bleh

I gave my bees some heavy (2:1) sugar syrup to boost their stores for the winter. I think I will keep the feeders on until I wrap the hives for the winter.

Also, I put the entrance reducers in the main entrances to keep out any mice looking for a cozy home for the winter. The drawers for the screened bottom boards also went in today, to keep out any cold drafts.

I feel like I have been neglecting my bees recently. Since my promotion at work, I have been working a lot, and have little time to tend to my honey bees. In fact, I have had little time to tend to any other responsibilities.

Honey

I will get some honey this year. The trick right now is finding the time to extract it and fill some jars. There will be gifts of honey.

My reactions to honey bee stings are becoming less severe. During my last trip to my apiary, I was stung five times. The swelling was much less than the last stinging incident, and the itching and irritation went away sooner.

The viticulturist who works in the vineyards near my bees has informed me that honey bees have been feeding on damaged grapes. Of course, this irritates the harvesters, since they don't want to be stung. But this is fascinating to me, since I wonder if I could get grape juice in honey. Would I get purple honey?

2d Treatment

Treated the bees for the second time with Sucrocide. The operation proceeded much more smoothly this time. It was faster, and the bees were less irritated.

Unfortunately, I think I initiated some robbing of A hive by B hive. I reduced the entrance to the hive with some sticks and hoped for the best. Fortunately, it was late in the day and there was not much time left before nightfall. I don't know if it will be wise to continue with the third treatment, if I am risking a similar situation.

Life sucks

I received a promotion at work. Now I work a lot more and make a little bit more money.

Sucrocide

I sprayed both hives with Sucrocide to treat for mites. Hive B was treated on Saturday, 3 September. I succesfully treated the top two hive bodies, but by the time I got to the bottom hive body, the bees were very agitated, and I called it a day. Hopefully, next time I will be practiced enough to get all three done before the bees get so agitated.

I treated A hive on Monday, Labor Day. I got all but the last three frames done. I stopped at that point owing to the presence of the queen. I am still worried about smooshing the queen, so I stopped after I found her.

I will return and treat both hives next Monday.

With the goldenrod flow on, both hive entrances are crowded with foraging bees coming and going. To me, the level of activity is awesome, and I love to sit and watch the activities at the entrances.

Kitten and bees

We surrendered the kitty to a foster home, hopefully to be adopted by some nice family. In the meantime, she will be living with some slightly older kittens and their feral mother.

I visited my bees, and added a third hive body to A hive. Instead of taking a frame of drawn foundation out of the 2nd body and swapping it with a frame of bare foundation in the 3rd, I took two drawn frames from B hive. I hope this will give some extra help to the hive that needs it, and give a bit of extra work to the hive that is very strong.

Kitty's gotta go!

Sadly, we have decided to find a new home for our kitten. Our dog thinks that the kitten is food, I think.

Would anyone like a kitten?

My bees have mites

First of all, the cat cost me 150 dollars this afternoon. She is a little sick and wormy from being on her own, but she should be ok. It looks like she got beat up by another cat, and she has two big teeth marks on her soulder. She will be just fine as long as she does not become dinner for one of our dogs.

I pulled out the drawers in the bottom boards to check for mites, and hoo-boy I have some mites up in there.

]]> The drawers, when I pulled them out after a day, were covered in bee garbage, wax, pollen, and bee parts. It is amazing how much crud falls down from the hive during just one day. Here is an overall pic of one of the boards:

The dark mass in the bottom center is wax cappings from cells.

This next shot is a close up of a bee leg.

This next shot contains the dreaded varroa mite. It is the black speck in the center:

There are not enough mites in either hive to cause alarm, but I will be treating for the mites very soon.

My first (very small) honey harvest

I went to check on the progress the bees have been making in the honey supers. Most of the frames are still not completely capped, but they are nearly ready. However, I could not resist taking one frame with me. The smell and taste of a comb of honey straight from the hive is simply ambrosial.

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Honey bees don't like it when you make off with their honey. I worked them without smoke, to avoid contaminating the honey with a smoke smell, and to avoid them engorging on the capped honey. Many bees were divebombing my veil, buzzing angrily. But it was not too bad, and I brushed the bees from the frame and walked away with my booty.

I took the frame home, cut out the comb, and placed it in hard plastic cases. Now, the combs are in the freezer, where they will stay for a day or two, what for to kill any wax moth eggs.

