It's currently illegal to keep bees in Minneapolis, one of the many reasons I share a beekeeping operation with Mr. Neil. There's been a move with the Minnesota Hobby Beekeeper Association to change the law so people could keep a hive in their yard. There's an article in the Star Tribune and I noticed commenter BeeGirl was quoted:
"Kathleen Connelly, a longtime city resident who's temporarily living just over the border of Golden Valley, said she's waiting to see whether the proposal passes before deciding where to buy a house. She now keeps her colonies in Zumbrota.
She called bee prohibitions a relic of efforts by developing suburbs to shed their agrarian pasts. With hiving season at hand, the city hopes to accept applications by June 1 if the measure passes as expected on April 25."
We still have juncos moving through, many were starting to sing some of their territory songs over the weekend. Some even chased each other through the brush piles as the flocks start their northward migration.
Lorraine has been gleaning honey from the remainders of the Kelli and Kitty hives. As she put the wrecked frames outside, we got some robber bees coming in to them!
Little honeybees came in to claim what honey we had not. We currently have no active hives in our beeyard...where are these girls coming from? Is it possible that these are bees from our first summer that swarmed off of the Kitty hive? Or is a neighbor also keeping bees? Honeybees will fly 2.5 - 5 miles away from the hive in search of food, so it is conceivable that these are from a neighboring hive. But it's more fun to think them being the Kitty bees. Oh, how I wish I had a little robotic, remote-controlled, helicopter bee cam!
I kind of put my nose to the grind stone the last week and finished off a draft of the book and now I am dying to get out and watch some birds! I'm hoping to do a bit of that on Wednesday. In the mean time, we are getting things ready for the fast approaching bee season. Our final living hive, the Kelli hive, has unfortunately succombed. From the looks of things, she had moisture build up and that's what killed the hive. In the meantime, Lorraine has been extracting the honey from the dead hive and forced that nice folk singer, Jason Webley to aid in the extraction.
Thanks to all who offered advice regarding Russian bees, we now have three packages on order, which brings our coming hive total to 7. Yikes! This year's Hive names are: Wendy, Juliet, Hannah, Yvaine, Magda, Svetlana, & Bea Arthur.
Mr. Neil emailed that he had been by the hives and that Kelli was silent. I emailed back, "You mean Kitty, right?"
If you recall, Kitty was in a small cluster and the cold was probably going to kill her. The Kelli hive was strong and loud. No, he meant Kelli. I hoped that he was either seriously jet-lagged, had excessive ear wax and ear hair, or maybe minor hearing loss of his punk band days.
Non Birding Bill and I headed out to the hives before I left for Indy to get the down low. I put my ear to the Kelli hive. It was quiet...too quiet. I wondered what could have happened, she was so healthy, did we finally get colony collapse? We wouldn't know without opening the hive. It was about to rain at any moment, so we decided to take the hive apart and take it back to the garage and inspect what could have been the problem. However I soon as I opened the ceiling, I found a small cluster of live bees.
At first I was hopeful to see signs of life. But wen I looked closer, I could see that the cluster was just too small. It barely covered one frame. She had plenty of food to see her through, but one more hard core cold snap was probably going to do this hive in--which is entirely possible even though the calendar reads spring.
What went wrong?
I think I have my answer on the front of the hive. Look at all that bee excrement, I think there's a bit of bee dysentery going on. I think the Kelli girls had a case of nosema, but I can't really say that unless I send in a few bees for testing. Bees hold in their poop all winter and then let it go in the spring. They'll go on cleansing flights on warm days to relieve themselves. They shouldn't go all over the front of the hive. When I give the bees their fall feeding, we put a little antibiotic to prevent nosema. Neither hive ate too much of our homemade nectar, which I didn't think about too much since they both had plenty of food. Kind of regretting that now, but then again, how does one forcefeed a bee so it will take her medicine.
So.
Looks like we'll be starting with all new hives this summer and no dividing of older hives.
We were planning on a total of six hives this summer, but that was based on four new packages and splitting Kelli. Since we will only have four, I'm thinking about trying some Russian bees. We've been using the Minnesota Hygenic bees (Italians) based on their "hygienic" behavior of cleaning out brood cells when they sense something wrong. But the more I read about the Russian bee and how it seems to resist varroa mite infestation a bit and can take a hard winter, I'm thinking I'd like to give some a go.
