#21. Where's winter?

Here we are in early December, and I have to pinch myself.  The weather has been, well, it's been sublime.  The bees have been flying like it's springtime.  (There is honeysuckle blooming.)  I've been using this bonus time to put the gardens to bed.(Gardens...bed...get it?)  Normally, by this time of year, we are wearing thermal gloves and ear muffs.  The other day, I was outside in a tee shirt.  (And a pair of pants, naturally.)  The extra-warm weather and extended harvest time has allowed me to reap amazing rewards.  Within the last week, I've harvested squash, peppers, tomatillos, the last of the eggplants.  Found a few extra potatoes when the tubers started sending up leaves.  Dug the last of the Jerusalem artichokes.  Still plenty of carrots, beets, parsnips, daikon radishes.  And, of course, the arugula will be providing greens throughout the winter.The garden is becoming truly self-sustaining, with much of it perennial, and much more seed-producing.  This past season, for instance, all my eggplants came from seed saved from the previous season.  They flourished.  Most of the tomatoes I grew came from saved seed as well.  And several squash varieties.  It's kind of thrilling.  Of course, the asparagus and rhubarb will keep on giving, year after year, as will the tubers, like horseradish (though I think that's technically a root) and sunchokes.  I don't know what the potatoes will do.  Will the undug tubers continue to live and reappear in the spring?  We shall see.

A few leeks that had gone to seed were an absolute vision of loveliness in the garden - stately, 5 ft. spires topped with beautiful purple globes of blossoms.  Each flower head was perpetually blanketed by winged pollinators.  All kinds of wasps and bees.  Finally, when the flowering ended, I cut them and laid the whole stalks in a disused part of the garden.  Now, there is a veritable carpet of thousands of leek seedlings emerging.  I will dig these up and bring them inside, to transplant in the spring.  Garlic has been wonderful.  Every year I seem to miss harvesting a few heads.  As a result, a few days ago I dug up a couple hundred garlic sprouts and transplanted most of them in neat blocks.  It will be a good harvest next summer of at least 160 heads of garlic.  The big question is what to do with my globe artichokes.  I grow them in California as a perennial border plant, and they expand every year and send up more and more buds with each passing year.  But here on Montauk?  I don't know whether to mulch them heavily and hope for the best, or dig them up and overwinter them in the cellar.

Globe artichoke in December.  One week from harvest.

This past Wednesday night we had quite a storm.  Violent winds that kept me up all night.  Rain.  Stuff outdoors flying all over the place and banging around in an alarming fashion.  Driving rain, but that wasn't a worry.  I lay awake in the middle of the night thinking about the bees. I hadn't weighted down the hive covers, because I still have to remove the feeder boxed before I truly bed them down for the winter.  I was imagining pieces of hives strewn around the yard.  As dawn arrived and the worst of the wind was behind us, I rushed out in my robe to the hives.  And, unfortunately, I was right.  The hive covers had blown off all 3 hives.  Thankfully, the inner covers were intact on two of them, meaning that the bees still had good protection.  The vicious yellow hive, however, had the inner cover blown off as well, so the tops of the frames were exposed.  I rushed to gather the covers to start protecting the colonies.  Well, as soon as I approached the yellow hive - you guessed it:  I got attacked by a guard bee who flew at me and got caught in my flowing locks.  It couldn't have been much over 40 degrees, so it never occurred to me that the bees would be actually be flying, but that yellow hive...Anyway, I ran at full speed towards the house, looking like a complete madwoman, I'm sure, night clothes flapping behind me, and into the house.  I didn't realize that the bee was still in my hair, and somehow she wound up on the living room floor, only to sting Tiki, my puppy, who ran around the house madly for a few minutes, and then was totally okay.

Now we've returned to mild weather again.  Nary a breeze, and it was almost tee shirt weather again yesterday.  But the brutal wind the other night was a harbinger.  Winter is now truly on the way.

#20. Bee school is over, but the education has just begun

My novice beekeeping journey that began last February ended last month when our class met for the final session of our nine-month beginner beekeeping course at Cornell Cooperative Extension in Riverhead.  


My classmates and I are hardly on our own, however.  Besides ordering our bees, our teacher, Ray Lackey, offered a good base of knowledge, including hands-on experience with the classroom's 1/2 dozen hives, a couple of excellent books to get us started, plus an introduction to the LIBC, our Long Island beekeeping club.  But perhaps the best resource all of us novices now have is each other; Ray is going to set up a Yahoo Group for all his former students (includes 3 or 4 different classes over 2 or 3 years) so that we continue to have a forum for communication and support, and a number of us from the East End have started our own group, the South Fork Beekeepers (unofficial name).  Our group has met three times so far, and each time we came away knowing a little more.  An old-time Master Beekeeper, Pete Bizzoso, who lives in Manorville, has joined us every time, and it's great to be able to pick his brains.  We also have our own Yahoo Group now, with a current membership of about 15.


The latest meeting was this past Tuesday at my home.  There were 8 of us, and the centerpiece of the meeting was going out to work my hives.  My swarm hive, Team Purple, had already been 'put to bed' for the winter.  I did my last thorough inspection a few weeks ago.  4 boxes had comprised the hive:  3 medium 8-frames for the brood area with a medium super on top that contained mostly drawn comb, and a hive-top feeder above that.  I had been sneaking peeks (see the photo in the last blog) and was pleased to see that the bees were taking the sugar syrup down into the super, drying and capping it for the winter.  But I'd suspected that I might have some rearranging to do with the lower boxes, and I was right.  As it turned out, the bottom box was largely unused.  Some of the black plastic Pierco frames had not even been drawn out.  So I removed that box.  The next box up was heavy with honey, with no brood present.  The third box also had good honey stores, and a little bit of brood in the center.  Here's the potential problem:  we have learned that as bees eat through their stores throughout the winter, they move up - not down -, so having honey below the brood area is not useful.  (Apparently, it is not unusual for a beekeeper to open a hive in the Spring to find a colony of starved, dead bees clustered at the top of the hive, with an untouched super full of honey on the bottom of the hive.)  So I placed the box with the brood on the bottom, the full box of honey above that, and the partially-filled super over that.  The feeder box will stay on top until around Thanksgiving, or until the bees have filled every nook and cranny and stop taking the syrup down.


Based on my last inspection, I knew I had a similar scenario to contend with in the red hive.  (Both the red and yellow hives had the same box configuration as the purple hive had had.)  One unexpected wrinkle was that Team Yellow had turned so nasty last time I tried to inspect it that I had to give up halfway through the inspection, I was so overwhelmed by a cloud of angry guard bees pummeling my veil.  At the time, I wondered if it was the DNA provided by their new queen (that hive swarmed for the second time during the Autumn, so the current queen is new since then).  Alternatively, I was afraid that there might be something else insidious going on inside the hive that was stressing out the bees and upsetting them.  Apparently, a queenless colony, or a colony infested by pests, can also get testy.  Anyway, I decided to wait until I had the supervision of Pete before going into the yellow hive again.


