Russian Bee Installation

I'm so bummed, I took video of Mr. Neil's first ever bee installation yesterday and I left the video card in my bee suit out at his house.  Gr.  I'll have to get it on Sunday.

We started our first great bee experiment this year.  We're going to have a total of 7 hives:  3 packages of Russian bees (why we're trying Russians) arrived yesterday.  This weekend we'll four more packages of bees: 2 Carniolans and 2 MN Hygienic bees.  For some reason, all of the bee talk got incredibly naughty yesterday--decidedly not safe for work.  I think it had to do with Mr. Neil.  In all the years we've been keeping bees, he's never been home when we do an installation, always off doing writer/movie guy stuff/Doctor Who stuff.

I started by calling him a Bee Virgin and comparing him to girls who claim virginity because they've don't everything but vaginal intercourse (what's up with that anyway). It soon went to telling him not to be nervous about inserting his Russian package (that's big like bull) into the hive for the first time.  Everybody is nervous the first time.  Non Birding Bill frequently asks if I'm 13 years old and I think I am.

Neil did well, he did all three packages--it's only fair since we've done the rest.  I will say that he broke new ground.  No one has ever been stung when we hiving packages, Mr. Neil got stung twice!  He was a brave little toaster though and continued on with no squealing or flailing of limbs.

Here's how you hive a package:

Remove 4 frames from an empty hive and block the entrance with loose leaves and grass (that encourages the bees to spend the night).  We used some of our frames from old hives, some that still had drawn comb, honey and pollen in there to help give them a head start.  We give all of our bees a food pail but that just sugar water.  Some wax foundation and food stores helps them have a head start.  And considering it's April 20 and I woke up to the sound of a snow blower removing last night's snow, I think the bees will appreciate it.

Spray the bees inside the shipping container liberally with sugar water.

Bonk the box so that all the bees hanging on the food tin and queen cage fall to the bottom in a sugar water coated clump.  Use the hive tool to pry open the top of the box.

Remove the queen cage, flick off the outer attendants and put the cage in your pocket (or give it to your personal assistant, Lorraine).

Remove the feeder tin from the bee package and then spray the bees inside again with sugar water.

Shake the bees into the empty hive.  I know I posted this last night, but it makes me larf.

Spread the bees gently like pizza sauce--which they will also do as they explore the hive.

Then take out the queen cage in your pocket and gently pry open the staple holding the screen and release the queen.  Above, the screen is already gone but you can see our queen with her attendants.  She was marked with white spot to make it easier to find her in the hive later this summer.

These Russian queens were a bit different.  Normally, queens are moving fast and sometimes even attempt to fly away when we install bees.  The first queen we put in wouldn't leave the cage, then crawled on Mr. Neil's glove and wouldn't get off, soon causing workers to crawl on to his glove.  It took some gentle nudging to get her onto one of the frames in the hive.  I'm pretty sure it was the cold that caused her to be so slow and sluggish.  The second queen was fast and running around all over--must be a bit more cold weather hardy.  The third queen...well...she looked dead.  Mr. Neil even tried blowing warm air on her to get to her to move in the cold--a little mouth to bee resuscitation.  She still looked dead.  The place we ordered the Russians from is sending us a new queen.  We'll have to do the slow release method with her but I'm hopeful that all will still go well with that hive.

After we installed the queen, we gently replaced the frames we took out at the start, put in the feeder pail and a pollen patty and closed up the hive.  Hopefully, they will get to work drawing out comb and the hive will grow.

The bees are raring to go.  One of the boxes already at the start of a small piece of comb going--I think these Russian bees are going to do great things for us this year.

Something different this time was that our bees came with a few drones--we usually only get workers and a queen.  Drones don't contribute to the hive, they don't build and they really aren't around in the winter.  I think these came from Tennessee so maybe it's been warm enough there to produce drones.

Because of the cold weather, the bees didn't fly around too much.  If they started to fly, they soon landed.  All of us had a good portion of sluggish bees on our suits when we were finished.

So, part one is complete.  Part two comes this weekend.

Dancing Neil

Mr. Neil is so excited to finally be home for installing our bees.  First time ever he was around to be a part of it.

