Dead-Out Already

My Michigan queen's hive is already a dead-out and it's not even Thanksgiving. Keep your fingers crossed for the Georgia queen.

Train the Trainer

Keep your fingers crossed: Meghan and I have submitted a preproposal to the Department of Agriculture's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant program. If funded, we would develop a "train the trainer" beginning/intermediate small-scale beekeeping curriculum and train Michigan local bee clubs to offer it in their own communities.

Photo credit - Oscar Brubaker

Moving the Hives

Imagine this: myself behind the wheel of a Ford F-250, four beehives strapped in the back, leaking bees. My right hand and forearm are swollen up like baseballs. It is midnight. We are on Pontiac Trail, driving from Tollgate Farm to Matthaei Botanical Gardens. I am cautiously following fellow beekeepers in a faded Volkswagon beetle with one headlight burned out.

People are looking at us.

Let me clear up a couple myths perpetuated by our teachers:

(1) Two small female beekeepers cannot easily move a 300-pound hive, even with a hive carrier.

(2) Bees do not all retreat into the hive on a warm summer night. Not even at midnight.

Moving the hives wasn't really a disaster. More of an adventure. Two weeks later, the girls are at last settled down and ready to believe me when I say the Botanical Gardens really is just as nice - nicer - than Tollgate Farms. While it's true that Twelve Oaks Mall is right across the street from Tollgate, I am not sure the girls really got much value out of the nearly 200 distinctive stores that can be found there. Bees probably liked that area better when there were more than twelve oaks.

Water, Water Everywhere

I got a call from one of my staff about a swarm of bees in the Gaffield Children's Garden at Matthaei Botanical Gardens. (Reminder - Matthaei Botanical Gardens is where I and a number of other beekeepers have our hives.) Staff have seen this "swarm" every day in the garden, and were wondering whether I would want to gather them, or if it was okay to go ahead and exterminate them. Here is a picture of what they are seeing:

All you beekeepers are probably thinking the same thing: this set-up looks pretty much exactly like a bee water dispenser. Honey bees need pebbles or other little islands to rest on while they drink.  Those bees in the picture are part of a stream (pun alert!) of steady customers who've found a water source a bit closer than Fleming Creek.

About a hundred bees typically hang out in this spot at any given time. The reason I put "swarm" in quotation marks is that 100 bees is not a swarm. A swarm should have thousands - even tens of thousand - of bees. With a literal million honey bees living in the dozen or more hives at the botanical gardens site, exterminating the hundred that are drinking in the children's garden might piss the bees off, but it won't solve the problem. We'd do better just to make this location a little less ideal for honey bee to drink. Removing the pebbles and having a deeper pool of water would do the trick. We'll just take care to do it early in the morning, before the bees head out to do their work.

Or we could just put up a sign to help kids and their parents understand what's happening here, and to warn them to tread with caution.

Moving the Brood Box

I had a strange set-up with the Botanical Gardens hive because the deep was on top of the medium. That was because of combining the nuc I created from Ben's deep with the nuc Meghan created in my medium. I checked the girls a few days ago and found that they had virtually moved out of the medium and up into the deep. Knowing that they prefer a deep brood box at the bottom, I went ahead and switched them. It seemed like the right thing to do, since there was really only one frame of brood left in the medium. I felt proud of my more advanced management while at the same time hoping I wasn't making a newbie error. Especially when the medium box fell off the stand, knocking the frames out and causing a great deal of angry buzzing. I think I did the right thing: when I went to feed them yesterday, they were much more active, and I saw many of the foragers bringing in big knobs of bright yellow pollen, a sure indicator of eggs and larvae.

The girls had hardly a drop of capped honey, so I switched my feeding regime from a 1:1 sugar:water ratio (which stimulates wax production) to a 2:1 sugar:water ratio (which stimulates honey production). So I felt proud also for knowing what to do about that.

Here's hoping the goldenrod and aster bloom will allow them to make enough honey to carry them through the winter. Early indications are that the goldenrod bloom will be as excessive and exuberant as all the blooms have been this beautiful season.

Feed the Bees

I discovered a very easy way to make bee food. This method works much better than the Ziploc bag approach, which can result in a trunk full of fermented bee syrup, stinking up your car and causing you to wrong your teenager.

Clean and Easy Bee Syrup

(1) Add water and sugar in equal parts to a quart-sized water bottle.

(2) Shake until dissolved.

(3) Decant into bee feeder. (My feeder involves mason jars with holes in the lid.)

What to Do, What to Do?

It's a thing among beekeepers to talk about how everybody does things differently. Every experienced beekeeper will tell you that if you ask five beekeepers a question, you'll get six answers. Here is a typical exchange:

"Mr. Beekeeper, when should I smoke my bees?"

