#13. I AM A BEEKEEPER!!

Mike, one of my classmates, picked up my two nukes along with his a week ago.  The next day, Wednesday, he brought my two nukes to the 4-H field in Riverhead where we had a field demo among the half dozen or so hives.  This field is across the street from the Cornell Extension buildings where we have our classes, and I think we will start out all of our monthly classes from now on, in this field, working these bees, led by our class leader Ray Lackey.

We transferred the boxes of bees from the back of Mike's pickup into the back of my Honda Element and covered them with a large overturned cardboard box.  Then we went to class, and all seemed quiet enough when I got back to the car after class that I went late-night grocery shopping in Riverhead before heading home.  Reached Montauk around midnight.  Getting the nuke boxes into the bee yard in the middle of the night was a little scary.  I aimed my car headlights in the direction of the distant hive stand, grabbed a box of bees and headed off down the muddy, rutted hill toward the back of my property.  The boxes, by the way, were much heavier than I'd expected.  Almost as heavy as a small cinder block.  Also, the boxes were warm.  You can feel the heat of the colony right through the wood.  And I was very aware that if I stumbled and dropped a box that it would be a disaster.  But I didn't.  I got both boxes onto the hive stand when I noticed that there were a few bees on the outside of the box, quietly hanging on.  Good thing I didn't grab them when I lifted the nuke boxes.  I pulled the foam plugs out of the entrance holes of the boxes and went to bed.

Next morning, Thursday, I went out to check the bees.  This was such a long-awaited moment - honey bees in my backyard!!  The red nuke (I have my two hives color-coded) had a number of bees flying.  Not much was going on with the yellow nuke.  I started wondering about doing the transfer of the nuke frames into the hives boxes.  Thursday was not a great day weather-wise, but the forecast for the rest of the week looked a lot worse, and I wanted to do the installation in the best possible weather, as we'd been advised that the bees get testy during inclement weather.  By afternoon, the red hive was going great guns, with a constant stream of bees going in and out.  Still only minor activity at the yellow hive.

Nuc boxes on either side of the hives, Wednesday, 4/20.

I should explain how I have my hives configured, because all the hive elements will come into play in this, or future, posts.  The red hive has a base, or 'hive bottom'.  Directly above this is a 'varroa screen' (more about this in future posts), which forms the landing pad for the bees (the red 'tongue' that is visible).  In a cavity between the hive bottom and the varroa screen, which cannot be seen here, is a white plastic tray that can be slid out from a slat at the back of the hive.  This tray collects debris, including some pests, that fall through the screen, and may help in monitoring the health of the hive.  The next two boxes, with the hand-holds, are the hive bodies - the boxes that contain the frames where the bees will actually be living and breeding.  Between the upper hive body and the metal-topped 'telescoping hive cover' is a styrofoam box feeder.  This is where the sugar syrup is stored and there's an interior access-way for the bees to climb into the devise and drink the syrup.  I should be able to remove this feeder once the bees are settled and there's plenty of flower nectar for them to forage.  Now note that the yellow hive is taller.  It contains all the elements of the red hive, plus one more - a 'pollen-collecting drawer' (indicated by the light-colored bar).  It's a complicated contraption - a series of wire mesh and wire mesh cones through which the bees pass, and which scrape off and collect some of their pollen load.  I thought it would be a cool thing to experiment with.  I'm now having second thoughts.

Now back to the hiving of the bees:  on that Thursday I waited until late afternoon, when the weather had cleared nicely, and decided to take a deep breath and go for it.  I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous and at least a bit scared.  I suited up, got my smoker going, and removed the cover and the feeder box from the red hive, exposing the inside of the two stacked medium hive bodies.  I had removed all but 3 frames in each box, because I thought there were 5 frames in each nuke box, and I'd be transferring all of theses into the hives (note that I have the 'lightweight' 8-frame, instead of 10-frame hive set-up).  I removed the duct tape that secured the top of the red nuke, pried open the top, and puffed a little smoked over the frames with my smoker.  Then I removed the top completely and gave a teensy bit more smoke.

(Note:  you're not allowed to laugh.)

Me getting ready to install the nucs.  Hive tool in hand, smoker next to me on hive stand.

The nuke box was teeming with bees.  They were calm, but packed solid.  Using my brand new metal hive tool for the first time, I started working the frames from left to right, easing free the first frame.  I picked it up and examined it.  One side, the one facing the inside of the box, had a lot of drawn comb, i.e. the bees had started making and shaping wax into comb.  There was not much on the outer - the opposite - side.  And though the comb was drawn, there was not a lot inside the cells.  Maybe some pollen.  I didn't look for too long, because I wanted to get the operation over with.

