Bees

[Donal Harris]

My wife drove the lawnmower past this about four times before she saw it.  She texted me this photo. When I saw it I texted back “Well, I guess they must not be Africanized, because I doubt you would have been texting if they were.”

I told her they were likely just a swarm passing through and I would check again in a couple of days to see if they had moved on. If not, we would find a bee keeper who wanted them. 

I forgot about it for a week. When I finally remembered to go check on them, I saw this. 

Obviously these bees had decided they liked our home as much as we do. My wife called a friend of hers who is a bee keeper. She came out the next day and found the bees had actually been living behind our house for quite some time. She said it appeared to be two colonies. One on the inside and another on the outside. 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

Hope the bee keeper left you some of the bees wax. Lucky they didn't short out your well control.

[Marc1]

Amazing. Just a very small swarm but strong enough to start to build honeycombs.

I hope your friend can relocate them safely. They are such intriguing insect. 

 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

Yep, they were busy as bees...groan.

[Marc1]

Groan?

Do the bees groan or am I missing something? 

[Donal Harris]

Groan as in “bad pun”. 

And she took the bees home in a couple of wooden hive boxes later that night. She had left the boxes there after removing the honey and comb so those bees that had been out foraging would have a place to go to when they returned. 

She kept the honey and the comb. She uses them both in some sort of face and hand creams she makes. 

[Steve Shimanek]

Nice bee score, I would like to have hives here, but just have wild ones around here. I did have a swarm of yellowjackets that have been trying to set up housekeeping in my shop, so i have been at war with them.

[JHCC]

We had a big downburst storm a few years ago that took out a few hundred trees across town, one of which was a big hollow hickory near me that turned out to have a well-established honeybee colony inside. In one of the more insane things I've done in my time, I raided the tree with no protective gear at all and ended up salvaging a couple of big pieces of honeycomb, enough to extract almost a pint of the best honey I've ever tasted. 

[Ohio]

We have an apiary and have captured swarms that the neighbors had in their low trees and shrubs. We were just working some of the hives a couple days ago. And in with all humility I am famous for, the honey from our hives has won prizes, mostly because we wait until the honey is fully cured before harvesting and that we have a small lavender farm that some of the foragers work during the season.

One reason the bees were on the outside of that thingie is that they may have gotten hot. Honey bees will set outside if it gets too warm inside the hive, or if there's a weird smell in there. In the third photo, if you go up from where the two red cables are, you'll see some cells in the honey comb that are covered and pouched out a bit---those are brood cells, where pupa are turning into new bees. "New bees" = newbies. Get it?

FYI, new bees are adorable. They can't sting yet and they don't have all their fuzz, so they kind of stand there while nurse bees feed them and take care of them. A nurse bee will then go to the next stage of her life and the new bee becomes a nurse bee. At some point, they'll be sent out of the hive to take an orientation flight, where they literally fly around the hive getting their bearings, and then they'll fly back in.

We don't capture swarms way up in trees or in structures, but I do know a guy who tore the drywall off two bays in a ceiling that was jammed with honeycomb. They figured the colony had been there for several seasons---the homeowners knew they were there and didn't really care. The roof was high and the bees never went after anyone. Then a couple years ago, honey started dripping into the house. The said part is that he couldn't find the queen, so while he removed the comb, the colony was lost. It was just too big with too many bees for him to find her.

[Nobody Special]

Better than a lot of them.  Sometimes the owners kill them in the walls without knowing better, and then the fermented honey starts coming through...which you would think would be lovely, but you also have all the wax moth larvae and bugs that get in after the wax, honey, and dead bees, plus mice, you name it.  It's naaaaaasty.

[Donal Harris]

The bee keeper who came to get them was happy to get the call. She said she had lost 8 colonies this past season. 

[Steve Shimanek]

I was up in Koke'e on Kauai some years ago when we came to a downed koa tree across the road. When we checked it out, there was a hive with honey in the tree, but the bees were not cooperative. Man that smelled awesome.

[Ohio]

13 hours ago, DHarris said:

The bee keeper who came to get them was happy to get the call. She said she had lost 8 colonies this past season. 

Yeah, this year was catastrophic. We had 40% losses---the worst season we've ever had, and the way the colonies were lost was pretty weird, too. There are some of the industrial migratory apiaries that were hit by the floods in CA. We can't even look at the pictures. One of them we've done business with in the past and it looks like he lost pretty much all of his colonies---we're talking hundreds if not thousands.

Nobody Special, interestingly, honey that ferments isn't honey---it's nectar. Honey must be below a certain moisture threshold to be honey and once it is, it will last pretty much forever. They got honey out of one of the tomb of one of the pharoah's recently. But you are totally right that fermented nectar is usually horrible and stanky, though it gives you a pretty good idea of how people figured out mead. Alcohol depends on fermentation, fermentation needs yeast, and yeast is local (unless people intervene). Some indigenous yeast yield a great-tasting beverage (or other yeast-dependent thing) though most give you something that smells and tastes not great.

