The Queen Came Too Soon

When my phone sounds like an oddly mixed flock of birds, I know someone is trying very hard to get hold of me. I was busy being a park ranger this morning and was unable to answer my phone so I heard the following. First, the bobolink song (that means a general phone call). Second, I hear a flock a flock of gadwall (that means someone left a voicemail). Third, a goshawk is screaming (Non Birding Bill is calling from his office phone). Fourth, a pileated woodpecker sings (NBB is now trying to reach me on his cell phone). Fifth, a veery warbles (someone is leaving a text message). All of this in the span of three minutes. Something must have been up.

And it was. When I finally got to listen to the messages, Lorraine said the post office left a message that our queens arrived and needed to be picked up. Queens? Plural? I had only ordered one...why did I have more than one and more importantly, what would I do with an excess of queen bees? Yikes!

We are planning on dividing the Olga hive and starting a new colony (Kitty 2). To do this, you take a box from the strong Olga colony that is full of workers and brood (and make darn sure that Queen Olga isn't in that box) and you place a new queen in a cage in that box and gradually introduce everybody and hopefully in about five days you have a new hive started. The old hive continues growing and if it's strong enough, doesn't miss the box you used for the divide. I only need one queen for this, so having additional queens was a tad alarming.

Well, it turns out that the post office was a tad confused. We did in fact only get one queen and she has a few workers to attend her while in her cage. To the uninitiated, this would seem like a small box of queens. Whew, on only getting one queen. There is still some concern, the queen is a whole week early and Olga is not ready for a divide. Heck, I'm not even ready for the divide. According to my Beekeeping In Northern Climates book, if we keep the queen in a cool, dark place and feed her one drop of sugar water a day, she can live like this for "several days"...does that seven days? Well, we'll find out. I'm leaving town on Thursday and Olga still needs to be prepped before we can do the divide, the queen will have to wait.

So, after plying NBB with some liquor, I think I have a plan. He'll go out this weekend and on Saturday (perhaps with Lorraine and Mr. Neil's help) prep Olga for the divide. He'll need to open Olga up, check and see that there are five to seven frames of brood in the top two boxes of the Olga Hive, if one has more than the other, he'll need to even it out. Then he'll put in a queen excluder between the top two boxes. When I go out next Wednesday to remove one of the boxes, all I'll have to do is look for eggs. Whichever box has fresh bee eggs will be the box that has the Olga queen and that box will stay put. The box without eggs will go to start the new Kitty 2 hive with the queen we just received in the mail today.

How did spring go from the delightful time of watching warblers and playing with bees to holy-crap-how-will-I-survive-this-season?

Bee Movies

Non Birding Bill filmed us installing our three pound packages of bees yesterday since Mr. Neil wasn't in town and this way he could get an idea of the hiving experience. It's in two parts:

Oh, it's a cliff hanger!

Hiving The New Packages

It's that special time of year when we install new packages of bees.

I have to say that after last year's complete and utter panic when hiving switching to relief and enjoyment was not relived this year. In some ways this year seemed anticlimactic, but that may be due to the fact that I have some sort of cold. Part of me is incredibly irritated and full of self pity (it's spring, warblers are coming darn it and I'm sick) but the other part of me is grateful that if I'm going to have a cold, that I have it this week and not next week when I'm doing the World Series of Birding.

We had a larger posse out at the hives this time. Above is Lorraine going over the instructions along with Non Birding Bill (who filmed it and hopefully will be able to get it up on YouTube soon) and Mary, a friend.

This is Queen Mimi. She arrived in this cage which was in a larger box with about three pounds worth of bees (please don't ask how many bees are in a pound--I have no idea). As my bee instructor says, she was placed in the crate in this cage with three pounds of workers from a different hive. The cage gives the queen and new workers a chance "to work out their differences" or rather, give the queen a chance to use her pheromones to work their mojo on the workers and everybody gets along. First we poured all the workers into the empty hive and once we had those in, we release the queen.

When I opened the cage, she half tumbled out but soon mixed in with all the workers. We filled the box up with frames, put on a feeder pail and a pollen patty--key ingredients to help the hives get to work drawing out comb so the queen can lay eggs and we can get the next generation growing. Some flowers were blooming. Near the location of these two hives we found some wood anemone and bloodroot blooming. The anemone already had a bee foraging on it, but I think it was an Olga bee.