"Well, Joe thinks you oughtn't smoke them at all. Jane thinks you only ought to smoke them when you're taking off honey. I smoke 'em every time. It's up to you." And this conversation repeats itself, whether it's about pest management, equipment, feeding, winterizing, or anything else.

Research would be good. There is almost certainly a right answer to most of these questions, or at least a technique that would predict a better outcome for the hive. The problem is, there are so many variables in nature that nobody can actually figure out cause and effect. Instead of controlled experimentation, we have passions born of anecdotal evidence (aka "years of experience"). We need a few scientists and a funding source.

We had a guest beekeeper at class who said that recent research indicated that bees recover 25% more quickly when they've been smoked than when they haven't. I didn't even ask him where he read it, or who funded this research, or how robust was the finding. I just knelt at his feet and lit up.

Good Advice

Our teacher sent 42 (yes, 42) tips for managing your hive. Some of the tips were actually multiple tips grouped together. Here are my six favorites, in reverse order:

(A)void rolling bees.

If bees come up, gently smoke them.

(My husband asks: how can you smoke them if you haven't rolled them?)

Remember that heat rises.

Do not burn yourself or anyone else.

Do not eat bananas before working your hive.

Fungicide = Apicide

It's confirmed. Fungicides are a significant contributor to colony collapse disorder. Mother Jones just published an excellent article on the topic. (Thanks for the link, Dad.) 

Another case where what's good for the chemical industry isn't good for honey bees. Or anybody else.

Occupy Scarecrow

These poor homeless bees are my fault. Yes, I know I'm supposed to consider them as cells on the body, not as individuals, but it's hard. They got separated from the hive on Sunday during the "Things with Wings" event at the Gardens when the top of the observation hive popped off. There were only about 50 of them - a fraction of the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands in a typical hive - so the right response is to forget them and move on.

But here they are, days later, huddled together on the shoulder of the Children's Garden scarecrow. The crows aren't scared, but the kids and their parents sure are. Queenless, they haven't moved docilely as a group into the nuc box I left for them. Hiveless. Purposeless. Stupid. Dead cells. And yet, here they are, clinging to life.

Sweet

A booming hive is like uncorking a bottle of champagne, or lighting the birthday candles, or finding $20 on the sidewalk. Oh, joy!

Just a couple of days ago, I added a FIFTH medium box onto my hive. That's right, a fifth box. On July 21. Only a week and a half after I'd added a fourth box.

For you southern beekeepers, that may be no big deal, but for me it's exhilarating. Last year (my first year), my little hive went into winter with a total of two medium boxes, most of it brood. There was a hot spring, then a freeze, then a drought. This year, there's an abundance of flowers, extended cool temperatures that keep the nectar flowing, and just the right amount of rain.

But it's more than the weather. Some of the hives aren't doing quite as well, even in this excellent weather year. It's a lesson in wild animal husbandry. We all started with the same package bees, the same pristine equipment, and the same lack of expertise. Yes, it's been a great year for honey. Nonetheless, I'm among the lucky, and it feels good. Really good.

Make Me One With Everything

No, this is not just the punchline of a bad joke about a Buddhist monk and a hot dog stand.

Meghan told me that the bee is to the hive as a cell is to the body. The hive organizes the bee and gives it purpose. On its own it is formless. Directionless. Stupid. We should avoid killing bees because it puts the hive on high alert, but not because we've killed an individual with an identity. Killing a bee is like giving the hive a mosquito bite. Bees will come after you like a human hand swatting a mosquito.

It is an interesting idea. It makes me feel less regret about killing bees. But it also makes me wonder about the nature of life, and humanity, and intelligence. Am I merely a cell in the body of mankind? Outside of the social context, am I formless and without purpose, stupid and directionless? Even the greatest human achievement is quickly forgotten, like dead cells sloughed off the living body. The Pharaohs, after all, were gods incarnate.

But who remember the Pharoahs?

Bee Stuff

Bee stuff is like taking a vacation in the 1950s, at the seaside in a gingham checked bathing suit with wide straps, a structured brassiere and modest leg cuts. Bee stuff is like a Shaker chair, or a feather comforter, or a one-speed Schwinn with an S on its broad seat.

Bee stuff is nothing like an iPhone or a big screen t.v. or an Xbox 720.

When they're new and pristine, bee boxes smell like a wood shop or a pine forest or a mowed lawn. Later, after the bees have lived there for a while, they smell like honey and beeswax, sunshine and sweetness. After I've dumped the ashes out of the smoker, the skin on my arms holds the smell of smoke, carrying me back to the beeyard.

The bee boxes and the empty smoker make the car smell like something outdoors and wild, like you want to take a bite of it, or take a nap in it, or take a deep breath of it. Nothing like a new car smell.

