Mom, You'll Be So Proud, I'm In Newsweek

Sort of.

There's a new website called Bird Cinema that wants to be the You Tube for birding videos. It just launched and I have been playing with it to see what the video quality is like compared to using Google Video. Any the whoo, I posted some videos that I have taken with my digiscoping set up, one being the young Cooper's hawk bathing in the roof top puddle where I narrate, "I'm a dirty girl!"

Well, Newsweek has done an article on the site and selected that video as an example of what one can find on Bird Cinema. Gee, mom, aren't you proud? Your daughter's voice is in Newsweek saying, "I'm a dirty girl, I'm baaaaaad."

It's interesting to note that the article has the birder statistics wrong. But what can we expect from a publication that thought an article about a woman illegally killing a cardinal was funny.

Squirrel Up A Pole

Went to take Cabal out for a walk and though he loves to chase cats, he doesn't seem to be interested chasing squirrels (although, he will bark at brown-headed cowbirds at the feeder, so he's not all bad).

When we passed by the feeders, two squirrels ran for the woods. A third ran up the bird feeder pole and up into the raccoon baffle. Cabal trotted past, not noticing the quivering piece of metal tubing meant to keep squirrels and raccoons from reaching the bird feeder. As Cabal forged ahead, I took a moment to snap a photo of the squirrel:

The squirrel eventually scrambled down and joined his companions in the woods.

Queen Excluder Time

I took this photo of an entrance reducer to show you guys what it is...I didn't notice the juxtaposition of Non Birding Bill until after I downloaded photos. If you read my answers at Nerve.com, you get the joke (insert naughty giggle here).

I'm confused about the Kitty hive, but I have a plan and am rallied by all the support! First, let's talk good news: Olga was reversed and given a queen excluder and a propolis trap today! Chances are good, that last sentence made very little sense to you, but it's a whoot in my book.

Olga had filled all three of her brood boxes with eggs and honey. Since all the frames in the boxes were 100% filled with drawn out comb, we need to switch the top box with the bottom brood box. Bees tend to fill hives from the top down, so to encourage more brood, we needed to switch--all the frames in the bottom box have hatched, all the frames on the top were full of freshly laid eggs. I'm SO glad NBB was with me. I learned something today: a brood box full of honey and brood is too heavy for me to lift...and I can lift sixty pounds without a problem.

It was a messy business. As we took the whole hive apart, worker bees were running a amok, gathering all over the sides. We smoked the crap out of them, but still had a tough time keeping them out of the way. Now, I see the value of a hive brush. One of the instructors in the class inferred that the hive brush was an unnecessary tool, but we could have used one today. I ended up sweeping all of the bees out of the way with my glove--boy they really didn't like that! But it was that or squishing them as we put the hive back together.

After we reversed the hive and reassembled it, I placed the queen excluder on top of the three brood boxes. This allows only the workers to pass above the brood boxes and insure that all the frames placed above this point will only be filled with honey. After I set it on top, I watched closely to insure that the workers could pass through--yes they could.

After we put on our honey supers, I placed a propolis trap on top of them. This will encourage our bees to produce more of the sticky stuff they use to seal up the hive for us to eat. Ah, propolis--irritating when inspecting the hive, tasty and nutritious in your tea.

Now, on to the Kitty hive! I wanted to take a look today to see if there were any eggs--hoping against hope that a new queen had returned from a mating flight and had started laying. As I scanned, I found a bee emerging and was watching it...then I found something troubling. Notice the worker bee right above the emerging bee? That worker bee is doing something she shouldn't--she's plunked her little abdomen into a cell to lay an egg! Doh! That really isn't a good sign for this hive. She sat in there for some time, almost appeared to be struggling like she was constipated.

I watched the hive and the other frames for a long time (at least a half hour) and only found this one worker bee trying to lay eggs. Here's the problem. When a healthy queen is present, workers don't lay eggs. When a queen is gone and the workers aren't controlled by her pheromone, ovaries develop in the workers and they begin to lay eggs. These eggs are infertile and will only turn into drones (female workers and queens are the result of fertilized eggs). If this is happening, this means that there is no viable queen. Perhaps I did kill off all of the queen cells right before the swarm--my effort to prevent the swarm has kind of doomed the colony.

There are other signs of this as well--spotty drone cells capped over in the worker brood frames. Above the bee is a capped over cell that looks puffy--that's a drone that has been laid in a worker cell. All the flat capped over cells are capped worker cells. I called B&B Honey Farms--that's who I have been getting all of our bee supplies from. They ran out of replacement queens last week, so the very helpful Tammy went over some options with me. She agreed that one bee laying eggs is a very bad sign for that hive and I need to take action now.