So, here is the Mimi Hive all set up and ready to grow. We added a new type of bottom, it's a screen that will trap varroa mites when they fall off the bees and prevent the mites from crawling back up to reattach themselves to a bee. It's not going to totally get rid of the mites, but every little bit helps and we can use this as a measure of our mite situation as opposed to rolling our bees in powdered sugar. By the way, TO BEE EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURERS AND SUPPLIERS: Is it too much to ask that you include some sort of instructions with the equipment? Really, just a one sheet, maybe with an illustration? Please? It's so frustrating to get these items in the mail and I don't know which way us up or how to put things together.

Next we put in Queen Kelli. I think she's going to be a tricky thing--she's really, really tiny. She not much larger than a worker. As a matter of fact, once we released her, we could not find her.

She's mixed in there somewhere swimming through a sea of worker bees.

So that is the Kelli hive. You will note that we've added a small luxury this year--see the table in back? It's to help us keep our equipment up off the ground and keep us from bending over so much. Whoot.

We also checked on Olga. We had to do a reversal--switch her top box with her bottom box to help brood production and prevent swarming before we do the divide later this month. We also had to move the hive two feet over. Above, NBB is using a Frame Spacing Tool to try and get all the frames spaced to prevent the Olga girls from making oddly shaped comb that makes bee inspections difficult.

Much of the comb on the bottom was empty and ready for eggs. The Olga girls have been doing a tremendous job of gathering pollen, you can see some of it in the cells. Bees build up towards the top of the hive. Once the top is full, they start to think that maybe they are crowded and swarming is a good idea. So, when the top has sealed brood, you switch it with the bottom box--it should be empty as all the brood as hatched. The workers go up and see the empty cells and think, "Hey, we got more room, get the queen up here to start layin' some eggs."

Many forager bees were returning while we reversed the hive boxes. Even though we've been providing them with a pollen patty, they are doing just fine on their own.

Check out all these forages coming back with loads of pollen! We're dealing with new workers this spring. These are not the girls from last fall. These workers have no basis for comparison as for what humans are all about. In the past when we would open up the Olga hive, she would be friendly for about five or ten minutes and then suddenly have enough of us and commence with bonking us and stinging. This batch of workers stayed calm, cool, and collected while we rearranged the boxes, added a mite tray and a separate tray to improve air circulation. We'll see how long this honeymoon phase will last.

And now if all goes well, we'll be dividing Olga in a few weeks to restart Kitty giving us a total of four hives.

Eagle Nest and Tons on the Horizon

For the readers who don't go to Disapproving Rabbits but would like to hear some of the sounds rabbits can make, check out this video of Cinnamon grunting.

So much to blog and so little time! I got the word from Lorraine that the bees have landed. I was hoping that they would arrive tomorrow or Friday and I would hive them on Friday but they came today. Right now I'm trying to rearrange my schedule to install them on Thursday. I'm hoping Non Birding Bill will come and use his mad video directin' skillz to make a short on how we install our bees. I can't help but giggle and think of two years ago when we first hatched the crazy bee plan. Mr. Neil and I with visions of hexagons and buzzing and Lorraine and NBB heavily protesting. Both saying we were not going into the bee business because Mr. Neil would be out of the country writing and I would be at some bird thing and Lorraine and NBB would be the ones to have to deal with the bees and they under no circumstances would not be helping with the bees...and here was Lorraine dealing with early bee arrival while Mr. Neil was away and I was doing a bird thing.

I stopped by the bald eagle nest at the 5-8 Club to get a last view of it before the trees leaf out. The chicks have hatched and the male and female are stopping by to feed them throughout the day.

Word on the street with the banders is that many eagles are about two weeks behind from last year because of the long winter. Some banding of eagle chicks was supposed to start next week and they are now scheduled to start on May 12. Eagles are usually good with starting early, they don't need water to be open, but osprey do. I know many lakes in northern Minnesota are still frozen, I wonder if they will be late this year too? Speaking of which, the are talking flurries again for the Twin Cities this weekend--for the first weekend in May. If that happens, that means that we will have had a six month winter. Our first snow was last November 5. That's the hardcore Minnesota winter we know and love!

