the door to keep the warmth in.

What's Goin On?

This evening at about 8:30 or so I cruised by the hive and noticed a lot of bees hanging out outside the door. I haven't seen this before. They are very quiet and moving slowly. Whats up with that?
Today was cool and cloudy with a feeling of rain in the air that never actually happened.

bee haiku

 buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz 
buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz
buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz 

she comes home again
summer still a week away
pollen on her legs

Traffic

It has been sunny and warm the last couple days and bee traffic has been brisk. Ive noticed quite a few bees "falling" to the ground in front of the hive and sitting a moment before flying up to enter. Maybe they are tired or weighted down so much they need a brief rest.
The blackberries are blooming now. That is all.

Weather and Pollen

Rainy today. Yesterday morning was too, but the afternoon broke out in sunshine, and Tuesday was a very bright warm day with a crazy traffic jam cloud. It seems a little wet for this time of year but Im hoping this means a bigger than usual pollen/nectar harvest in the weeks/months to come.

Had my first taste of pollen yesterday and WOW! it is amazing. The taste is both sweet and gently bitter with an amazing perfumey quality that hits the back of my throat like nothing i have experienced before. Im delighted to taste what the bees eat (besides honey of course) and feel kindof priveleged to be able to eat this substance that came from I dont know how many flowers, collected and concentrated into a kind of flower garden essence of sweetness on my tongue.  This flavor of pollen is so full of notes and complexity Im not surprised that many ppl on the interweb  say they dont like it. It is intense. 

What's BEEn Goin' On

The weather has been a mixed bag lately, but temps are not too bad for the season.  The off and on rain im sure will be sucked up by all the flowering plants and converted to nectar. It's interesting how much effect the sun has on the behavior of the bees, there is a dramatic difference in traffic when a cloud passes in front of the sun, it's like everything slows down. When the sun re-emerges again in full brightness suddenly they come pouring out and a traffic jam can happen at the entrance.

Flies seem to like hanging around the hive. Twice now I have seen a fly casually walk into the hive entrance and out again, without so much as a how do you do, and I am surprised there as no sign of any door guards kicking them out immediately or anything. whats up with that? I guess they dont think a lone fly is a threat, and I suppose a fly couldnt get too far inside or cause any mischief without getting noticed. I do wish the bees would wing slap them away or something, because flies are dirty and gross, not at all like our nice bees.

Pictures from Today's Inspection

Just a link to all the pictures of our bees to date, most recent at the bottom. 
Including today's hive inspection.                                   Danna

Der Lebensweg der Arbeitsbiene

I found this great illustration of the life cycle of the worker bee. What great drawings! I found it here: http://www.nordwestreisemagazin.de/bienen/wunderwelt2.htm

Today was warm with a mix of sun and clouds. I only visited the hive once today and there was mad traffic.

rainy days

The last two days have been pretty rainy and cool, but the bees were still flying.
Today is cloudy but hopefully the sun will come out for a while, before tonight's forecast rain.

sun and cloud

There was lots of traffic at the hive today, they were coming and going faster than I could count them.
This evening, it was 7ish, as I was standing by the compost bin watching the bees come and go as I usually do, there was a lull in the action for a short while. so as I was just standing there looking at the entrance, a worker came out and stood for maybe 30 seconds on the board, then took flight, but didnt go up and away like a foraging run, but flew straight at me and stopped to hover for a second maybe 6 inches from my chest. She moved to the left and then to the right very quickly, back and forth a few times, then she flew around me 2 times and went back inside.
I imagined her reporting back to the queen: "Yes, It's out there again today. It smells pretty bad but it seems harmless."

Rainy day

Grey drizzly day, but it didnt stop the bees from going out.



Check out this guy's article on beesource.com
He gives 10 principles of beekeeping backwards:
Principle #5: Beekeeping is not about honey.

beesource.com/point-of-view/charles-martin-simon/principles-of-beekeeping-backwards

"The mass-productionization of bee culture is the single most damaging process in our world. The great pioneers of modern beekeeping created vast empires without knowing what they were doing. The motivating point was and always has been, how to get the most out for the least put in. Those great men had no idea what old fools they were, and how universally pernicious their principles would become.