Here are some pics of the cut comb in the plastic cases, cover removed:

Kitten Rescue

No sleep for the wicked, so I may as well write about this evening's excitement:

This evening, vinfille and I took the dogs for a walk. Returning home, we heard a cat meowing, and we were curious. We put the dogs inside, and went to where we heard the cat, just three houses down the street. We discovered that the meowing was coming from under the hood of our neighbour's car, so, a bit alarmed, we rang the doorbell and informed our neighbour that there was a cat in his engine. He seemed unconcerned, and informed us that his wife had just recently chased the cat out. I asked him if it was a cat or a kitten, and he told me it was a kitten. Again, he seemed completely unconcerned about a kitten under the hood, so vinfille and I left.

We returned a short time later, after nightfall, with flashlights. Fortunately, we found the kitten sitting underneath the car, and not actually in the car. Unfortunately, when we approached too closely, it went straight into the old canal which parallels the street...

]]> This canal is probably about fifteen feet across and ten or so deep. It has not been an active canal in years, since the city built a new and improved version which runs behind our back yard. In the meantime, this old canal has filled with all manner of muck, runoff, and ooziness. A great variety of wetland plants and trees now grow out of it, and it stinks like a stagnant swamp. Which, at this point, with no actual water running through it, it is.

It was into this stinky bug-infested marsh that I went crawling, flashlight in mouth, to search out this kitten. I could see no more than a few feet in front of me through the thick tangle of layers of reeds and jewelweed. With vinfille spotting from above, I tracked it much more by sound than by sight. Of course, every time I drew near to the cat, it would slip further away.

After a good half hour or so of this, we lost track of it completely, and decided to take a break for dinner.

I returned alone after dinner, determined to find and catch the kitten. I prowled back and forth along the canal a few times, listening. Finally, I stopped and popped a squat and waited. I heard a crunching noise almost directly below me, and after some peering with a flashlight, I saw the kitten almost within reach, munching on... something. I thought I had it this time, but it slipped away and led me on another thirty minute romp through the muck.

I guess it probably just got bored, and let me catch it. vin and I brought it back to the garage, where it immediately devoured a half can of tuna fish.

We could not find a peepus, so we assumed it was a girl. I named her Jewel, since I was crwaling through a great bed of jewelweed (one of my favorite flowers) to find her.

vinfille has suggested that we not keep the adorable little varmint, since our dog Paola will no doubt find her a tasty snack. So, we called out cat-owning friend to take her for the evening, and tomorrow I will take Jewel to the vet to make sure she is as healthy as she looks. Hopefully, in the next few days we can either figure out where she came from, or find a new home for her.

Here are some pictures of the adorable little critter:

Not much

I put the drawers in the screened bottom boards today. Tomorrow I will remove them and inspect for mites.

I applied for a management opening at work, and was interviewed for the position this morning. For some reason, the management where I work likes me, and I was encouraged to apply for the position. However, the position will require a larger time commitment, and I sincerely hope I am not selected for the job. Simply put, I do now want to spend any more time at work than I absolutely have to, regardless of pay. With both of us working, I see little enough of vinfille as it is, and I do not want to spend more time at work than I already do.

Good news, everyone!

Hi, everyone (you know who you are).

Nothing new yet, as I have just finished copying all of my old journal entries into this blog. I will be preferentially updating this blog, so check here for all of teh bee hotness, and other whatnot.

1 August 2005, Happy Bees and A Wordy Journal Entry

Conducted an inspection this morning at about 10 am. The weather was warm and sunny, but not too warm and sunny.

My goals during this inspection were twofold: to check the condition of the bees, of course, and to replace the bottom boards on both hives with screened bottom boards. I will explain screened bottom boards later on.

I was very happy with the state of Hive A, which has the new queen. There was lots of stored honey and lots of capped brood. In fact, while inspecting one frame of capped brood, we witnessed a bee crawling out of her cell. She was fuzzier than the other adult bees, a lighter color, and had a wet-dog sort of look to her. It takes a bee a few hours out of the cell to dry off, and about a day to finish developing completely into an adult bee. Looking around the frame, I noticed several other bees with the same appearance. So, the eggs on the frame were hatched about the same time, and now many of the bees on the frame were being "born" at the same time. This was a wonder to witness, and a joy to behold.

I was a bit worried about this hive, but now, after seeing so many new bees emerging from their cells, I think that this hive should be on their way to making it through the winter. I hope that the coming late summer/fall nectar flow should be enough for them to build up their stores for the winter.

I also uncapped a few drone cells to remove the drone pupae and inspect for vorroa mites. Vorroa destructor are the scurge of modern-day beekeeping, and are one of the many challenges faced by would-be beekeepers like myself. Vorroa mites prefer to lay their eggs in drone cells, since drones have the longest development time of the honey bee castes. The female mite crawls into the cells before they are capped and lays her eggs on the pupa after the cell is capped over. The young mites attach themselves to the pupa and suck its blood, like leeches. I found no mites in this very random search.