The weather can't put a hold on the rest of migration. We had one intense day of banding at Carpenter Nature Center today, which I will get to tonight. The towhee above is just a hint. Boy, wasn't it just the other day that I blogged about wanting to get a photo of that crazy towhee eye? Sometimes, wishes do come true in the short term.

Here are a couple of other hints: What bird hates black sparkly nail polish more than titmice hate purple nail polish?

And, what bird caused this blood bath? That's not my finger...dodged a bullet with that bird!

I'm So Proud Of The Olga Bees!

After we banded the birds on Sunday, Amber and Reier asked if I would mind showing them the bees. Would I mind? Pish-sha! (That's Reier holding a frame above) I love to show off the bees. Non Birding Bill, Mr. Niel, and Lorraine went with me to the Olga hive to give her some nectar and a pollen patty the day before--we need to help feed the hive until more trees and flowers bloom. I thought I would just show Amber and Reier the top of the hive.

NBB had walked past the hive while we were banding and warned she was active in the warm weather. When we got there we found a ton of foragers coming back loaded with pollen. Even though I had given them a pollen patty, they were still out there looking and successfully finding it on their own. Look at all those yellow pollen baskets on their legs!

I know they are getting pollen from blooming tree buds, but I think they are also taking advantage of crocuses that are starting to bloom. There are some around the house, some around neighboring homes and I planted several in the surrounding woods.

Amber got the above shot of Reier and I opening the hive and looking at the frames on the inside--we were covered in bees, but they were not stinging us. The hive sounded happy and thriving. Curiosity got the better of me, so I thought we would take the top off and look at a couple of frames and see if any new eggs had been laid since we switched the top box last weekend. We didn't find eggs, we found larvae:

There's larvae all over in the above frame, but to make it easier, I put some blue arrows next to a few cells with bee larvae in them. See the tiny little curled up things in the bottom of the cells? In a couple of weeks, those will be new worker bees! I'm so proud of our girls, they are finding pollen on their own, the queen is laying lots of eggs for fresh strong workers for the spring, and we even found several frames still heavy with honey that they built up last fall. I think Olga is going to provide us with lots of honey this summer.

I'm just swelling with pride for my girls. I think spring has officially begun for me.

Spring Bee Inspection

On Sunday, we did our first big inspection with the Olga hive after having sealed her up for winter and my goodness was she active! With the sun and balmy forty something degree temperatures, we expected some activity, but they were buzzing around like crazy. I didn't realize how much I missed them, missed the smell of the smoker, the smell of the wax and hive, the buzz and hum of happy bees.

Here's my faithful bee assistant poking the bees during the inspection. Actually, Mr. Neil is not poking the bees, he's doing them a great service of removing a layer of dead bees that have built up at the bottom of the hive. There were so many that they were blocking the bottom entrance.

Look at that pile of dead bees. That's really just the tip of the iceberg. We decided to lift the whole hive off the bottom board...

Ewww - a whole layer of dead, wet bees. We were a little alarmed to find that in the corner was a frozen puddle of bees. After Mr. Neil scraped out the bees, we decided to turn the hive around so that future moisture would be able to roll out, rather than collect in the hive. We did leave a hole open on the other side so that workers who were out foraging could find a way back in without too much confusion.

Part of the inspection included checking their food reserves. I had put in a pollen patty a couple of weeks ago (that's how bees get their protein). Last time, there was half of the one I left them last fall and I put in a fresh one for good measure. Sunday, there was only half of the fresh one left. I have a feeling that next weekend I will need to put in a new one. We checked for signs of brood. If there were three to six frames with brood, I was to switch the top box with the center box. I found three frames of brood, not a huge amount, but brood none the less. We went ahead and switched them.

Olga still had some good honey stores left--I think she's going to be busting out all over with honey this summer. She already provided us with extra honey her first year. I'm betting this summer will be intense. We noticed a weakness in the corner of the hive that had let in some moisture, probably from the last snow storm (the wind blew off the insulation and since it had been fairly warm we left it off). You can see it in the corner--the mold is the black stuff. The bees were probably soon going to cover the fungus with propolis, but we scraped it off.