Take the drone situation for example. They reasoned correctly that since it only took a few drones to fertilize the queens, this business of a colony supporting hundreds or even thousands of drones was wasteful. So great minds went to the drawing board and described a hexagonal cell base parameter based on worker-bee size, uniformly embossing foundation with this pattern, thereby rendering it more difficult for the colony to raise drones. A war developed between the colonies attempting to raise drones and the keepers attempting to subvert their natural inclination. The apotheosis of this process was reached with plastic worker brood foundation, making it impossible. But even then, the bees drew cross-comb and tried to raise their drones there. Human ingenuity and technology prevailed, and drone populations decreased, honey production increased, the practice was deemed brilliant, and worker foundation was simply another unquestioned standard of the industry."

he is a real minimalist

Weather Report and Talked to the Neighbor

Yesterday's weather started out grey and cool but developed into a lovely sunny afternoon/evening, but its been gray skies and sprinkles all day today.
The bees have stayed mostly inside today with just  few sent out with only one or two bees arriving and leaving every minute or so, as opposed to 16 or more every minute observed on bright sunny days.

The Neighbor said the bees had been all over his thyme and that they had been drinking from his bird bath. I told him, "No charge for the pollination service."
He asked me, "How many bees are there?" and i didn't know what to say. "Hundreds and hundreds of them" was my best guess.
According to http://www.badbeekeeping.com/, there are about 3000 worker bees to the pound so I guess I could have said "thousands" and still been right.

Lithuanian Museum of Hives (still making honey!)

Found on Wikipedia... from Stripeikia Honeymaking Museum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive

Somethin Goin Down in Bee Town

 

At about 2:30 today I noticed a large cloud of bees around the hive, their sound was pretty loud  and I thought they were mad about something, but I couldn't tell what might have upset them. They kept buzzing around for almost an hour before settling down again.

4 drones


orange pollen and yellow pollen.


Today's weather was mixed sun/cloud this morning but it broke out into a lovely sunny afternoon.
The thermometer is currently showing 20C but im sure its much warmer in the sunshine.

Grey Skies and Water

Today the weather is overcast and breezy, the temperature has not gotten over 16C. The current reading is 14C. Traffic today has been steady but rather low volume.

The bees need a safe source of water. They had been going to the stream, but Danna took away the rocks that made the slow moving part and set up an aquarium with rocks and moss for them to drink, and it is a pretty popular spot:

the key is having something safe to stand on while drinking, and this bee drinking fountain is perfect in that regard. however, the bees have also been going to a bowl that was left out for the birds, and it has proved a dangerous place

I fished several bees out of the water. i put them on the rock in the middle to dry out, hoping theyd make it back home none the worse for wear, but the two on the rock pictured above just stayed there moving very slowly -i think its too cold for  them to recover very quickly from a dunking like that.  I since dumped the water out of that bowl, but of course theres nothing to be done about the many dangerous puddles all around that a bee might fall into. Bees are not good swimmers.

Not to linger too much on danger and death, but there was a dead worker right outside the hive entrance this morning, then several hours later there was another. I dont know at what rate bees normally die off but i thought i might mention it here just in case, because they were lying on the board literally right outside the door.

i also witnessed a couple drones buzzing very loudly and moving back and forth in the air very rapidly outside the door before going inside. what are they doing when they leave the hive? my guess is they are looking for flying queens.

Pictures from Today's Inspection

Today's pictures didn't come out great, a lot of senselessly blurry ones, including some mysterious pictures of the ground. Sorry, but there were many factors that prevented good picture taking: i was really excited to look into a real live occupied beehive, then i became really nervous as the bees were walking all over my arms/hands/camera. It was easy to be nonchalant beforehand, but when they are walking on you its a whole different thing.
In addition to that, i used a old crappy camera... I had picked up PJ's good camera and looked at it, and i couldnt figure out how to turn it on. i didnt want to admit to being lame or technologically chalenged, ands suddenly the lid was coming off the hive and i just grabbed the other camera. so heres a few views of todays event:

This is a picture of what i thought was the queen. you can just see her body at the very top of the picture.

frame #3

All i can say is that it was tremendously awesome to look into bee city.