I love the elegance of bee stuff, and its function, and the way it mostly hasn't changed in a hundred and fifty years. A blacksmith and a carpenter and a seamstress could have made beekeeping equipment for President Lincoln that would fit right into my bee bucket in the backseat of my car. The hive tool. The veil. The bee brush. The smoker. The boxes.

Bee stuff.

The Queen Is Dead, Long Live the Queen!

I was right to worry. When I opened the new nuc yesterday, this is what I saw:

Meghan's nuc - the bottom box

Hatched brood cells, no eggs, no larva, no queen. For whatever reason, the queen cell did not turn into a successful queen. Maybe I killed her when I monkeyed with the hive last week, or maybe she never made it back from her nuptial flight. Or maybe something else went wrong. No way to know.

Queenless deep - the top box

This time, I'd come fully prepared to move the nuc into a new hive. I went ahead and moved them out of the nuc anyway so I could return the box to Winn on Sunday.

Then I consulted with Meghan and UM Bees beekeeper Parker Anderson. Their advice was to combine the queenless nuc with the nuc Meghan had set up for me a few weeks ago. This was an easier option than finding a new queen, and would theoretically give me one strong hive rather than two weak hives. The strong hive can hopefully be split later in the season.

New combined hive

So, I took the top board and telescoping cover off the queenless deep and Meghan's nuc and put a single sheet of newspaper over the bottom box. Then I stacked the queenless deep on the newspaper, replaced the top cover, and put the telescoping cover on at an angle to give the top bees an entrance.

Bees flying in and out of the combined hive

By the time they chew through the sheet of newspaper, they will be used to each other and (I hope) will not kill each other off. The queenless bees will be fully integrated into the new, stronger hive.

I wasn't sure that the bees would be able to find their way home, what with all the moving around. Both the top and bottom openings are in active use today, however, so I am hopeful that this strategy will work.

To Be Prepared Is Half the Victory

I was not victorious.

It was the day before vacation, a week after we created the new nuc. I traveled to the botanical gardens - on my day off, dragging my husband along - and smoked the new nuc. Opened it. Removed and examined the frames. Moved the frames into the new deep super (so generously given to me by Parker Anderson from U-M Bees), disturbing and disbursing honey bees as I went.

Realized that I did not have the top cover, inner cover, or hive stand.

What the --? Embarrassing video courtesy of Rich Rickman

Realized I could not leave them with no top or bottom cover, unattended, for over a week. Realized I did not have time to come back to assemble the hive before my vacation.

Smoked them again. Puffed some smoke at the neighboring hives by mistake. Got smoke in my eyes, but did not start crying. Asked Rich to stop taking pictures.

Removed the frames and bees from the new super. Put them back in Winn's nuc box. Backwards.

Realized they were backwards. Righted them. Left.

Worried. What if I rolled the queen? What if they all moved into the hive next door? What if they outgrew the nuc while I was away?

Tomorrow I will return to the hive, prepared this time with a complete hive set-up. I will see whether they survived BNB syndrome. Brainless neophyte beekeeper.

Forewarned; forearmed. To be prepared is half the victory.
~Miguel de Cervantes

Flower Watch

Bird's-foot trefoil, Lotus Corniculatus,
photo courtesy of Tim McGee

"Today was a bit of a field trip day for me to locate food sources and observe nectar gathering. I watched honeybees on birdsfoot trefoil, milkweed, thistle, and basswood," writes my beehive neighbor, Tim McGee. He sent a couple photos of major nectar producers currently in bloom that "bees love."

Monarch on common milkweed
MBGNA file photo

One is bird's-foot trefoil. or Lotus corniculatus, which resembles a tiny yellow lady's slipper orchid. Unlike the lady's slipper, bird's-foot trefoil is a non-native. The Arb & Gardens's curator, David Michener, tells me that this plant is not officially designated as an invasive species in Michigan yet,  but, "It does have a tendency to take over. I wouldn't recommend planting them in your garden." He tells me it is already designated as invasive in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and is commonly found volunteering along freeways in Michigan.

Common milkweed in the field
Courtesy of Tim McGee

Tim's other photo is common milkweed, or Asclepius syriaca. I love milkweed and have it all over my home garden in many varieties. When you plant common milkweed, not only are you feeding the bees, you are also helping build a highway for monarch butterflies, who depend on its leaves for food during the caterpillar stage. Monarchs, like honey bees, are also in decline due to loss of habitat and other factors.

Nuc'ing It Out

Now I have two nucs to compare. One Meghan made for me out of a bursting hive of hers that survived the winter. The other my carpool mate, Ben, gave me. His hive was getting ready to swarm, so we created an artificial swarm - ie, a nuc - during last class. Ben has a five-month old baby and doesn't have time to maintain a nuc at a separate property. He generously gave me his. In exchange, I promised to give him bees in the spring if he has a deadout.