The day of the meeting, Pete wanted to start with the yellow hive.  Besides Pete and me, there were 6 fellow beekeepers watching and ready to help.  However, as soon as we opened the yellow hive, all but 4 of us headed for the hills - Team Yellow was on the warpath!  Pete, who usually doesn't wear gloves or a veil, was stung several times, including a nasty one on the eyelid.  A bee got into the crown of my hat, through one of the grommets, and stung me thoroughly on top of my head.  Thankfully, all the unsuited onlookers moved far away and were unharmed.  Undaunted, Pete put on a veil, and the super-brave Bea and Paige helped us to inspect and reorganize the hive similarly to what I'd done with Team Purple.  Interestingly, we found no signs of the stress factors I had been fearing, like an infestation of hive beetles or hive moths.  Just a vast number of really aggressive bees.  


We moved on to the red hive, and dealt with them in a similar fashion, putting the box with brood on the bottom, with two boxes of honey above.  But the mood in the red hive was markedly different from Team Yellow.  Box after box, the bees kept to their business and tolerated us extremely well.  Note that this is the hive that produced the vast majority of my honey this year - like 60 lbs., compared to 15 lbs. from the yellow hive.  All in all, an excellent colony.  The yellow hive, in contrast, was problematic from the very beginning, first being weak, then swarming more than once, and finally becoming aggressive.  If all three colonies survive the winter, it will be interesting to see how they develop in the Spring.  Aggressive bees have a reputation for producing a lot of honey.  If that's the case, I may try to tolerate Team Yellow's crankiness.  Otherwise, this is a case where I will consider replacing the queen.


My bee friend Josie, at whose home in Springs we met for our last meeting, brought me a fabulous gift when she came to the meeting at my house.  She had been caring for 2 hives in Montauk all summer at a lakeside rental of a NY designer.  He wanted bees for the summer, so he had them shipped down from upstate NY to the tune of $1500.00, and then gave her the colonies to move back to The Springs when he moved back to NYC after Labor Day.  Wow.  Anyway, I had gone over one day to help her with the bees, and asked her if she was going to want both the unused nuc boxes that the colonies were originally shipped in.  Well, she brought me one of the setups.  They are great!  Heavy duty plywood construction.  2 deep boxes just 5 frames wide, with a shallow super, plus frames, a lid, and even a queen excluder!  I will modify them by cutting them down to medium depth, and I'll be all ready to go in the Spring when a swarm appears, or when I decide to split one of my hives.


I'll end by including a recipe for panmelati, an Italian confection that I made and entered at the LIBC annual honey show last month.  (See post #19.)  It is modified from a Lidia Bastianich recipe.  These make a great holiday treat to finish off a meal, perhaps with a glass of vin santo, eiswein, or other dessert wine.  My only criticism is that they are a bit soft, so you might want to try adding more bread crumbs to stiffen up the 'batter'.  Also, they keep forever, and would make a terrific hostess gift, especially if made with your backyard honey!

PANMELATI

4 large navel oranges, washed & dried
3 cups honey
1 cup fine, dried bread crumbs (see note above)
2 cups toasted walnuts, finely chopped (or try with other nuts)  
2 Tbsp. brandy or other alcohol (optional)
vegetable oil

• Peel oranges and clean away all the light-colored pith.  Slice into thin strips and dice finely and evenly.  There should be about 1 cup.
• Mix peel and honey in a saucepan and heat to a simmer, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes, or until peel is somewhat translucent.
• Stir in 1 cup of nuts and the crumbs.  Simmer, stirring frequently, about 10 minutes, or until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan.  Stir in brandy.  Remove from heat.
• Scrape mixture onto a lightly oiled work surface.  When cool enough to handle, break off small pieces and roll with oiled hands.  Then roll the balls in the reserved nuts.

Makes 60+ pieces.   

    

#19. HONEY COMPETITION: The harvest is in - let the games begin!

I've been moving toward winterizing the bees since early October.  This includes checking brood boxes and honey stores and feeding heavy sugar syrup (2:1 sugar to H2O, by weight) as needed.  The goal is to have a hive chock full of stores for the winter:  all frames should be filled and capped, signaling that the bees have enough to eat until March or so.  I'm using styrofoam hive-top feeder boxes, and as you can see, the bees go crazy for the syrup.  They are protected from falling into - and drowning in - the syrup by a clear plastic panel that affords them just enough room to maneuver, while providing a foothold so they can rush in and out of the feeding area.  Having this kind of 'indoor' feeder is great in that the bees can use it 24/7.  In fact, one of my favorite things is visiting late at night just before going to bed, lifting the cover and examining the feeder action by flashlight.

A peek under the hood

I never did get a late crop of honey, so my total harvest was around 75 lbs., most of it from Team Red.  There were some capped frames in all three hives late in September that I could have extracted, but I decided to leave them for the bees.  And so I turned my attentions to preparing for my first honey competition, which was to take place in Bethpage, L.I., at a colonial restoration village.  In the great tradition of state and county competitive agricultural fairs, the Long Island Fair features all kinds of livestock, produce and crafts from Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties.


I got some tips about the proper way to present honey for competition from teacher Ray Lackey, mentor Peter Bizzoso, and doing a lot of reading on the internet.  One of the most important things in honey competition is cleanliness.  Honey must be meticulously strained and free of any foreign objects.  The 'queenline' style glass jars - the gold standard for competition - have to be polished and filled to exactly the right level.  Even a fingerprint or a piece of lint on the jar will send your score down.  That means that after the bottles are washed and polished, they are not touched by ungloved human hands.


I was pretty disappointed with the number of entries.  I entered 2 classes:  light honey and amber honey.  My light entry won second place.  First place went to my teacher, Ray Lackey, so I can't complain about that.  Problem is that there were only our 2 entries in the class.  So if you want to look at it in a different way (which I don't care to do), I came in last.  My other class had a total of 3 entries, and I took second again.  

The exciting thing, though, and what really made all the effort worthwhile, was that the judging is very formal and you get a detailed score card.  I was thrilled that I got high marks for things I could control - like cleanliness.  I also got a perfect score in flavor.  Moisture and crystal content are what dragged my scores down, and there's little I can do to affect those categories, at least at my current level of knowledge.