Opening the Hive

It was a lovely sunny afternoon when we took a peek inside today, a week after installing the 4 frame nuc. Lots of bees, but not sure if we saw the queen after checking all the centre frames. Saw at least some capped brood, but not really sure if there is more than last week. The bees have done a great job of cleaning up the old hive frames, and--except for the 3 black frames on the edge that weren't drawn out when installed--they're into the old hive frames' honey nicely, cleaning, and making more. Lots of foraging going on, pollen coming in from all over, different shades of yellow and orange. Looks good! Hope to see more in a few weeks, compare pictures. Growth?

DON'T BEE SKUNKED!

The Striped Skunk is widely distributed, easily recognized, and hard to forget. Opportunistic omnivores, skunks can find a meal anywhere. The apiary offers skunks a bountiful feast. On skunk can decimate the entire population of a hive in as little as three nights. Scratching at the entrance the animal alerts the guard bees to a disturbance at the door. As they respond to protect the hive, the skunk quickly devours the workers. As more bees emerge, they too are consumed. Satiated, the skunk will waddle away to sleep off its delectable meal and return the following evening. This behavior will continue until the hive is vacant. If it finds any way to access the hive, the wax, pollen, and honey would also be eaten.
http://www.jonesbee.com/skunked.html

Lorenzo Langstroth

Thanks to Rev Lorenzo Langstroth, inventor of the modern bee hive as we know it today.

Here are 10 bee keeping axioms from his book, A Practical Treatise on the Hive and the Honey-Bee, published in 1853:

There are a few first principles in bee-keeping which ought to be as familiar to the Apiarian as the letters of his alphabet :

1^st.  Bees gorged with honey never volunteer an attack.

2^nd.  Bees may always be made peaceable by inducing them to accept liquid sweets.

3^rd.  Bees, when frightened by smoke or by drumming on their hives, fill themselves with honey and lose all disposition to sting, unless they are hurt.

4^th.  Bees dislike any quick movements about their hives, especially any motion which jars their combs.

5^th.  Bees dislike the offensive odor of sweaty animals, and will not endure impure air from human lungs.

6^th.  The bee-keeper will ordinarily derive all his profits from stocks, strong and healthy, in early Spring.

7^th.  In districts where forage is abundant only for a short period, the largest yield of honey will be secured by a very moderate increase of stocks.

8^th.  A moderate increase of colonies in any one season, will, in the long run, prove to be the easiest, safest, and cheapest mode of managing bees.

9^th.  Queenless colonies, unless supplied with a queen, will inevitably dwindle away, or be destroyed by the bee-moth, or by robber-bees.

10^th.  The formation of new colonies should ordinarily be confined to the season when bees are accumulating honey ; and if this, or any other operation must be performed, when forage is scarce, the greatest precautions should be used to prevent robbing.

    The essence of all profitable bee-keeping is contained in Oettl’s Golden Rule : KEEP YOUR STOCKS STRONG.  If you cannot succeed in doing this, the more money you invest in bees, the heavier your losses ; while, if your stocks are strong, you will show that you are a bee-master, as well as a bee-keeper, and may safely calculate on generous returns from your industrious subjects.

Sunshine and Rain

Yesterday was rainy in the morning, but that didn't stop the bees from going out. The sun came out in the afternoon and traffic increased.
Today is slightly overcast and warm (thermometer is showing 22). The girls are proverbially busy with much coming and going.

Spider vs. bee

I'm afraid the bee lost this battle. 





Looked up what kind of spider it might be and discovered this blog and pics on this spider.

"Misumena vatia, the flower crab spider, lives only in North America, usually on flowers—and you can see why. Apparently it has the power to change colour over several days from white to yellow or vice versa to match the flower it's on."

Another good pic of this type of spider.

Regular Monday and Thanks

The bees seemed to have a regular workday today. There was a steady stream of workers coming and going; most workers arriving with their baskets full of yellow but a few come back with their legs loaded up with red.

The People of Davesland  want to thank PJ for bringing the bees to our small nation, and for teaching our people the ways of the bee. Now the Daveslandian countryside is even more rich with life and activity. Thanks PJ!!

Where pollen pants come from.

Who is this?

The Bee Chair