1. Can I find the swarm? Boy howdy have I tried, but the woods are so thick and full of hollow trees, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

2. Do I want to pick up a swarm? There are apparently quite a few showing up along Hwy 90 and 94 through Minnesota and Wisconsin. Someone who travels around so their bees can pollinate farms has lost six already. One was in Tomah at a truck stop if I wanted to go for it. A little too far away for me at the moment.

3. Combine what's left of Kitty with the strong Olga hive using the newspaper method.

4. Then I ran an idea I came across on the Hive Mind Bee Blog(one of the beekeepers who answered questions like I did on Nerve.com): take a frame or two of brood from the Olga hive (making sure that it's full of freshly laid eggs) and inserting that into the Kitty hive. Like birds, bees look at eggs as something needing to be raised. They will take some of the eggs (they will all be fertilized and therefore female) and place them in queen cells. The only difference between a worker bee and a queen is that the queen is raised entirely on royal jelly. If one of those queens makes it, she will go on the mating flight and then come back and lay eggs. Also, the bees won't turn all the eggs into the queen, but raise them as workers--this will put some new life back in the hive to cover for the lack of eggs being laid in the last few weeks. Tammy said I could try it, however for every person who has had it work, there's another person who hasn't had it work. I think it's crazy enough of a plan that it just might work. What have I got to lose at this point anyway?

I think that's what we'll try tomorrow...too bad we just did the reversal and all the eggs are in the bottom box. Ah well, it'll be good exercise.

Because Kitty's progress we had to change the third brood box. When you start them, you put in ten frames to help with the way the comb is drawn out. Once they fill the brood box, you take one of the frames out so you only have nine in there. When you are expanding, you put the tenth frame in the new brood box. We'll we've expanded all we can in the Olga hive and the supers for honey are too small to hold a brood frame.

So, I brought it in and we had a little of the honey in our tea. It wasn't capped over, so it wasn't true honey, but it tasted awful darn close.

It was yummy! Although, now that we are going to take a frame of brood out of Olga and put it in the Kitty hive, we'll need to put this frame back in Olga. Good thing we didn't scrape off all the honey from her comb.

Refreshed, recharged, and ready to tackle the situation!

Quiet in the Kitty Hive

Non Birding Bill and I are watching Cabal (the beekeeping dog) while everyone is away--If you don't regularly read Mr. Neil's blog, the last week has been hilarious--Maddy, his 12 year old daughter has been guest blogging their adventures on a movie set in Budapest. Check it out, she writes exactly as she talks. She's crackin' me up, this one is my favorite.

Well, on to the saga of the Kitty hive. If you remember from last week, she was showing signs of swarming or a failing queen by building lots of queen cells. If queen cells are on the bottom of one of your frames, that means she's feeling crowded and the old queen will stop laying eggs, and then fly off with half the hive. If the queen cells are on the middle of the frames, that's a sign that the current queen is failing and is about to be superseded. We had mostly queen cells on the bottom frames and a few in the center. We removed as many queen cells as we could find and added a third brood box, hoping that room for expansion would encourage them to stay. We decided to wait a week and see what was happening.

Non Birding Bill and I went out to the Kitty hive and opened the box. It was quiet...too quiet. There was not the usual buzzing. We took out two center frames and they had not drawn out any comb at all. Not a good sign. We opened the second box, still quiet and the bees were totally calm. One of the most important beekeeping tools is the smoker, it helps keep them calm. We really didn't need it. The bees were as calm as the were when we first installed them...there were also noticeably fewer. We had our answer, sometime in the last week, the Kitty hive had swarmed. The old queen left, taking half the workers with her. The other half was left behind to start with a new queen.

Taking out more frames we found queen cups, the start of queen cells, the workers probably started those after I had ripped out all of the queen cells I could find last week.

I also found queen cells that I had missed. Can you find this one? Look at the top of the photo right in the center--there's kind of a vertical peanut shell structure--that's a queen cell. If you recall, this was the hive that kind of doubled up on each frame--the cells were away from the frame, so the bees had brood on the outside and between the cells and the frame--I wonder if that contributed to the feeling of being overcrowded? If you still can't see the queen cell, here is an up close shot:

I started to think back to the last time we were at the hive, last week when we first discovered the queen cells, quite a few bees were covering the side of the hive--they were much further along in swarming than I realized. Ah, hind sight is twenty twenty. Now, what will I do. I tried to find the new queen, but we couldn't. However, depending on when she hatched, she could be out on her three day "maiden voyage". A newly emerged queen is a virgin. When she hatches, the workers show her around the hive and she seeks out any remaining queen cells and kills them--it's kind of a Highlander thing--there can be only one. This takes about three days. Then she flies off for another three days to a "drone congregation area". Seriously, this is what the drones live...and die for. She will go up in the air about a half mile and find a few dozen drones to mate with (each drone she accepts will die in the copulatory act). After three days of sex and killing, she will return to the hive full of sperm and begin laying eggs.