Any blog readers know someone who raises and sells Russian bees in the US and would be willing to send a package to Minnesota?
DON'T FORGET:There is still time to get your entries in for the Swarovski Guest Blogging Contest. A chance for you to have a blog entry posted here for the day (and getting some of my readers a taste of your writing) and a cool prize while I'm birding in Guatemala!
Well, the weather has been above freezing and all of us just happened to be in town for a moment so Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill, Fabulous Lorraine and myself decided that it was time to do a winter bee inspection to determine how many bees and supplies to order for this spring.
Since we would be digging about inside the hive to check the food stores the hives had left, we decided to go with our bee suits on. With his hat and bee suit, NBB almost looked more like seaman from the movie The Life Aquatic than a member of a team of award winning beekeepers.
We have two hives that we are over wintering. Above is the Kelli hive. She is three deep brood boxes, wrapped in insulation, with two moisture boards (stuff they use in your bathroom walls to absorb moisture), and some newspaper. You worry more about your hives getting wet in winter than you do the cold. The bees can take the cold, but moisture in a hive just messes everything up. Kitty is two boxes without insulation and just newspaper for moisture. We were running a couple of experiments: for overwintering, do we want to do three boxes instead of two and do we want to use insulation or not. There are arguments for both. It's possible for bees to survive with only two boxes--fewer places to go and therefore the cluster won't be at risk of being too far from food. Insulation on the hive could fool the bees into thinking it's warmer outside than it really is and they fly out too soon and die.
Before we opened them, I put my ear up to each hive to see if I could hear them buzzing. I could! Kitty was not as loud as Kelli, but both hives were totally alive and had survived the harsh January temperatures so far! After we opened the Kelli hive, I held up my camera to the open frames so you could hear a hive buzzing in winter (you can see the green Kitty hive in the background):
We didn't dig too deep in Kelli, she was loud, just glancing at the top frames, she had plenty of food, and if we have learned anything, it's that the more you leave your bees alone to just bee, the better off they are.
We did make sure that bother bottom and top entrances were open for good ventilation. She was incredibly dry. Even her news paper was bone dry. The moisture board was working well and there weren't too many dead bees at the entrance and we could see a couple come in and out. The three box system, with insulation, and the moisture boards appeared to be working very, very well.
Kitty was a different story. She was alive, but her cluster was very small. If you look between NBB and Mr. Neil in the above photo, you can see part of it. Mr. Neil is holding a spray bottle, he sprayed some homemade bee nectar around them and we made sure that the frames closest to them were full of food, so if the cluster ran out of food where they were, they would not need to go far.
The cluster of bees stays together to stay warm. If it gets so cold that they cannot move far and they have eaten all the nearby food, they may starve before they can move to where there is food in the hive. As we moved the frames around, the hive was incredibly wet.
Even the newspaper on top was wet. There were thousands of dead bees on the inside. We took out a bunch of the dead wet bees. We have some concerns about this hive. Her cluster is small. If the rest of the winter is mild, she should survive. If we get some more subzero days, we're afraid that the remaining cluster of bees is so small it won't be able to stay warm enough. There's not much more we can do at this point.
So, I think two things to take from this are: 1. That white moisture absorbing material used for bathroom walls helps to keep a wintering hive dry. 2. That a two brood box hive probably could survive, but I don't know if we would do it again without insulation. We want to have six hives going this summer and we think what is going to happen is that we will split the healthy Kelli hive into two hives and that Kitty will most likely die and we will need to restart her.
Some good, some bad with the hive inspection, but it was fun to get a taste of our beekeeping operation. I really do miss it. I love birding and I love travel, but I think beekeeping is one of the coolest things you can ever try in life. It's more fun than I ever realized.
After we were finished we had to put the hives back together and put the bricks back on to make sure a strong winter wind didn't knock their covers off...and I can never resist working a Father Ted reference:
We are hardy folk, we northern beekeepers! Mr. Neil and I pose around a snow surrounded Kitty beehive. We came out to make sure that the snow wasn't blocking key ventilation areas in the beehives and to see if they were alive.
