#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