If I had to predict, I would guess that Meghan's nuc will be the healthier. The queen in Ben's nuc will most likely be a full-blooded Georgian (unless his Georgia queen mated with a local drone). I don't know how well the Georgians will do in our Michigan winters. I know that Meghan's hive is a survivor. 

Anyone care to bet?

Here's how we made the nuc from Ben's overfull hive:

Step One

Our teacher, Winn Harliss, offered an empty nuc box. He says he is the most prepared beekeeper you'll ever meet, and I believe him. The three queen cells in the hive tipped Winn off that the girls might be getting ready to swarm. Creating a nuc is like creating an artificial swarm, except the beekeeper gets to keep the bees.

Step Two

Winn made room in the nuc box by removing a couple of empty frames.

Step Three

Winn removed a frame of honey, pollen and bees from the overfull hive and placed it in an empty spaces in the nuc box.

Step Four

Then he removed a frame of brood, which had three queen cells on it, and put it in the nuc box.

You can see one of the queen cells here. It looks like a little cone in the upper left corner.

-Whispered Aside-

Winn said the bees built a second layer of comb instead of drawing out this foundation because the foundation is plastic instead of wax. Some people swear by the plastic, but not Winn. He says the bees don't like it.

Last But Not Least

Finally, Winn put the new frames into the busting hive to fill the gaps we'd created by removing the brood and honey frames.

Too Darn Hot

My little white hive at Tollgate,
right across the street from the mall.
I added a super yesterday so
it no longer looks so tiny

The SEMBA beginning
beekeepers' hives

Ironically, the bee yard at Tollgate Farm is directly across the street from Twelve Oaks Mall, which my co-workers call "Negative Twelve Oaks" because more than twelve oaks had to be removed in order to build it. The farm itself is a little idyll between freeways, complete with a pond, fruit trees, garden plots, goats and a gambol-roof barn.

The farm is about a 40-minute drive from home, too far for regular weekly checks. Last time I visited, three weeks ago, I left my girls with a completely empty medium super and the bottom board still in place. By yesterday, they were overheated and spread out all over the outside of the hive (ie, bearding). In these photos, the bearding is already starting to dissipate because I removed the bottom board and tilted the top cover to provide more circulation. Later, Winn, our teacher, recommended that I move the inner cover entrance to the back, face up, and close the telescoping cover. He said there would be enough ventilation with the bottom board removed, and the closed cover would keep out more pests.

The girls were overheated
and bearding when I arrived

I removed the bottom board
(see it behind the hive?) and
tilted up the top cover to provide
more ventilation

We saw just a couple of Varroa mites on my bottom board. We had learned in class that twenty mites on the bottom board is a good threshold for treatment. At Winn's recommendation, I decided not to treat, even though I had a flour sifter and powdered sugar in my bee box. Coating them with powdered sugar would distract them from their work at hand, and the hive seems strong enough to combat the mites for now.

The weather this year has been much better than last year for bees and flowers. By yesterday, the hive was already bigger than last year's ever got to be. The empty medium from three weeks ago was already 95% full. Luckily, the girls were not preparing to swarm, so all I had to do was add a third box to give them more room. My carpool mate, Ben, was not so lucky. But more on that later.

Gone Native

They may look like animatronics, but they're real. Our Michigan native sweat bees - green eyes and all - are pretty cool. Bumble bees, with their heavy, furry bodies, are also native to Michigan, and also pretty cool.

Sweat bee
courtesy of Steve Parrish

Bumblebee courtesy of Steve Parrish

My question - does the fact that honey bees pollinate 30% of agricultural crops mean that 30% of our food produce depends on honey bees? - is still out there. 

Native bees don't produce enough high quality honey for us to manage them as livestock. They do, however, help pollinate the agricultural products we eat. Like honey bees, native bees are in decline due to loss of green space, monoculture farm practices and increased use of pesticides.

Dr. Roger Hoopingarner, a large-scale blueberry farmer and retired MSU entomology professor, says that blueberries are "designed for bumble bees." He goes on to say that honey bees prefer dandelions over apple trees. Another MSU entomology professor, Rufus Isaacs, says that 80% to 90% of Michigan blueberries are pollinated by honey bees. He's working on a project to encourage and increase the wild bumblebee population.

I especially like the use of the electric toothbrush as a field research tool.

Nursing the Queen

Remember that scene in Terms of Endearment when Shirley Maclaine wakes up her peacefully sleeping baby because she fears the baby is dead? Well, that's me.

My hive is the one with just the top cover removed.
The video is of that two-inch hole in the inner cover.