In that time, I have to hope that nothing bad happens like a phoebe or great-crested flycatcher eating her before she comes back from her mating flight. There is some unhatched brood, but there haven't been new eggs for awhile. I'm kind of at a crossroads: do I start a new queen or do I work with the old queen? Which ever way I go, is there enough time for them to build up enough food and workers to survive winter this far north? I also wonder if I just shouldn't have left the queen cells last week.

Searching bee forums, I did what I could, but I should have caught this much sooner. My mistake was not checking the bottom box after adding the second. I thought that if I had let them alone, they would construct faster. Although, I did learn that even if I had caught it early, my methods of stopping a swarm still might not have worked. There are even some valiant efforts I could have tried, but probably wouldn't have, like finding the queen and cutting off her wings, making her flightless. If she couldn't fly, she would fall down on the swarm flight and the other workers would have been forced to stay. I don't think I could have the heart to cut the queen's wings.

As I look at the frames that are completely empty of brood, I feel that I have let this hive down with my inexperience. NBB was very excited--he was looking at this from a more scientific angle. He found the whole swarm process and the change in the hive's behavior fascinating. As I kept feeling like a failure, he kept marveling that our bees were now out in the wild--starting fresh and perhaps this healthy line would help build up the population that is so in trouble in North America. Our main goal was to have bees for pollination and well, the swarm couldn't have gone far so they will continue to pollinate Mr. Neil's yard--we will just not be managing it or getting any of the excess honey. So, for now, I will check Kitty daily for eggs, signs of the new queen. If there are no eggs in a week, I'll order a new queen.

The Olga hive, our former problem child is right on schedule and is ready for honey supers--honey for us to collect for our own purposes. Go Olga! Look at this frame full of honey! We took a small taste--it was awesome.

I walked the woods to see if I cold find signs of the swarm. Swarms don't go too far from the hive. There are quite a few hollow trees nearby, so they could be near. I watched the hives to see where the bees were flying off to. From this photo, they start from each hive respectively, and then fly up and off to the upper left corner of this photo. They clear the tree line and then go on. I tried following the bees, but was stopped by waist high stinging nettle.

I started following the creek. I was feeling very down, NBB had a hard time understanding it. It's understandable that there will be some problems your first year as a beekeeper, but I wanted to get everything right. Our class instructor even advised us to get two hives in case something goes wrong, and from what I've read, swarming happens to the best of beekeepers (although usually the second year, not with a new package). I'm bummed, I feel I've let our beekeeping operation down. But on a deeper level, I think what was really bothering me was a sense of rejection. The Kitty bees didn't care for the hive and took a bunch of their workers and left. A bunch of stinging girls left me and moved on. It's middle school all over again.

And then I heard this (it's about 32 seconds long). Can you identify the bird singing:

It's a song I haven't heard for a long time. I've never heard this species singing in Mr. Neil's woods before (this has been a good year for them, many more reports on the local listservs than usual). We used to get these in the woods where I lived as a kid in Indianapolis. It was the first bird I tried to id based on song--without the help of bird identification CDs--or records as we used at the time. My mom and I spent an entire Saturday morning chasing this bird down trying to see what made such a beautiful song. It took us a long time, but finally we caught a glimpse through the leaves of a robin shaped bird, with black spots on a white belly, and brown back: a wood thrush.

Hearing this song reminded me of how much work it was to id this bird. We'd heard it for several days before we had the chance to really track it down and find it. It took a long time, and a lot of work--that's how it was early on my birding life. And it's a good reminder of how it will be with my beekeeping life. I will make mistakes, and bees will do what they want to do.

Thanks, wood thrush, for the reminder and for making one of the most haunting melodies a person can ever hear in the summer woods.

Dakota County Bird Trip

Saturday, I led a field trip with my buddy Stan Tekiela to Dakota County, through Staring Lake Outdoor Center. It was a small group and loads of fun. I love birding this place because it's just south of the Twin Cities metro area and you can see some great birds: loggerhead shrike, dickcissel, grasshopper sparrow, indigo bunting, even a Swainson's hawk (they're not really supposed to be in Minnesota).

We started the morning by checking one of the Outdoor Center's bluebird boxes. Some of the participants got to hold a young bluebird--what a great way to start a Saturday morning!