After that inaugural experience, I was all ginned up about the prospect of a competition that was to take place in Holtsville, L.I. on October 16, as part of the Long Island Beekeepers' annual meeting.  Based on the SRO crowd at the LIBC-sponsored lecture I'd attended (see post #14) I was expecting a heavy turnout.  And when I saw the entry form and the number of classes, I was overwhelmed.  I decided to enter as many classes as I could, and worked for days to get my entries ready. Besides the 2 colors of honey, I entered the Soft Cookie class, the Candy class, and the Gadget class.  Here's an edited version of the LIBC entry details:  

Extracted Honey

Class ONE: One jar of water white honey

Class TWO: One jar of light honey

Class THREE: One jar of light amber honey   

Class FOUR: One jar of amber honey

Class FIVE: One jar of dark honey

Comb Honey

Class SIX: One section box of comb honey 

Class SEVEN: One package of cut comb 4" square honey

Class EIGHT: One circular section of comb honey

Class NINE: One shallow super frame of comb honey

Class TEN: One shallow super frame of extracting honey

Class ELEVEN: One full depth super frame of extracting honey

Creamed Honey 

Class Twelve: 16 oz. clear container of creamed honey

Chunk Honey 

Class THIRTEEN: 16 oz. clear container of chunk honey

Novelty Packaged Honey 

Class FOURTEEN: One honey-filled container

Beeswax

Class FIFTEEN: Single piece, pure beeswax, weight 2 Ibs.

Class SIXTEEN: Candles, dipped, one pair, pure beeswax 

Class SEVENTEEN: Candles, molded, one pair pure  beeswax 

Class EIGHTEEN: Candles, fancy, one pair pure beeswax  

Class NINETEEN: Novelty beeswax, with additives permitted

Mead

Class TWENTY: Mead, DRY   

Class TWENTY-ONE: Mead, Sweet 

Class TWENTY-TWO: Mead, made with fruit juices 

Class TWENTY-THREE: Mead), sparkling, made without fruit juice

Honey Cookery And Gadget Classes:

Class ONE: Cookies, crisp, one dozen      

Class TWO: Cookies, soft, one dozen 

ClassTHREE: Bars or Brownies, one cake    

Class FOUR A: Cake, unfrosted, one cake

Class FOUR B: Cake, frosted, one cake    

Class FIVE: Yeast bread, one loaf

Class SiX: Yeast bread, fancy, one loaf    

Class SEVEN: Yeast rolls, one dozen

Class EIGHT: Quick bread, (Fruit or nuts optional), one loaf

Class NINE: Muffins, (Fruits or nuts optional), one dozen

Class TEN: Candy, 1/2 ib or 12 pieces 

Class ELEVEN: Pie, one pie (rules apply to filling)

Class TWELVE Granola, two cups or more

Class THIRTEEN: products baked with 100% honey used for sweetener 

Class FOURTEEN: Honey spreads, 1 jar 

Class FIFTEEN: Salads, one container of salad 

Class SIXTEEN: Sauce, 1 jar       

Class SEVENTEEN: Miscellaneous cookery 

ClassEIGHTEEN: Arts and Crafts (Honey labels have been included in this class).

Class NINETEEN; Gadgets 

The Sunday morning of the show I loaded up the car with my precious cargo, plus my 3 dogs (an even more 'precious cargo').  Mapquest had indicated that it would take me about an hour and a half to get to the event.  I decided to give myself 2 hours.  The first indication that the trip would not go smoothly was the virtual parking lot that was Sunday-westbound-Hamptons traffic.   Uggh.  I'd lost over 1/2 an hour by the time I hit the Long Island Expressway.  And Tiki, my 9-month-old puppy was horribly carsick, so I was pulling over to clean her - and her crate - with alarming regularity.  Thankfully, she was heartbreakingly brave about the whole thing.  Her little tail never stopped wagging, as if to say that nausea was a price she was willing to pay for an adventure.  

Alas, the challenges of the trip didn't end with traffic and dog vomit.  For some reason I thought that the show was at a lovely site I'd visited (and described in post #12) near St. James.  I'd pictured a glorious day out among rolling hills, the dogs frolicking in the fields on what was going to be a warm and lovely afternoon.  Only when I drove up to the gates, they were locked.  Panic welled up in my throat as I realized immediately that I was in the wrong place.  And I was already late.  And when I sorted out where I was actually meant to be, I noted that it would take me another half an hour to get there.  To add insult to injury, it was back in the direction from whence I'd come.  My underarms were clammy; my mouth was dry.  Off I went in search of the show.

I finally found where the competition was actually supposed to be, at the Holtsville Ecology Center, a sort of childrens' zoo-cum-park.  "No Dogs Allowed" on big signs all over the place.  Poor Tiki, I thought fleetingly.  And by now I was so late I thought I must have missed the competition.  I ran from entrance to entrance, door to door, gate to gate.  It was Sunday.  Free admission.  No employees to be found anywhere, and no sign of anyone who looked remotely like he was a beekeeper.  

Eventually I found a couple of security guards and they told me to drive down a no-access road, which they indicated by pointing, turn right at the end, and I'd find my group.  Which I did.  Drive down the road, that is.  There was no group anywhere, except a large group of Canada geese.  And the road was wending around and I didn't see any other cars.  Just me and tons of joggers, strollers, families.  And me.  On, what it turns out, was an asphalt jogging trail.  I drove for at least a mile or more, creeping along so as not to up-end any pedestrians.  And they did look at me kind of quizzically, but surprisingly, I thought, without signs of outrage.  I responded by giving my best imitation of a royal wave, and mouthing official business through the windshield.  Yeah, 'official business' in my Honda Element with the salt-crusted windows and the California license plates.  

And then it got worse.  I reached the end of the trail.  I had assumed - and hoped - that the trail would be a loop and that would take me back to where I'd started, near the Canada geese.  No such luck.  I had to turn around and retrace my route back through the now not-at-all-amused fresh air fiends;  by now, they'd had time to reflect on my unorthodox use of their trail system.  Fists were clenched and raised, middle fingers were brandished.  I was sure that there was going to be a squad car waiting for me when I found my way back to Point A.  By the time I did make it back, the security guards were gone.  Thank God, perhaps.  