Mr. Neil and Non Birding Bill also checked to see if our electric bear-proof (and skunk-proof) fence was still in working order. Not that we need to worry about bears at this exact moment, but better to find out now if there is a problem with the solar panel now than in the spring when a bear has breached the fence and made a mess of the hives.
The Kitty bees are in a smaller hive this winter (an experiment to see if we can overwinter bees in a two hive system instead of three). This time of year, the workers and queen are all clustered together to stay warm. We opened the roof and they were right at the top. A couple even flew out at us! Mr. Neil asked, should we go inside and see what's going on, maybe we could add a frame of honey for them."
NBB quickly said, "No!"
"But do we--"
"No!"
We didn't have a smoker and two of us were dressed in black--the color a bee is most likely to sting. So we didn't go much further. Her humming sounded very healthy. Here's a video I made just to pick up the sound of their buzzing in twenty degree temperatures:
Things over that the Kelli hive were just as happy:
We could hear them inside the hive. The snow had piled up over the bottom entrance and Mr. Neil shoveled the front. As soon as it was clear, a couple of bees came out--one even took out a dead be. Bless our OCD Minnesota Hygienic Bees--"Must be clean, must be clean," they chant in their little buzzy voices.
Both seem content and healthy. They still have a few months to go and we'll check them again. This reminds me that it's getting time for me to order our bees for the spring! I think we'll have a total of six hives this summer! We'll probably divide Kelli and order three new packages of bees.
On our way out to the hives NBB found some feathers scattered on the snow. Above is one of the clumps. We found them in the spot where we have seen a saw-whet owl in the past. We were trying to figure out what kind of bird the feathers came from. The coloring of this clump looked like morning dove.
But then we found these secondaries (with a little blood ), looks too small for mourning dove to me. I think this might be junco. Possible for a saw-whet to take out, but also prey for a sharp-shinned hawk which also hangs out in Mr. Neil's woods in winter. I didn't see any owl poop on the snow, but then again, find white on white is kinda hard. But a fun mystery to chew on.
I just got the current issue of WildBird Magazine in the mail and there's a photo of me at the beehives! I'm so proud, part of our award winning Kelli Hive is pictured in a birding magazine. I feel like I'm crossing some sort of border by getting bees in a birding magazine. Now sure what that border is exactly, but it's cool in my little brain. Incidentally, you can send in your own photo of yourself reading WildBird, you just need to make sure to take it someplace where you do a lot of birding. Which for me happens to be around my beehives. Check out this killer titmouse photo I got near the hives on Sunday:
Nothing like mixed nuts and brush pile to make a titmouse come in and give you his sexy side.
We went out to our two remaining beehives to prep them for winter (the lovely lady above is the Kitty namesake). We are running a couple of experiments. There are beekeepers of two camps: 1 is to insulate your hives in the winter and the other is to not insulate. In our neck of the woods where subzero is the norm in January and February, insulating your hive makes sense. However, some beekeepers feel that a strong hive can stay warm without the insulation and that the insulation gives the hive a false sense of how cold it really is outside. Foragers come out too soon and die, weakening the hive.
We decided to insulate the Kelli hive and this year, Non Birding Bill made sure the insulation was not going to come off like it did last year. He duct taped the crap out of it.
We decided to not insulate the Kitty hive and to take her down to two boxes instead of three. Mr. Neil has read that this will work in our neck of the woods and I was skeptical but he brought me around to his way of thinking. The idea is that the cluster of bees does not have to travel as far to get to the food storage. Last winter, the Kitty hive died because the cluster got stuck were there was no food and starved to death. So with lack of insulation and a small space to keep warm, she should be good to go.
Note how Mr. Neil and NBB are a good distance from the hive? We foolishly went out to the hives with no beesuits or smokers. As we checked inside the Kitty Hive (and true to her cranky nature) some bees flew out and one stung me through my winter glove. Everyone took a step back. Interestingly enough--the sting did not hurt nearly as much as my first sting. It is true, the more you get stung, the less painful the sting--although it has been rather itchy the last two days.