While we were getting all of this done, the workers came out and completely covered us. Above is Non Birding Bill (say it like Eddie Izzard with me) "Covered In Bees!" Even though they covered us, they didn't really seem all that angry, they were more curious (I'd like to say, happy to see us, but that would be anthropomorphic now, wouldn't it).

We kept smoking our suits, but they would just come right back. Above, NBB is smoking Mr. Neil. For some reason, Mr. Neil decided to start our bee-venture by forgoing the sensible hood on his suit and putting on our spare pith helmet with bee net. It looked good, but left a space on his neck for bees to crawl in, so after much smoking and removal of bees, he put on his helmet.

The bees were really, really interested in the tops of our hoods. I noted this on Mr. Neil and NBB and tried to get them to pose bent over side by side because, together they looked like an odd pair of boobs with nipples made of bees, but when they realized what I was doing, they stood up.

After we finished, I stood by them for a few more minutes, just watching them come and go. I love the above shot, a few girl hanging at the corner of the hive and another flying in.

Bee season has officially begun.

Whoot!

And to give you an idea of how loud our girls are on a forty degree spring day, here's a video. NBB says that if you listen to it with your eyes closed, it sounds like we're doing something naughty.

Unwrapped Bees

Olga's busting out all over! I went out to check the Olga hive today and her winter insulation was gone. I started mumbling to myself something along the lines of, "Now, why did Mr. Neil go ahead and take the insulation off the hive without telling me? Is it too soon? What was he thinking?" Then I found the insulation in a pile in the woods. There must have been some strong winds in the last week that blew it off.

Couple of the girls were out and about. I did notice that there appears to be some type of weird damage on one of the boxes. It looks like damage done by paper wasps when they take bits of wood and chew it up to make their nests. I don't know if the Olga bees got bored this winter and decided to start chewing paint or if it was something else. I'm also not sure if I should put the insulation back on. It's the end of March and the temps are currently thirties and a few forties...although there is a winter storm advisory for tomorrow and we're supposed to get about six inches...

Checking The Olga Hive In Winter

Hey, I did end up getting a photo of Mr. Neil's common redpoll. I wonder how much longer this bird will stick around. It has been the only redpoll in his yard--separated from a flock further north. I'll be curious to see how long it stays.

Non Birding Bill went out with me to the beehives last weekend. There he is with a worker climbing up his fleece. We had the following conversation before we went out to the hives:
NBB: Aren't we going to put on bee suits?

BC: Nah. We won't need it.

NBB: What about the smoker, shouldn't we take the smoker?

BC: Nah. They'll be calm enough, we shouldn't need it. We're just going to put in a pollen patty for some extra protein.

When we got to the hive, NBB held his ear next to the hive to see if he could hear them buzzing inside the hive. We could see that the bees had been out in some of the warmer weather--pooping like crazy. Not all the little spots on the black insulation--that's bee poop! Bees don't go potty while they are in the hive to help keep it clean. That's fine in warm weather, but takes remarkable self control in winter. Then in spring when the weather is warm enough, the fly out to release all that they have been holding during the winter, these are called cleansing flight. Can you imagine having to hold it all winter long--and I'm not talking one of those southern winters, I'm talking a serious and long northern winter! Ah, bees, you never cease to amaze me!

As we were taking the hive apart to put in the pollen patty, we noticed that it was sealed with propolis and I regretted not bringing along the hive tool to pry it open. We did some knocking and that kind of alerted the girls. To hear NBB tell it, when a few flew out at us, I ran off squealing "Don't flail!" while running like a two year old and flapping my arms. I think I more dashed back cautiously. The few bees that flew soon fell to the ground and we tried our best to pick them up and put them back on the hive. Bill had one on his gloves and she tried to sting him. Fortunately, her stinger didn't get stuck in his glove so he put her back on the hive alive and intact.

The bees were in a loose cluster and when I was at the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers meeting was told that they could even have brood inside! Whoot. We put the Olga hive back together and I felt a pang of excitement that in a month or so I would be installing two new packages of bees. When I was at the meeting, I learned that lots of keepers up here lost hives over the winter, some to the cold temps like we did and some to possible Colony Collapse. I met one woman who said that she lost five of her six hives. I was incredibly grateful that we still had Olga--and SO grateful that we started our beekeeping adventure with two hives instead of one. It gave us a much better frame of reference. NBB and I also took home a couple of jars of the now defunct Kitty hive that Mr. Neil had extracted. My goodness did it taste good!