Let's Get Weird With Honey

Here is a curious article about an interesting hurdle faced by some urban beekeepers in Brooklyn...their honey is turning out bright red!  Guess what the culprit is: Red Dye #40 from Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company.  So people who want hives in the neighborhood to contribute to the whole slow foods/locally grown/organic/natural movement are being betrayed by bees who cannot resist heavy syrup no matter how many native nectar rich plants are around.

Speaking of weird honey, Lorraine and I finally got around to putting some of our extracted honey into jars.  Kind of fascinated by our honey colors this year.  We usually only have light colored honey, but this year we have both light and dark.  Both taste fabulous, the darker honey is a bit more...rich in flavor, while the light is delicate and subtle in its sweetness.

I was not having the best day.  A project I have been working on for some time received a setback yesterday.  Every time I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with this project, I get the rug yanked out from under me.  This time it's a financial setback on the project. Lorraine and I had planned on bottling honey today, but when I saw the snow and ice as I got out of bed this morning, I texted Lorraine that I was bad company and decided to stay home to brood a bit about my problem.  She called and said, "No, that's not what you need to do, you need to come out here and help me with the honey and talk."

Well...how could I argue with that?

We have some honey that has been drained from comb and then we have comb with honey called Ross Rounds.  Both are safe for human consumption.  We decided to get a little arty with our bottling and put chunks of wax and comb honey in our jars.  We'd then pour extracted honey over it.  It looked cool and it gives our friends the chance to try comb honey if they want but still get plenty of the straight liquid variety.  As we admired how cool the wax comb looked in the jars...we wondered what else we could put in there...like the above Buddah.  We were quite pleased with the results and wondered how far we could go with this madness.

I noticed a Weeping Angel figurine and told Lorriane that I wished we could try that.  She said, "It's my figurine, let's do it."

The affect was cool and terrifying.  If you have seen the Doctor Who episode, you know why this is the most terrifying and dangerous honey ever.  If not...well...I guess Lorraine and I seem a little weird, but that's okay.

The shenanigans helped put my project in perspective.  I'm always thrilled to rediscover that no matter what life throws at me on a long project, friends and beekeeping are a great escape.

Take That, Wax Moths!

Earlier in the summer I reported that an empty hive feel victim to a wax moth infestation.  The frames were nasty and full of webbing and tons of squishy larvae.  This gross combo did lead to me finding a way to combine my love of beekeeping and birds:

It took some convincing, but the birds got comfortable enough to approach the frames and totally dug the fat little protein packed larvae (note the black-capped chickadee above with a worm)!  I placed the frames on a stump that I use as a tray/feeder photography studio.  At first, I had to scatter some favorite seeds to get the birds' attention and when they landed, they instantly saw the squirming wax worms and chowed down.  I did have to flip the frames over from time to time, the larvae would crawl to the other side to hide but I think the titmice, chickadees and nuthatches took care of them.  I'm not sure what to do with the webs that remains on the frames.  Some beekeepers say to put them in the hive and the bees will clean it off.  At night, something has been coming up to the stump and eating all the wax off of the frame (perhaps mice).  Maybe if I leave the frames out, the mice will take all the webbing too and I'll have a totally bare frame?

Unadulterated Dog Joy In Leaves

You may recall that earlier this summer, Mr. Neil's newest dog Lola learned that if you violate bee ettiquette, you get stung.  I must say, this incident of swollen dog face was not enough to convince her to avoid mischief around the hives.  Non Birding Bill and I took her to the hives after this incident and she went straight for one and started sniffing the entrance.  She got bonked and a sting and then went back to the entrance for more.  We had to guide her away and fortunately, she did not swell to the epic proportions as she had before.

When we went out last weekend to the hives, I learned that Lola is in love with piles of leaves--like any eight year old (even the one buried inside every adult).

Which is a much safer area for her to play in rather than right in front of the hives.

If you are wondering about her cape, it's hunting season.  Currently it's bow hunting season on deer and grouse shooting season.  In a couple of weeks it will be deer shooting season.  The dogs run so quickly it's best that they wear orange when they are barreling after small mammals in the woods.  You may think that a white dog couldn't be mistaken for a deer, but there are some hunters who shoot first and ask id later (as in this infamous 2002 MN incident) and we do have quite the population of albino deer up here.  I saw them on my first trip to Father Hennepin State Park...I should go back and try to digiscope them sometime.  Here's a video of an infamous albino buck that used to live along the Minnesota/Wisconsin border.

But check out the unadulerated joy that is Lola in a pile of leaves!