I've made mead and have a batch aging now that is very dry because sweet mead is ick, gross. I actually make melomel, honey and fruit wine, with blackberries as the fruit. It's a lovely color but the seeds in the berries are full of tannins and the fresh wine was, well, let's just say it was a bit astringent. One sip and every part of you puckered to a degree you didn't think was anatomically possible But the melomel has been sitting for several years, which makes me think maybe I should crack open a bottle and try it now.

I don't recall us getting a mouse into a live hive though we did get one in a stored collection of hive boxes and that was gross enough. I have seen pictures of mice caught in a hive that have been stung to death. The corpse is too big for the bees to move, so they coat it with beeswax and propolis. Propolis is plant saps the bees collect to use to fill gaps and entomb mice once they've evaporated some of the moisture out. Interesting stuff, and like honey, is different based on micro-climate. We use it as a wood finish and I've developed an incense with it. Some people use it in a tincture, basically dissolving it in vodka and either swishing out their mouths or just drinking it. Not for me---why ruin vodka? what did it ever do to you?

The propolis we get from the bees is monumentally sticky, iron red (like, when you see it you think there was a gunfight), and smells amazing. There's also a theory that Stradivarius used propolis from local hives as the ground for the instruments he was making, which was more yellow than massacre-red and could account for the description of the instruments being gold or golden.

We did find something corpsified in one of our surviving hives early this spring, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a mouse because it was too small. I just scraped it out.

Now, where did I put that corkscrew...

[A.R.]

As a beekeeper myself that is a great find and an easy collection. We always need bees.

[SLAG]

Attention bee keeper cum iron bangers,

I recently, read an article in the weekly Economist magazine.  (in the science section at the back).  It concerned factors in bee keeping.

It discusses a report that discloses methods to diminish bees from mistakenly getting into other bee hives. This apparently is a major reason for the spread of virus diseases, varroa mites, and other parasites  etc. etc.

Their reported findings found a dramatic reduction in bee error, using the following simple steps.

1)  painting the  boxes in different colors.

2) varying the height of the colonies, (boxes).  

3) changing the orientation, of the hive entrances.  (e.g. facing N., S. E. W.)

4) decreasing hut density, by lengthening the distance between hives.

There were some other measures that were reported, but I do not recall them.

Please note that these measures do not use chemicals themselves.  And they are comparatively cheap.

Economist is a weekly magazine. I cannot find that specific magazine.  So I cannot site a reference for it. (I suspect that that magazine ended up in our paper recycling box).

But it was in a June 2019 issue. Probably from the middle of the month.  (second or third week).

Hopefully, someone here  can find it and give us the reference.

I hope that this note is of some value to some bee keepers, and others,

SLAG.

I must run along for now.   Marg,  (the Marvellous),  is preparing 'patriotic'.  hamburgers,  French fries,  and an apple pie for dinner. We bought the beer at the store.

[Donal Harris]

Interesting stuff.  I’ve wanted to try, but am quite sure I would be afraid to drink the result. 

[Ohio]

1 hour ago, DHarris said:

Interesting stuff.  I’ve wanted to try, but am quite sure I would be afraid to drink the result. 

Heh. Yeah. Drink it right after it's finished first fermentation and you'll be sad. But it is fun to make. Winemaking of any kind is fun to make. I think making wine is like waiting tables---everyone should try it at least once. You learn a lot very quickly, especially how hard it is to do it well.

SLAG, those techniques are well known to most beekeepers I know. You don't have to do much to stop honey bee drift (when a bee goes into a hive not belonging to her) and robbing (when honey bees attack another, weaker hive, to steal food) because honey bee navigation is impressively accurate.

The larger problem are people who decide to "help the bees" by putting a hive on their property but never check on the colony's health. Often these colonies fall prey to the viruses, many of which are carried by Varroa destructor, an amazing insect that has parasitized honey bee colonies. When that hive is weakened, bees from another hive sense an opportunity and rob out the dead or dying parasitized colony. And the varroa jump on the miscreant foragers and travel to the healthy hive.

Varroa originated in Asia, but the honey bees from that region developed responses to manage the parasite themselves. Elsewhere, like here, varroa showed up a couple decades ago and apiarists responded with chemicals. The original varroa species evolved to become immune to those chemicals, evolved so much that it's a different species---Varroa destructor.