We were a tad worried about Kitty when we came out, her buzz was not as loud as Kelli's and when the hive was opened, I thought I heard that kind of dissonant buzz that you get when your hive has gone queenless. It may just be the winter low-key buzz. I'm not going to worry about it. Requeening just does not work out for us and I refuse to intervene on that any more.
We will check on our girls a bit in the winter. Mr. Neil suggested we go out with a spray bottle of sugar water to spray the cells if they look low on food. We are also trying to use some newspaper in the tops of the hive to absorb moisture and that will need to be replaced.
Just a reminder:The next Birds and Beers is this Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 6pm at Merlin's Rest.
This weekend was kind of a blur, I'm still trying to catch up. This early winter weather is just perfect for a one last hurrah before the hardcore cold temperatures force us inside. Non Birding Bill got Mr. Neil to host a bonfire gathering.
We had a great bonfire going and we burned some unusable beehive frames which made for some spectacular pyrotechnic effects with the old wood. Speaking of frames, we still have some frames full of honey to extract and a big fancy extractor. I thought that maybe we could do some extracting at the bonfire gathering--lots of friends over, "Hey, don't you want to be a junior beekeeper and extract some honey?" We could all take turns, running the crank. Alas, much like all the beekeeping equipment out there, NO INSTRUCTIONS (beekeeping equipment manufacturers--that sucks and makes me not like your products and is off putting to new beekeepers).
This morning we woke up to a dusting of snow and LOTS of finches at the feeders--the long tube feeder almost had all 20 perches were full. Non Birding Bill and I headed out to our remaining hives we are going to over winter--Kitty and Kelli. We were going to screw in the metal entrance reducers so the girls would have less area to defend and to also keep mice from moving inside.
When we arrived, we found paw prints which looked remarkably like skunk at the entrance of both hives. This snow fell in the early morning hours. That jerk skunk had just been there a mere few hours before NBB and myself. Skunks knock at the entrance of a hive. This makes the bees angry and they come out to attack, the skunk eats them, apparently unfazed by the stinging. We have carpet tacking around the entrances to prevent this (when the skunks come knocking, they get pricked by the nails), but it's gotten strewn around this past bee season. So NBB and I rearranged it to give that skunk a few good pricks if it comes back. Hanz (the guy who does yard maintenance) built our bees a wicked bad electric fence to keep bears out, Lorraine is going to ask him to add one more line of electricity, closer to the ground and closer to skunk height to encourage the b@stard to look for food elsewhere.
NBB and I put our ears to both hives and heard contented buzzing from within each hive. Love that!
Early plans for next season--six hives! We'll divide Kelli into 2 hives (cause she's gonna swarm and if we divide her, we can control the swarm), 3 new hives, and Kitty...well, that's our angriest hive and we're just gonna let her do whatever she wants to do. If she wants to swarm, then she can swarm. I'm not gonna argue that hive.
There was a constant flow of goldfinches all morning. None of them were banded, so it was just a steady stream of hundreds visiting. The day before, I had noticed a couple of pine siskins and the more I watched the goldfinches...
...the more I would see streaky pine siskins mingle in among the flock. Which is right on target according to the Winter Finch Forecast: "A conifer seed specialist in winter, most siskins should leave the province this fall because the spruce cone crop is poor in the boreal forest. It is uncertain whether the huge white pine seed crop will keep some siskins in central and northern Ontario this winter."
I put some fine ground sunflower hearts and thistle on the tree stump. Goldfinches flew in for it, as did juncos and (of course) pine siskins. In the above photo, you can see some of that yellow edging on the wing feathers of the siskins. If you have goldfinches in your yard and you've never noticed a pine siskin before, take a closer look at your finches. Pine siskins can be easily mistaken for goldfinches in winter plumage. But look at the breast. If it's clear, it's a goldfinch, if it's super streaky, it's a pine siskin.
Once two or three siskins were on the stump, more moved in. It wasn't too long before the siskins outnumbered the goldfinches! I didn't get a photo of it, but we did have one crazy pine siskin going to the no melt peanut butter suet. I'd never seen a siskin on suet before, I thought they were strick seed eaters.