On our way back to the house, I found a hawk pellet. I'm pretty sure this is from a large red-tail that has been keeping watch over the fields at the front of the driveway. I can tell that this is a hawk pellet and not an owl pellet by the lack of bones--owl pellets are fun to take apart because they tend to swallow prey whole and and have weaker digestive acids than hawks so you find bones in the pellets. Hawks tend to rip and shred prey and when they do swallow bones, their stronger digestive acids dissolve small bones.

I walked by the bluebird house to see if any early returning bluebirds had left a calling card.

A calling card was left--but not from a bluebird. It looks like a downy woodpecker has been in here and pecking the floor. I'm thinking the woodpecker has been using this as a winter roosting box and not a potential nest site, but I'm going to leave it alone and see what happens in the coming weeks.

I went to check some of the bushes and trees we planted last fall and found that some unauthorized pruning was going on. Gee I wonder who did this?

Or this?

Well, speaking of calling cards, I find that a bunny left one around the dogwood. I didn't need the rabbit poop to confirm it, you can tell bunny damage by the perfect little cuts that their teeth make. For once, I disapprove!

Rabbits weren't the only pruning offenders. This one looks like it has both bunny damage and a bit of deer damage. Ah, the joys of planting for wildlife...sometimes the unintended wildlife eat it before the birds do.

Bees & Owls

When you're sick as a dog, your friends will blog. Mr. Neil did the beekeeping entry this week! When we learned that the Kitty hive had died, we decided to keep her honey for ourselves rather than give it to Olga (on the off chance Kitty died from some bee disease). So, this week Mr. Neil undertook that monumental task of extracting Kitty honey. He used the simple (and sticky) cheesecloth method.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to catch up on all the work I missed last week. Ugh. Tomorrow, I plan on going out and birding the crap out of Sunday. Perhaps, take my Fuji out for one last hurrah before my new digiscoping camera arrives. Today, I stepped out for an hour to peak at a great horned owl nest that Ecobirder has blogged about. It's a busy intersection in the south metro, across from a strip mall. The owls are remarkably obvious when you drive by.

There are two owls in the above photo. Can you spot them? If you can't see them, check out the photo below:

The female was on the nest and the male was hanging out towards the center of the tree. Normally, the males are well hidden, but I'm not gonna argue a good look at a great horned owl. If he doesn't want to behave the way books say he's supposed to behave, who am I to tell him what to do?

You could see the female on the nest through the scope, but it was pretty much a vent side (aka butt side) view of her.

The male was much easier to see and a welcome treat for sore eyes that had been holed up indoors for the past week.

Whoot

My goodness today was busy! We had a lot going on at The Raptor Center: programs, inspections, moving birds around indoors because it's too cold for them outside.

This imprinted male kestrel was very fascinated with the doin's a transpirin' outside his crate. We were having a conversation about the morning's activities and he was watching us intently.

Well, my talk at the Minnesota Beekeepers Association went really, really well! The audience was very engaging and my fears about not knowing what I was talking about were quickly relieved and the talk became more of me sharing some of my experiences and mistakes and laughing together. I also talked about the cameras that I use. One of the instructors from the Beekeeping Short Course that I took last year in the audience. He asked if I would send him the above photo for research, he said that he thinks the bees are removing propolis in this photo and not pollen. I told him that I learned so much from that class that he's welcome to any of my bee images.

The best part was that the talk really helped me formulate a book outline. There has been some interest in a beekeeping book and I wasn't sure how I would structure it or what I would have to say, but tonight, it all came together--whoot.

The meeting itself was very different from the county beekeeping meeting that attended last year. It was rowdy and funny and even had a show and tell time where members can show off inventions or ideas that have worked for their hives. The next meeting is going to feature a talk by master gardeners with tips for plantings for your hives. We started some bee plantings last fall, but I hope my travel schedule allows me to come to that one as well.

Here's another photo of those tracks we found outside the Olga hive. I was thinking with the thumb and the smaller star shaped track to the right that these are opossum tracks, but again, if someone has a better idea, I'm open to it.