We've written for Bee Culture, including an article doing a field test of a specific beneficial insect against Varroa destructor. Basically, we introduced into a hive an indigineous mite, Stratiolaelaps scimitus, that jumped on the varroa as the varroa rode around on the back of a honey bee. Imagine walking around with a dinner plate glommed onto your back, biting in and sucking your hemolymph. I mean blood, unless you have hemolymph, which is fine---who am I to judge? The strats were no threat to the honey bees but swarmed the varroa like a pack of sharks.

Unfortunately, strats are ground dwellers and passed through the hive and out. While it was satisfying to find varroa body parts strewn about like a spilled bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the strats made no appreciable difference to the varroa mite counts. This was a bummer because we're all looking for ways to mitigate the effects of varroa and take some pressure off, letting the honey bees survive. Unfortunately, it appears that Apis mellifera is going to have to develop a defense that evolves as they respond to this threat. There are some entomologists who suggest stopping all varroa treatments and letting the honey bees die, except those in select breeding programs. Projected colony losses in this scenario run in the millions of hives.

My idea is to help the varroa evolve to eat food high in cholesterol so they all get fat and slow and can't jump onto bees anymore, then die of heart failure. This plan won't work because varroa don't have hearts, literally and metaphorically, the little SWEAR WORD I'M NOT TO USE ACCORDING TO THE TOS.

Alas, varroa is only one of the threats to honey bees.

And all honey bees who collect pollen, nectar, water, plant saps---basically, all the bees who do actual work are female. Yes, you read that right. The drones have only one job. They don't even feed themselves the little ANOTHER SWEAR WORD I'M NOT TO USE ACCORDING TO THE TOS.

[Marc1]

Varroa Jacobsoni and V Destructor are two of many species of varroa. It seems that Varroa was introduced into the US more than once ergo the two species. 

I was reading recently that some colonies of apis mellifera are learning to groom each other and take the parasite off each other, something that they can do rather easily, yet have to learn. 

I remember when the african bees started to come down from Brazil, we learned to select queens from colonies who were better at defending the entrance. 

We tied a grasshopper to a string and dangled it in front of the box entrance. With a chronometer at hand we registered the response time for the guards to attack. The fastest response was the queen selected and soon we had very alert bees that could fend off the africans. 

Funny note ... most people asked if african bees were darker

I believe that observing grooming habits should be noted and those queens selected. 

[Ohio]

11 hours ago, Marc1 said:

I believe that observing grooming habits should be noted and those queens selected. 

The amazing entomologist Marla Spivak (link is a pdf article from Apidologie) has done tremendous work regarding hygienic behavior in honey bees, known as Varroa Sensitive Hygiene or VSH. Unfortunately, breeding for VSH is a tricky business. There is a field test for showing hygienic behavior that involves liquid nitrogen, but we've never done it here.

Anyway, if you have the bees with the behavior, a successive queen may not have offspring with that behavior because the genes connected to it are recessive. IOW, a VSH virgin queen may have the recessive gene but she breeds with drones (20 or more in her one mating flight) who come from all over the place and may or may not have that recessive gene. So you can try to select only these queens but she may not have daughters who have the behavior.

There are breeders who have inseminated VSH queens and you can buy her daughters, bred with VSH drones, from them. You can also buy queens raised in an area where the breeder controls the entire breeding population. We've had mixed success as far as productivity and low-to-no success regarding varroa control with these queens. Adding insult to injury, we once paid $60/each for some VSH queens. Those $60 queens were the meanest bees I've ever dealt with and that's saying something. We live in the sticks so it wasn't that big of a deal until the septic guy came to pump out the tanks and they went after him. He was sixty feet away and standing in the shade. He actually screamed.

Poor Patrick. He said we can pump our own SWEAR WORD from now on.

[Nobody Special]

You don't have to tell me from moisture content, Sonny Jim, I've had a hive or two in my time, and will again after I buy my next place this month. Probably not as much as you.  I'm a bit north of ya on Whidbey Island.  I've had a few sweet meads come out okay, depends on how sweet you go.  I've got one I prefer though that I do with champagne yeast and simmering plain ole raisins in the starter as a yeast nutrient.  I know it's a bit of a dated technique, but the final product is wonderful, feels a little like a honey beer, and has a fairly high alcohol content.  

With blackberry, you might consider doing a "sack" melomel.  In the older sherries, they'd add syrup after they racked a couple of times so the initial sugar didn't get too high and kill the yeast.  You can play with it to adjust sweetness and alcohol content, counteract some of the astringency.  I'm still not sure I'd trust most fruit wines past two years or so.  You also might try a little bit of honey as the sugar in a homemade fruit vinegar. Homemade vinegars beat anything you can get at the store.  I've got an excess right now.  Had about ten gallons of...what was definitely not pear and apple mash...that I didn't get around to this winter came out as good as half the vinegars that I made deliberately.  They benefit nicely from aging too.