Meghan's hive really was on the verge of swarming (see my last post). That means the queen had started laying eggs in queen cups - baby queens in the making, ready to take over the hive. To prevent them from swarming, and to get me started on my nuc, Meghan cut out some of the queen cells and put them and some nurse bees in my empty hive box.

I am meant not to open the hive for a full week because opening the hive will disturb the nurse bees at work. When I went to look at the exterior of the hive today, however, I saw very little activity around the entrance. In fact, I saw no activity at all. All the other hives - including the small nuc boxes - were abuzz. 

What if my new nuc absconded? What if they returned to Meghan's hive, only a few doors down? What if they died? I had to open the hive just enough to make sure they were still in there.

Here's what I saw inside.

Yes, they are alive and kicking. If all goes well, in 4-5 days, the queen will hatch, and in a week, she'll take her nuptial flight. Stay tuned.

Still Waiting for the Swarm

I got all excited because I thought Meghan's hive was swarming.
Turns out it is only a variant of bearding - where the bees spread
out along the exterior of the hive to keep it cool inside.

Thanks, Parker, for helping me figure it out, and for the photo.

Hive, Hive, Hurray!

"Your post about nucs is a bit doomsday," Meghan writes. She goes on to say that the survival of the bees over the winter is less about growing huge than it is about the bees' conditions and ability to survive.  "Many people over-winter nucs successfully, and very small hives as well.  Many, many more factors come into play than when you put the bees into your hive."

More good news: "If you overwinter even a small hive successfully, it can be built up and split in the spring. You don't even have to take queen-rearing courses to do that, and you can be more sustainable." As I suspected, the most important thing is to have more colonies, so that when you experience overwinter losses, you still have colonies as support.

Her best guess about why my hive absconded at the end of last season: too much moisture. The technique Clay showed me of intensifying the fully drawn, honey- and brood-filled frames into a single medium will help the bees manage climate within the hive and give them a better shot at winter survival.

No Nucs!

I am eagerly waiting for Meghan to let me know my nuc is ready. I want to compare its progress to the package bees who arrived in early May. The latest word from Meghan is that the nuc won't be ready until early July.

Early July? Last year's nuc was ready in late May, and they struggled to make enough honey for the winter. They ended up a deadout. How will the new hive make it through winter with so little time to prepare? I'm hoping the drawn comb from last year will give these new girls a big enough leg up.

Nuc: a mini bee hive, complete with
queen, workers and drones

Once I get enough hives going that at least one survives the winter, I can start producing my own queens, and reducing my costs. But if my hives die off every year, I'll never get there. I'll be stuck buying somebody else's nucs or chasing swarms.

Curious about why the bees are behind? Here's what Meghan has to say:

Why the bees are behind
If you have been following the weather, you all know that this has been a very cold spring, and everything is behind schedule. (Karen's note: climatologists at the American Public Gardens Association conference a couple weeks ago said that we should expect these "frozen springs" as a feature of climate change.) The bees all use environmental cues to build up and reproduce, and it appears that they are a good month behind where they were last year - and not just here, but all over the country. I'm  working on getting queens and packages for work, teaching, and MSU from places like Florida, Georgia, and Ontario, and everyone I talk to is in the same place.  Similarly, last year I was catching swarms in April, and this year I received my first call last week, so bees everywhere are having a slow build up this spring.

To raise good queens, we need two things: 1) drones and 2) good weather for mating flights. I can't get started with queen production until there are drones, or the queens can't get mated, and the drones hatched out weeks behind where they were last year. I started raising queens in the beginning of May, as soon as I saw mature drones in my hives, but the weather quickly got cold again, and the nucs were not able to keep the brood warm during the subsequent deep freezes, and were seriously set back, or the queen cell didn't make it.  The second batch of queens emerged during a cold and rainy spell, and were (I believe), not well mated  - they need to mate sufficiently to produce fertile eggs for their lifetime. Those that haven't been superseded by the bees have not started laying, so I don't think they are of sufficient quality to sell. I am currently in the third round of raising queens, and I am feeling optimistic. The bees are starting to swarm now, meaning that they themselves think that this is a good time to be raising queens and to split colonies - and the bees generally know best about these things.  

Teed Off

Sometimes golf courses get a bad name because of the intensive water and chemical needs of the green, particularly in places like Scottsdale, AZ. (I was there recently and learned that they have 200 golf courses ... in the middle of the Sonoran desert!)

Honey bee looking for pollen and nectar at Radrick Farms.
Photo courtesy of Paul Scott.

However, golf courses are by definition dedicated open space, and many golf courses and golf course associations have explicit conservation goals. Along with this great picture of a honey bee, Paul Scott, General Manager of Radrick Farms golf course, sent me Radrick's environmental stewardship goals. 