I had driven our route on Friday looking for target birds and didn't find all of them but hoped for the best on Saturday. I did find lots of song sparrows (above). It's interesting to note the abundance of corn growing in many of the fields and I wondered how much more there will be in the coming years with the popularity of ethanol. One spot that has traditionally been great for yellow-headed blackbirds was all corn.

I like going with Stan, because he likes to help put the adventure in a trip.

Case in point, the above photo. Note in the background the sign reads "Road Closed"--that's where we parked. Well, this was our unplanned last stop of the day. We had seen all target species except for dickcissel. I had an email with me that someone in the past week had seen dickcissel off of Hwy 52 and 117th Street--just off the exit. That was on our way back to the Outdoor Center, so we decided to stop there, what did we have to lose? As we drove on the exit, I had my window down and I immediately heard, "dick dick cissel cissel" and there on the exit sign was a dickcissel. Stan pulled his vehicle over right on the exit, I went a little further ahead to an area blocked off for construction. We hopped out and everyone got a good look at the dickcissel.

Incidentally, we were across the highway from the Koch Refinery. Even though we were far away, my spotting scope though aimed at the dickcissel, was pointing towards the refinery. Two security vehicles approached us in less than five minutes to insure that we were not taking any photos--I opted to not try and digiscope the dickcissel.

One of the target species (and on that put on the best show was a northern shrike). I had seen one along this stretch of road on Friday and at first I drove past it, but Stan called out on the two way radio, "Shrike." We pulled back and there it was perched on a telephone pole.

Look at that little shrike loaf. The bird was totally dosing off--slacker. It was hunkered down and periodically the eyes would close--certainly wasn't too stressed out by us humans. I even pulled out my Handheld Birds and played the call of the northern shrike versus the loggerhead and it still continued to dose off.

Eventually, the shrike did wake up and went through a series of stretches. Here is your basic wing stretch.

And this? I don't know, perhaps a bird version of downward dog? I'd never seen a shrike stretch quite like this before--kind of a butt up pose. Boy, it doesn't look anything like it does in field guides. After this stretch it flew across the street to some spruce trees and teed up. It looked like it was on the hunt. I wonder if the shrike was thinking, "Alright, you got your pictures, you got to see me, I'm off the clock, so buzz off."

Another highlight of the day was watching some young kestrels that had recently left the nest learning to fly and hunt. The young birds would fly and perch right over us...that is until the adults showed up and started screeching a warning.

All and all a fun time. Up next is a bee entry. Brace yourself, we find out what happened to Kitty.

For Teageeare

Who tells me that I don't put enough Kabuki in the blog:
Here is my cranky little cockatiel, eyeing my inbox, hoping I will not notice if he pulls out and chews some paper. He and Cinnamon are about to go an a small adventure. We're going to dog sit for the next few days and we're bringing the pets with us.

I can't believe blogging escaped from me for a couple of days--it turned much busier here than I had anticipated. Next weekend should be about the same. I took Cinnamon with me to Carpenter Nature Center on Friday. I got an email a few weeks ago from some blog readers who said they might join us for banding. They asked if Cinnamon would be there and originally I had said no, but Thursday night and Friday morning, she was doing all those things that say, "Hey, mom, I need some stimulation." ie - digging in her litter box and sneaking into the kitchen. So, on went her leash and she went with me to Carpenter and found a whole slew of new things to disapprove of.

Even though we can still get her to put on the leash and harness without too much of a fuss doesn't mean she tries to chew and whip it off when she thinks I'm not looking.

We're getting in quite a few of the summer residence. Above is a male robin we have had in the nets twice this summer. You can tell he is male by the dark head and the darker rusty breast. Boy, he really looks unhappy in this photo.

We also got in this hairy woodpecker. Notice anything strange about him? Check out his red patch--it's on the front of his head and not the back--a way you can tell if the bird just hatched this year when it is at your feeder.

Cinnamon was not as impressed with all the banding going on and was way more interested in exploring all the prairie grasses. Just by hopping in a few feet, she would completely disappear.

Apart from the leash, the only other way you could tell she was in there was by watching a tall piece of grass waver for a moment and then fall over as she had chewed its stalk. She was almost on sensory overload with the abundance of chewables at her feet.

To a blade of grass, she's kind of a scary looking monster. Afterwards, she kept me company as i scouted for a field trip that I was leading on Saturday. Which I will blog about later tonight. Right now, I have to go out and check on the bee situation...have I prevented a swarm...will the Olga hive be ready for a queen excluder...what wonderful bee adventures will I encounter this week?