Do not get cocky with the bees.

Oct 23, 2011

All I wanted was to change the size of the upper entrance for the bees!

I have been reading a book by a beekeeper who doesn't use any chemicals on his bees.  His hives only have top entrances rather than bottom entrances and his theories made sense to me.  He has read enough and seen enough to believe that there is less issue with mould and condensation with the ventilation through the top of the hive.  So I wished to follow suit.

On Sunday, I decided that I would take the top off Hippolyta, replace it with a temporary top and cut the opening bigger, or rather, get Bill to cut the opening bigger.  Before I go on, let me describe what I was wearing...remember I said that black and red are not good colours since bees see them as colours of their predators, especially if they are fuzzy?  Need I say more?  I was wearing black fleece pants and a black fleece jacket.  I was not wearing any protective gear.  I did not light the smoker.  The only smart thing I did was in not asking Bill to take pictures.   So there are no embarrassing photos of what happened next.

I blithely used my hive tool to pop open the top of Hippolyta.  There were a lot of bees under the lid and some of them were looking at me.  I ignored these warning signs and shook the many bees to the ground in front of the hive.  I had barely placed the new top on the hive when I realized that the bees were entirely unhappy with me.  I had bees in my hair and was being dive bombed.  I ran.  I ran towards Bill and the house.  Olive ran with me, snapping at the bees.  I was shaking my head and I hate to admit it, I was yelling like a baby.  Of course the bees got scared too and by the time I was done, I was stung about 4 or 5 times on the top of my head.  Ouch!  Bill brought me a comb to comb them out and try to get the stingers out.

Of course when I went back with the newly cut top for Hippolyta, I was completely protected.  When I went to Queen Elizabeth I she didn't have any bees under the lid and had no interest in me at all.  Doesn't that just figure?  I switched out the top and now both hives have longer top entrances.  I put in a smaller reducer in the bottom of each.  They can spend the next week getting used to the top opening before I close the bottom entrance entirely.

The moral of this story is "Do not underestimate the bees"!  I had decided that my bees were gentle and calm but that was in the summer when they had lots of forage around, not in the fall when they are busy kicking out the males and readying for a long winter.  Just like us, they are cranky as the sunny days leave us.  Lesson learned.

It is fall, so I will leave you with some images of autumn in my garden.

Fungus on a dead elm trunk

Grasses 

Autumn sedum

Large fungus on very live Manitoba maple

Front garden with trains in background

Autumn is glorious!  Enjoy the apples and apple cider!

The story of the new queen

October 11, 2011

On this beautiful Thanksgiving weekend I decided that I should start to winterize the bees.  The forecast is for cooler days and the bees stop being interested in leaving the hive at 14 degrees centigrade.  For those of you that I have not bored with the details on what the bees do in the winter time, here it is.

As it gets cold the queen will be surrounded by all her workers.  The workers form a ball or cluster around her.  They whir their wings to keep the temperature at  the magic 22 degrees centigrade...just like they do in the summer to cool the hive.  As the bees on the outside of the cluster get too cold, they will exchange places with the bees on the inside of the cluster. The outside bees can access the honey that they have stored and will feed on it. When there is a prolonged spell of cold the cluster will get tighter and tighter.  The tighter the cluster gets the harder it is for the bees to access the honey so in extreme circumstances the bees can starve even though they are surrounded by food just because of not being able to move!  When the weather gets a little warmer the bees can move around more easily and feed on the stored honey.  The bees will also leave the hive when it gets a bit sunny and warm.  They leave on cleansing flights, which means they can go out to defecate.  They can hold it for a month if necessary!

It is really important that I leave enough stored honey for the bees to feed on for the winter...particularly for the beginning of spring when the queen starts laying eggs again and the larvae need feeding.  Lots of beekeepers feed sugar syrup in the spring to help them out but I am going to try to leave them enough honey to make it through...60-80 pounds.  That's the beauty of not being a farmer...it doesn't matter to me if I don't take every drop of honey to sell.

I went into the bees, partly to see if there was any honey that could be taken to extract, partly to take the screen from the bottom away and partly to see how the bees were faring.  There were so many bees, it was amazing.  I knew that I wouldn't be able to find the queen so Bill took pictures of every single frame in the bottom box for me to take a look at afterwards on the computer.

I definitely got both hives agitated by going through all the boxes...the air was buzzing with bees.  Bill got stung on his arm while taking pictures, so that's his first sting of the season.  We are pretty sure that Olive, the dog got stung too since she was busy snapping at them.  Wasps were around being end-of-season-stupid and I am pretty sure that there were some robbing bees coming around to see if they could score some easy honey.  I tried to work gently and quickly so that I could close them up but it still took a fair bit of time going through to the bottom.  I also know now why beekeepers always have bad backs!  You don't think about lifting with your legs when you are handling a 100 lb box of buzzing bees!

The deep box that is the brood chamber

Putting a super on top of the deep

 I think that I will going back into the hives in a while just to take off the 4th box from the top but for now, the bees are still working away.  After I finished working in both hives I came in to download the photos to see if I could find the queens as well as check for any diseases, mites etc.  Happily, I haven't found one mite in the hives and the bees seem to be very healthy.  While looking for the queen I came upon my first real bee mystery!