"We are proud of all the work it details," he writes. Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program for Golf Courses. Groundwater Guardian Tree Site. Community Partner for Clean Streams. Reason to be proud.

Next up for Radrick: on-site honey bees, in partnership with the University of Michigan student beekeepers (who also have bees at Matthaei Botanical Gardens).

Peonies & Pollen

Honey bee snagging pollen from a peony at the Arb's peony garden
courtesy of my former co-worker Nick Hadwick. One nice thing
about a beekeeping blog is that people me send their cool photographs.

Beautiful. 

Peonies are generally associated with ants, but as you can see, honey bees like their flowers, too.

Our bee teachers suggested we garden to benefit honey bees. The list of "beneficial" plants included a bunch of invasive species like autumn olive, Japanese knotwood and black locust.

How do you wrap your mind around non-native species that are beneficial for human purposes, like earthworms and honey bees? Is the concept of native vs. invasive plants just a form of politically correct xenophobia? Is it shoveling against the tide? Or is climate change and ecosystem globalization nature's way of sloughing off the most invasive species of all...human beings?

Who knows? Myself, I'll plant peonies but stay away from purple loosestrife in my own garden. By the way, the Arb's peony garden (where this photo was taken) is in full bloom now and it a great time to visit. I'll be there on Monday from 11 to 7. Come see me, and bring your favorite photo.

One Month In - Brood

We released our package bees exactly a month ago. Sunday was the best class ever. Our instructors were brief and focused inside so we could get out to the beeyard sooner. Thanks, guys!

I'd already put a second medium on the brood box a couple weeks ago. With a three-pound package, I started with 10-12,000 bees, so I estimate I've got about 35,000 now, thanks to my queen (read: egg slave). 

Instead of completely filling the brood box, the girls built upward. The result: two half-filled mediums. Clay showed me how to rearrange the frames to get the optimal arrangement: honey frames on the outsides, then pollen, then brood in the center. Fullest frames to the east since the girls like to go west. We moved the empty and drawn comb frames to the top box, and made sure all the frames are evenly spaced to ensure bee space.

What's bee space? It is the exact amount of space bees need to move freely through the hive. Too much space, they'll build comb. Too little, they'll seal the space with propilis. Bee space. About 3/8 of an inch.

Mighty Mite

"Are we going under? I don’t think so," says State of Michigan Apiarist Mike Hansen. "But we are going to go through some very challenging times." Mike goes on to say that shortly after the introduction of the tracheal mite into the U.S., we saw large overwinter declines in beekeeping operations in Michigan. This was complicated by the Varroa mite. "Many of America’s beekeepers tossed in their hive tool."

I had Varroa mites in my hive last year. I used a screened bottom board, which allows pollen and other detritus from the hive to fall through onto a piece of white plastic sheet (resembling a blank election sign). You pull out the sheet to inspect what's in the hive. One of the horticulturalists here at the Gardens helped me see the tiny movement on the board, and showed me how to look through a microscope to identify it. Using Google images, we were able to identify the speck as a Varroa mite.

Meghan (my bee mentor) was not alarmed. She said that the population in my hive was still small and manageable. After more on-line research, I elected to sprinkle the hive with powdered sugar. When they clean off the sugar, the bees also clean off the mites, causing them to fall through the screened bottom board and out of the hive. The mites are not able to clean the sugar and die of overheating, but the sugar does not harm the bees. Still, I wonder if the Varroa mites had anything to do with my deadout last winter.

The nasty Varroa mite attacking drone larvae.
It's disgusting.

Mike Hansen talked about the new generation of beekeepers: people who look carefully at beekeeping as a business and investment, and have accepted the changes in life needed to follow the migratory patterns necessary to overwinter and manage large numbers of bee colonies and have them ready for pollination when they return to states like Michigan in the spring.  That's beyond my level of effort, but I am prepared to devote time and attention to understanding the health of the hive, pests and diseases, and working to keep the hive strong.

Those simpler days when Sherlock Holmes could leave the hive unattended year upon year, only opening it to harvest honey, are gone.

Mother-Daughter Bonding - Not

My hopes for mother-daughter bonding around beekeeping were dashed when I took Emma to the hives. All seemed to be going well. Meghan - young, friendly, and almost as freckly as my daughter - talked us through the hive, showing frames of bees and honey as she went. Her description of what happens to successful drones during the queen's nuptial flight were titillating.

Emma wore the only extra bee veil. I stood ten feet away, looking on from a secure distance. And I got stung, right in the middle of my forehead. Horrid.

No, I didn't scream or cry. I just said, "Oh" and jumped a little. I was proud of myself. But still.

Now she hates bees.