Frame with drawn comb.

The next 3 frames was where all the action was.  As one of the photos below shows, they were pretty solidly covered with bees.  I never saw the queen, even though I looked.  But I didn't look too long, because I was nervous.  The final frame, like the first, didn't have a lot going on.

But I did it!  I had transferred the bees.  Now the only thing to do was to place the feeder box on top of the hive body and fill it with the sugar solution I'd prepared in a 5-gallon bucket (1 part sugar, 1 part water, by weight).  I put the metal-roofed cover on and I was done.  Or I thought I was done.  I didn't count on there being a huge knot of bees left in the bottom of the nuke box.  So I placed the box on the ground leaning it against a leg of the hive stand.  ( A few hours later, not a bee remained; they had all found there way into their new home.)

I repeated this process with the yellow nuke, but what a different experience.  There was almost nothing going on at the outer frames - one of them had barely been touched.  As I mentioned, I had set this hive up differently, with a pollen collector, and I wondered if this might stress out the bees, which were clearly not as strong as the red hive.  But I put everything together just the way I had planned it.  The last thing I did was to install a metal gismo called a 'mouse guard'.  This adjustable metal plate keeps large stuff, like mice, out of the hive by reducing the size of the hive entrance.  It also reduces drafts so it can be helpful to the bees during cold weather.  And it has been an unusually cold Spring.

Completed hives with metal 'mouse guards' in place.

The next day it was all I could do to keep away from the hives.  A gloomy morning turned warm and sunny and there was a veritable cloud of bees around the red hive.  I was concerned about the yellow hive - slow, steady line of bees going in and out, but nothing like the red hive.  Also, I lifted the back of the covers to peek into the feeder boxes.  The red hive was lapping up the syrup; lots of bees were at the trough.  Not one bee feeding in the yellow hive.  By late afternoon things had changed.  The red hive had slowed down and the yellow hive appeared to be flying more.  I felt better.  Eventually, like within a couple of days, the yellow hive was using the syrup, but still nothing like the red hive.

I have to say, Mike had told me that he lost a whole day's work because he couldn't tear himself away from his bees the first day he got them.  I'm having the same experience, and I'm sure most of our class is equally obsessed.  I find myself making excuses to go out to the bee yard at least once every couple of hours.  Thankfully I positioned the hives so that I can even watch them from the comfort of my leather recliner in the living room.  I just can't seem to get enough of bee-watching!  I'm worried about the yellow hive.  But I'm hoping that it's just because the red hive colony is larger, and that Team Yellow will catch up eventually.

#12. The wait is almost over

There is a magical feeling about all this.  Perhaps it's as close as I will ever get to re-living those highly-charged days just before all the Christmases of my childhood.  The delicious anguish of waiting for Santa Claus is something akin to what I'm going through no, counting down the days and hours until honey bees inhabit my garden.

And I know I'm not alone.  I just got off the phone with Mike, one of my classmates, and it was so cool to hear the undisguised, boyish excitement he expressed at the prospect of installing his bees in his hive - finally - this week.  I had thought of beekeeping as a largely solitary pursuit, but it now appears that there will be a community of like-minded folk who will be eager to share experiences and help one another along.  Case in point - Len.  I met Len last weekend at a bee demonstration and class up island near St. James.  What a gorgeous site in a large nature preserve, with a beautiful, rustic building where the class was held.  Anyway, we were there to watch Ray install 'package bees' into hives in the bee yard.  These are new colonies this year, and so we helped set up the hives before Ray did the installation.  We were all 'suited up' and there were bees all over us.  (P.S.  No one got stung.)  At the end of the class, Len invited anyone who was interested to follow him back to his nearby home and watch him divide his colony.  He started with one hive last year, but had just picked up a second queen from Ray and was splitting the colony into two hives.  (The dark Yugoslavian queen came from one of the best bee breeders in the country, apparently.  The queens that came with the packages Ray installed were blonde Italians.)  Several of us went along and it was a pretty exciting experience.  Len has been lucky enough to have been mentored by a prominent beekeeper, and wants to pass along his experiences to the rest of us.

Mike, the classmate I mentioned earlier, is picking up my nukes for me tomorrow night from Ray's house in Bohemia.  (This is the third time the pick-up date has been scheduled; twice the bees were delayed and now they're earlier than expected!)  Mike will relay the nukes to me Wed. night after class in Riverhead.  I don't know Mike, except by name and over the phone, but he knows I'm all the way out here on The End, and offered to do this just to help out a fellow novice beekeeper.  I have to say that everyone I've met so far through this bee network has been super nice.  Hey, maybe all beekeepers are great people.