Dog smile!  A much better time for Lola at the hives than earlier this summer.

Useful Beekeeping Tools

The lone bee!

It's late fall and we are getting our bees ready for the winter.  As we were winding our bee season to a close, I thought I would bring up 2 different pieces of bee equipment that have been incredibly useful to use this year.  There's a lot of bee equipment equipment that is mediocre (or does not come with instructions so is about as useful as a Slap Chop).

This was a hive tool Mr Neil found...I think when he went to Australia.  Hive tools are needed to pry boxes and frames apart--especially after bees have propolised them together.  Our newest one is called an Australian hive tool. What separates this from your garden variety beekeeping hive tools (besides higher cost) is the little hook on the end--you can use it to pull out the frames from the brood boxes.  If you are only going to have one hive tool...I'd go with with this one.

The other really cool piece of equipment that Mr. Neil ordered for us is the escape board.  Every year when we extract honey, we have the not so fun task of convincing all the worker bees to leave those honey supers and join all the other bees in the brood boxes.  We don't always see eye to eye on this sort of thing.  We've tried other things to get the bees to leave like Bee Quick which is an essential oil that you spray that causes most of the bees to leave the super and go deeper into the hive.  You have to order a new bottle every year because it appears to be less effective after the first summer.  There's also Neil's shake the hell out of the box to flick the bees out method.

But I gotta say that this escape board works WAY better!

You place the escape on top of the supers or boxes that you do not want to remove and place it so the triangle side is on the inside of the hive.  The top has a hole, the bees crawl down that and out the triangle to join the rest of the hive at night.  The next day, when they try to return to the other honey supers, they can't figure out the triangle maze and don't go back.

You then place the box full of honey that you want the bees to vacate on top of the escape board and in a day or two you have a bee-free honey super--it's awesome.  More effective than the Bee Quick and the flick method.

You end up with happy bees and not angry bees lost and irritated in the honey super you are trying to harvest.  Bonus!

Drunk bees!

Hello all, NBB here. Yesterday was a pretty shining example of why, three (?) years into this process, I'm still the junior beekeeping assistant, the Barney Fife of the apiary world.

To get everyone up to speed: the bees needed to be fed, Sharon has to work, Neil is out of town, Hans is out of town, and Lorraine is sick as a dog. Which left me. Now, the last time I was sent off alone to check on the bees it was a comedy of errors, if by "comedy" you mean "it's funny because it happened to someone else."

This mission, however, was a simple one: feed the bees. I didn't have to switch boxes, combine any hives, or search for the queen. Just feed the bees by mixing sugar and water in a pail, then add the pail to the hive. A job so simple, an idiot could do it.

Which is why they sent me.

It was a cold day, about 44°, which meant the hives would be less active, they tend to stay inside and cluster for warmth. I got there in plenty of time, figuring to take about an hour to make the sugar water solution. Small problem:

The sugar, having been left in the garage all summer, was not so much as “easy pour” as more of a “solid brick.” After chipping away at the bags, I was able to produce several manageable chunks and also a large mess. So after about an hour I had five pails full of sugar water.

Too bad we have six beehives. Sigh... what can I say? Math is hard! Back to the house to make another pail, then back down to the hives.

Amazing, the bees were still alive by the time I got to them.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsJIUgrF0ws[/youtube]

We didn’t get as much honey as we were expecting this year. I wonder if the wetness of the season had something to do with this, or the fact that we had eight hives competing for pollen rather than two.

Regardless, the remaining hives seemed full. And thirsty...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAv3TBxv7-Y[/youtube]

For reasons that escape me now, I had to reopen one of the hives after I put the pail on. I noticed one of the bees had gotten splashed with the sugar water, making her the most popular girl at the dance.

Her wings were sparkling.

We’re heading towards the end of bee season. Soon we’ll be taking the hives down to two or three brood boxes (filled with honey, which the bees will eat over the winter). We’ll wrap the hives in insulation, put the entrance reducers on (to keep out mice and other pests that would make a honey-filled box a winter home), and that’ll be that. We’ll sneak down in the winter and press our ears to the side to make sure they’re alive, dreaming whatever winter dreams bees have.

Mice & Moths In The Hive

I always love when I catch bees making little mistakes with m camera--like falling when landing.  It happens a lot.  Bees are not perfect creatures.