Daunted, but not quite ready to give up, I decided to explore another no-entry roadway.  This time the path landed me behind a grouping of big, ugly prefab steel buildings with metal siding that was peeling off in great curls and punctuated by metal doors that were rusted and corroded around the margins.  There were tractors and large dumpsters and dump trucks parked here and there.  I was looking around, just taking it all in, now pretty much resigned that my day was a total waste.  I was resisting thinking about all the hours I'd spent on preparing for the competition.  I could hear a horse whinny somewhere.  Through a distant chain link fence I could just make out a pair of emu in a wooden pen.  In a far corner was a greenhouse, and through its open door I thought I spied orchids.  Perhaps, under different circumstances, this was the kind of place I could enjoy exploring.  Just then, a woman appeared from out of the greenhouse.  I ran up to her and asked (by now with no expectation that I would ever find the Long Island Beekeepers) if she knew where a group was meeting.  She pointed at one of the ugly steel buildings.  I creaked open one of the rusted doors, and there they all were.  The LI Beekeepers, just finishing up their annual meeting.  And though the judging had begun, I was not too late to enter all my stuff.     

I took first place in every class except light amber honey, where I came 3rd out of 4 entries.  But before anyone gets too impressed, I was also the only entry in all the classes I won.  (Not to put too fine a point on it, I took a 3rd place in the only class where I encountered actual competition.)  And out of the almost 50 classes offered, there were no entries at all in about 35 of the classes.  Most classes that did get an entry had only one.  It was pretty demoralizing.  Clearly, this area of LIBC club activities is atrophying.  There was a bright spot, however:  my 'gadget' entry - the drill-driven garbage can honey extractor I invented - got the award for Best in Show.  It was awarded by my teacher, Ray Lackey, himself an inventor and holder of countless patents, so I considered it a high honor.

My winning garbage can extractor

#18. A Taste of Honey (and other things).

A follower of this blog emailed me the other day.  She was concerned that something had happened to the bees and that's why I hadn't been blogging.  I'm happy to report that the bees are doing fabulously well.  It's just that I've been swamped.  What with summer guests, gardening, and now harvesting and processing the fruits of my labor, well, I guess the blog just took a back seat.  Actually, I was so on top of things in June that I started a blog post that I never finished.  I'm going to post that June draft now, because it will set up the current scenario a bit:

Over the last month I have been trying to aggressively manage the hives, moving frames around so that I can eventually replace the cruddy, old, original deep nuke frames with nice, new, properly-sized medium Pierco frames.  The theory is this:  bees keep their colonies organized in a spherical cluster.  The nucleus of that cluster is where most of the egg-laying and brood-rearing takes place.  By gradually moving center frames out toward the edge of the brood box, the bees will convert that comb to honey and pollen storage receptacles instead of brood cells, once the existing brood hatches.  Empty of brood and, with luck, filled with honey, the over-sized old frames can be removed without compromising the population of the colony.  So far I've managed to remove all 5 of these deep frames from the Yellow Hive, and 3 from the Red Hive.

Some of the frames I removed contain uncapped (or 'unripe') - and some capped - honey.  One of these I placed atop the Yellow Hive, sitting inside the now-disused hive-top feeder box.  Theoretically, the bees will go up into the feeder, unload the frames of its sweet cargo and re-pack it down below, either in the brood boxes or in the honey super.

I couldn't help myself.  I brought out a metal spatula and plastic storage container from the kitchen.  I reached into the feeder box, held fast the frame and dug deep into the soft comb.  Honey oozed and flowed as I pushed the spatula through the wax.  I spooned the luscious, gooey ribbon into the plastic cup and stole away to the house to savor my loot.  Can I say that it was the most deliciously fragrant, palest, most delicate honey I'd ever tasted?  Yes, I can.  The aroma of something like lemon blossom lingered in my mouth long after I'd swallowed.

It's been a month since I captured the swarm from the yellow hive.  I wanted to give them some time to settle, so I waited two agonizing weeks before I did an inspection.  But Ray, my bee teacher, had instructed me to get a second story on the single brood box as soon as possible.  

I didn't know what to expect in this new hive.  Either my original Yellow Queen was in there, or there was a newly-hatched queen who would have had to go on a successful mating flight before she started laying.  What I found surprised and delighted me.  The queen practically introduced herself to me when I pulled out one of the center frames.  She was dancing and wiggling around in the middle of the frame. It was a new queen.  She was born here.  That means that this is a 100% Montauk colony of bees.  And the most thrilling discovery was that the queen was laying.  She had flown off into the 'drone zone' and had found her way back and was busy depositing countless tiny, rice-shaped eggs in the bottom of the cells.  I also found larva, but no capped brood yet, so she'd been laying for about a week.  

The fact that this was not the original queen from the yellow hive, but a newborn queen, would seem to indicate that I had missed the primary swarm from the yellow hive.  Most likely, the old queen had gone off with a large contingent, and this was a secondary swarm.  I don't know where they are, but I wish them well.  The new queen's small band of daughters who had accompanied her from the yellow hive were feverishly drawing comb and tending to their tiny larval charges.  I was worried that there were simply not enough of them to get the job done.  It would be about 2 weeks before new bees hatched and were able to help with the household chores.  I added another box with new frames, put some more broken, nectar-filled comb into the feeder and went away, fingers crossed.  

So far, it looks like I needn't have worried.  Last week I added another frame of honey, from the super above the red hive, just to help them out with a house-warming gift of stored food.  I didn't see the queen on this most recent inspection.  She may have been in the lower level of the hive, which I didn't check.  I did see plenty of eggs, larva, and capped brood this time, and so it looks like the swarm hive - Team Purple - is settling in nicely.  Now that I have a viable third hive, I will be ordering proper hive parts - a cover, a couple of more supers with frames, a bottom board with a varroa screen.  

Below are some of my favorite late-spring things: 

New garlic

The last of the robin chicks about to fledge from my front porch

over-wintered giant leeks (about 30 inches worth)

Well, that was then, and this is now.  And it's hard for me to know where to begin.  I ordered the parts and organized Team Purple into a proper hive.  It's been about a month since then, and they seem to be doing fine.  I stole some partially-drawn frames, and some nectar-filled frames, from the hard-working red hive, and added them to the purple hive in order to give them a running start on building their colony.  I didn't add a honey super, thinking they wouldn't have the time or 'girl power' this year to make excess stores; I wanted them to concentrate on filling out all the frames in the 3-box hive.  Now, I have to say, I'm actually thinking of putting a super on, even though it's late in the season.  That's how well they seem to be doing.

The taste of honey I had in mid June was just the beginning.  A month later, I started to extract honey, mostly from the red hive.  I also extracted some honey from the discarded large nuc frames that I took out of the red and yellow hives.  These are now all gone, replaced with new black Pierco frames, with the exception of one that remains in the red hive.  I will be removing that soon, and replacing it with two drawn frames from which the honey has been extracted.

Some of the honey I harvested by hand - mushing and mashing the wax to break it up, then pushing against a sieve, and finally straining through a coffee filter cone lined with a new nylon stocking.  Messy.  Then I was invited to join a newly-formed group of bee enthusiasts in Sag Harbor.  We met at a lovely woman's home, named - wait for it - Bea!  Bea had a new extractor that she allowed us to use.  I extracted 4 more frames.  So far, I have harvested 22 lbs. of honey!!  It is the palest of pale gold and wonderful.