I've been busy as a you-know-what the last week getting my hives set up.  The weather has been a challenge - lots of rain - so my painting kept getting delayed.  But the rain made the ground nice to work, so I did a lot of digging and weeding in the bee yard.  Then I put down landscape fabric and covered it with wood chips.  I constructed a low (12" high) table out of pressure-treated scrap wood that I had laying around.  This hive stand is big enough to accommodate two hives with some extra space for resting frames and equipment when I go in to open up the hives.  The most exciting thing, though, is the color I've painted the hives and the table.  I'm calling it 'midnight blueberry'.  Oil-based solid stain, because I think that'll hold up better.  I'm in love with the color.  It's yummy.

I think the bees will have plenty to do by this weekend.  There are a lot of native highbush blueberries on my property and the flower buds are about to burst.  The lovely scarlet catkins on the big swamp maple will be unfurling in a week or less.  The forsythias throughout the neighborhood have exploded, and there are plenty of dandelions around.  The daffodils and violets are not yet at their peak.  The buds are abundant and fat on my espaliered pear.  But I understand that honey bees are not very fond of pear blossoms.  Pity.    

#11. You are what you eat - nurture trumps nature in a bee's world

Back to the saga of our queen and her subjects (see post #9).

After her final mating flight, the queen settles back into the hive to begin her life's mission - laying eggs and defending her throne against would-be usurpers.

The mated queen now carries a life-time supply of sperm in her abdomen, in an organ called the 'spermatheca'.  Because she has mated with a number of drones, the sperm will be genetically diverse.  Each time Her Highness lays an egg , it is first individually fertilized as it passes through the spermatheca.  Then the queen lowers her abdomen into the bottom of a high-sided, wax hexagonal cell, deposits a single egg, and moves on to the next cell to repeat the process.  She will go on to lay up to 2000 (or even more) every day for the rest of her life.  If the average queen lives 2 years (they can live up to 5, apparently), she may lay well over 1,500,000 eggs.

(Here's a fact that I have a hard time getting my head around:  besides laying fertilized eggs, which usually mature into workers, and very rarely into another queen (more on that later), the queen may choose to lay unfertilized eggs which are also viable.  These unfertilized eggs, which bypass the spermatheca, mature into drones, who are the only male bees in the colony.  So every male bee has a mother but no father.  Astounding.  In fact, if you notice an unusually large number of drones in a colony, it is a sign that the queen is at the end of her breeding life; laying a large number of unfertilized eggs probably means that the queen's spermatheca, her personal sperm bank, is running out of juice.)
  
A bee egg looks like a small white comma at the bottom of the cell and can be seen with the naked eye.  (We will be looking for these, along with other stages of brood, like larvae and capped brood, which is the last stage before the emergence as adult bees, each time we open our hives to examine them.  Seeing an abundance of bees in all stages of development will indicate that the colony is thriving.)  3 days after being laid, the eggs hatch.  Well, not 'hatch', exactly - the 'eggshell', actually a membrane, dissolves to reveal a tiny larval bee grub.  It is at this stage that the nurse bees really get busy.

The nurses start feeding the larvae with royal jelly, the amazing nutritionally-dense elixir that is exuded from the glands on their heads.  The bees fill the larval cells with the concoction and the tiny grubs actually float around in it.  After the third day, the diet is changed to less-rich nutrients.  The bees raised in this manner mature into worker bees if the eggs that produced them were fertilized, or drones, if the eggs were not.

And here's where it gets amazing - the worker bees may choose to continue to feed only royal jelly to one or more larvae, instead of switching to a less-rich diet.  And a bee grub that is fed only royal jelly will develop into a queen; the egg of a queen and the egg of a worker bee are identical in every respect.  The sole factor determining who becomes a worker and who becomes a queen is baby food; depriving larval bees of royal jelly stops their reproductive organs from fully developing.  So the worker bees, while genetically female, lack the full complement of hormones and pheromones that ultimately enable the queen to mate and produce fertilized eggs.  Additionally, a queen bee grows to be about 50% bigger than a worker, but matures much faster - 16 days from egg to queen, as opposed to 21 days from egg to worker, and, as has already been mentioned, lives many, many times longer than her sister worker.  And the queen can sting with impunity - she does not die after stinging, as the workers do.  In fact, should her workers form a coup to unseat her by raising new queens, the reigning monarch will try to sting to death any newly-emerging queens in order to protect her throne.  (The Borgias have nothing on these bugs!)  All these differences due to diet alone.