I headed out to the hives to check my frame situation.  A friend works at a local nature center and they need a few extra frames full of honey for programs.  They will extract the honey for us and we do a good deed loaning out our frames.  Seemed like a win/win to me.  As Non Birding Bill and I check on the frames we'd be donating, I just peaked into all of the hives.  We started the summer with 8 hives but we are ending with 6--not bad.

We left our two empty hives out this summer--my thinking was that 1. the other hives would rob the stores of the empty hives and incorporate the little honey that was there into their own hives and 2. if any of the other hives decided to swarm, they might take over one of the empties.  No honey bee swarms took them over, but other critters did.  When I looked into one, I found tons of webbing between the frames.  I had a suspicion of what was going on and took out a frame.

The frame is full of larvae and webbing--we've go wax moths!  It's a type of moth that you see sometimes for sale at bird stores or bait stores.  The moths lay their eggs in wax, the larvae eat the wax and their webbing makes a mess.  If you have a healthy hive the workers keep them out.  Since this hive was void of bees, the moths made themselves at home.  The infestation is bad, the larvae is on every frame.  They will die when it gets cold, but they could burrow in to the wood before then.  I'm half tempted to set the frames out at the bird feeders.  I have a feeling that the chickadees and titmice would make short order of them.

I checked our other empty hive and found some holes in the frame.  It knew this was familiar but couldn't quite remember what it meant.  We took it apart to put it in storage and then I remembered what this meant:

As I lifted the floor--we found three mice--the little stinkers! They are always trying to move into one of our hives.  We took the hive completely apart and booted out the mice.

They had a nice little grass nest underneath.  I can't blame them for trying, but the little plague carriers are going to have to find a new spot to live in.

The occupied hives are doing well.  I did have to chuckle that on our plastic hive...

...there was a teeny frog soaking up the sun.  Do you see it?

I originally called this a toad, but an alert reader told me that this is a Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor).  It was very small, a young frog and was about the same size as a drone.  It was certainly not after the bees.  It was far enough away from the entrance so as not to attract the attention of the workers or the guard bees.  I do love how it looks like it has a huge grin, as if this one wee frog has the entire world figured out.

Beware Of Honey Laundering

We are in the midst of the Minnesota State Fair which is usually an opportunity to see cute barn yard animals and eat strange things like deep fried mashed potatoes on a stick.  But this year, Minnesota beekeepers teamed up with Senator Amy Klobuchar to bring attention to the dangers of honey laundering...you read that correctly: honey laundering.

The complaint appears to be specifically with China.  The accusation is that China tries to avoid playing high import tariffs by rerouting Chinese honey through countries that have lower duties.

Senator Klobuchar used the example that if the tariff on honey from China is $1.20 per pound, but only 2 cents per pound if that same honey is labeled as a product from Argentina, China might try to sell their honey through Argentina to the United States.

She said one tell-tale sign is when nations with no history of exporting honey begin to ship huge quantities to the United States.  Currently, there is no purity standard with honey set by the US Food and Drug Administration.

You may be wondering why this would be a big deal.  Well, there could be substances in the honey that could be harmful.  Recently, the FDA seized 64 drums of Chinese honey in Philadelphia that contained residues of Chloramphenicol, a bee anti-biotic used in China but not approved for use in the United States honey industry.  Could Chloramphenical be harmful to humans in the long term?  Could it weaken honeybee colonies?

Will this be solved soon?  Doubtful, the FDA is overwhelmed checking every other food out there--e coli eggs anyone?  So, what can you do?  Try to get in touch with local beekeepers and purchase local honey from your state or town.  Or go hog wild like we did and keep your own bees.

You can read more about the honey laundering issue here and here.

Beehives Attract Flycatchers

This is an interesting little bird.  It's an eastern wood-peewee that was singing out around Mr. Neil's property.  Periodically, the peewee would flip out from its perch and grab some insects.  I didn't get a photo of it, but as I was watching the peewee through the scope, I noticed it grabbed a bee!  That's when I realized this peewee was perched right over our yard hive and is hanging out in what we call the "bee highway" or the main flight path bees follow going to and from the hive.

This is not the first flycatcher I've seen around the hives.  Great-crested flycatchers show interest as well.  I'm not too worried about it, there are several thousand bees, so a dozen or so eaten by birds is manageable.  Plus, I suspect the birds prefer drones--they are bigger, fatter, juicier, slower and being males, they do not sting.