A better way to check for mites, and estimate the mite load for a colony (in mites per bee), is to use a screened bottom board. Unlike a traditional bottom board, which has a solid bottom, the screened bottom board has a big hole cut out of the bottom, covered by a mesh wire screen. Since mites occasionally are knocked off or fall off of the honey bees, they will fall through the mesh onto the ground and be unable to crawl back up. Or a removable drawer can be introduced into the bottom board, to allow the installation of a greased sheert of paper. Thus, when the mites fall through the screen, they will be trapped on the greased paper and die. Later, I can remove the drawer, count the mites, and estimate how many mites there are in the hive. If the count is high enough, I can choose a treatment to reduce the mite load.

Also, the screened bottom board helps manage the mite population in the hive without chemical treatments. I am not using any chemical treatments, preferring rather to take the integrated pest management route, using selected genetic strains of bees which are disease and parasite resistant, and non-chemical methods of pest management.

B Hive was also very healthy. The honey super on top is not quite ready to harvest. I hope that one more week should be enough for the bees to fill and cap the remaining cells.

This is a hasty journal entry. I am a bit tired, but I wanted to get this updated as soon as I could. I will probably correct some typos later, and add some pictures.

Step 1: Honey, Step 3: Profit

I inspected my bees this evening with the help of Gustavo, a Brazilian exchange student working at the HRC. He lives in a cabin just a few hundred meters from my hives. He told me that he worked at an apiary in Brazil for several months, and has some experience with bees. He was very relaxed around the bees, which comes as little surprise, since he told me that they work with Africanized honey bees in Brazil.

We worked the first hive, A hive, first. I worked with no veil, since the hive is still small and very relaxed. I was very happy to see lots of eggs and larvae in the hive, a sure sign that the new queen has been accepted and is doing her job well. Although I did not see her on this inspection, I was more than happy with what I saw, and closed up the hive. I hope that in a week or so they will be ready for the third hive body, which should give them enough time to draw out all of the foundation before winter.

One of the great pleasures of working without a veil is being able to take a sample of the honey straight from the hive.

Hive B was much more work, and I made sure my veil was in place for opening up this hive. First, we checked on the progress in the honey supers I recently added. The top honey super is almost ready to harvest, as only the very bottoms of the frames are not capped. They honey in these frames is a wonderful light color, most likely from the clover bloom, which is just now fading. I will wait one week and then harvest my very first full super of comb honey.

The second super is coming along very well, and I suspect that I will have enough time for the bees to fill up a third before the close of the summer.

Next, I performed another full reversal of the hive. What a right pain in the ass that was. I was only stung three times, and had to walk away from the hives only twice. I am guessing that the bees were much less happy this time owing to the extra honey they had stored in the hive. Gustavo, of course, was not stung at all.

Inspection 14 July 05

I inspected today to see how the honey supers on hive B were doing, and to check for the new queen in hive A. The good news is, the new queen is alive and well in the hive. The bad news is, she does not seem to be performing her queenly duties very well. There was only a small amount of new brood in the hive, and I did not see any eggs. However, the light was not good for checking for eggs, so there may have been some. I will have to perform my next inspection when the light is more favorable for egg spotting.

In this next photo, you can clearly see the queen (number 12), on the comb. Also visible is the small patch of larvae from the new queen. Ideally, this frame should be packed solid with eggs and larvae. I don't know what exactly is happening, perhaps she starts slowly as she gets acclimated to the new hive. I only hope she has been accepted by the hive to the degree that my inspection did not disrupt a fragile situation.

Hive B is doing very well, drawing out the foundation in the second honey super I provided them. No capped honey in the first super yet, but it should be soon, I hope. There are a lot of bees in this hive. They are spilling out the front of the hive, piled all over the entrances. Here is a picture of the hives, showing the difference between a strong, three-deep hive and a weak two-deep hive:

I don't think they are preparing to swarm. Swarming season is behind us, I hope. And I really don't know what steps I could take at this point to discourage swarming. I performed a reversal recently, although I may go in on Monday or Tuesday and perform a second reversal, just to keep them guessing.

I removed one frame full of capped brood from B hive and introduced it into A hive. I swapped it with a frame of bare foundation from A hive. B hive should draw out the foundation on the frame in short order, and I hope that the introduction of the brood frame will help the new queen in A hive.

There were a lot of bees at the main entrance of A hive in defensive posture.

Also, I can feel the entire hive vibrating when I place my hands on the hive bodies of B hive.