A Humble Hum

We’ve had quite enough. February 16th it snowed, and pretty as it was, we’re so over it. Let’s get on with bee season. Thankfully, on Wednesday it was over 60˚F so I came home from work to do the first real inspection since we hunkered down. I assumed the bees were doing pretty well based on the activity I’d been seeing, but the coming & going really only tells you whether or not there is a healthy foraging population. There could be all kind of havoc being wreaked in there and still be a good number of foragers flying in and out.

As it turns out, I’d give what I saw on Wednesday mixed reviews. I started with the Charlie Brown hive and found no eggs and only a little bit of capped brood. This means they’ve been queenless for around 2 weeks. I also found several empty queen cells and several capped ones. These cells were hanging from the center of the comb which would indicate supercedure (which I am all too familiar with). This means that either the existing queen suffered some tragedy or they determined she was unfit (based on pheromones) and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. And have been working to replace her by raising new queens. When I looked in the hive, they are in the midst of a brutal queen selection process in which baby (virgin) queens fight to the death for the throne. Then they have to mate successfully, which they leave the hive to do. Sometimes more than one virgin will be allowed to go on a mating flight but from what I understand this is rare. I guess I wouldn’t know the difference really. I did see a virgin running around on one of the frames. She was probably looking for unhatched queens to sting through their cell casings. I’m going to let nature take it’s course and check back next weekend if it’s warm enough. If there’s no queen by then, it’s a good thing I ordered two packages. I also saw quite a few varroa mites on the backs of bees in there. Not a good sign – it means the mite load is pretty high but they are already in a weak state, so I won’t treat that hive this year. The only good thing is that the break in brood rearing is also an interruption to this parasite’s life cycle since young mites live off brood hemolymph (like blood).

In the blue & green hive (decended from my first hive, kinda), brood was being raised like gangbusters, with the best brood pattern I’ve probably seen in any of my hives. I mean wall-to-wall brood, with not a lot of spottyness in the midst of it where babies had died or needed removing. And so many bees on each frame I could barely see what was going on. BUT I did see the queen (so embarrassing, I couldn’t remember her name), and she had the yellow paint still on her thorax so it’s the same one I went into winter with. She looked nice and fat. Not a huge retinue, maybe 3 bees. Lots of eggs, a very good sight. Also the honey super I had left on was well on its way to being capped over, and although some of that is sugar syrup I gave them, it can’t all be, so if I can keep them from swarming (or otherwise meeting some unforeseen calamity), hopefully the honey harvest will be more this year. Again with lots of mites though, and so crowded I know they must have been on the verge of beginning to raise queens for swarming. I took a risk and decided to split them early (they did swarm on March 18 last year so I’m 2.5 weeks ahead of that) AND give a MAQs treatment since daytime temps are just high enough at around 50˚. That will knock the bee population back and put a break in brood-rearing that will probably help assuage the swarm urge, which is all based on how dilute the queen mandibular pheromone is and how much room there is for brood growth. So I pulled 3 frames of varied brood age and stuck them in a 5-frame nucleus (nuc), and set them about 6 or 7 feet away. They will have realized they were queenless in only a few hours and will start trying to raise a queen from eggs to 2-day old larva. Any fertilized egg (female) can become a queen based on the amount of royal jelly she is fed in the early days. This is called emergency queen rearing. If all goes well, in 21 days or so I’ll have another virgin death battle going on.

In the end, all three hives are in a weak state. (Two of which are in an Amy-inflicted weak state). You can see from the picture some of the mite-treatment carnage that has ensued on the green & blue hive. There is dead brood and bees on the front porch, which has attracted some very unwelcome behavior from a Carolina wren. Dude, that is so not allowed.

The weird thing is, when I went out there Wednesday, there was no bee poop on the front of the hives. This was around 2pm so I figured that was time enough for them to get out and have their first poop in awhile (since they don’t poop in the hive). When I was done inspecting, I fed them some sugar syrup and in a couple of hours there was poop streaming down the front of the hives. Lovely. This is normally a sign of nosema, which I treated for at the beginning of winter. Maybe something was wrong with the sugar syrup? I really can’t explain it. Maybe I have nosema problems.

Like I said. I called in for two packages. I hope I won’t need them – worst case: all three hives succumb to their various queen problems, nosema, MAQs, or mite load, and I have to install two new packages. Best case: the two raise good queens, the nuc grows into a deep hive body, and the big hive brings in lots of honey. Yay. We shall see! Either way hopefully I have headed off swarming issues for at least the first part of the season.

WEDNESDAY’S INSPECTION AUDIO (2.27.13)

Do they hibernate? Well, sort of. I’ll tell you what the bees are supposed to do and what mine do. But first of all here’s what I do during the winter: worry. I go a few weeks without seeing any coming and going and I start to wonder if they’re still in there. Did they all die of starvation? Did they freeze to death, or succumb to the viruses brought by varroa mites? Are the combs slimed by wax moth or small hive beetle larvae? Did a well-meaning mouse crawl in and cuddle up? There’s a lot that can go wrong. So on the random warmish days when the fretting beekeeper finally sees a waft of bees in that corner of the back yard (like the day I took the photos above), it’s a big relief worth toasting with a $20 bottle of wine instead of your usual Rex Goliath.

In North Carolina, as far as I can tell in my two winters and from what I’ve heard around the bee club, it seems all the pantry it takes to get your girls through most of our mildish winters is one mostly-full hive body – or safer, a hive body plus a super full of honey. That is, I have to restrain myself from harvesting ALL of their honey stores because they need at least 6 or 7 frames to get through winter when nothing is blooming – more if it’s an especially cold or long one.