I would have been quite happy with 22 lbs. of honey, but it doesn't end there.  Team Yellow looks like it will be filling its honey super, and team red just keeps going and going.  There are 2 supers on and I took a peek a few days ago and I think they may both be almost ready to harvest.  If that's the case, I could have as much as 60 more lbs. of honey.  Frankly, it is unfathomable how much of the sweet stuff they're producing.

We just experienced Hurricane Irene yesterday.  Today is clear, calm, dry and sunny.  Yesterday and Saturday were another thing altogether.  And, of course, the bees were my biggest concern.  They are on high ground, so flooding was not a concern, but the wind was.  I bungied them to the hive stands and put cinder blocks on the covers and on the hive stands as well.  They survived, and are out and about today, doing their thing, appearing no worse for the wear.  

It now feels as though the hives have been here forever.  Was it really just a couple of months ago that I doubted that they would thrive?  Soon it will be time to prep for winter, and that will offer another reason to fret.  Still, I just can't imagine life without bees any more.

  

#17. Swarm warning

Wednesday was bee class in Riverhead.  The topic of the evening's lecture was requeening, that is:  why, when, and how to replace the existing queen with a new model.

In feral colonies and unmanaged hives, the worker bees take matters into their own 'hands'.  When they determine that a queen is failing, they will raise a new queen and kill the reigning monarch, as in "The queen is dead - long live the Queen!"  Queens emit pheromones, and these airborne organic compounds are what give the queen her mojo and knit the hive together.  14 distinct pheromones have been identified in queens.  When, due to age or infirmity, the queen's capacity to produce these pheromones in sufficiently potent quantities wanes, the word spreads through the colony instantly, and the workers start to raise a replacement for her.  They modify a wax worker cell to accommodate a queen's larger frame and they modify the diet of the newly-hatched larva within to 100% royal jelly, and - voila! - about 2 weeks later a new queen emerges.  Just beforehand, the workers will kill their mother and dump the body - or body parts if they've dismembered her - outside the hive.

Of course, the newly-emerged queen is a virgin and must be mated before she is a viable matriarch.  She mates on the wing - often far from the hive - and, (and it's a big "and") has to make it back to the hive without getting lost, and in one piece, avoiding birds, wasps and other death traps along the way.  Apparently only about 10% of queens don't make it back, which I think is pretty good, given the risks.  And if she doesn't make it back, the colony is doomed; there is no queen to produce any more workers.  In theory, if a beekeeper is on top of things, she can spot a queenless hive and buy a queen, if she can find one and introduce it to the hive without getting her killed.  All I can say is that if a queen gets lost in any of my hives, they're probably out of luck.

In my blog post #9 I explain the queen's mating rituals and I also promised to make corrections if I found I'd misstated something.  Well, I need to fine-tune details about the mating flights.  I understood that the queen needed to return to the hive after every mating, to be groomed by house bees in preparation for her next encounter with an airborne drone.  Not so.  On each mating flight (there can be several) she will mate multiple times, each subsequent successful suitor grabbing her, mid-air, and yanking out his predecessor's trailing entrails before thrusting his own 'member' in her 'sting chamber' and thus disemboweling himself.  By the way, there was a lot of chatter regarding post #9 and  my use of the term 'bee vagina'.  Well, as it turns out, that is what it's called.  In a jaw-droppingly fascinating passage about historical attempts to artificially inseminate queens (as in creating an artificial to-scale steel bee penis!) in Hannah Nordhaus's excellent book The Beekeeper's Lament, there it is, on page 189, a reference to a bee vagina.  So there.  (By the way, read the book and you will probably never buy imported honey again.  You may also have second thoughts about eating almonds...) 


It is not just in times of crisis that bees will raise new queens, however.  When times are good and the colony experiences an explosion in their numbers, they take the opportunity to go forth and multiply by swarming.  The sitting monarch will sally forth with a contingent of several thousand loyal daughters.  They will leave the hive, often around the middle of the day.  The air fills with a massive cloud of bees and, almost cartoon-like, they follow their queen onto a nearby branch, split-rail fence, or some other temporary hitching post, until scout bees locate permanent new digs, usually a mile or more away, preferably in a hollow tree - less preferably under someone's porch.


When my beekeeping class began in February we were told that first-year hives generally don't swarm; they're too busy building up a nascent colony to think about expansion plans.  And, of course, our queens were young when they arrived and so not likely to be replaced by the colony.  So it was with some surprise that I learned from my bee buddy Mike that his bees swarmed early in May.  Multiple 'secondary' swarms from the same hive followed, which is common, as it turns out.  Mike managed to capture 2 of the swarms, so he has now gone from 1 hive to 3 - all in year 1!  (If this happens every year...well, just do the math.  He would have over 200 hives in 5 years,  almost 650 hives in 6 years.  Yikes.  Did I do that right?  Jorg, help me out here, please!)  And it turns out that there were classmates other than Mike whose bees swarmed within the last month.  So a lot of Wednesday night's class was devoted to swarms:  understanding them and managing them, which dovetailed nicely into the subject of queen replacement, which is part of swarm management.

Well, as it happens, yesterday afternoon, around 2 pm, my ward and protege, Jaime, made a trip to the town dump.  Even though it's one of my favorite excursions, I decided to stay home and continue gardening.  If I had gone with Jaime, I would have missed all the action, because by the time Jaime returned, the mass exodus from the yellow hive was over.  I don't think I would have noticed the tight bundle of bees, hanging, like a fuzzy football, hidden among the boughs of a red cedar:  the only residual clue that my bees had swarmed.

The first thing you notice during a swarm event is the unmistakable din - the hum of thousands of bees, levitating, filling the air above the hive.  And I'll admit it:  it crossed my mind to ignore the entire episode - heck, if I'd gone to the dumps with Jaime...

I couldn't believe it!!  We'd had a lecture about swarming Wednesday night, and not 24 hours later I had a swarm!  What are the odds?  Of course, being the micro-managing control freak that I am, ignoring the swarm wasn't really an option, was it?  So I started scrambling around to jerry-rig a Hive #3, what will become Team Purple, if they survive the transition from swarm to managed colony without dying or absconding.

I had an extra medium super I could use as a mini brood box.  And I had plenty of new frames.  I quickly made a bottom board out of a piece of scrap plywood.  Glued and nailed thin cedar battens around 3 sides - the forth side would provide the hive with an entrance.  To mitigate the lack of depth in a single medium box, I added a 'slatted bottom board' between the plywood bottom board and the hive body, which should give the bees some extra wiggle room.  I initially placed just 2 frames, one on either side of the brood box.  Then I bungeed the whole affair together so that I could move it around as a unit.