Some Good News

To Frank's point about thinking beyond honey bees, the loss of biodiversity for bees in Europe has slowed significantly. Let's work to accomplish the same result in the U.S.

Fail-Proof Smoker Lighting

ECourtesy of my husband, Rich, not a beekeeper but possibly a high school pyromaniac. The face that he could light the smoker quickly and efficiently on the first try is possibly evidence that women beekeepers are different from men.

Step One: Lay Out the Materials
3 wadded up half-sheets of newspaper (if you can get printed newspaper any more)
1 handful of smoker fuel
A lighter (do not use matches!)
Your smoker, lid off

Step Two: Light a Wad of Newspaper and Drop It in the Smoker

Step Three: Stuff the Rest of the Newspaper in the Smoker

Step Four: Puff

Step Five: Add the Handful of Smoker Fuel

Step Six: Puff, puff, puff. Keep puffing.

Voila.

Day Three - Checking for Queen Release

Queen cage, empty
except for one poor dead worker

On day three, I went back to the beeyard to be sure the workers had released the queen. There were about a half-dozen of my classmates in the beeyard, and there was a spirit of kindness and collaboration that I am coming to expect among beekeepers. I headed to my own hive first, feeling a bit tentative. I wore close-fitting jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt, leather gardening gloves and my veil, much more than I wore to tend my hive last year: I don't yet know the temperament of this Georgia queen. I was quickly joined by three other new beekeepers, all eager to see how my girls were doing. No one else had lit their smokers, so I left mine in the beebox. The girls didn't kick up a fuss when I removed the top cover, but seemed as gentle and quiet as my Michigan Mongrels. Inside, everything was fine. The workers had released the queen from her cage, and the girls were busily building up comb and storing nectar. A couple people helped me lift my hive so I could raise it up higher with extra 4"x4s".

The beebox

Sadly, one of the beekeepers' hive was mostly dead, her pile of corpses already much bigger than my entire dead colony from the winter before. We helped her lift her hive so she could dump the dead ones off, saving the remaining workers the job of removing so many. Perhaps the hive isn't queen right. We were not skilled enough to figure out what was wrong, but we all hoped that our teacher, Clay, will have the answer at the next class.

My carpool buddy Pete's hive had drunk the entire two gallons of sugar syrup he'd left for them, and another beekeeper, Lawrence, offered a gallon from the trunk of his car. Elliot, a fellow Ann Arborite, gave me his phone number and offered to add my super for me if I didn't have time to get back to the beeyard next week.

All this generosity and helpfulness makes me feel like I've entered a slower, kinder universe.

Day Ten - Finding Eggs

M'Lis and I went out to check our  hives. My bees had built pure white burr comb on the inner cover, right between my two on-the-cheap Ziploc feeders. I never saw white burr comb in my hive last year - it was always yellow - and this looked exactly like spun sugar. I love sweets, and all I wanted to do was scrape it off and eat it. I didn't feed my bees sugar syrup last year, and I wonder if this comb - a product of the bees' bodies - has this white color because of the granulated sugar they've been eating.

Eggs look like little grains of rice

Another beekeeper showed us how to hold up the frames at an angle with our backs to the sun, so we could see the eggs. How exciting, the moment when our eyes made sense of the tiny white grain of rice in the center of each cell, and we knew the queens were laying!

We also checked Ben and Pete's two hives, our carpool buddies. We were interested to see that their hives were about equally far along, although Pete's has consumed over two gallons of sugar syrup, and Ben's has consumed none. Makes me wonder, is there really value in feeding them syrup? Two hives is too few to draw conclusions.

Another Point of View about the Honey Bee Crisis

Dandelions in this blooming cherry orchard mean the nectar is flowing

I spoke to the director of Beal Botanical Garden at Michigan State University, a professor of plant biology and a backyard beekeeper. Frank emphasized that he is not an expert on honey bees. He  pointed out that we use neonics to treat for emerald ash borer, a pernicious invasive beetle that has more than decimated the ash tree population in Michigan and elsewhere. So there might be a downside to banning their use. "To me, the bigger question might be, if neonics are toxic to honey bees, what are they doing to the native bee pollinators?" Frank says.

Frank has observed many wild honey bee swarms near his home. He himself got into beekeeping when a swarm moved into one of his wife's empty parrot breeding boxes. Now he's up to three personal hives.


The honey bee is one among many pollinators. Some believe that the introduction of the honey bee - brought here from Europe in the early 1600s - has led to a decline in native pollinators due to competition for nectar and pollen resources. Many agricultural crops are also not native to the Americas, and a farm, especially an agribusiness, does not resemble a naturally occurring ecosystem.

Day One - Package Bees

First day in the beeyard for the SEMBA beginning beekeeping class, suited up and read to go.