As I was searching for her majesty Queen Elizabeth I, I was looking for a brown queen...you may have seen her a few posts ago.  Imagine my surprise when I came upon a queen with a black abdomen and a white stripe at the bottom of the abdomen!  An entirely different queen!  I can only assume that when I was frantically keeping this hive from swarming back in June, I wasn't completely successful at eradicating all the queen cells.  One of them must have hatched and taken over the hive.  This might explain why the hive became more active throughout the summer.  If I take the advice of most beekeepers, I would try to replace this new, home grown queen with one from a queen breeder but I think that I will go with the instincts of my bees and see how they do.

New Queen Elizabeth I...she is centre left

I also found her majesty Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and as far as I can tell, she has not changed so I will be going into next season with a 2 year old queen which apparently will have a very strong chance of survival and growth.  This will be interesting since I will be able to compare two very different hives next season if both hives make it through the winter.

Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons...centre left

Education moment:  The raising of queens is not a random act.   First, you need to know that all the female eggs that are laid by the queen are created equal until they are fed by the worker bees.  All female larvae are fed royal jelly for three days by the worker bees.  If they are then switched to pollen and honey diets they will become sterile worker bees.  If the worker bees decide that they would like to raise queens, they will make the cells of certain larvae larger and continue to feed these larvae with royal jelly.  This will change these larvae from sterile to fertile females.  These larvae then become queens.  They need a much larger cell because they are so much larger.  The workers will choose about 10-12 larvae to raise as queens...each a day apart in their growth so that they have a guaranteed queen if the first few don't work out.

What makes the workers decide to raise queens?  

There are two reasons for raising queens when there is already a queen in the hive.  The first reason is because the existing queen is getting ready to swarm.  These queen cells are called swarm cells and usually hang on the bottom of the frames.  Swarming is the only way a hive can pro-create.  Even though the queen is constantly laying and thousands of new bees are being born, this is not pro-creation.  You must imagine that the whole hive is one organism so to  pro-create, the hive must duplicate itself.  The queen must leave the hive with about 1/2 the bees to start another hive.  When the queen decides to leave, the workers who stay behind need a new queen and start raising them.  When the old queen leaves, the new queens hatch and the first one to hatch will quickly kill all the other queens in their cells.  She will then go out on maiden flights to be fertilized by drones.  When this is accomplished she comes back to the hive to begin laying eggs.  She will not stop laying or leave the hive until it is her turn to swarm.

The other reason for raising a queen is if there is an emergency such as the accidental loss of a queen or if the queen is showing signs of not being a successful egg layer.  These queen cells are often found in the middle of the frames and are called supersedure cells.  If one finds these, it's a sign that all is not right in the hive.  Beekeepers can get a new queen from a breeder at this point or let the hive go ahead and hope it all works out...like me. 

I'm not sure which happened with Queen Elizabeth I.  Guess we will know how successful she was next season...but I love the white stripe! 

Happy Thanksgiving!

October 8, 2011

It is a beautiful day and I have the use of a macro lens for my camera!  This will be a little photo gallery of my garden taken through this amazing lens..some from earlier this summer and some from today.  This lens is much more difficult to master than I would have thought.  Holding it steady is difficult and since I  like to wander through the garden without a tripod I find keeping things in focus is the challenge.

During my wandering this summer I discovered an Anise Swallowtail caterpillar on the dill plant. Apparently these particular Swallowtails are becoming more plentiful further North due to global climate changes.  I feared for its life since the plant was right beside the bird feeder so I brought it into the house and put it into a jar with lots of dill, a branch and some water.  It ate and ate and ate and then hung itself on the branch with silk strings.  There it hung for about a week and then it started to jiggle and jerk.  I am so glad I happened to be standing next to it as it started to pupate, because that is exactly what it was doing.  It looked like it was turning itself inside out...what we look like when we take a sweater off over our heads!  After a bit, it turned completely green and a ball dropped off its end and it stopped moving.  It turned brown over the next couple of days and now it looks like a dried stick.  I hope that it turns into a beautiful butterfly in the spring and, more importantly I hope that we notice when that happens so that we can set it free.  Here are pictures of it in its various forms.

Anise Swallowtail caterpillar on dill plant

Anise Swallowtail caterpillar hanging on stick ready to pupate

An old tattered Anise Swallowtail butterfly on butterfly bush flower

The following pictures are of various creatures in the garden...can't name all of them but I found them so fascinating, I would like to share them with you.

Some kind of wasp...now you understand "waspish waist line"...

Honey bee on the pink cosmos

Bumble bee covered in pollen, on the orange cosmos

Action at the composter

Too many grasshoppers this year...here is one sitting on a spent dahlia flower

Beautiful black and white wasp on the trumpet vine

Honey bee at the trumpet vine flowers...it goes through the back instead of down the flower since the flower is too huge.

We are plagued by snails and they eat the hostas but it's perfect to look at, isn't it?

Beetle on black eyed Susan...think it knows how gorgeously it matches?

Tomorrow I will show you cool seed pods and fungus around the property.  Hope you have lots to give thanks for on this lovely weekend.