I had read that it is best to move a swarm in the evening.  So around 7 pm, when the bees were tightly balled and content - "drunk with love", as Mike says - I sprayed them down pretty thoroughly with sugar water.  I think they liked it, and they're less likely to fly around when they're coated in syrup.  Then I placed and steadied my grandfather's old wooden ladder (oh! how I wished he were alive to witness this!) right under the swarm.  When I put the hive box on top of the ladder, it was just a few inches from the bottom of the swarm.  With my left hand I grasped the pliant cedar bough just above the swarm and pulled gently, lowering the ball of bees into the box.  I clutched a big stick in my right hand and, holding my breath, gave the cedar branch a couple of good whacks, until every bee had dropped from the branch into the bottom of the box.  I covered the hive, still perched on top of the ladder, with a piece of loose plywood, and retreated.

When I checked back 15 minutes later, I witnessed a behavior that Ray Lackey had described in class on Wednesday.  On the lip of the box, around the wide crack created by the warped plywood cover, an orderly conga line of bees had assumed the position - faces to the floor, butts in the air, wings beating madly.  They were fanning their queen's pheromones out into the atmosphere, calling all their sister bees who might have been detoured or waylaid during the swarming melee.

Shortly before dark I clasped the new hive box in gloved hands and carefully - oh, so carefully - picked my way through the rocks and weed piles about 20 yards to a quickly-improvised hive stand.  Once I placed the hive, I lifted the plywood lid.  All the bees were covering one of the wide inner sides of the box and the adjacent frame.  I removed the bungees and carefully slid in 6 more frames - one with partially-drawn comb 'borrowed' from the red hive's honey super.  I placed a disused feeder box on top of the hive box.  In it I laid a deep frame - one of the original nuc frames from the yellow hive, which was partially filled with uncapped honey.   I hope they like it.  Then I slapped a piece of plywood atop the makeshift hive, weighed the rickety cover down with rocks, and said good night.

It was a miserable, rainy, cool morning today when Jaime checked Team Purple.  The bees are still there.  Glad I gave them some food as they won't be foraging in this weather.

So why did Team Yellow swarm?  It's possible that, early on, I was overly concerned with their seeming lack of oomph (compared to Team Red), and that when I switched the positions of the red and yellow hives on the hive stand, thereby artificially increasing the number of bees in the yellow hive, I created a swarm condition.  I don't know.  And who wears the crown in the purple hive?  If I find a blue dot on that queen I will know that she's my original, marked queen from Team Yellow.  If so, I now have a virgin queen in the yellow hive, with all the uncertainty that situation implies.  If it's an unmarked queen in the purple hive, maybe I missed the primary swarm and this is an after-swarm.  And will there now be more swarms to come?

Stay tuned...

#16. What the bees are eating

Turnip flowers, over-wintered leeks, azaleas, Daphne's butt (right background)

It is hard to believe, even harder to convey, the thrill of watching bees from my backyard hives visiting flowers in my own backyard.  And I thought I might be alone with my obsessive bee-watching, but then I saw a post on our bee class message board the other day from one of my classmates.  She was voicing her frustration about not seeing bees on the flowers in her own yard.  Where were they going, she wondered?  They were not on her dandelions, cherry blossoms, or blueberries.  They were flying, and coming back to the hive with pollen, but she never saw them foraging.  

Until a couple of days ago, I had the same experience.  I finally did track some bees to my neighbor's giant, native cherry tree.  And I counted 3 bees on my espaliered pear and that was very exciting.  But still, that was 3 bees.  Then the bees found my flowering turnips.  I had planted turnips last spring.  I quite like turnips, especially baby turnips.  But these turnips were just gross.  Gnarly, thick-skinned, cracked, fibrous and tough.  I didn't get rid of them because I liked the turnip greens they provided.  I left them in the ground over the winter - partly out of laziness, and partly out of my 'vegetable over-wintering experiment' (more about that in a future post).  And, indeed, the turnips started producing greens very early this spring.  And then they quickly bolted to seed.  The acid yellow flowers are very much like the oilseed rape that covers vast swaths of the English countryside where I lived many years ago.  The bees are having such a good time with the turnips that I will plant a patch behind the hives this year so that they can have a good supply next spring.      

Bee foraging in a turnip flower.  Look closely and you can see a yellow ball of pollen on her thigh.  
(Who knew it would be so hard to photograph a foraging b?  They move a lot, & my cellphone camera kind of sucks. )

Then there are the tree peonies.  I have always love my tree peonies.  So much so, in fact, that I have dragged the poor things with me every time I've moved house.  They started their life in Palo Alto, CA in 1998.  When I sold that house in 2000 the peonies were just settling in, but I couldn't bear to leave them behind.  So they went with me to my next home in Menlo Park, CA, and then to Atherton, CA.  Eventually, when the time was right for me to make Montauk my permanent home, they made their way across the country with me in the back of a pick-up.  That spring, the peonies started blooming during the road trip, and every evening I'd climb in the back of the truck, cut a flower and bring it into whatever roadside hostelry I'd selected for the night.  Their heady perfume and huge crepe-paper petals - the flowers measure 11 inches across! - added an absurdly festive air to the dingy motel rooms I became so accustomed to.

But never have I loved this plant so much as I do today.  Multiple flowers unfurled late this morning, their sweet scent inviting the bees into the yellow mop of pollen-covered stamens.  The bees cannot contain themselves; they're rolling around, and diving in, and seemingly enjoying some sort of drunken euphoria.  They've probably never encountered so much pollen in one place before.  

I'm so happy that I didn't leave this magical plant behind.  It was meant to settle here, at The End, making the bees and me deliriously happy.  

Bees frolicking wildly in the abundant pollen

I had bee class last night in Riverhead.  Even though it was drizzly, we still met in the bee yard an hour before class and Ray worked about 4 of the hives.  Despite the bad weather, the bees were pretty cooperative.

I had not been feeling too good about my bees.  Even though they appear active and happy, they just don't seem as if they are growing their numbers quickly enough to cope with the nectar flow and honey production that begins next month.  When I checked my hives before heading to class, I was disappointed that not much progress had been made in expanding their nest area into the frames I'd provided.  In each hive, the activity is largely confined to the frames that arrived with the original nukes.  Of course there is a lot of free comb being built in the empty space underneath those frames, so maybe they have doubled the comb in the month they've been here.  It is hard for me to know if they should be drawing and filling comb faster than they are.  The queens, of course, are the real unknown quantity.  Have they been properly mated?  Are they laying enough?  I will have to go in and pull all the individual frames and try to assess the brood patterns.  Up until quite recently, I didn't know if I was looking at capped brood or capped honey.  As I said in one of my early posts, the learning curve is steep.  After last night's class, though, I think I have a better idea of what I should be looking for and I also have a plan for manipulating the frames to encourage more comb-drawing, and maybe even more egg-laying from her highnesses.  We'll see if I can pull it off...  