The MimiKo hive has failed in a big way. I thought maybe last summer, I messed with the hives too much and that perhaps being a bit more hands off would be better this summer. Apparently, I was too hands off.
Lorraine took the Magnetic Fields out to our hives the day before and mentioned that the MimiKo hive was quiet...too quiet. We headed out today and she did seem quiet, but what caught my attention were odd looking drones. They were small, having trouble walking and totally out numbered the workers. The odd drones brought one thing to my mind--egg laying workers. Only queens are supposed to be able to lay eggs. Fertilized eggs become workers and on a occasion a queen, unfertilized eggs become drones. Workers are not supposed to lay eggs, but if a hive is queenless, workers will lay eggs and because they are all infertile, they will all be drones (who do not build comb or gather honey). A queenless colony with egg laying workers is a hive that is as good as dead.
There were dead workers on the roof and so we opened her up. It was quiet and the buzzing that we heard was that dissonant buzzing that you get from a queenless colony. More and more drones were moving all over the hive and I noticed a few non honeybees entering the front entrance. The drones moved as though drunk--another suspicion that they were the result of egg laying workers. Here's a video:
That is just so sad! Further inspection of the colony brought worse news:
Every cell had been ripped open. The colony had been robbed, most likely by the nearby Kelli Hive. All would take is one or two Kelli workers coming to the hive and noticing how weak it was. They fly back and let the other Kelli foragers know and the siege of the MimiKo would be underway.
With few workers, no queen, and lots of blundering drones, the colony didn't stand a chance. Flakes from shredded cappings that covered cells of honey were everywhere. There were even a few other species coming in to take what little honey was left. Notice the two non honeybees in the above photo.
Here's another look at ripped open cells. There were even flakes on the inside. I suddenly remembered that one of the signs of American Foulbrood is scales in empty cells. I'm panicking a little because American Foulbrood is a serious bee disease that would require some drastic measures. I tested a couple of what little remaining sealed brood was left (you poke it with a toothpick and if it's foulbrood, the contents comes out brown and ropey). Nothing I poked came out brown and ropey, the contents of the cells looked like an almost formed bee.
Here's another view of a ripped apart cell. To me, all this looks like bits of capping but if there are any experienced beekeepers seeing this and feel that this is American Foulbrood, feel free to let me know. I'm hoping it's not. American Foulbrood is a big fat downside to beekeeping. We'd have to burn the remains of the MimiKo hive and treat the Kelli hive with some serious drugs since she would have been exposed by robbing the MimiKo hive.
I found a dead worker that appeared to have died while trying to lay an egg in a cell. How long had this hive been queenless?? It has to have been a long time for things to be as bad and as empty as this hive is. How did it happen? Is this American Foulbrood? Did we crush the queen on one of the few inspections? When we took a frame of brood from the MimiKo hive to help the failing Olga hive this summer, did we accidentally brush the queen onto the ground and kill her? Was she just a bad queen?
Here was a sad little drone that died as it was trying to crawl out of its cell. Without any nurse bees around to help it along and the fact that it's a drone that grew in too small of a cell, it got wedged.
We took the hive completely apart and found lots of dead bees but not the huge amount that I expected. I looked over all the dead bees (and a few wasps) that were on the bottom, trying to work out what had happened. What caused things to go this wrong, why didn't I catch it sooner. I've come to a couple of conclusions--if the queen had failed and we caught it early enough, I would not have tried to requeen the colony--we've tried that more than once and it just doesn't seem to work for us. Both hives we've done that too have ultimately failed. We probably would have left this one alone to try and grow a new queen. I wonder why they didn't grow a new queen? Did they not realize they were queenless until it was too late to grow a new one?
So we left MimiKo in pieces so all the bees that were robbing it already could finish the job. I'm not sure what we're going to do next. I have a beekeeping meeting on Tuesday, I'll see what I can learn there. Non Birding Bill suggested I take a frame with me to show, but on the off chance it is American Foulbrood, I think bringing a frame full of it would make me the least welcome member of the club.
I love beekeeping, I love my girls, I love that I get to do it, but a discovery like this is a challenge. My goodness, we started this spring with four hives. We're now down to two and we have to move one of them into the bear proof fence. Will that hive make it?