When it gets below 55˚, the bees (all workers because they kick out all the boys in late fall) will gather into the “winter cluster,” a tight little ball of bees in the center of the hive. They vibrate their flight muscles (but without moving their wings) to generate heat, and rotate who is roasty toasty next to the baby bees and who is on the colder outer edge of the winter cluster. In this way they can keep the hive at least the minimum temperature they’ll stand which is around 57˚. During this time, brood rearing slows down drastically or even stops altogether. The life span of a worker bee in the winter is several months as opposed to the 2-3 week lifespan they have in the summer (when they’re worked ragged). They stop raising drones (boys) completely until spring approaches.

Also, they don’t defecate in the hive (unless they have nosema which is a like bee dysentery). So when you have a warmer day in the midst of winter you don’t want to stand in front of the hive or you’ll come away covered in adorable little yellow-orange bee poops.

I said that they cluster at temperatures below 55˚, but MY bees tend to brave much colder days – I’ve even seen them out even when it’s a breezy 45˚ or so. I don’t do much to prepare my hives for winter, really. I put an entrance reducer in to cut the doorway down from the full width of the box to just a few inches, and I swap the screened bottoms for solid ones. You’re also supposed to leave a hole near the top of the hive as a condensation exhaust (either by drilling a small hole or by putting bottle caps under the top cover) but I’ve never gotten around to that. I thought my Charlie Brown hive wouldn’t make it through winter because they didn’t have but 4 or 5 frames of honey but they’re looking even stronger than my bigger hive at the moment based on the number of bees I’ve peeked at. You don’t want the hive to be much bigger than the space the cluster takes up because they’d have to heat it and protect it all from small hive beetles. So it’s possibly my big hive seems weaker because they’ve had to use more energy.

In northern states, beekeepers often wrap their hives in insulation & black garbage bags to help them absorb heat from the sun. Even snow acts as a good insulation. And I know a lot of beekeepers give their bees pollen patties or candy boards to give them some nutritional help nearing the end of winter. I’ve given mine sugar syrup on warmer days and both have a good bit of coming & going on days like today where it’s above 50˚. One day this winter it was even over 70˚ so I got to peek in and see that bees covered every frame. I didn’t take any frames out because I didn’t want to risk chilling the brood.

The textbooks don’t address these warm winters where there are lots of days the bees can leave the hive to forage.  Won’t they expend a lot of energy (and thus, honey & pollen stores) flying around looking for nectar & pollen but not finding it? Or get fooled into amping up brood rearing but not be able to care for them? I blame last year’s warm, short winter for the swarm I lost. I would have split the hive earlier to suppress the swarm instinct had I known they were building up so early. So this year my plan is to treat for mites in early March (if it’s 60 most days by then) and split as soon as they recover from that treatment.

Of course it never goes quite according to plan.

Jason & I went into the hive on Sunday after a weekend in Charlotte. It had been rainy and cold but Sunday afternoon it was just cold. The plan was to mix a gallon of sugar syrup for a Fumagilin-B treatment (like bee pepto for nosema prevention over winter) and investigate Evangeline’s status. Also we were going to swap the screened bottom board for the solid one (better warmth) but the solid one needs painting and I didn’t get it done (yet again my scheduling affects the bees adversely).

SO HERE IS WHAT I DID TO MAKE MY FIRST BATCH OF FUMAGILIN:

1. Dump two 4lb. bags of sugar in your biggest pot (I should start buying sugar at Sam’s).

2. Add 8 cups of water.

3. Simmer ‘til the sugar dissolves. (What is that white stuff floating at the top?)

4. Let cool to below 86ºF.

5. That will take forever which is equal to approx 2 hours sitting outside with 10 ice cubes added too.

6. Add half a heaping tablespoon (I think this is like 1 1/2 teaspoons, heaping).

7. Dump in top feeder without spilling.

HERE IS WHAT I SHOULDA DONE:

1. Get 8c water warm.

2. Mix in sugar which should dissolve.

3. By that time it has cooled down and you can add the Fumagilin-B.

I only did the amount called for a one-deep hive because my hive is pretty underweight due to the recent queenlessness. I’ll check later today to see if they’ve taken it all by now and if so tomorrow I’ll give another 1-gallon treatment just to be safe.

SO even though it was a little colder than it should have been because we waited so long on the syrup to cool we got into the hive and the first frame or so that I pulled didn’t have any eggs. I was pretty resigned to the fact that the colony was going to go into winter queenless. I was about to close everything up when I thought maybe I’ll just look at one more frame, a few frames over from the one or two I’d already looked at. I saw a little flash of white and totally double-took Merry Melodies style. I was so focused on looking for eggs and I guess so long since I’d actually SEEN a larva I completely wasn’t expecting it.

I probably only had my eyes on the things for 10 seconds. I couldn’t believe it. We closed up the hive and then poured in the syrup (successfully without spilling) and as we started to go in I had a terrible thought. What if those were actually the larva of laying workers? I hadn’t seen the telltale sign of bunches of eggs in one cell but then again I hadn’t checked every single frame for the last few inspections. I hadn’t paid close enough attention to remember if the capped pupae I’d seen were drone or worker. Worker larvae supposedly get capped on the 9th day. I installed Evan on Thursday, the 2oth and it was Sunday, the 30th. That would mean she would have had to have been released from the cage that Friday (if they had JUST capped those pupae that same day. And I HAD seen drones even this late in the season in my hive that day. I’d say the odds are against me but geez don’t I deserve a break?

So probably, maybe, we hope our queen woes are over. We still have to switch the bottom boards so hopefully we’ll have a warm day and when we do that I’ll pull a frame or two to confirm our fate.

Of course even with a queen they still might die this winter. So it goes.