  

#15. There's bee stings...and then there's BEE STINGS!

Well, I knew it had to happen sooner or later...

Last week I did my second hive inspection, and I started with the red hive.  As Ray Lackey had predicted, swapping the locations of the stronger (red) hive with the weaker (yellow) had resulted in red hive field bees relocating to the yellow hive.  And the yellow hive has really been buzzing since then.  So much so, that it is now even more active than the red hive used to be.

I wanted to start my inspection with the red hive to make sure that their forces weren't too weakened to recover their strength.  And besides, I had never seen the Red Queen, and I thought it would be a good idea to try to track her down.  When I opened up the hive I was a little disappointed, but not really surprised, that the bees hadn't started drawing comb in the top brood box I'd added the week before; they really need to fill this box with brood and food before they will begin to produce excess honey.  Of course, I added that box and then promptly tricked half the Team Red field bees into moving over to the yellow hive, so I guess they didn't have the manpower to develop the penthouse apartment.

So I pulled the whole top box off and concentrated on where the action was.  And there was A LOT of action.  The foraging activity may have dropped off, but the house bees' brood-rearing action was going strong.  They still hadn't done anything much with the frames I'd added, but the original deep frames that came with the nuke were teeming.

The 3 frames on the left are the ones I added to the original nuc frames.  The next 4 frames are packed.

When I started pulling frames, I saw where all the energy was being directed.  The bees were building 'free comb' in the space created between the bottom of the deep frames and the bottom of the hive.  Eventually, theses frames will be replaced with frames that fill the area more efficiently, but until then, hive examinations create a real mess, because you break off pieces of comb when you lift out the frames.  It was very distressing - to me and the bees - to see a huge chunk of wax comb, now with brood exposed and vulnerable, fall to the bottom of the hive as I lifted one of the center frames.

Broken comb attached to the bottom of one of the 'deep' frames

I was so intent on finding the Red Queen that I didn't notice just how angry the bees were becoming.  Who could blame them?  I was breaking up their brood area and appeared to be a serious threat to their queen.  And I guess I was kind of cavalier since I was fully suited up.  What I didn't count on, though, was that bees can sting through standard gardening gloves.  This I hadn't anticipated.  So two of them got me on the top of my index finger.  I quickly put everything back together and moved out of the area before I removed my glove and scratched out the stingers.  Lesson learned - next time I go back to leather gloves.  Still, the stings didn't hurt very much, and I was thrilled that I had been able to locate the Red Queen.

  I've drawn a red square around the queen, upper half of the photo.  

Unfortunately, you can really only see her abdomen.

I let the bees calm down for awhile and then went to the yellow hive.  I decided not to pull frames, because I didn't want to break brood cells and destroy comb as I had in the red hive.  What I did do was pull off the cover and feeder and add another brood box.  I could see that the bees hadn't yet moved into the frames I'd added when I did the nuke transfer, but there was a lot of action, and the center frames looked packed.  Even though they didn't look like they need it yet, I'm glad I added the extra box because yesterday Ray emailed a warning to the class that we must stay one step ahead of the bees - one of his students' new hives has already swarmed; that is, most of the bees left with a queen to establish a new colony elsewhere because they felt overcrowded.

I really felt as though I'd dodged a bullet with my bee stings.  Until the next day, that is.  It took a full 24 hours, but my hand blew up like a balloon and took a good 4 days to get back to normal.  But, hey, I think I remember reading that bee stings are good for arthritis.  

Turns out I really did dodge a bullet.  The day after my bee sting incident, I was down the block visiting my friend Mikey, a retired NYC firefighter.  His friend John, another ex-firefighter was at the house too, and he was curious about my beekeeping exploits.  He told me he has a friend, Rob, in East Hampton who keeps bees, that he had lost his colony over the winter and had just replaced them.  The story sounded familiar, and I realized that I already had Rob's contact information - another mutual friend had told me what a great guy he is and that I should contact him.  I told this to John, and said that I hadn't yet connected with Rob.  So John says, 'Yeah, well I guess you heard about Rob's bee sting incident, right?'  I told him I didn't know what he was talking about, but when he told me the story, I ran right home and emailed Rob, and he confirmed the details.

Rob was doing a hive inspection.  He was wearing a veil, but it must not have been tied down properly, because a bee made her way inside the veil.  Before Rob could remove the veil to release her, the bee flew up into one of Rob's nostrils.  --  I'll just let that sit with you for a second or two  --  According to Rob himself, he panicked, and reflexively did the worst thing imaginable - - - he inhaled.  Through his nose.  He sucked her right into his sinus cavity before spitting her out his mouth.  The problem was that while she was in his sinus cavity, she stung him.  According to John, Rob's head blew up like a pumpkin.

But Rob still loves his bees.  This winter, when marauding deer careened through his bee yard, they took down the hive.  By the time Rob found it, on the ground and opened up, all the bees were gone.  So he's just got himself a new colony from a local Long Island breeder and is looking forward to another season of beekeeping.  I have to say, I'm not so sure I'd be so ready to get back in the saddle after something like that.

#14. HYGIENIC BEES deserve the Good Housekeeping seal of approval

All honey bees are good housekeepers.  But some are better than others.  Part of the job of the house bees is to maintain the brood area, cleaning out and repairing wax brood cells for reuse.  And bees remove their dead brothers and sisters from the nest.  But some bees go a lot further in ridding the colony of diseases and parasites.

I drove up island to Setauket last week to hear a talk, sponsored by the Long Island Beekeepers' Assn. (of which I am one of the newest members) by renowned entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak.  (Dr. Spivak is a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship - the "genius grant" that bestows half a million $ on each of its honorees.)  Through a program of selective queen breeding, Dr. Spivak has developed a strain of 'Hygienic' honey bees that can effectively identify and destroy diseased brood within the colony.  They can actually sense when something isn't right - even within a completely sealed cell; that is, one that has already had a wax cap applied and is pupating.  When they locate an unhealthy pupa, the bees chew through the cap and remove the infected youngster from the nest.  This behavior can help to interrupt the life cycle of the disease pathogen, thereby limiting its effects on the colony.