Meanwhile, back at the apiary-in-training...MY HIVES HAVE ARRIVED!  Five big boxes delivered by UPS a couple of days ago.  I put the boxes in the garage, and the next morning when I went in to unpack them, I was greeted by such a warm, sweet scent of honeyed beeswax wafting from the packages.  What a luscious aroma.  I will start assembling today, and maybe do some painting.

And the arrival of our bees has been delayed due to bad weather in the south.  (The bees are coming from a breeder in Georgia, and his bee yards are flooded.)  We were to have had a demonstration of installing bees into the hive yesterday, and were to have picked up our bees next week.  But, no bees:  no demo, no pick-up.  The demo is now scheduled for next Saturday, with the nuke pick-up on the following Friday or Saturday.  Great.  Easter weekend.  And I have a houseful of guests.  Oh, well, more people around to witness my first sting, I guess.

#10. Feeding the bees(t)

I know everyone is sitting on the edges of their seats, waiting to hear what happens next to our mated queen.  So consider this post a slight detour - an intermission, if you will.  I think a crash course in bee nutrition will help to set up what happens next in our hypothetical hive.

There are four types of honey bee food:

1. Nectar - Field bees, the foragers, drink the dewy nectar that collects on the 'nectaries' of flowers, usually located at the base of the petals, and head back to the hive, where some of it is converted to honey.  This process starts in the field bee's 'honey stomach'.

2. Honey - Some of the partly-converted nectar is regurgitated and transferred from the field bee to the tongue of one of the house bees, and thusly transferred to another, and so on, until it is deposited into cells where its conversion to honey is completed by the process of evaporation.  The bees accelerate evaporation by beating their wings to increase air flow.  Once the honey is fully 'ripened', the bees cap the honey cells with wax, where it can store indefinitely, to be uncapped and eaten as needed.  Today's bee factoid:  according to Ray Lackey, it takes 10 pounds of nectar to make one pound of honey.

3. Pollen - In the process of visiting flowers, bees collect dusty, yellow pollen on their abundant body hairs, and pack it into the 'pollen baskets' on their thighs to carry back to the hive.  There the pollen is unloaded by the house bees, who mix it with saliva and honey.  This recipe causes the mixture to go through a fermentation process similar to yoghurt and results in a nutrient-rich and highly digestible food.  This 'bee pollen', or 'bee bread' is also stored in wax cells and is used by the nurse bees to feed developing bee brood.  Unlike unprocessed plant pollen, which is perishable, bee pollen, like honey, has an indefinite shelf life.

4. Royal Jelly - The fourth type of bee food, this 'bee milk' is secreted by nurse bees through glands located on the tops of their heads.  It is the first food of bee larvae.

Besides food, bees need access to water.  This never occurred to me.  I guess I never thought of bees drinking anything but nectar.  But apparently they need a lot of water.  They use it for a variety of things, including diluting honey to feed brood, and for cooling the hive during warm weather.  Bees drown easily and we've been counseled to provide escapes from pools, dog bowls, and the like.  Tiny little bee ladders, life rafts and preservers would be adorable, I think.  Safety first!

What many people don't know is that it is customary to feed bees if you are going to steal their honey.  Logically, if you took too much of the stuff that the bees stored to feed the colony, they'd starve.  What does a beekeeper feed bees?  A syrup made from sugar and water.  That's right, we take the good stuff and return the favor by giving them the bad stuff.  Of course, one could leave enough honey on the hives so that the bees would not need supplemental feeding, but that could mean little or no honey for the beekeeper.  (Besides feeding syrup, apparently there are times when feeding a bee pollen substitute is also called for.  It's not yet clear to me when this is recommended, but probably when some occurrence  results in a dearth of field bees, so that plant pollen is not being harvested in large enough quantities to support the colony.)

Another scenario where feeding bees is required is during times of stress, like when you're starting a new colony.  Supplemental feeding helps them by offering a reliable, immediate source of food that replaces the nectar that takes so much bee power to forage for.  This allows the bees to tend to the establishment of the colony more easily, and is one of our first management tasks as novice beekeepers.  As soon as I place my bees in the hive, I will have to feed them.