After all of this, I had to do some digiscoping to try and clear my system. The fall colors made for a perfect backdrop. Usually, taking photos of birds is relaxing and satisfying but I was having trouble getting my focus down or predicting the perch the birds would use. I was getting frustrated, so my dear NBB offered to help...
Clever Bill. We did go for a walk in the woods and I got some cleansing that way...more on that tomorrow.
We had so many people coming, that we were short on bee suits. NBB wore long pants, with a red shirt (the color red doesn't bother bees), just a helmet with a net and gloves--go NBB. Euan was there to interview Mr. Neil about his latest book, The Graveyard Book. What a brave man, you're scheduled to do an interview and told, "Hey, why don't don't you come out with us to our hives!" And he comes along in full bee suit to record part of the interview. What a good sport.
And then we put him to work! The honey supers (boxes where bees store excess honey and no brood) are incredibly heavy and you sometimes need two people to take them out. Now, last year, I used something called Bee Quick to get the bees out of the hive. It didn't work as well this year. I suspect that the bottle I purchased last year lost some of its potency because the bees did not vacate the supers quite like they should have. I think we'll just have to get a fresh bottle every year. Here's a video of Mr. Neil and Lorraine trying to shake out the last few bees from the honey super...and notice the irritated bee buzz:
Don't you just love the maniacal Lorraine giggle?
We checked the MimiKo hive first--no honey production--but the bees are so incredibly friendly, did some hand feeding. Next we checked the county-fair-blue-ribbon-winning Kelli hive next--three supers with honey in all (she made both comb honey and regular honey), but not willing to give up the supers, she got a little angry. We were talking about the differences between the two hives. How Mimi doesn't make much excess but she is so, so friendly and how Kelli works hard and made a terrific amount of honey her first year. Mr. Neil told me that the two women who painted the hives have been following their progress on the blog and discussed this as well. Kelli said, "When I painted my hive, I put in the message, 'Be productive.'" To which Mimi replied, "That's funny, I told my hive to 'Be friendly.'"
And that's what the hives are.
Then we checked the combined Kitty/Olga hive (and we actually had the Kitty namesake with us). We warned Kitty and Euan that we needed to be ready for this hive. Someone asked if she's a mean hive. This hive isn't a mean or angry hive, it's just that she's older and doesn't tolerate any shit. There really is no other way to explain it. We had the smoker at the ready, we took off the top lid--bam! Mr. Neil got stung through his sock near the ankle! It's one of those rare areas where a bee could breach the bee suit. Some beekeepers wear boots (Mr. Neil often does) others duct tape the bee suit pants over the shoes to prevent the breach, but we didn't and he got stung very quickly. Kitty/Olga was living up to her hype. We went back to work--bam! Euan got stung--right through the bee suit, a complete breach of the beesuit.
It was at this point we decided to put the fume board on top of the hive and leave it for 20 minutes to a half hour to really let the essential oils do their work--bees do not like the aroma of the Bee Quick and it pushes them deeper into the hive, leaving all the honey supers bee-less and allows es to harvest the honey relatively pain free. Also, leaving the hive for awhile meant Euan could continue his interview, the boys could also treat their stings and the rest of us could get a much needed break and have a snack.
I took a moment to take the Ross Rounds out of their frames--the easiest way to harvest honey if you can talk your bees into making comb honey (instructions for how to extract from Ross Rounds can be found here). It was weird having Euan along. He's a terrifically nice guy, and again, I must say that he was a very good sport to come out to our hives and still keep a genial nature after being stung. But the weird thing is that you hear him all the time on MPR (he's the dude with a hint of a Scottish brogue) and so it kind of felt like we were taking the radio out with us. I made sure that when he went home, that he got some fresh comb honey. We take a lot of people out to the hives and sometimes we just give them the smoker. It keeps them busy and if they get nervous at the hives, they have something to hold on to and most of the time we can work with minimal smoke. Euan went right in there, lifting the heavy supers, taking one for the team and getting stung, all while he was just trying to get an interview. When the interview is up, I'll post a link.