So imagine my horror and fascination as I watched while two bees wrestled a fully-formed, but still bright white, bee pupa out of the yellow hive and unceremoniously dumped it over the side of the hive stand onto the ground.  To understand the level of my concern, readers of this post need to know something about the life cycle of the dreaded 'varroa mite', one of the most debilitating bee pests, and one of the likely ingredients of 'Colony Collapse Disorder' a term that even most non-beekeepers are now familiar with.

Varroa mites feed on bees, and probably also introduce viruses into the colony, and the baby varroa mites feed exclusively on bee larvae, because their mouth parts are not developed enough to pierce the armor of an adult bee in order to feed.  Larval bees' exoskeletons are still soft and, therefore, especially vulnerable to predation.  If a varroa mite can make it into a cell where there is a bee larva, once that cell is capped with wax, she can lay her eggs and raise her brood in the closed environment meant to protect the pupating larva.  Enter the Hygienic Bees.  They can actually smell - right through the wax - whatever outgassing is happening as a result of the feeding mites.  They will tear through the wax cap and destroy the bee pupa, and the baby mites along with it.

I watched the pupa incident on Tuesday, 4/26.  That was the day after I went up-island to hear Dr. Spivak and learn about Hygienic Bees.  Did I witness hygienic behavior, and was that, in fact, a good thing?  The following day, Wednesday, was a week after I got my bees, and it was time for their first hive inspection.

So I suited up and started with the yellow hive, pictured below.  The photo shows what you see when you remove the hive cover and the feeder to expose the frames.  The three frames on the left are the ones I added when I hived the bees the week before.  The bees still hadn't touched them, i.e. they hadn't started making wax and drawing comb.  I didn't like that.  The fourth frame, with yellow wax comb visible, looked much as it did when I first transferred it from the nuc box to the hive, i.e. no brood or food stores.  I didn't like that either.  All the action was on the 4 old, crummy-looking frames on the right of the photo.  During my inspection I found another discarded bee pupa.  And it would seem that this does, in fact, indicate the presence of varroa mites.  Ray, our bee mentor, says that we have to live with varroa mites; that they are pretty much ubiquitous.  Our aim is to properly manage colonies so that they are strong enough to withstand the stresses of mites and other pests.

There was a bright spot during my hive inspection, though.  The big thrill was that I saw my beautiful queen.  She's a big, blonde bombshell with a dazzling sky blue paint dot on her thorax, placed there by her breeder so that she would be easier to spot.  It was such a thrill to see her, and I couldn't help but to pray a silent little prayer that all would be well with her and her yellow hive family.  

I worried even more about Team Yellow once I opened up the red hive.  The activity and number of bees in that hive was overwhelming compared to the yellow hive.  This colony had begun to use one of the frames I'd placed in their hive, drawing beautiful, new wax comb.  And on the other side of the hive, I saw what was obviously lots of newly capped honey.  The buttery yellow swath of honeycomb was a stark contrast to the largely dark, vacant cells of the yellow hive.  But all was not peachy at the red hive either.  Besides opening up the hives and checking through the frames,  I also slid out the white plastic trays that are set under the 'varroa screen' bases of both hives.  I couldn't see any mites (which are supposed to fall off some bees, through the screens, and onto the trays where they are visible to the naked eye) but that probably doesn't mean anything.  What I did see, on the tray from the red hive, was a beige wormy thing about 1/2 an inch long.  I didn't know what it was, but I knew it couldn't be good.

Yellow Hive - workers have built a 'queen cup' in the center of this frame, a possible sign of stress

I posted my concerns, along with photos, on our bee class message board.  Jorg, my classmate, immediately came back with an ID for the grub - the dreaded 'wax moth'.  Wax moths are opportunistic creatures that destroy weakened colonies by devouring wax, honey, even baby bees.  Uggh.  Worry, thy name is beekeeping.  And the next morning, shortly after dawn - because now I almost want to pitch a tent next to the hives and slay all comers - I found 2 adult wax moths skulking around on the outside of the hives.  Naturally I squooshed them, and was quite satisfied when I checked back a few hours later and found one of the dead moths being gobbled up, head first, by a large black and orange spider with beady eyes and iridescent beetle-black mandibles.

I mean honestly!  My first week as a beekeeper and I already have two different creepy crawlies to deal with? Wax moths and varroa mites?  No honeymoon (sorry) for me!  It seems as though I'm fated to dive in at the deep end and confront problems right from the git-go.  And it doesn't seem fair.  I mean, these problems cannot have arisen within one week, can they?  Did my poor nukes come to me with this attendant pestilence?  I am not happy.

Of course Ray had a BRILLIANT idea - which is why he is the Master Beekeeper and the rest of us are just dolts.  He suggested that I pull a switcheroo on the bees; that is, move the red hive to the position of the yellow hive, and vice versa.  This I did on Thursday and it didn't seem to trouble the bees at all.  The theory is fantastic:  bees, as we are all by now aware, have amazing homing skills; they know exactly how to get back to their hive once they leave it.  So if you put a different house where theirs was yesterday, all the foragers who are out flying around will go back to their home location - but now they will be entering a different house.  Frankly, I would have thought that the guard bees from the yellow hive would kill the red hive intruders, since bees take on the specific, unique scent of their hive and queen.  Didn't this seem like a foreign invasion to Team Yellow?  Apparently not.  I watched all afternoon as hoards of foragers from Team Red returned home - to the yellow hive!  Of course the idea behind this is that if you have a weak colony, and there is strength in numbers, then you may save that colony by adding more worker bees.

Of course, at the same time as I may be strengthening the yellow hive, I have also weakened the red hive.  Has it been weakened to a dangerous degree?  Will this all even out in time and result in two balanced and healthy hives, or did I just compromise Team Red in a potentially fruitless attempt to save my yellow hive?  I can say that now, three days later, the yellow hive is behaving more like the red hive used to - many more foragers, and more activity at the feeder.  It may just take a week or so for the red hive to catch up, once brood starts to hatch and the Team Red population explodes anew.

I will say that Ray Lackey, my teacher, is being very supportive.  He has said that if one of my hives doesn't look like it's going to make it, he will give me a locally bred and mated Hygienic queen this summer so that we can inject some new lifeblood into the colony.

Fingers crossed.  I'm going to open up the hives in another few days and we'll see what I find.

On a more upbeat note, and since the description of this blog indicates food production other than honey (as if I'm ever actually going to produce honey!), I picked my first Purple Passion asparagus this week.  I planted a few rows last year and they're coming up beautifully.  The taste is very sweet and they're crisp and tender.  The purple color - as with so many purple veggies, turns to green when cooked.  So it's more of a novelty - but for those who like raw asparagus (and I am one of those) - the color is spectacular!

   PURPLE PASSION ASPARAGUS