I have ordered 2 kinds of feeding devices.  One is called a frame feeder.  It is a receptacle that replaces one of the frames in the hive.  You fill it with syrup, and the bees dive in and lap it up.  The downside is that the bees can drown in the syrup.  To avoid this, interior walls of the feeder are scuffed up to give them a foothold.  The other feeder I've bought is called a hive-top feeder.  This is the same size and shape as a honey super and sits right on top of the brood box.  It holds a lot of syrup, and it's not clear to me how the bees access the syrup, but I'll find out when my equipment arrives.

Speaking of which, I was starting to get nervous.  The bees are supposed to arrive in 10 days and no sign of my hives.  So I called Betterbee just now and they were still waiting on a couple of back-ordered items, and since the missing things are totally optional, I pulled them from the order so they should now be shipping by tomorrow.  This means I should have my hives before the middle of next week.  It's cutting it close, but that should work out fine.  While I wait, I will finish leveling and clearing the bee yard and constructing my pressure-treated hive bench - a low table on which my hives will sit.

#9. It's time we had THE TALK - you know the one - about the birds & the bees.

The only people who I know for sure read this blog are my friends and family, most of whom know absolutely nothing about bees.  In order for us all to be on the same page, as it were, some information about the structure of bee society, their life cycle, and their sexual reproduction is warranted, I think.

It must be said that if my loved ones know nothing about bees, I know next to nothing.  But, because everything is relative, I look to them as if I command a vast wealth of bee knowledge.  Not true, I'm afraid.  So I'm hoping that I don't misrepresent the facts.  As I said in one of my earlier blogs, the learning curve is steep.  And if I misstate something, I will make corrections at a later time and point out the errors to readers in a future post.

First, there are three classes bees in every honey bee colony: the queen, of which there is only one at any given time (although I understand that there are exceptions to this rule); drones, which are male bees; and the workers, which are nominally female, but who cannot mate.

The queen has but one function - to lay eggs.  Drones also have only one function - to mate with a queen.  Workers, however, wear many hats during their 6-week lifetimes.  When workers first emerge from the 6-sided cell that has housed them from egg to adult, they act as nursemaids, feeding and caring the developing bees, making wax, and building comb.  New bees (I guess you could call them 'newbies', or, better still, 'newbees') cannot yet fly well, so they are most effective inside the hive.  As they age, they adopt other functions, like security, stationed around the hive entrance, guarding against marauding animals and bugs - including "robber bees" from other colonies who may come to steal their honey.  And yes, the guards can tell the intruders from their own.  Finally, the bees graduate to foragers, and these fully mature bees are the ones we see working the flowers.

Now to the sex part.  When a new queen hatches from her 'queen cell', shortly she must leave the hive to mate.  She can only mate in the air - on the fly, so to speak - and she can only mate during the first 10 days or so of her life, so she has to do it fast and make it last.  This is how it happens:  first, the queen makes a few 'dry-run' flights to orient herself to her hive; she must be able to find her way back home once she's been mated.  When she's ready, she will make a solo flight to a magic area in the sky where drones gather.  These drones, usually from other hives, hang out in a group, buzzing around, hoping to get lucky (or unlucky, as you shall see), sometimes as high as a couple of hundred feet above the ground.    I'm not making this up.  There's a name for this airspace - the Drone Congregation Area, and it even has an acronym - the 'DCA'.  But I'm going to rename it the 'Drone Zone', or 'DZ'.  Masses of them fly around, a great cloud of testosterone with only one purpose - to try to mate the queen.

So the queen leaves the hive and takes flight.  She flies up through the cloud of bees.  The first drone who can grabs her and hangs on, inserting his stinger, which is actually not a stinger.  Workers have stingers, but in the drones the stinger is modified to act as a penis.  The same pump mechanism that pumps venom from a worker bee's stinger into your bare foot, let's say, pumps semen into the queen's bee 'vagina' ( - sorry, I have absolutely no idea what it's really called).  And, as with the worker bee who will die after stinging, the drone only gets one shot; when the stinger/penis enters its target, it, along with its sperm pump, gets ripped out of its owner's abdomen, effectively disemboweling him.  If there are any men reading this, you should be clenching your bums and crossing your legs right about now.

The queen returns to the hive, where the workers remove the stinger/penis.and clean her up.  And off she goes again, to be ravaged, over and over by up to 20 drones, as each of the previous suitors, now dead, hurtles earthward - dead, but triumphant!, having sacrificed his life to accomplish his one true purpose - to spread his seed.

I'm exhausted just thinking about all of it.  But the life of the queen and her colony is worth investigating further, and I'll do that in the next post.

Beekeeper factoid:  there are over 200,000 beekeepers, both amateur and professional, in the U.S., and they manage over 3 millions hives.