Yes, I dropped the queen bee down among the ten thousand bees in the little box they were delivered in.

Yes, I placed the bottom board upside-down.

Yes, I forgot the extra 4'x4's to raise up the hive.

Yes, I forgot the nail I needed to release the queen, and the rubber band I needed to secure her in the frame. (Thanks for bailing me out, fellow new beekeepers!)

Yes, my Ziploc bag of sugar syrup leaked all over the boot of my RAV4, causing the rubber seal to come undone and inviting an ant invasion.

Yes, I had a colony last year and should know better.

No, I did not get stung. Neither did any others of the 30 students who were installing package bees in their hives that day.

Yes, the colony survived all that ineptitude. 

Onward.

Food Disaster?

Could this be our future?

Several people have asked me about the truth of The Huffington Post article "Honey Bees Are Dying Putting America at Risk of a Food Disaster." I'll be talking to horticulturalists and bee people over the next few weeks to try to make sense of all this overwhelming and sometimes alarmist information about honey bees.

Today I spoke with the horticulture manager where I work, at the University of Michigan's Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum. He had this to say:

"While it’s true that 80% of agricultural crops are pollinated by honey bees, honey bees are not their only pollinators. In fact, many agricultural crops are self-pollinated and don’t rely on insects at all. Some crops – such as the almond crop in California – are quite dependent on commercial beekeepers for pollination, but here in Michigan we do not rely on domesticated pollinators to such a great extent."

So, Mike is not worried that we are one bad winter away from starvation. However, he does say that there is a general decline in many pollinator species, not just honey bees, due in part to indiscriminate use of pesticides. Lawmakers can help by implementing restrictions on pesticides containing neonic-treated crop seeds, similar to the ban set to take effect in the E.U. in December 2013. 

Home gardeners can help by reading the labels of pesticides they buy for home use. These product labels clearly state if they are damaging to honey bees. You can also write your Congressional representative advocating for neonics restrictions.

Other ways you can help: plant flowers, buy local honey, or even become a beekeeper.

Building the Bee Boxes

I ordered two complete hive sets, one for the swarm I was planning to capture (still waiting for them to show up) and one for my new hive at the SEMBA beginning beekeeping class.

After hammering 280 heavy-duty nails and 600 finish nails, I felt like my arm was going to fall off. By the end, I was hammering (slowly) with my left arm, using my right arm for support, while standing on a stool to get more torque. I still have 100 sheets of wax foundation waiting to be attached to the frames.

I think it took about 15 hours. Maybe more.

All this to save fifty bucks.

I recommend assembled hives.

Dead Bees

The colony was dead.

The apprehension of every fresh, green beekeeper: will the girls make it through the winter? All too often - for over 40% of backyard beekeepers this year - the answer is "no."

I recall a day back in late October - one of the last days the bees were out and about before the long hard winter - when I thought, perhaps, there was too little activity compared to my neighbor's hives. Those bees flying about looked a bit large. Were there only drones in the hive? Was something wrong?

I told myself that I was just overthinking. Like the first time my infant daughter slept through the night, and I woke up at 3 a.m. afraid she wasn't breathing. I'm a worrier, that's all. My nice neat little colony, so healthy, thriving, all summer long. They'd be fine.

On a warm day in February, I noticed a tiny puddle of water on my bottom board. I thought, "Well, good! They must be breathing. They must be keeping it warm in there, warm enough that the moisture inside the hive hasn't frozen." How wrong I was. The truth is, just because you're a worrier, doesn't mean things don't go wrong.

There are many beauties to beekeeping. Not least is the kindness and community of one's fellow beekeepers. I was lucky enough to discover my dead colony in the company of my bee mentor, Meghan, and a group of others from my beeyard. Meghan told me that moisture in the hive is a bad sign - bees don't like it and work to keep it out - and sure enough, when we opened the hive, inside was a little bolus of tiny black corpses.

"If you had ten hives," Meghan said, "Four of them would likely have died, and this would have been one of them."

"This happened to me my first year," said Karen, another beekeeper with a thriving hive. "Don't be discouraged."

Then Meghan pointed out that this tiny bolus of corpses was only a fraction of my colony; most of them had likely absconded - perhaps swarmed - before winter set in. This small bunch was not able to generate enough heat to keep warm through the winter. She helped me clean out the hive, and set it up to receive a swarm or a nuc later in the season. The new hive, she said, can really hit the ground running with the drawn out comb from last year's colony.

The bright side - and I do mean bright - is the honey. Fragrant, gold, sticky, chewy, sweet, thick honey, redolent with pollen and beeswax and the flavor of the garden. The hive apparently absconded before winter set in, leaving their 60 pounds of winter honey stores for me to extract, eat and share. 

More on honey extraction later ...